Ankica Čakardić. Historical Materialism. Volume 25, Issue 4. 2017.

Introduction

Luxemburg did not write many texts on the so-called ‘woman question’. However, that does not mean that her work should be omitted from a feminist-revolutionary history. On the contrary, it would be highly inaccurate to claim that her works and, specifically, her critique of political economy lack numerous reference-points for the development of progressive feminist policy and female emancipation, throughout history and today. With Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital in mind and her strong emphasis on the vibrant dynamics between capitalist and non-capitalist space, let us try to take Luxemburg’s theory a step further. Is it possible to speak of a ‘Luxemburgian feminism’? Is it possible to establish a connection between the Luxemburgian ‘dialectics of spatiality’ and social-reproduction theory? Can the framework of the Luxemburgian critique of political economy be used for the feminist analysis of women’s reproductive work and its economic role in the reproduction of accumulation? In this paper the above questions shall be analysed in more detail through a) a presentation of Luxemburg’s critique of bourgeois feminism and, subsequently, b) an established connection between crucial elements of Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital and social-reproduction theory. Before we move to the feminist analysis of Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation, let us briefly make a few introductory remarks concerning The Accumulation of Capital and its historical context.

On the eve of WW1, after about fifteen years of preparation, Rosa Luxemburg published The Accumulation of Capital (Berlin, 1913), her most comprehensive theoretical work and one of the most relevant and original classical works of Marxist economics. The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism was a follow-up to the Introduction to Political Economy which Luxemburg wrote while preparing her lectures on political economy, held between 1906 and 1916 and delivered at the German Social-Democrats’ Party School.

Briefly put, The Accumulation of Capital sought a way to scientifically study and explain the conditions of capitalist monopolisation, extended reproduction and imperialism, while taking into account the dynamic relation between capitalist and non-capitalist spatiality. Luxemburg held that Marx had neglected capital’s spatial determination, while in his critique of capital he had centred exclusively on ‘time’, i.e. the temporal dimension of the internal dynamics of capitalist reproduction. In contrast, Luxemburg ‘sought to show that capital’s inner core consists of the drive to consume what is external to it—non-capitalist strata’. Luxemburg’s goal was to articulate her own theory of extended reproduction and critique of classical economics, which would contain not only a temporal but also a ‘spatial analytical dimension’. This spatial determination of capitalist accumulation Peter Hudis has termed ‘dialectics of spatiality’.

Friends and enemies alike piled sharp criticism upon Luxemburg for noting Marx’s ‘glaring inconsistencies’, as she believed, the ‘defects’ of his approach to the problem of accumulation and expanded reproduction from the second volume of Capital. In a letter to Franz Mehring referring to critiques of her The Accumulation of Capital, she wrote:

In general, I was well aware that the book would run into resistance in the short term; unfortunately, our prevailing ‘Marxism,’ like some gout-ridden old uncle, is afraid of any fresh breeze of thought, and I took it into account that I would have to do a lot of fighting at first.

Lenin stated that she ‘distorted Marx’, and her work was interpreted as a revision of Marx, in spite of the fact that it was Luxemburg who mounted a vehement attack on the revisionist tendencies within the German SPD. In opposition to the Social Democrats who grouped around ‘epigones’ and an opportunistic current of political practice which ‘corrected’ Marx into a gradual dismissal of socialist principles, revolutionary action and internationalism, Luxemburg insisted on harnessing a living Marxist thought in order to offer more-precise responses to and explanations of the growing economic crisis and newly-appearing facts of economic life.

While Luxemburg’s works on political organising, revolutionary philosophy, nationalism or militarism are often analysed by scholars of her thought, few authors have tried to provide a systematic retrospective of Luxemburg’s economic theory and its legacy, or offer a contemporary Luxemburgian analysis of political economy. In the words of Ingo Schmidt: ‘Leftists interested in Luxemburg’s work looked at her politics but had little time for economics’. One should also take into account that The Accumulation of Capital was only translated into English 38 years after the original publication (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1951, translated by Agnes Schwarzschild), with numerous omissions as noted by, among others, Raya Dunayevskaya.

Although The Accumulation of Capital was met with severe criticism upon publication, by the opportunistic-reformist and revisionist elements of the SPD, as well as by orthodox Marxists led by Karl Kautsky, it was not only her work that was criticised as ostensibly suspect in its Marxism. These critics often used cheap psychological and conservative naturalising arguments that were meant to undermine the credibility of Luxemburg’s work and expose it as inept and insufficiently acquainted with Marxist texts. A good example of this type of criticism is provided by Werner Sombart, who stated in his Der proletarische Sozialismus:

The angriest socialists are those who are burdened with the strongest resentment. This is typical: the blood-thirsty, poisonous soul of Rosa Luxemburg has been burdened with a quadruple resentment: as a woman, as a foreigner, as a Jew and as a cripple.

