Abstract
Marnie Holborow's book, subtitled ‘Gender, Work and Revolution’, ranges widely across issues of care, domestic labour (paid and unpaid), female participation in the labour force, changing families, and the nature of home. These topics are explored via discussions of various Marxist and feminist texts dealing with ‘social reproduction’ and illustrated by a variety of empirical studies and data, both scholarly and journalistic.
Following an introductory chapter setting out basic themes and approaches, there is a chapter on Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, and a final chapter on how the social problems identified are to be addressed. In the intervening chapters, Holborow addresses the issues of care and home through the framework introduced in the introductory chapter, namely an Orthodox Marxist take on the ‘social reproduction’ literature. Key concepts are ‘social reproduction’, ‘capitalism’, ‘the labour needs of capital accumulation’, and ‘home’ (the latter being a proposed conceptual innovation). Social reproduction consists of the ‘systems through which health, education and people-care are provided by the state, society and homes. The latter are unique in that they are left almost entirely to individuals and therefore their services are provided at very little cost to capital or to society’. (p. 135)
The decision to use ‘homes’ as a key concept is justified on the grounds that it is more inclusive than ‘household’ in reflecting the growing diversity of household type, and because of the growing importance of homes since the Coronavirus pandemic.
What undergirds the text is the classic Marxist base-superstructure distinction. Holborow places care relations in the superstructure as opposed to e.g., Nancy Fraser who wishes to see it as a separate dimension. She suggests that the base-superstructure model allows for the observed flexibility and variations in social reproduction systems within a relatively unchanging capitalist mode of production.
The text also aims to provide a ‘unitary theory of women's oppression…which sees it as arising from the political economy of capitalism’ (p. 5). The central argument here is that capitalism leads to the separation of work from home, which devalues the domestic labour mainly carried out by women and disadvantages women in employment, resulting in female oppression. This oppression has accelerated under neoliberal capitalism with the family bearing the burden of the increased privatization and marketisation of services. A key contradiction is capitalism's current need for both greater female labour force participation and for females to continue to supply care in the home.
The implications for politics are clear: ‘The existing mode of production affects all social relations, including those of gender and race…Understanding society as a totality carries the important corollary that struggles against women's oppression in capitalism are also related to other struggles within and against capitalism; they are not struggles on different parallel or unconnected tracks’ (p. 47). A transformed method of social reproduction, specifically around care, would move from individualised to socially collective provision, impossible within the confines of capitalism.
What joins ‘capitalism’ and ‘homes’ together in Holborow's book is a functionalist Marxism, an ontology that allows for an omniscient ‘grand theory’. Despite less monist statements about the relation between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, the default explanation is a ‘needs of capital’ approach. However, Holborow understands ‘homes’ in a very elastic manner – and manages to say little about housing and tenure. Remarkably, there is no discussion of Engels’ classic The Housing Question. Likewise, ‘capitalism’ remains diffuse and undefined throughout, when what is required are precise dissections of e.g., the impact of financialisation on the provision of housing and care.
The methodological choice not to focus on any country invites the temptation to cherry pick examples and to flatten contrasts between ‘different worlds of welfare capitalism’. This allows Holborow to avoid discussion of the Welfare State, whose role in social reproduction is not addressed in any systematic fashion.
Supplying sub-headings in the Table of Contents would allow the reader to more readily navigate the text. As it is, the sub-headings within the body of the text are not always illuminating. For example, the chapter on women in the labour force has headings which would belong more in a political pamphlet: ‘women of colour’, ‘greater levels of exploitation’, ‘home pressures’, ‘female-driven’, ‘a voice for all’.
Homes in Crisis Capitalism provides a wide-ranging introduction to debates within certain Marxist-feminist strands of the social reproduction literature. However, a more compelling text would offer a clearer focus on women's role in social reproduction, supply a more careful analysis of how these are shaped by multiple aspects of capitalism (and other determinants), and consider how a range of policy tools – both reformist and radical – might address the resultant inequalities.