Modes of Production and Household Production

1. Introduction

The term “household production” has a seemingly simple definition: production of goods and services by household members for their own direct use. An analysis of household production requires an understanding of its place in the social relations of production that constitute different modes of production.

Such an analysis does not, of course, constitute an analysis of all social relations. Thus the gender and age division of labor within and between different categories of production (such as wage labor and household labor) must be distinguished from the division of total labor between these different categories of production. The latter constitutes the focus of this paper. As such, it serves as a contribution to the necessary analysis of the long-term interaction between relations of production on the one hand and other social relations on the other hand, such as those of sex-gender-age that result in the observed gender and age distribution of labor and wage disparities in the capitalist mode of production.

2. Modes of Production

Let us begin with the concept of mode of production and the distinction between necessary and surplus labor. Necessary labor is the labor carried out in a society that is required for the sustenance and generational reproduction of the laborers of that society. The remainder constitutes surplus labor. In class societies, this surplus is extracted from the laboring class by a non-laboring ruling class, a process that constitutes the exploitation of that laboring class. Marx’s account of modes of production focuses on this exploitation:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element . . . It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers . . . which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure . . . (Marx 1971: Volume 3, 791)

Modes of production are also distinguished from each other by the use to which this surplus is put.

Implicit in this analysis is the (generally unstated) assumption that all the time of the laboring class, composed of women and men, adults and children, must be used for production, and thus that surplus production is maximized (although not without class struggle). This is not a simple assumption. It essentially characterizes all the activity of the laboring class as “production.” Production relations, and the imperative of surplus extraction, can and do come into conflict with other social relationships, including relations of oppression, of which the most obvious are relations of gender, age, and ethnicity/nationality.

These other social relations may have the effect of reducing the level of the surplus that could be extracted by the ruling class relative to the level of surplus that could be extracted under different social relations. A full analysis of social relations therefore requires an understanding of intersectionality, that is, the interaction among these sets of social relationships, of which class relations (or relations of production) are only one set. See, for example, Delia Aguilar’s paper (2015). There can be no presumption that any one set of relations is dominant at any particular point in time, although Marxists make the empirical assertion that relations of production play a dominant role in long-term historical development.

But whatever the entire structure of these sets of social relations, all members of the laboring class must engage in full-time labor. There is no opportunity for leisure in class societies. This is more obvious to women than it is to men in contemporary capitalist societies. The twentieth-century “second-wave” feminist movement succeeded in gaining recognition by neoclassical and Marxist economists alike that the household is a site for the production of use-values. Marxists make the additional assertion that it is the site for the production of that “peculiar” commodity, labor power, and that household labor is a component of the necessary labor for its production. In contemporary societies, women carry out a large proportion of household labor. But without denying the existence and significance of gender inequality within the laboring class, a Marxist analysis of class societies asserts that the full-time labor of both men and women of the laboring class must be used for production in its various forms, as a condition for their ability to reproduce their class from generation to generation. The term production must be thus be understood to include not only the time necessary for sleep but also periods of time not used for the production of use-values, time often described as “leisure.”

Such time is necessary for recovery from the physical and mental strain of labor and for the ability to carry out material production in an ongoing manner. Insistence on this “necessary” break from material production is embodied in many cultures through the social prohibition of “work” on a seventh day or Sabbath. Thus even the time used for “leisure” must be understood as having as its primary component the production and reproduction of the class of laborers.

3. Necessary and Surplus Labor in Different Modes of Production

The fundamental characteristic of class societies is the appropriation of surplus labor by a ruling class. Labor that takes the form of household labor constitutes one category of total labor in class societies, and one that does not necessarily coincide with a gendered division of labor. Nor does household labor cease to exist in a post-capitalist society. The traditional Marxist understanding of relations of production based on the concepts that are unique to the capitalist mode of production must yield to a more comprehensive analysis of human activity. An analysis of household production provides an entrée into such an analysis.

The following section of this paper will present, in necessarily abbreviated form, the place of household production in the pre-capitalist (or “feudal”) mode of production, and in the capitalist mode of production, before exploring the concept of a communist mode of production. The analyses of “feudalism” and capitalism will in each case assume a two-class model in which each person is a member of one of only two classes, namely a laboring class or a non-laboring ruling class. This assumption is adopted to facilitate an understanding of the significance of household production. The communist mode of production will be defined as one in which there is no surplus extraction by a non-laboring ruling class.

4. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production: Feudalism

The term “feudalism” is used here as a concept to refer to class societies that immediately preceded capitalism, and can be distinguished from it. No distinction is made here among the many ways in which such “feudal” societies differed among themselves or over time.

While the level of productivity among these varied greatly, there is little disagreement that the proportion of surplus to necessary labor was small when compared to the proportion in capitalist societies. This means that a large portion of the surplus was required for the simple physical reproduction of the non-laboring members of the lordly ruling class.