Even within the German Communist Party she was dubbed ‘the syphilis of the Comintern’, and Weber once ‘assessed’ Rosa Luxemburg as somebody that ‘[belongs] in a zoo’. Dunayevskaya writes:

Virulent male chauvinism permeated the whole party, including both August Bebel, the author of Woman and Socialism—who had created a myth about himself as a veritable feminist—and Karl Kautsky, the main theoretician of the whole International.

Dunayevskaya’s gender-social analysis also cites a part of a letter in which Victor Adler writes to August Bebel on the subject of Luxemburg:

The poisonous bitch will yet do a lot of damage, all the more so because she is as clever as a monkey [blitzgescheit] while on the other hand her sense of responsibility is totally lacking and her only motive is an almost pervasive desire for self-justification.

In question was evidently a certain type of conservative political tactics that amounted to attacking prominent women, which in this case included a serious dismissal of Luxemburg’s work based on biology—the fact that she was a woman. Although this important aspect of social and gender history will not be further discussed here, its ubiquity needs to be borne in mind when discussing the theoretical and numerous quasi-theoretical critiques of The Accumulation of Capital and Luxemburg’s experience as a woman theoretician, teacher and revolutionary.

Bearing in mind that texts tackling the feminist dimension of Luxemburg’s theory are few and far between, here we shall try to make a contribution to the feminism of Rosa Luxemburg or to a so-called ‘Luxemburgian feminism’. If feminist analyses of Luxemburg’s works in general are rare, even rarer are feminist engagements with her The Accumulation of Capital. If there is any interest in feminist interpretation of Luxemburg’s work, it is usually defined in relation to her personal life and occasionally to her theory. Luxemburg not having written much on the subject of the ‘woman question’ certainly contributed to the fact that the subject of most interpretations of Luxemburg’s feminism is linked to episodes from her life and intimacy. These are, naturally enough, highly important subjects, particularly bearing in mind that historical scholarship has traditionally avoided women and their experiences; however, here we are aiming to step away from that sort of interpretation in order to contribute to a social-reproduction feminism based on Luxemburg’s critique of political economy.

What can a few of Luxemburg’s texts and written speeches tackling the ‘woman question’ tell us about her feminism? Can we use these works to identify discursive entry-points that can be used to establish a connection with her critique of political economy? In the following section we shall attempt to identify Luxemburg’s underlying position vis-à-vis the so-called ‘woman question’ in order to move to the second part of the paper where we shall establish a connection with her theses on the accumulation of capital and the role of non-capitalist spatiality in multilevel processes of social reproduction.

Luxemburg’s Critique of Bourgeois Feminism

Luxemburg did not exclusively devote herself to organising female workers’ groups; her work in that field was obscured by the fact that she usually worked behind the scenes. She fervently supported the organisational work of the socialist women’s movement, understanding the importance and difficulties of work-life for female emancipation. She usually showed her support through cooperation with her close friend Clara Zetkin. In one of her letters to Zetkin we can read how interested and excited she was when it came to the women’s movement: ‘When are you going to write me that big letter about the women’s movement? In fact I beg you for even one little letter!’ Relating to her interest in the women’s movement, she stated in one of her speeches: ‘I can only marvel at Comrade Zetkin that she … will still shoulder this work-load’. Finally, although rarely acknowledging herself as a feminist, in a letter to Luise Kautsky she wrote: ‘Are you coming for the women’s conference? Just imagine, I have become a feminist!’

Besides the fact that she was working ‘behind the scenes’ and privately showing her interest in the ‘woman question’, she still engaged herself in an open discussion concerning the class problem faced by the women’s movement. In a speech from 1912 entitled ‘Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle’, Luxemburg criticised bourgeois feminism and assertively pointed out:

Monarchy and women’s lack of rights have become the most important tools of the ruling capitalist class…. If it were a matter of bourgeois ladies voting, the capitalist state could expect nothing but effective support for the reaction. Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against ‘male prerogatives’ would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage.

The question of women’s suffrage along with the philosophy of the modern concept of law based on the premises of individual rights played an important role in the so-called big transition from feudalism to capitalism. For Rosa Luxemburg, the question of women’s suffrage is a tactical one, as it formalises, in her words, an already-established ‘political maturity’ of proletarian women. She goes on to emphasise that this is not a question of supporting an isolated case of suffrage which is meaningful and completed, but of supporting universal suffrage through which the women’s socialist movement can further develop a strategy for the struggle for emancipation of women and the working class in general. However, the liberal legal strategy of achieving suffrage was not class-inclusive and did not aim to overturn the capitalist system. Far from it. For Luxemburg, the metaphysics of individual rights within the framework of a liberal political project primarily serves to protect private ownership and the accumulation of capital. Liberal rights do not arise as a reflection of actual material social conditions, they are merely set up as abstract and nominal, thus rendering their actual implementation or application impossible. As she contemptuously argued: ‘these are merely formalistic rubbish that has been carted out and parroted so often that it no longer retains any practical meaning’. Luxemburg rejected the traditional definition of civil rights in every sense, including the struggle for women’s suffrage, and she pointed to its similarity with the struggle for national self-determination:

