Social Reproduction Theory with Lisa Maya Knauer

This six-week reading group, facilitated by Lisa Maya Knauer, will focus on one of the germinal texts of social reproduction theory: Lise Vogel’s groundbreaking 1983 work, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Marx argued that capital accumulation depends not only upon the production of goods and the extraction of surplus value, but also on the reproduction of capitalist social relations and above all of the class of people who have nothing to sell but their labor power. Social reproduction theory analyzes the processes whereby working classes and their conditions of life are sustained over time. Marx only sketched the concept in very broad terms, but it was taken up and expanded upon by Marxist and radical feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Vogel and others argued that women’s oppression under capitalism is linked to their role in social (as well as biological) reproduction. We will supplement Vogel’s classic work with some early writings by the Wages for Housework campaign and more recent scholarship, including a newly published collection of Lise Vogel’s essays, The Contested Domain.* Some familiarity with Marxist and/or feminist theory is helpful but not essential.

Lisa Maya Knauer stumbled across the writings of the Wages for Housework campaign in the mid-1970s when she was a college student. A few years later, she started reading Marx’s Capital at the MEP’s predecessor, the School for Marxist Education. She is a co-founder of the MEP and has led our Capital Volume I reading groups for the past few years. In her day job, she is a tenured radical at a public university.