The dominant form of extraction of this surplus in these pre-capitalist societies thus consisted of the imposition of requirements in two forms. One was the compulsory submission (without “compensation”) of specific goods and services produced by peasant households using their own means of production. The other was the peasants’ performance of labor using resources owned by the lord, resulting in production of goods and services that accrued to the lords, not the laborers. There were, however two very different ways in which this work took place. One was the widely recognized requirement for the performance of a certain number of days of agricultural labor on the fields of the lords. Surplus extraction, however, also took place through the exploitation of those employed as servants within the households of the lord. Both of these were necessary “in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production” (Marx 1971: Volume 1, 226).

All production in such societies was then understood to be production by households (King 1696). The “households” of the ruling class were obviously composed not only of the family members of the elite, but also of large numbers of resident servants, drawn from the peasantry, whose labor in those households was used to provide not only for the members of the lords’ families and lavish hospitality to visiting members of the aristocracy but also for their own maintenance (Quick 2010). The peasants who comprised the servants in these multi-class households were thus major providers of the surplus and were subject to direct supervision in their work. (Recognition of this household production, which was carried out primarily by adolescents prior to their marriage, is useful to counter the frequent presumption that a study of household production is necessarily a study of gender relations.)

In contrast, peasant households were composed only of members of the peasant class (excluding those who were “in service”) and were responsible only to themselves for the remainder of their activity. The ruling class played no role in the organization of production within the peasant household. The compulsion that required all members of this household to work beyond the specified obligations imposed upon them came from the need to survive, rather than from any threats posed by agents of the ruling class acting as supervisors of the process of production.

This seeming diversion from the dominant Marxist approach, which looks only at capitalist production, into analyzing the labor that takes place in pre-capitalist or “feudal” societies, is necessary precisely in order to establish this concept of “compulsion.” The need to ensure the survival of the peasant household, from day to day and generation to generation, was the force that made its members rise before dawn and work until they fell asleep, exhausted, at the end of the day. This “force” was fundamentally different from the direct force of the punishments that were imposed or threatened by those supervising either household labor or the agricultural labor on the fields of the lords. Household production in the households of the laboring class was, and is, motivated primarily by concern to ensure the survival and reproduction of that class.

5. The Capitalist Mode of Production

Writing almost a century after Adam Smith, Karl Marx wrote of a mode of production in which men indeed grew very rich by employing a multitude of wage-laboring “manufacturers” whose commodity production resulted in the production and accumulation of surplus value. Although many people were still employed as live-in servants in the households of the wealthy, the “feudal” use of the surplus was, in the new capitalist mode of production, no longer a path to riches. Both Smith and Marx characterized such labor as unproductive.

Yet Marx was wrong in asserting, most explicitly in Capital, that capitalism and wage-labor required the complete separation of workers from the means of production. This was, however, a useful assumption for much of his analysis, and recognized as such elsewhere:

To the extent that capital conquers the whole of production . . . the home and petty form of industry—in short, industry intended for self-consumption, not producing commodities—disappears. (Marx 1969: 159)

In fact, this conquest, and this separation of workers from the means of production, is a gradual process that is today very far from complete. Household production today, using household-owned means of production, continues to account for a substantial portion of the production of goods and services in both developed and developing countries, and a correspondingly large proportion of the labor of the working class. The need for wage labor rose not from the total inability of laboring people to engage in production but rather from their inability to provide in full for the reproduction needs of the laboring family through their own labor, which takes the form of household production and the form of petty-commodity production.

When the full-time labor of all members of the households of the laboring class using their own means of production for household (and petty-commodity) production cannot ensure the (generational) survival of that class, a portion of that labor must be allocated to wage labor. The production carried out by wage-laborers using the means of production owned by the capitalists then allows for the payment of wages sufficient to supplement the workers’ household production, while the remainder constitutes a surplus that is extracted by capitalists. (This brief paper does not allow space for an account of the different, although well-understood, process through which petty-commodity production is increasingly displaced by capitalist commodity production, and the corresponding transformation of petty-commodity producers into wage-laborers.) How much of the total labor of the working class takes the form of wage-labor is determined by the conditions of production in both the household and the capitalist spheres of production.

The allocation of the labor of the working class to the different forms of production by gender and age is a very different topic that requires an analysis of relations of sex-gender-age as well race-nationality-ethnicity (Quick 2004). In the United States, for example, many of the first factory workers were young, single, white Yankee farm girls. In contemporary capitalist societies, women perform a majority of household labor. Household labor in the capitalist mode of production remains, however, a necessity, and must be supplemented by the earnings of wage laborers. It should be noted that this constitutes a very different approach from one that distorts the (ongoing) historical process by beginning with an account of wage labor and then adding on the existence of household labor. Such a theoretical formulation conceives of household production as reducing the wage that would have to be paid to the worker if all production did consist of commodity production. In fact, it is wage labor that must be “added” on to household labor to ensure the reproduction of the working class. Household labor continues to be as necessary as it ever was, and to be subjected to the same compulsion as it was in pre-capitalist (or “feudal”) modes of production.

The growth in the productivity of labor that characterizes capitalist production continually reduces necessary labor. While some of this reduction takes the form of a reduction in the labor required for the commodities purchased with the wage (that is, an increase in relative surplus value), the historical development of capitalism also takes the form of a continuous substitution of commodity production embodying less labor for the goods and services formerly produced by households. This commodification of production corresponds to an increase in the proportion of total labor that takes the form of wage labor relative to household labor.