For the historical dialectic has shown that there are no ‘eternal’ truths and that there are no ‘rights’…. In the words of Engels, ‘What is good in the here and now, is an evil somewhere else, and vice versa’—or, what is right and reasonable under some circumstances becomes nonsense and absurdity under others. Historical materialism has taught us that the real content of these ‘eternal’ truths, rights, and formulae is determined only by the material social conditions of the environment in a given historical epoch.

What Rosa Luxemburg suggests in the aforementioned quotation from ‘Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle’ pertains to classical problems initially raised and debated within the framework of socialist feminism from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century: the role of bourgeois feminism in capitalist reproduction and the use of feminist goals as a means of achieving profit. Whenever capitalism is in crisis or needs ‘allies’ for its restoration or the further accumulation of capital, it integrates marginalised ‘Others’ into its legal liberal political form, be they women, children, non-white races, or LGBTQ people—whoever is disposable or potentially useful for further commodification:

Thus one of the fundamental conditions for accumulation is a supply of living labour that matches its requirements, and that capital sets in motion…. The progressive increase in variable capital that accompanies accumulation must therefore express itself in the employment of a growing workforce. Yet where does this additional workforce come from?

According to Luxemburg’s economic theory, the capitalist mode of production reproduces itself by creating surplus-values, the appropriation of which can only be hastened by a concomitant expansion in surplus-creating capitalist production. Hence, it is necessary to ensure that production is reproduced in a larger volume than before, meaning that the expansion of capital is the absolute law governing the survival of any individual capitalist. In The Accumulation of Capital Rosa Luxemburg establishes the premises for understanding capitalism as a social relation which permanently produces crises and necessarily faces objective limits to demand and self-expansion. In this sense she developed a theory of imperialism based on an analysis of the process of social production and accumulation of capital realised via various ‘non-capitalist formations’:

There can be no doubt that the explanation of the economic root of imperialism must especially be derived from and brought into harmony with [a correct understanding of] the laws of capital accumulation, for imperialism on the whole and according to universal empirical observation is nothing other than a specific method of accumulation.… The essence of imperialism consists precisely in the expansion of capital from the old capitalist countries into new regions and the competitive economic and political struggle among those for new areas.

Unlike Marx, who abstracted the actual accumulation by specific capitalist countries and their relations via external trade, Luxemburg claims that expanded reproduction should not be discussed in the context of an ideal-type capitalist society. In order to make the issue of expanded reproduction easier to understand, Marx abstracts foreign trade and examines an isolated nation, to present how surplus-value is realised in an ideal capitalist society dominated by the law of value which is the law of the world-market. Luxemburg disagrees with Marx, who analyses value relations in the circulation of social capital and reproduction by disregarding the specific characteristics of the production process which creates commodities. Thus, the market functions ‘totally’, that is, in a general analysis of the capitalist process of circulation we assume that the sale takes place directly, ‘without the intervention of a merchant’. Marx wishes to demonstrate that a substantial portion of surplus is absorbed by capital as such, instead of concrete individuals. The question is not ‘who’ but ‘what’ consumes surplus commodities. Luxemburg, on the other hand, analyses the accumulation of capital starting from the level of international commodity exchange between capitalist and non-capitalist systems.

Despite Luxemburg’s objections, she nevertheless realises that Marx’s analysis of the problem of variable capital serves as the basis for establishing the problem of the law of the accumulation of capital, which is the key to her social-economic theory. Equally, that line of argument allows for understanding the highly important distinction between productive and non-productive labour, without which it would be almost impossible to understand social-reproduction theory as a specific reaction to neoclassical economics and its partnership with liberal feminism. Precisely for this reason in The Accumulation of Capital Luxemburg quotes Marx:

The laboring population can increase, when previously unproductive workers are transformed into productive ones, or sections of the population who did not work previously, such as women and children, or paupers, are drawn into the production process.

This type of economy and liberalistic inclusion of the ‘labour population’ obviously has low democratic potential and lacks any aspiration to emancipate the oppressed class. Rights are allocated very cautiously, on an identity-level basis (as opposed to the material social level), and exclusively according to the formula designed primarily to safeguard the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Bourgeois women from the early nineteenth century do not have the abolition of the class system in mind; on the contrary, they support it. Moreover, bourgeois feminism affirms capitalism and one’s own class position, and disregards the rights of working-class women. The processes of accumulation of capital, the modern state, the aspirations of liberalism, and then bourgeois feminism move along the same path:

At a formal level, women’s political rights conform quite harmoniously with the bourgeois state. The examples of Finland, of American states, of a few municipalities, all show that a policy of equal rights for women has not yet overturned the state; it does not encroach upon the domination of capital.

