Political Economy Students' Journal

This essay is an attempt to use existing literature from social reproduction theory and world-systems analysis to sketch out a theoretical framework for the argument that an important, overlooked vector of uneven development is the appropriation of surplus value produced by social reproductive labor in the periphery, by the core.

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Introduction 

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The rise of international connections of trade and production have undeniably increased the productive capacity of the world; however, the distribution of the benefits of this modern phase of globalization are still in question. Globalization itself is not a topic of consensus, with views ranging from promises of shared prosperity (Stiglitz 2022), to an attempt to hasten global proletarianization to “cheapen the cost of labor, reduce workers’ entitlements, and intensify exploitation” (Federici 2002, p. 60). More economic value is being produced in the system as a whole, but the question is to where does it flow; where are its centers of accumulation, and by what mechanisms does it pool there? “Non-industrialized” economies have long surpassed the “industrialized”—their degree of industrialization was 99.4% of the latter in 1980; by 2000 it was 117.1% (Arrighi 2007, p. 188)—but the income gap has remained the same. Development, then, cannot be just the power to produce value; it must also include the total value consumed by a society. Hickel et al. (2022) tackle this by quantifying the value drain from the global South to North through unequal exchange, but leave open the question of gender dynamics. Women suffer doubly in their dual aspects as workers and as women—the “double day”—and here we will investigate the role of their unpaid labor in the domestic sphere, and how it relates to development.

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I argue that there is an economic link between the oppression of women, the exploitation of marginalized workers, and the underdevelopment of the periphery. First, I will present the social nature of surplus production and the role of social reproductive labor. Second, I will describe the appropriation of social reproductive surplus. Third, I will introduce world-systems analysis (Wallerstein 1974) and track the movement of these value flows and the unequal exchange through which they occur. Finally, I will briefly discuss the idea that making this labor visible to the market is a solution to this problem.

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Social surplus and social reproductive labor

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All societies produce a surplus—the difference between total output and the consumption required to reproduce themselves—and the political economy of a society is by and large the allocation of that surplus (Baran 1957, pp. 132-3). Marx (1947) describes this process of production as having four moments: humans produce their basic requirements; this results in the production of new needs; to continue the process requires reproduction of daily life and the production of new people; these things are not produced in isolation, but through cooperation (Marx 1947, pp. 15-17). Graeber (2001) reconfigures this: humans intentionally act to meet needs and in doing so produce a network of social relations to coordinate production and distribution. The producer is thus produced as a specific type of person; through cooperation, they are defined in a specific way (Graeber 2001, pp. 58-59). This is the social division of labor and the social production of society; labor is socially produced, so surplus is socially produced.

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The most fundamental form of production, then, is social reproduction, whose surplus is crystalized in productive labor. Vogel describes it as “a variety of daily activities restore the energy of direct producers and enable them to return to work” along with the replacement of the labor-force itself (Vogel 2000, p. 157). These processes take place mainly within the family; the primary ideological institution of reproduction under modern capitalism (Althusser 1971, p. 80). Labor-power is produced collectively, but from the point of view of capital is separated into its reproductive and productive elements.

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This separation of production and reproduction is a mechanism of gendered domination unique to capitalism; the masking of the labor of the woman behind the labor of the wage-earner. The starting point for analysis is not the family, but the “materialist foundations that underpin the oppression of women” (Vogel 2013, p. 8). This is what Federici calls the “patriarchy of the wage” (2004, p. 97), which feminizes, devalues, and naturalizes the gendered division of labor. This creates an internalized gender hierarchy that minimizes the costs to capital of the reproduction of labor (Federici 2004). Ryder (2015, p. 5) notes that gender here is performative; it is the action of social reproductive labor that defines the oppressed condition of women. It can be separated from people with vaginas and performed by men or gender-indeterminate people; it is the role rather than the identity that is determinate.

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Appropriation of social reproductive labor

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The woman (person) performing this work reproduces her own labor-power daily; this is the socially necessary labor time that would, in a waged job, be compensated. Any production of labor-power she does beyond this is surplus value production, which is transferred to and embodied in the labor-power of others. The wage of the labor-power produced and sold must necessarily be large enough to compensate the socially necessary abstract labor of both the wage-earner and the woman, but the surplus is never realized by the wage-earner. The employer appropriates the surplus of both workers but pays only one, while the woman performing unwaged labor is compensated by having her means of subsistence provided for; a much more explicit form of the same exploitation as occurs in waged work, and a form of internal gendered unequal exchange.

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Between this individual household (micro) view and the total (macro) view are myriad institutions and organizations (meso or social level) that produce and reproduce labor (Jaffe 2020, p. 4): schools, daycares, healthcare—care work, dominated by women. These tend to be either state-owned production, or at least state-subsidized. The state, as with social reproductive labor, does not appropriate the surplus in the short run; it is transferred to the labor-power which it produces. The surplus is captured by society in the long-run through the products of that labor-power; it is social surplus. However, if the product of that labor-power is consumed geographically distant the surplus is lost to the social whole.

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In summary, social reproductive labor acts as a hidden subsidy for the sellers of labor-power in the market; that is, it enables labor-power to be brought to market at a reduced price and purchased below its value by employers. They get the socially necessary abstract labor of two for the price of one. This social reproductive subsidy hides the true cost of labor from the market and lets it slip through the fingers of the invisible hand.

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Unequal exchange in the world-system 

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In world-systems analysis, Wallerstein (1974) describes the capitalist world as a complex system of interconnected economies made up of polycentric circles of hierarchy. These are divided into core, semi-periphery, and periphery, defined by their concentration of capital and power. These designations describe not only countries, but also regions within countries and even cities. Core regions exploit the periphery for cheap labor and raw materials to support their own development and consumption (Wallerstein 1974). Social surplus gravitates toward concentrations of capital; the drain occurs not only between countries, but also between labor- and capital-rich regions within countries, and between labor and capital within regions.