Although household production continuously declines as a proportion of total production, it remains a category of necessary production for the working class.

6. The Communist Mode of Production

The essential characteristics of a communist mode of production are generally recognized to be, first, the expropriation of privately owned means of production, and second, the democratic control of production. While the first is a topic for revolutionary strategy, discussion of the second has focused on the process through which such democratic control can be used to determine the necessary coordination of production and consumption decisions.

This discussion has, however, generally taken the form of proposals for the democratic coordination of commodity production and consumption. (I will use the term “social sector” to refer to this sector of production.) While this is, of course, necessary, such analyses fail to take into account the fact that households in the capitalist mode of production constitute sites of both production and consumption. I posit an alternative approach that incorporates an expanded role of the household sector of production, by looking first at the concept of the surplus in a communist mode of production, and second at the concept of the “household.”

The elimination of exploitation (i.e., the expropriation of surplus labor) removes from decision-making, in both the social sector and the household sector, the constraint that workers must maximize the surplus and must therefore minimize the labor time necessary for the production of goods and services.

A numerical example may be useful here. Suppose that the total twenty-four hours per person per day in the capitalist mode of production requires eight hours of (necessary) sleep and one day of rest, with the remaining sixteen hours of each of the six days of the workweek consisting of seven hours of household labor and nine hours of wage labor. Suppose further that four hours consist of the necessary (wage) labor that corresponds to the wage, while the remaining five hours of wage labor constitute surplus labor.

The expropriation of the surplus from the control of the capitalist class thus allows 5 hours per day for all laborers to use as they want; it constitutes “free time”, namely time freed from the necessity of using human activity for the mere reproduction of the laboring class. Within the social sector, the democratic decision of the workers might result in a reduction in the intensity of labor and an extension in the hours of labor in order to make labor less oppressive and perhaps even enjoyable, and allow for more social interaction among workers. Thus the hours allocated to this “necessary production” might be five, rather than four.

Workers might then choose to work two additional hours in that social sector (a total of seven hours per day) in order to provide for an actual increase in the total production of that sector. (With appropriate recognition of ecological constraints, there is no reason why people should not enjoy some additional products from the social labor sector.) This additional production could take the form of additional use-values for the workers and an increase in the means of production of the society as a whole. Workers could then leave the workplace of the social sector two hours per day earlier than before.

Despite improved conditions of work, it is undeniable that for many years most, if not all, workers would continue to look forward to a shortening of the day of social labor so as to enjoy these two hours that have been freed from the necessity of reproducing the class. So what would happen to the two hours of the surplus that is now under their control?

It would constitute an increase in the time available for what can, provisionally, be described as household production. One possibility is that necessary household production could be carried out, as in the social sector, in a more leisurely and more pleasurable way. Instead of seven hours, the time allocated to the production of the same use-values could take eight hours. This would still leave one additional hour that was no longer used up in producing necessary goods and services.

This hour would provide the opportunity for the activity that constitutes human development. This would be in addition to incorporating this goal into restructuring production in both the social and the household sector. It is not necessary to speculate on what human development might take place, other than to recognize that the extra time would allow for everything from the pleasures of solitary observations of nature, to a great expansion of cultural creativity, to the further collective development of an understanding of the universe.

The communist mode of production is thus characterized by a fundamental and increasing divergence between necessary and actual labor. Necessary labor could however, usefully be used as a unit of account for the measurement of labor performed within both the social sector and the household sector, and the allocation of the products of such labor. The increasing productivity of labor would continually reduce the proportion of this necessary labor and thus provide increasing freedom to allocate time to alternative pursuits.

There is, however, a more fundamental change that would characterize the communist mode of production in its most fully developed form, namely the disappearance of the distinction between production and consumption. This in turn opens up the question of the distinction between the household sector and the social sector.

While many economists find it useful to use the concept of production to describe household activity, those currently engaged in the household provision of childcare, for example, do not use the term production to characterize this activity. Marxists are correct, however, in asserting that household production in the capitalist mode of production is dominated by the necessity of producing labor power. Household activity is therefore, in fact, a part of the production of labor power. Resistance to the use of the term production to characterize household activity such as childcare, and the continuous attempt to go beyond what is merely necessary, is an important form of resistance to capitalism.

The realization of the communist goal of breaking down the distinction between consumption and production requires now an exploration of the distinction that has up to this point been drawn between the household and the social sector. In the communist mode of production this distinction is continuously erased. Activity in the social sector increasingly expands into the “social life” that was formerly restricted to the time after the end of the workday. At the same time, the household expands into the community. In addition, the skills involved in the coordination of community life in turn contribute to the ability to engage in the democratic control of production in the social sector.

7. Conclusion

The goal of this paper is to articulate an understanding of human activity that takes the form of household production. The struggle in class societies constitutes one part of the struggle against all forms of oppression. It can be understood as not only a negative struggle against exploitation, the theft of the products of labor, but also a positive struggle for what can be accomplished by the organization of free human beings, namely human development. A part of this positive struggle takes place in the realm of household production.