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The Centrality of Reproduction and the Question of Labor Power

A Review of Immanent Externalities

February 4, 2025

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Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of LIfe in Capital
by Rebecca Carson
Haymarket
2024

The 2008 crisis was seen by some as evidence of the parasitic nature of finance. If, as this perspective maintained, capitalism returned to its postwar golden years centered around production, neoliberal inequality could be eliminated or significantly reduced. Yet the years following the 2008 crisis have been marked by a deeper integration of finance capital across the entire economy.

More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the importance of social reproduction—practices of lifemaking and care—to the forefront. But instead of prioritizing human life, capitalist states intervened primarily to restore productivity and profits. While, at times, this took the form of increased top-down state welfare, the responses of nation states to the pandemic were fundamentally about returning to business as usual.

In Immanent Externalities, Rebecca Carson contends that, under neoliberalism, social reproduction has increasingly become a major site of capitalist accumulation and financial investment, which we would do well to theorize in order to respond to this deepening financialization of our daily lives. This process of financialization, including the spread of predatory subprime mortgages and the expansion of consumer credit, has reorganized social reproduction according to the interests of finance capital, transforming spaces of lifemaking labor essential to our reproduction as human beings—spaces such as housing, schools, and hospitals—into new sites of profitmaking. The increasing financialization of social reproduction necessitates both a theoretical understanding of finance capital’s entanglement with social reproduction and a political recentering of struggles over it.

In contrast to the view that finance represents a predatory element separate from the “real” economy, contemporary Marxist discussions have argued that the entire economy has been reorganized according to the interests of finance capital. Recent years have also seen a revival in Marxist social reproduction theory (SRT), both as a theoretical inquiry into the sphere in which workers are reproduced and as a strategic intervention highlighting the importance of struggles over practices essential to human life, including housing, education, and health. Yet, as Carson notes, “analysis has seldom delved into the logical co-production of finance capital and social reproduction.”1Rebecca Carson, Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital (The Netherlands: Brill, 2023), 6. Carson effectively argues that such analysis is urgent due to the rise of finance capital, which has reorganized—not replaced—production. This commitment to the “co-production” of finance and social reproduction is the starting point of Carson’s argument and makes the book a unique contribution to our understanding of capitalism as it exists today. In what follows I will expand on the logic and importance of Carson’s argument before turning to the political stakes of the book, which hinge on Carson’s view of labor power. While Carson insists that the reproduction of capital is more inclusive than the category of labor, I will argue that retaining a focus on the reproduction of labor power remains important because it highlights the contradiction between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of the worker central to capitalism. This allows for an understanding of recent social reproductive strikes as struggles over time—that is, as efforts to direct labor towards human life rather than profit.

Carson follows much of the best recent Marxist work on finance, defining financialization as “the expansion of the circulation of interest-bearing capital.”2Carson, Immanent Externalities, 16n13. This makes reproduction the central site of contradiction in contemporary capitalism because, as Carson argues, there has been “a shift in production’s temporality: production is no longer merely that which makes value possible, as an aspect of value’s prehistory, but is assumed to exist in the future to account for rising proportions of fictitious value.”3Carson, Immanent Externalities, 17. Because fictitious capital is  “a title to future value” that is not productive of value, it requires the continued reproduction of both capitalist relations and the lifemaking processes that enable production to continue.4Carson, Immanent Externalities, 17. In this way finance capital and social reproduction are unavoidably and increasingly both imbricated with and coproductive of each other. 

Reproduction is dependent on both impersonal forms of domination (where “the production of commodities is directed towards the accumulation of value with indifference to the particularities of consumption”) and interpersonal forms (or noncapitalist relations which Carson understands to be internal to the value form).5Carson, Immanent Externalities, 80. The rise of finance capital and the specific fetishized form of interest-bearing capital (IBC) have changed both the impersonal and interpersonal forms of domination. Carson, following Marx, terms this the “automatic fetish,” or the accumulation of money by money, described in Capital via the notation “M – M.” As capitalist accumulation becomes more reliant on IBC, it increasingly depends on interpersonal relations for its reproduction: “because the lending of money, which is not an exchange, requires an interpersonal, legal contract. While the actual capital accumulated is fictitious, these social relations are not mediated by exchange. Therefore, while the individual, as bearer of capital personified, lends their money, they engage in an interpersonal relation between respective bearers of the capital relation.”6Carson, Immanent Externalities, 87. Here, we can see that the abstract form of the fetish of interest-bearing capital is itself reliant on interpersonal legal relations, the latter being “internally necessary to capital’s social form.”7Carson, Immanent Externalities, 90. Even the most abstract form of capital’s domination rests, in this way, on the manner in which we organize our interpersonal relations.

