Tithi Bhattacharya

Tithi Bhattacharya is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University. She specialises in Modern South Asian History. Although she is a historian by training, Tithi’s contribution to Class Struggle Feminism and Social Reproduction Theory is incredibly significant to the field of feminist economics. She writes extensively on Marxist theory, gender and its intersection with class as well as the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, Electronic Intifada, Jacobin, Salon.com and the New Left Review.
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What is Social Reproduction Theory?

Marxism teaches us that in the capitalist mode of production, it is workers who produce the commodities and so are the producers of value i.e labour power produces value. Social Reproduction theory asks the question - who produces the workers? What social processes produce labour power as a commodity?

Social Reproduction Theory challenges traditional notions of work as inadequately attentive to labor performed outside the points of production. It insists that economic understanding is incomplete if only involving waged work. Instead we need to examine how the reproduction of society produces and sustains the economy. Social Reproduction scholars look at both waged and unwaged work as constitutive of the economy. The approach is significant for the Global South where labor remains largely informalized.

Take the ‘care economy’ as an example which includes the formal health-care sector and social security infrastructure at the state level that also extends into the unpaid sector through activities such as cooking, cleaning and care taking done in the privacy of our homes. These types of activities and institutions, often lie outside the realm of mainstream economics because it is not considered to be a part of the “productive” economy. However, in its absence, the reproduction of human life or the production of a healthy labour force that drives the productive economy is impossible.

Social Reproduction theorists, like Tithi Bhattacharya, have been using SRT as framework through which one can understand the economy, allowing us to pinpoint the source of an economy’s wealth and labour power.

Capitalist and social reproduction frameworks have very different vantage points. Since capitalism concentrates on capital accumulation for the sake of profit making, the production of “things” is more valuable than the people who make them. Naturally, under a capitalist framework, activities that come under the realm of social reproduction, being “unproductive”, are often unpaid, low paid and devalued, with the most vulnerable of society often performing this work.

Historically, social reproduction activities have been gendered with women taking up a larger share. With the rise of capitalism, economic production moved away from the household, taking place mostly in offices and factories in return for wages while social reproduction was relegated to the private sphere or provided by the state. With the global dominance of neo-liberal, free market economics, that started in the US and the UK in the 80’s and subsequently spread to the rest of the world, there has been a rolling back of the welfare state in the name of accelerating economic growth, shifting the burden of welfare provisioning from the state onto households. This has meant massive cuts to public services like health care, child-care and education that women, especially single mothers, the poor, disabled and minority groups depend on most.


Additional Reading and Resources:

What is Social Reproduction? - Tithi Bhattacharya - Video

What is Social Reproduction Theory - Tithi Bhattacharya - SocialistWorker.org