Luxemburg explains that the role of the women’s suffrage movement is reactionary not only because of the simple failure of bourgeois women to support the struggle for workers’ rights and the social rights of proletarian women, but also because of their active participation in affirming the oppression of women which arises from social relations based on the reproductive work of women within the household sphere. The central methodological point of Luxemburg’s theory of economics consists of an assertive clash with classical political economics. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that the subjects of her critique also include precisely those social phenomena and processes which enable capitalism—liberalism, the role of the bourgeoisie in the transition from feudal monarchy to capitalism. Rights, laws, and modern-day social contracts are institutions that played a key historic formal role in the affirmation of capitalism. But also, bourgeois feminism plays an important part in the maintenance of capitalist class-structures. On the one hand, the bourgeois class of women demands the political right to vote only for the ruling class of women, and from an individualist standpoint they hold no interest in tackling the issue of the position of women in general or class-related causes of the oppression of women. In Luxemburg’s opinion, the role of bourgeois women is very important and it maintains an active presence in perpetuating the established social relations:

Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat.

By opposing the goals of bourgeois women to the goals supported by proletarian women, Luxemburg clarifies that the problem here is not only gender-related, a ‘woman problem’, but also a class-related problem. Talking about women in general whilst feigning universality will not do, because gender analysis without class analysis is reductive. Women belonging to the higher classes mostly do not participate in production within the framework of market processes and thus consume surplus-value, which has been drained through the exploitation of the working class; thus their role in the reproduction of social relations is of a ‘parasitic nature’:

They are parasites of the parasites of the social body. And co-consumers are usually even more rabid and cruel in defending their ‘right’ to a parasite’s life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation.

Thus, Luxemburg adds, the only social role of bourgeois women is to maintain and reproduce the existing order; they are not allies in the struggle for emancipation:

The women of the property-owning classes will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.

Luxemburg is not alone in her sharp criticism of bourgeois feminism. Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai, among others, contributed a great deal, particularly if we bear in mind their standpoint towards the reactionary attitudes of liberal women on the emancipation of women. Socialist women’s universal demands arose as an effect of social material motives and causes, ultimately finding more in common with men belonging to the same class than with the women of a higher class. This was in spite of the fact that, historically, the appearance of women in the labour market was frequently seen as an attempt to introduce cheaper competition for the male labour-force, which in turn influenced the decline in the price of labour. Considering the problem of the female labour force, socialist women point out that the workload of women is additionally aggravated by reproductive labour within the household sphere. One could almost speak of the ‘first wave’ of, or ‘early’ social-reproduction theory, when Zetkin states: ‘Women are doubly oppressed, by capitalism and by their dependency in family life’.

Dialectics of Spatiality Meets Social-Reproduction Theory

Luxemburg’s Marxist standpoint in all of her analysis of economics, particularly in The Accumulation of Capital, stems from the critique of classical economics and capitalist social formations. In her social-economic analysis of labour and the labour theory of value, Luxemburg, in the wake of Marx, introduced a distinction between productive and non-productive labour. One such example comes from her interpretation of the societal role of the family. Referring to Engels, in a speech from 1912 she differentiated between labour in the market sphere and labour in the household sphere, thereby laying the foundations for early social-reproduction theory:

This kind of work [bringing up children, or their housework] is not productive in the sense of the present capitalist economy no matter how enormous an achievement the sacrifices and energy spent, the thousand little efforts add up to. This is but the private affair of the worker, his happiness and blessing, and for this reason non-existent for our present society. As long as capitalism and the wage system rule, only that kind of work is considered productive which produces surplus value, which creates capitalist profit. From this point of view, the music-hall dancer whose legs sweep profit into her employer’s pocket is a productive worker, whereas all the toil of the proletarian women and mothers in the four walls of their homes is considered unproductive. This sounds brutal and insane, but corresponds exactly to the brutality and insanity of our present capitalist economy. And seeing this brutal reality clearly and sharply is the proletarian woman’s first task.

