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Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon: Work, Power and Political Strategy
How do we integrate the theoretical underpinnings of social reproduction theory (SRT) into our understanding of the social harms inflicted upon us? How can we use it to inform our struggles and affect societal change under capitalism? Integrating our understanding of productive and reproductive spheres and exploring the connection between identity-based oppression and class exploitation, SRT has emerged as a powerful Marxist frame for social analysis and political practice. In this book, Aaron Jaffe extracts SRT's radical potential, relying on recent struggles, including the International Women's Strike and the teachers' strikes, showing how we can use SRT to motivate socialist politics and strategy. Using social reproduction theory to appreciate distinct forms of social domination, this unique and necessary book will have vital strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists, LGBT activists, disability activists and feminists.
- GenresFeminismNonfiction
176 pages, Paperback
Published November 20, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 18, 2020
I was really hoping for more from this one. Since I’m a Marxist feminist, I don’t really have any major political disagreements with Jaffe, but I have some theoretical concerns about his approach.
1. Jaffe’s “philosophical anthropology” is promising but quite underdeveloped. We need a deeper, humanist theoretical core to ground socialist feminist theory, and Jaffe offers an account of historically situated “need satisfying powers” that starts that discussion.
I would have liked to see more about how the development of some powers actually works against emancipation, specifically in the realm of sexuality. Jaffe points in this direction with a discussion of how climate change means we should not developed powers to burn fossil fuels. This does not address my feminist concern about how some leftist arguments about sexuality justify harmful and oppressive practices (eg adult-child sexual contact) as if they contributed to expanding human freedom. In short, there’s not enough about how to discern which powers are to be developed and which are to be eschewed.
2. Jaffe’s discussion of gender is unsatisfactory. Jaffe’s gender chapter is limited to a critique of Federici and Vogel, two major social reproduction theorists.
I think his critique of Vogel is largely on the mark, but his critique of Federici is unnecessary and based an aggressive misreading of her work. He accuses Federici of “naturalism,” which while certainly present in her most recent work, is not at all to be found in the book he critiques (Caliban and The Witch).
More pressingly, there are far more interesting and important arguments to be made about gender and social reproduction than the point Jaffe makes about how gender is not natural and how there are queer people oppressed by gender too, not just cis women. As a transfeminine non-binary person, I’m getting to increasingly annoyed for arguments like Jaffe’s that pit feminism against queer liberation. Queer oppression is caused by patriarchy, and many queer people suffer from forms of misogyny and sexual violence that I have found queer perspectives do not adequately address.
I would have instead liked to have seen some discussion about the theoretical role that gender violence plays in social reproduction. For example, how are battering, femicide, rape, sexual harassment, and child sexual abuse related to the social reproduction of labor power? Recent struggles against gender violence point in this theoretical direction, as do decades of feminist theory.
3. Jaffe’s dismissal of intersectionality was easily the most unconvincing part of the book. Jaffe is sympathetic to intersectionality but basically argues that social reproduction theory is superior because it centers class.
Now, Jaffe seems to hold a definition of class that includes racism, gender oppression, and other forms of social oppression. But this is still a form of unhelpful class reductionism, as Jaffe basically argues that the capital valorization process is basically the ultimate cause/purpose of all forms of oppression, and so that if it were eliminated all oppression would fall too.
He does argue that we need to fight social oppressions in order to fight capitalism, and his point is to get socialists to see why fighting oppression is central to the struggle against capitalism. My worry is this less political than theoretical, because it’s not at all clear to me that everything reduces to class in this way. I think I agree more with Ashley Bohrer (Marxism and Intersectionality) that capitalism is equally composed of multiple forms of oppression, all of which are interrelated but none of which reduce to any other.
Strangely Jaffe claims that the Combahee River Collective agrees with his perspective, which is a gross misreading at best.
Overall, I’m ambivalent about this book. If it gets Marxists to care about social oppressions, then that’s all to the good. But the refusal to concede that class isn’t central in the way Jaffe wants it to be holds back a more radical analysis. It’s past time for socialists to recognize that a commitment to universal human emancipation requires us to be equally socialist, feminist, anti-racist, and otherwise committed to eliminating oppression. A class-first perspective, no matter how nuanced, does not suffice.
1. Jaffe’s “philosophical anthropology” is promising but quite underdeveloped. We need a deeper, humanist theoretical core to ground socialist feminist theory, and Jaffe offers an account of historically situated “need satisfying powers” that starts that discussion.
