Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value-form

Abstract:Wages for Housework! This demand on the part of radical feminists in the 1970s was underwritten by a critique of the role of reproductive labor for capitalist accumulation that challenged contemporary Marxist orthodoxy. Since then, this critique has advanced urgent and insightful contributions to contemporary Marxist and feminist theory. Here, I revisit its challenge to the question of value and accumulation. I argue that the call to wage reproductive labor seeks to exploit the dialectical and utopian movement of the value-form itself, and opens onto more fulsome utopian scenarios, such as the collectivization of social reproductive labor and the abolition of gender.