In her article ‘The Proletarian Woman’, referred to earlier, Luxemburg focused on the issue of the ‘political maturity’ of working-class women and the ways in which ruling-class individualism during the transition from feudalism to capitalism strongly influenced the restructuring of the family and the gender division of labour within it. She continued to argue that bourgeois women, who existed smoothly alongside the processes of establishing and formalising private ownership, had no interest in struggles relating to the inclusion of women in that ‘great workshop of social production’, and also how ‘[f]or the property-owning bourgeois woman, her house is the world’. Due to the very fact that bourgeois women do not participate in the economic functions of society (participating in neither household-domestic labour nor market production), Luxemburg highlighted that the historic appearance of women in the productive sphere is marked by a highly-conservative reflex. It is a structure of capitalism which is now being additionally formalised with regard to feudalism through a specific and entirely new pattern of social reproduction. As Lise Vogel put it, a huge gap between the sphere of surplus production and the domestic sphere was established in capitalism:

While women have historically had greater responsibility for the ongoing tasks of necessary labour in class-societies, it is not accurate to say that there is some universal domestic sphere separate from the world of public production. In class-societies based on agriculture—feudalism, for example—the labour processes of necessary labour are frequently integrated with those of surplus production. It is the development of capitalism… that creates a sharp demarcation between the arena in which surplus-labour is performed and a sphere that can properly be called domestic. To the extent that analysts assert the universality of some invariant domestic sphere, they are in fact projecting onto non-capitalist class-societies a distinction that is the product of capitalist relations of production.

Thus, women appeared for the first time in history as a labour force which reproduces both the capitalist mode of production and the working class itself, by caring for employed and unemployed family members (children and the elderly). Luxemburg underlines the key analytical issue we face if we are to attribute the disadvantageousness of women’s position simply to the ideology of the ‘antagonism’ between women and men, instead of to the capitalist mode of production. That warning illustrates how wrong and reductive it is, according to Luxemburg, to interpret the oppression of women transhistorically and in line with liberal feminism, instead of interpreting it as a product of the antagonism between capital and labour:

The call for women’s equality, when it does well up among bourgeois women, is the pure ideology of a few feeble groups without material roots, a phantom of the antagonism between man and woman, a quirk. Thus, the farcical nature of the suffragette movement.

Lise Vogel takes a very similar critical stance in Marxism and the Oppression of Women:

In the theoretical sphere, the first requirement for further forward motion is to abandon the idea that the so-called woman-question represents an adequate category of analysis.

Luxemburg begins The Accumulation of Capital with ‘The Problem of Reproduction’. She points out that the problem of the reproduction of the entire social capital was identified by Marx in his theory of political economy. She goes on to explain that reproduction is repetition, ‘renewal of the process of production’, hence implying that

the regular repetition of production is the general precondition and foundation of regular consumption, and is thus a prerequisite of human civilisation in each of its historical forms.

In order for society to survive it needs to reproduce. Social-reproduction theory points out that ‘reproduction’ may allude either to the process of the regeneration of the conditions of production which enable society to survive, or to the regeneration of humankind. To simplify, using the example of classic industrial labour, it would mean that reproduction is used to secure work operation, its regularity, to invest in the machines, factories, and raw materials. When machines break down they need to be repaired, replaced, or have new ones purchased in their place. Moreover, the labour force which delivers the production and reproduces the relations of society must be secured. Analogous with the machines, when labourers grow old or die they are ‘replaced’, while those of working age need to eat, rest, and renew their strength in order to be fully ready for work:

Ordinarily, generational replacement provides most of the new workers needed to replenish this class, and women’s capacity to bear children therefore plays a critical role in class-society.

In order to present my arguments relating to a connection between Luxemburg and social-reproduction theory in a clear manner, I shall elaborate on the ways in which I intend to use its key points and notions. We are presented with the task of placing ‘the reproduction of labour-power in the context of overall social reproduction’, due to this aspect of reproduction not being adequately dealt with in the contemporary tradition of socialist theory, as pointed out by Lise Vogel.

In the capitalist mode of production, the capitalist secures through the market the means needed for the operation of a factory and workers’ wages. Wage labour enables the working class to secure/consume items and services necessary for life—like food, clothes, covering household expenses—however, those needs are met in the household, not on the market. Moreover, in order to eat, one needs to take into account the preparation of food; if one buys clothes, they need to be washed and maintained; and also physical care needs to be provided to elderly members of the family or children. Unlike labour in the ‘productive’ sphere of society, domestic labour belongs to the ‘reproductive’ sphere. And to conclude, both capitalists and labourers consume, one way or another, food prepared at home, their clothes must be washed, or they depend on some other kind of reproductive labour. Therefore, their life and work in the productive sphere is mediated through a range of activities belonging to the domestic sphere. Much of the problem lies in the fact that both the working and capitalist classes perceive reproductive work as self-explanatory, to-be-taken-for-granted, ‘natural’. This structural and spatial gap between the reproductive and productive spheres of society indicates the fundamental reason for the oppression of women in capitalism. On what basis can we make this claim?

Following tradition, historically, the reproduction of the working class is undertaken by women outside the productive sphere and is unpaid. This indicates the ontological level of the problem: activities not defined as labour (food preparation, cleaning, care, breast-feeding, giving birth) and lacking any market value are not considered labour. The mathematics is clear here: if the labour in question is transferred to, for example, a capitalist with an employee, he would be obliged to organise a range of activities, invest time and money which are traditionally free and a burden to the household, in other words, to women. The question of an alternative, more-egalitarian distribution also requires significant shifts in attitude towards the market, changes which cost and are thus not feasible.

