ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evidence and reasons for Karl Marx’s “under-theorization” of reproduction, focusing on his reductive concept of work and production, and his implicit assumption that only waged industrial workers have the power and knowledge to subvert capitalism and create the material conditions for communist society. It explores Marx’s seemingly neutral stand on the contemporary reorganization of family life with the consequences of this reorganization on social life and class relations, arguing that it was a significant instrument of cooptation of at least important sectors of the industrial workforce. Despite continuous technological revolutions, capitalism has relied on migratory movements, as well as the regulation of women’s reproductive capacity, to satisfy its need for the quantity and quality of labor-power that the development of the productive forces and the breakdown of workers’ resistance to exploitation required. In Marx, by contrast, love, sexual passion, procreation, appear to be natural givens, outside the world of capital’s economic relations and workers’ decision-making and struggle.