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One method of this transfer is unequal exchange. World-systems analysis and the dependency school argue that many of the colonial economic dynamics remain in place, with core countries and multinational corporations leveraging economic and political power to create price differentials and imbalances in the terms of trade, and through the structural composition of peripheral exports (Wallerstein 1974; Prebisch 1950; Singer 1950; Baran & Sweezy 1966; Hickel et al. 2022). Peripheral economies are characterized by their endowment of labor and raw materials; their comparative advantage is in producing cheap labor-power. The greater the ratio of labor-power to capital the greater the rate of profit (Marx 1971), so capital is not incentivized to make capital investments when they can reduce the wage budget and increase competitiveness by offshoring production. Fajnzybler calls this “spurious competitiveness”; based on intentional underinvestment of capital and exploitation of cheap labor, versus genuine competitiveness from improvements in productivity (1988, p. 13). Similarly, the price of primary commodities tends to decline over time relative to manufactured goods (and simple manufacturing to more complex) due to income elasticities and technological differences (Prebisch 1950; Singer 1950). To put it another way, capital is incentivized to continually offshore production to where labor is cheapest and most abundant.

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The social reproductive subsidy described above applies at each step in the global value chain, and occurs in proportion to the labor-capital ratio employed (i.e. it is greater in labor-intensive processes). So we have higher rates of exploitation, higher income shares to capital, and a greater appropriation of social reproductive labor in economies with higher labor: the periphery. This additional surplus is realized each time a product is sold and more surplus is added each time labor-power is consumed. The product of this labor-power is then exported to core economies at depressed prices, where it is either consumed and the surplus realized, or it is incorporated into advanced production and exported back to the periphery and paid for in full along with the added surplus value produced at core wages. Hickel et al. isolated the steps in this process using trade in value-added footprint methodology and concluded that drain from the periphery to the core is over $10 billion a year (2022), but as mentioned earlier left open the question of the gender in this process. This is, I argue, where it lies; in the subsidization of the production of labor-power, disproportionately in peripheral economies.

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A mirror of this process occurs in the export of labor, with emphasis now added on the productive powers of the meso-level described earlier: the social production of workers, through the work of women both in the home and in schools, daycares, etc. There has been a migration of “biblical proportions” (Federici 2012, p. 70) with workers fleeing the impoverishment of economic liberalization. This includes both refugees and economic migrants, but also the importation of migrant agricultural labor on special-purpose limited visas, for example, sent home after the surplus they produce has been appropriated. Sometimes labor is fully integrated, but then so is any value produced; Portuguese-trained doctors emigrating to Germany to treat Germans, for example. In both cases this is labor produced by women in the periphery, subtracted from the social surplus, now contributing to development in the core.

 

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Formalized labor: a solution?

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If the problem is the hidden nature of this labor from the market, the obvious solution would seem to formalize it, either through commodification or something like “wages against housework” (Federici 1975). But this would then simply feed into the same neo-colonial processes which characterize international economic relations. The privatization of resources, explicit at the state level but also through the expansion of market logics into non-market spheres such as social reproductive labor, is a continuing form of primitive accumulation and enclosure, separated from the core not by time but by space. As historically distant primitive accumulation feeds into the development of the contemporary capitalist core, so does the geographically distant primitive accumulation of today (Federici 2004). This is a continuing process of accumulation by dispossession: enclosure, privatization, financialization, and displacement (Harvey 2005, p, 145).

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There is of course an incentive for capital to minimize the costs of social reproductive labor—both to increase its surplus and thereby decrease wages (Marx 1971, p. 167; Vogel 2000, p. 161-163), and to enable women to enter the formal workforce (Federici 2004)—which would be magnified if it was remunerated fully. However, this follows the same logics as above; reduction where costs are high (core) through capital investment and offshoring. Capital, here, can be thought of as the technological means of production of social reproductive labor: kitchen appliances, washing machines, anything that increases productivity of the reproduction of labor-power. Offshoring, then, is the importation of domestic labor and care work—disproportionately performed by migrant women—along with what Illich (1980) calls “shadow work”: any domestic labor that does not contribute directly to the household’s autonomy from the market; services increasingly performed by gig workers today. Both processes have allowed women in the core to increase labor force participation and education, and to move into less peripheral sectors where they earn more and consume more; increased economic productivity, development in itself. Also in both cases, however, the benefits have remained with professional households in core economies, and with the companies, job and migration agencies, tech platforms, and others who mediate this provision of service work. Federici isolates this as the driver of the crisis in the reproductive systems of the “Third World”; a “New International Division of Labor, whereby migrant women now do most of the work needed for the reproduction of the work-force in industrialized countries” (Federici 2002, p. 1). These benefits are an increased social surplus paradoxically set free by capitalist production processes at the cost of the developmental potential of the societies which produced it; a process which would only be increased were it subjected to market forces.

 

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Conclusion

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The economic oppression of women takes a unique form under capitalist production, and its particular characteristics contribute significantly to the uneven development of periphery and core economies. Our ability to work is produced socially and collectively, largely through the work of women. The appropriation of value from periphery labor is therefore the appropriation of the work of women in these societies. There are, of course, other dimensions of womens’ oppression; it is not merely in their economic relations, nor is it only subordinate-class women or women in the periphery (see Butler 1997; Fraser 1998). Similarly, there are other drivers of uneven development (see above). Nevertheless, this is an important dimension, and if we are seriously committed to gender equality and to the development of periphery economies and standards of living, addressing this is a good place to start.

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Bibliography

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