Marxist feminism has tackled the problem of social reproduction in various ways. Feminists supporting the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign in a dual-system manner offered one approach. A second (materialist) approach is found in Christine Delphy’s characterisation of social reproduction as a series of actions within the domestic sphere, which she sees as a separate mode of production. Finally, Lise Vogel offers a ‘unitary’ approach, in which social reproduction is taken to mean the simultaneous reproduction of the labour force and class society.

Autonomist feminists involved in the Wages for Housework Campaign initiated discussion in the early 1970s in relation to the unpaid labour of women. This was announced in the pamphlet by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, and the debate was followed later by a text written by Silvia Federici, ‘Wages against Housework’, and the book The Arcane of Reproduction written by Leopoldina Fortunati. For our current purposes, we shall shortly refer only to Fortunati.

Leopoldina Fortunati, just like Rosa Luxemburg, started from Marx’s formula c + v + s in an attempt to further develop his labour theory of value by focusing on the role of reproductive labour in the production of surplus-value. Although she misinterpreted the model of the labour theory of value (as was also the case with the Wages for Housework campaign, which tried to apply the abstract model to individual households) by equating productive and reproductive work, she nevertheless accomplished a veritable epistemological leap in both feminist and Marxist theory by pointing to the dialectics of the market and the household: accumulation is impossible without reproductive labour.

The basic analytical unit of Fortunati’s political-economic theory functions through (what she calls) the ‘obvious antithesis’—production/reproduction. She believes that the capitalist mode of production and its cycles cannot be fully analysed while holding on to the dual ontology in which production connotes value, and reproduction un-value. Moreover, according to her understanding this would represent an omission and a methodological error in Marxism. Criticising the naturalisation argument (which understands reproductive work as natural, as opposed to produced by the relations of production) in this sense also means casting doubt on the thesis that only production creates surplus-value—unlike reproduction which, according to the Marxist interpretation, has no such potential. In short, Fortunati questions the assumptions of orthodox Marxists who claim that reproductive labour is a precondition of value production, but valueless in itself.

Lise Vogel as a response to the domestic-labour debate argues that reproductive labour does not produce surplus-value, only use-values, and also uses Marx’s theory of accumulation to offer an alternative interpretation of the oppression of women. Although the domestic-labour debate produced a view of domestic work as ‘productive labour—a process or set of activities upon which the reproduction of (capitalist) society as a whole depends’, we could hardly find a more important contribution to the socio-materialist foundations of women’s oppression in terms of Marxian political economy. Equally so, this debate undoubtedly served as a springboard for Marxism and the Oppression of Women, particularly in so far as it offered a ‘unitary’ analytical framework to theorise domestic labour as an integral part of the capitalist mode of production.

When Luxemburg (much like other socialist feminists from the late nineteenth century) criticises bourgeois feminism and states that the oppression of women is an integral part of the capitalist mode of production, developing her theory of accumulation as the dynamics between capitalism and non-capitalism, her analysis affines to the conclusions of the ‘unitary’ theory of Lise Vogel. While the reasons behind Luxemburg’s and Vogel’s drive to expand the conceptual reach of key categories of Capital are not similar, their specific, individual contributions and their expansions of Capital can be connected. On the one hand, Vogel proposes to extend the key categories of Capital in relation to researching the biological, social and generational reproduction of labour-power, whereas Luxemburg was trying to create a theory of capitalist reproduction starting from Marx and drawing on dialectics of spatiality. It seems that both elements of these contributions are crucial to grasping the wider notion of reproduction, or the accumulation of capital, respectively. Although domestic labour produces only use-value and not exchange-value, and therefore does not directly produce surplus-value, domestic labour ‘is [possibly] its own mode of production, operating according to a distinct pre- or non-capitalist labour’. The commodification of domestic labour presents a key connection point of the Luxemburgian critique of political economy and social-reproduction theory: only when a large part of the population is dispossessed and forced to sell its labour-power on the market, including the female workforce, is it possible to talk about the systematic process of capital-accumulation.

The market, in order to accumulate capital, is maintained by spreading to non-capitalist spaces, integrating into the productive sphere populations which were not traditionally part of the market. The specificity of the historical-materialist method which places the feminist understanding of reproductive labour in the framework of the dialectics of spatiality is that it offers an explanatory analysis of the systemic correlation of women’s work and the reproduction of accumulation. If we wish to look at reproductive labour through the lens of the Luxemburgian analysis of surplus realisation, it would be necessary to take into account the relation towards the household as a non-capitalist space, i.e. its commodification and surplus accumulation.