I would have liked to see more about how the development of some powers actually works against emancipation, specifically in the realm of sexuality. Jaffe points in this direction with a discussion of how climate change means we should not developed powers to burn fossil fuels. This does not address my feminist concern about how some leftist arguments about sexuality justify harmful and oppressive practices (eg adult-child sexual contact) as if they contributed to expanding human freedom. In short, there’s not enough about how to discern which powers are to be developed and which are to be eschewed.
2. Jaffe’s discussion of gender is unsatisfactory. Jaffe’s gender chapter is limited to a critique of Federici and Vogel, two major social reproduction theorists.
I think his critique of Vogel is largely on the mark, but his critique of Federici is unnecessary and based an aggressive misreading of her work. He accuses Federici of “naturalism,” which while certainly present in her most recent work, is not at all to be found in the book he critiques (Caliban and The Witch).
More pressingly, there are far more interesting and important arguments to be made about gender and social reproduction than the point Jaffe makes about how gender is not natural and how there are queer people oppressed by gender too, not just cis women. As a transfeminine non-binary person, I’m getting to increasingly annoyed for arguments like Jaffe’s that pit feminism against queer liberation. Queer oppression is caused by patriarchy, and many queer people suffer from forms of misogyny and sexual violence that I have found queer perspectives do not adequately address.
I would have instead liked to have seen some discussion about the theoretical role that gender violence plays in social reproduction. For example, how are battering, femicide, rape, sexual harassment, and child sexual abuse related to the social reproduction of labor power? Recent struggles against gender violence point in this theoretical direction, as do decades of feminist theory.
3. Jaffe’s dismissal of intersectionality was easily the most unconvincing part of the book. Jaffe is sympathetic to intersectionality but basically argues that social reproduction theory is superior because it centers class.
Now, Jaffe seems to hold a definition of class that includes racism, gender oppression, and other forms of social oppression. But this is still a form of unhelpful class reductionism, as Jaffe basically argues that the capital valorization process is basically the ultimate cause/purpose of all forms of oppression, and so that if it were eliminated all oppression would fall too.
He does argue that we need to fight social oppressions in order to fight capitalism, and his point is to get socialists to see why fighting oppression is central to the struggle against capitalism. My worry is this less political than theoretical, because it’s not at all clear to me that everything reduces to class in this way. I think I agree more with Ashley Bohrer (Marxism and Intersectionality) that capitalism is equally composed of multiple forms of oppression, all of which are interrelated but none of which reduce to any other.
Strangely Jaffe claims that the Combahee River Collective agrees with his perspective, which is a gross misreading at best.
Overall, I’m ambivalent about this book. If it gets Marxists to care about social oppressions, then that’s all to the good. But the refusal to concede that class isn’t central in the way Jaffe wants it to be holds back a more radical analysis. It’s past time for socialists to recognize that a commitment to universal human emancipation requires us to be equally socialist, feminist, anti-racist, and otherwise committed to eliminating oppression. A class-first perspective, no matter how nuanced, does not suffice.
December 29, 2025
A standard social reproduction theory affair. No crazy takes, either good or bad, although it was a bit vague in its analyses at times. Glad I've read but wasn't life-changing.
September 19, 2026
Jaffe brightlining the limitations of marxist-feminisms that implicitly rely on a conception of binary natural bodies felt useful as did the first chapters which spend time defining SRT and its development and a few later pages examining SRT and intersectionality. His methodology skews toward philosophical idealism so larger points about other authors' understanding of history and dismissals of 'actual existing socialism' are not supported by...evidence. This is better at the history of ideas than the history of, say, labor struggle and education workers. At times the analysis of quotes from workers are generative in the sense that those quotes and that analysis don't always square. This was particularly evidenced in one workers' description of being in a worker co-op. Jaffe seems to be following a kind of Spinozan ontology that naturalizes the expansion of individual capacities; his highest value is freedom and the expansion of our labor powers and he uses that quote to meditate on it. But the quote from the worker seems to be much more layered, a reflection of the relationship between freedom and chosen obligations/commitments--feeling not alone and less alienated because people have each others backs and "have to be honest." I'd like to see Jaffe expand on the social dimension of reproduction, the question of how we reproduce each others' labor powers in the direction of freedom that seriously contends with the "have to" in this quote. This might open up SRT as a process in motion through time.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews