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Reproductive Labor

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In a globalized capitalist society, the most relevant translation of a commodity’s value is into money. Commodities aren’t only possessions like cosmetics and La-Z Boys, they are food, land, knowledge, identity, humans. Anything and everything that is valued for the needs and desires of humans is a commodity. A human is commodified as soon as they, or their labor can be bought, and everyone and everything is up for sale. This is because capitalism facilitates humans’ “[dispossession] of access to their own means of production--raw materials as well as instruments of production” (Burawoy, 1979, p. 23). “Direct producers [human laborers] have no alternative but to sell their capacity to labor--their labor power--to the capitalist in return for a wage, which they then turn into the means of existence,” …show more content…

Another is the reproductive labor of women. Personal productive and reproductive labor is labor applied to looking after one’s well being (cleanliness, health), and personal provisioning--essentially an extension of the workday in that wages earned are transformed into resource commodities like food, clothing, housing, etc. A more literal form of reproductive labor is that of women: carrying and birthing of children. In the preface to her book Caliban and the Witch, synthesizing other femenists’ opinions, Silvia Federici wrote the “exploitation of women has played a central role in the process of capitalist accumulation, insofar as women have been the producers and reproducers of the most essential capitalist economy: labor-power” (2009, preface). Homemaking and raising children are necessary labors involved in the capitalist economy. Both are exploited in the U.S.’s capitalist society “as a natural resource or personal service, while [the U.S.’s corporate economy] profit[s] from the wageless condition of the labor involved (Federici, 2009,

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Essentially, the worker does not control what he or she produces because the capitalists control it to ensure an increase of profit. In Alienated Labour, Marx explains that, “this relationship is at the same time the relationship to the sensuous exterior world and to natural objects as to an alien and hostile world opposed to him”(McIntosh 1997:18). He argues that the workers feels alienated form their own work because they know that they will be unable to reap the benefits (McIntosh 1997). An example of product alienation is how Z understand that he is digging tunnels to increase the production of the colony however is alienated because he does not receive any personal benefits of his work. The general stands in front of the entire colony and says, “We are the hero’s.

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A male factory employee familiar with his female coworkers noted that many women still had children at a young age, during their teenage years (Doc 4). Women also tended to have a large number of children, common when peasants worked on farms and needed as many bodies to help tend to the animals as they could get. However, since women now worked in an urban setting outside of the home, conflicts arose when they needed to care for young children. This led to small children being brought to work with their mothers, although this usually occurred with women working in fields, not factories, given the harmful environment of the factories (Doc 1). While women worked outside of the home and earned money for themselves and their families during the Industrial Revolution, they continued to have several children, and act as the prime caregiver, as they had prior to the

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Even though some women did work, it was more commonly thought of only men who did labor. Labor rarely mentioned housewives, domestic servants, and female outworkers. The idea that the men were the head of the house meant that he, not the wife, should bring in income to support his family (Foner 351). According to the newspaper Workingman’s Advocate, “Capitalism tore women from their role as ‘happy and independent mistresses’ of the domestic sphere and forced them into the labor market, thereby undermining the natural order of the household and the authority of its male

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Men want to be “free and conscious producers.” (“The German Ideology”) By impeding man’s ability to realize his true desires, capitalism incentivizes the proletariat to demand change and make it happen. According to Marx and Engels, it is people’s ability to produce not solely to meet their needs, but as an end in and of itself that makes us truly human, and people will not rest until they reach their human potential.

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This is because despite the energy of labor and the being of the labor which are put into the product, that product itself doesn’t belong to the laborer nor do they receive any benefits from the product i.e., ‘the fruits of their labor’. In a sense, the laborer loses something of himself during the time spent creating this estranged object, as it doesn 't identify with it as a meaningful part of its own presence as a person, yet simply as an independent entity alienated to itself. Marx states that the “worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object” (29). Therefore, the more labor one puts into a product the more powerful and estranged the world of products becomes of them. This estrangement can become so acute that the bare necessities of living are taken from the laborer as the more products they produce, the less they possess.

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This sociological study will analyze the problem of commodity fetishism in American consumer culture. Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is a major problem in the United States due to the inability of consumers to see the intrinsic value of a commodity. American consumer culture tends to become trapped in the “magical qualities” of a product, which makes them unable to understand the object as it was made by a laborer. This abstraction of the commodity is part of Marx’s analysis of capitalist products that is separated from the labor and become valuable objects in and of themselves. This is an important sociological perspective on commodities, which creates an irrational consumer culture in the American marketplace.

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Whether reproducing workers or gender norms, social reproduction can be defined as the process of reproducing the capacity to continue working, leading to the reproduction of the pseudo-commodity known as labour power. The reproduction of this labour power is reliant upon unwaged, domestic labour to help replenish the labourer for the next day of work. Reproducing this worker, typically the male breadwinner, is reliant upon women’s unpaid labour, creating the nuclear family form. Armstrong believes social reproduction involves the processes of “socializing children, repressing sexuality, and instilling appropriate hierarchical relationships through the education of future workers” (Armstrong, [ ] , p. 74). Peck views social reproduction in a spherical configuration, distinguishing the multiple factors involved in reproducing people, such as education, training, the media, and biological procreation (Peck, [ ], p. 38).

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