Domestic labour is not a productive part of the market, and can, for the purposes of this discussion, be treated as an ‘external’ element of the capitalist economy. It does not have a value or a price and ontologically does not have the status of labour. The commodification of domestic labour could in the Luxemburgian framework be viewed as a typical example of the expansion of capitalism into a non-capitalist field. From the early 1970s onwards, social welfare was increased through the inclusion of households in market circulation. A whole variety of economic activities was concentrated around domestic work, care and similar services previously offered in a non-capitalist manner. The neoliberalisation of the market through the introduction of part-time labour contracts, the flexibilisation of the workforce and deregulation of labour and welfare legislation are all phenomena related to the 1970s crisis and stagflation, when the neoliberal regime was being formalised, in part, through women’s labour and the commodification of domestic work.

Vogel points out in her theory of social reproduction that the family as a social-economic formation is not an exclusive unit that allows for the reproduction of capitalism. Her historical-materialist approach traces the arguments of Luxemburg who, in her analysis of imperialism, insists on the historicisation of capitalist accumulation and its tendencies to spread and ‘adjust’ to the requirements of reproduction. As such, historicisation of a case demonstrates that, with time, social units which were traditionally not a constitutive element of the productive sphere become integrated into market circulation. Female migrant labour is certainly one such example, which illustrates how female migrant labour is useful for carrying out reproductive labour. Sara Farris notes:

Since the late 1980s… European women have entered the paid labour force en masse. Albeit at different paces and in different forms in each country, the majority of working-aged women are now in some form of employment outside the household. Furthermore, the immigrant population is no longer predominantly male; on the contrary, in some European countries women constitute the majority of migrants…. The demand for carers, cleaners, child- and elderly-minders, or social reproducers in general has grown so much in the last thirty years that it is now regarded as a phenomenon brought about by the global crisis of social reproduction as well as the main reason for the feminization of migration.

Given that today half of the world’s migrant population are women, we may confidently speak of the phenomenon of the feminisation of migration. Within the framework of ‘new imperialism’ and neoliberalism, female migrant work, a cheap and precarious labour force, becomes the ideal force for the reproduction of capitalism. Integration of the migration problem into the analysis of capitalism facilitates an understanding of the ‘new imperialism’, by pointing to a necessary link between the accumulation of capital and imperialism. The concept of social reproduction contributes to the analysis of capitalism in its entirety because it integrates both market and non-market aspects of capitalism. It should be noted that, despite the fact that migrant women were integrated into the productive sphere through the market, their appearance on the international labour market in no way constitutes competition for the male working class. That is because they mainly participate in a work sector connected to reproductive labour. On the one hand, Western upper-class women have attained ‘emancipation’ and have thus outsourced their domestic work to migrant women; but on the other, by outsourcing that labour they treat migrant women, whose labour they buy, as they might any commodity on the market. History repeats itself through the paradox of liberal feminism. In the midst of the crisis of social reproduction, the labour of migrant women in households and in care-work primarily plays a ‘support’ role to the female workforce in the Global North.

As opposed to the earlier trend of women leaving their homes and home countries as part of the family, today women undertake this move independently, often accompanied by children. As such, the dynamics of the countries of the Global South are to be understood through the concrete consequences of migration processes, bearing in mind the role of women in such vibrant dynamics. This is a highly specific configuration of capitalism in the context of its imperialist tendencies, achieved through cheap female care-taking labour that is materialised in rich countries. Thus, contemporary analyses of political economy should broach the phenomenon of female migrant work, as it enables us to understand how the crisis of social reproduction functions and the ways in which modern-day trends of accumulation are being realised using the relations of, as Luxemburg puts it, the capitalist and non-capitalist worlds. This relation is particularly enhanced in the specific connection of capital and gender, as Selma James has stated:

It is impossible to speak of the relation of women to capital anywhere without at the same time confronting the question of development versus underdevelopment.

Luxemburg devotes a lot of attention to the problem of foreign trade in her critique of political economy, hence developing arguments for her theory of imperialism. Even if we were to disagree with her claim that imperialism is based on the problems of insufficient demand and under-consumption which cause capitalist crises, her undisputed and topical thesis on the relation of crises and elements ‘outside’ capitalism through which the system is stabilised or crises are overcome, remains:

Growing profits (surplus value) meet the barrier of realisation resulting from insufficient aggregate demand. In other words, there is a tendency to create a surplus of accumulation that has no rational use, or, from the other perspective, to create the demand gap that does not realise the production made. In order to reduce this barrier it is necessary to find, or even create a demand that would realise the production, and thereby capitalist profits. Luxemburg presented examples of forming these (additional) artificial sources of demand: primarily expansion to non-capitalist economies, but also militarisation of the economy and international loan expansion.

This is precisely the reason that I have insisted on the importance of the ‘dialectics of spatiality’ and of the dynamics between productive and non-productive labour, particularly within the framework of neoliberalism. Similar historical examples, such as that of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which also unfolds through the transformation of social reproduction that is now, of course, capitalist, enable insight into the modern-day relations of productive and non-productive labour:

Once the small peasants have been ruined, domestic production frequently becomes the main occupation of men, who work for capitalists either under the putting-out system or as wage-laborers in the factory, while agricultural production devolves entirely on the women, old people, and children.

Luxemburg considers the integration of the non-capitalist elements of society into the circulation of the capitalist economy as necessary to achieving capital growth, but the mode of integration varies throughout the course of history. At a certain point in time, the productive sphere of the economy, or rather its non-productive ‘external’ counterpart, encompasses different populations in specific ways. Contemporary global capitalism’s tension between the developed and developing worlds should be considered through the connection between capitalism and the non-capitalist social environment:

On this basis, the conceptions of internal and external markets, which have played such a prominent role in the theoretical disputes around the problem of accumulation, can be revised. Internal and external markets certainly each play a great and fundamentally differentiated role in the course of capitalist development—not as concepts of political geography, however, but rather as ones of social economy. From the standpoint of capitalist production, the internal market is the capitalist market, this production is itself the purchaser of its own products and the supplier of its own elements of production. The external market, from the point of view of capital, is the noncapitalist social environment, which absorbs its products and supplies it with elements of production and labor-power.

Neoliberalism brings certain innovations into that relation, which David Harvey would call ‘creative destruction’. One such example is certainly the commodification of domestic labour and female migrant labour. Moreover, despite the fact that the aforementioned quote dates from 1913, it still bears the stamp of cold reality and not merely in relation to agriculture in Third World countries and the role of female labour within it, but also in relation to the actual consequences of the dichotomy of productive and non-productive labour. The historicisation of the capitalist mode of production and the tendencies of the ‘new imperialism’ indicate the contemporary relevance of Luxemburg’s thesis concerning the dialectics of spatiality, particularly once the theory of reproduction is integrated into it.

Conclusion

This paper functions as a contribution to feminist analyses that are methodologically based on Luxemburg’s critique of political economy, but also as a contribution to contemporary social-reproduction theory that aims to integrate Luxemburg’s legacy alongside that of Marx.

The aspect of Luxemburg’s political economy was analysed as a problem of the ‘dialectics of spatiality’ which serves as a key link between her critique of political economy and social-reproduction theory. In order to establish a connection between Luxemburg’s dialectics of spatiality and the feminist interpretation of the role of reproductive labour in surplus-creation, the paper opened with an overview of Luxemburg’s critique of bourgeois feminism, or the basis of her socialist feminism. Since we argued that Luxemburg’s contributions to feminism were of an intermittent and incomplete nature, the paper ‘filled gaps’ in the existing structure of her critique of bourgeois feminism and thus functioned as an introduction to a concept we termed ‘Luxemburgian feminism’, based on the link between Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation and social-reproduction theory.

In a certain way, we discussed the Luxemburgian critique as a tool for a materialist analysis of the connections between the household and the market. Although it may seem that both frameworks function as independent analytical elements, the contemporary methods of capital accumulation and women’s reproductive labour are two interconnected processes. This is illustrated in the paper using the example of women’s reproductive work, particularly with a view to its commodification, such as is typical of neoliberalism. We demonstrated the importance of discussing contemporary methods of capital accumulation, having in mind migration processes and their role in social reproduction. Moreover, it would be also very interesting to analyse the problem of commodification (or to use the ‘law’ of the dialectics of spatiality) when it comes to the contemporary feminist movement. From the 1970s onwards, in line with the process of the neoliberalisation of society, the feminist movement established itself as a useful niche market. The NGOisation of social movements undeniably meant their inclusion in the market, which had become actively state-regulated as part of the process of neoliberalisation, either through ‘outsourcing’ (with the state transferring its tasks in the field of welfare to NGOs, such as women’s groups working with victims of violence) or the direct inclusion of women’s organisations in the circulation of the market (as with women entrepreneurs or free-market feminism). In a way, the problem about which Luxemburg warned has a continuous flow. Bourgeois feminism from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries underwent shifts which have, through the neoliberalisation of social movements and in the absence of a systematic critique/struggle, recurrently indicated tangible support for processes of reproduction of the capitalist market.

As neoliberalism successfully exploits gender for the purposes of the class-interests of capital, we are facing an important task of designing anti-capitalist strategies based on the resistance to the market and its reproduction, thereupon focusing simultaneously on the domestic sphere and reproductive processes within the framework of the capitalist mode of production. At a time when systematic analyses of the relation between the market and the state—either at the national or international level—are necessary starting-points for a discussion of any short or long-term alternatives to the capitalist mode of production, Luxemburg’s dialectics of spatiality and her connection to social-reproduction theory seem to present not only a valuable introductory reference, but also the political model well suited to organising alliances among parallel structures and aligning their progressive goals.