After centering capital’s social form, it becomes both possible and necessary to think the forms of oppression through which capital expands. For Carson, these oppressions are not add-ons, but “necessary and immanent in practice as social forms that reproduce the capital relationship. Although capital might not need gender oppression, it does require gross social inequality to be internal to the class of the wage labourer.”8Carson, Immanent Externalities, 143n9. Importantly, while Carson acknowledges that her view “broadly aligns with a ‘unitary theory’ of reproduction, where capital’s abstractions are understood to play a role in the reproduction and conditioning of non-capitalist social relations,” she insists on a dialectical view. By this she means that “a theory of reproduction needs to understand the logical role of concrete and historical life-making processes as external and immanent to capital’s abstractions.”9Carson, Immanent Externalities, 174, 143, emphasis added. The processes appropriate to our lifemaking are both external and immanent to capital’s abstractions, thus the title of the book itself.

This view of the relationship between the capitalist value form and noncapitalist relations is central to the book’s valuable reflections on time. Here Carson examines the “two concepts of life derived from Marx’s three volumes of Capital: one concrete and one abstract. The concrete concept refers to human life and nature, the abstract to the life of capital.”10Carson, Immanent Externalities, 4. On the one hand, concrete forms of life are both the basis of and a limit to the movement of capital and the production of value. On the other hand, social reproduction is dependent on the commodity form: the abstract life of capital structures and limits the possibilities of human and nonhuman life. By differentiating between these two internally related concepts of life, Carson makes it possible to analyze the dependence of concrete forms of life on the value form and, crucially, those moments of concrete life’s independence on the value form that may represent a limit to capital’s reproduction. These moments of independence are potentially important sites of working-class struggle.

This tension between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of life is central to Carson’s analysis and, as she argues, to Marx’s understanding of the outer limits of capital. By “deploying temporal concepts,” Carson argues, “Marx included the reproduction of concrete life as a variable within his analysis, often referring to ‘interruptions’ that inform the duration of capital’s circuits and thereby impose limitations on the reproduction of capital.”11Carson, Immanent Externalities, 104. These interruptions to production are themselves interrupted by the reproduction of life, both human and nonhuman. Carson is attentive to the contradictory and multiple temporalities internal to capitalism, pointing to reproduction as the site where “capital’s abstract form mediates – and is mediated by – the concrete reproduction of human life and nature.”12Carson, Immanent Externalities, 105. Marx identified the reproduction of workers as one of these interruptions in Volume II of Capital, where he stated that “workers, in order to continue to exist on the market as exploitable material for the capitalist, must before all else keep alive, and therefore maintain himself by individual consumption.”13Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 138. In Volume I of Capital, Marx defined this contradiction as that between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of labor power. On the one hand, the worker “consumes” means of production in the labor process, producing commodities containing surplus value and thereby reproducing the life of capital. On the other hand, the worker purchases and consumes commodities that are necessary for the reproduction of their own, human life.14Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 717. This contradiction is between what Michael Lebowitz calls the worker for capital and the worker for themselves.15Michael Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). On the one hand, the worker’s reproduction is dependent on capital, since workers obtain the use values they need by purchasing commodities on the market; on the other hand, capital is dependent on the worker as the producer of value in the labor process.

While Immanent Externalities shows the centrality of finance to capital’s reproduction and…how this has led to the intensification of interpersonal forms of domination, the book decenters…the political consequences of this development. Carson’s subsumption of both abstract and concrete labor to the category of wage labor leaves the book with little to say about the politics of lifemaking that might follow from its profound insights. But even without developing a clear politics, Carson creates the space to do so…

Against Lebowitz’s approach, which centers labor power, Carson argues that the overarching framework of “reproduction” is better equipped to understand this contradiction. This is the case because reproduction, as Carson argues, “encompasses” labor.16Carson, Immanent Externalities, 139. For Carson, we ought not focus too much on labor power, both because it “begets a labour-centric account” that marginalizes those who do not work for a wage and because the rise of finance capital has made it necessary to reconceptualize the internal relationship between the life of capital and human life.17Carson, Immanent Externalities, 142. Carson maintains that “there is no value without the expenditure of human effort through labour,” yet views financialization as the increasing “evasion of valorisation.”18Carson, Immanent Externalities, 24. Thus, finance has become more central to the reproduction of capital, while only indirectly affecting the wage relation. It is for this reason that she criticizes SRT for limiting its focus to “the tension between the reproduction of human life and wage labour, and not between human life and capital’s process of reproduction.”19Carson, Immanent Externalities, 142. Carson’s move, while theoretically illuminating, leaves open some lingering questions and potential criticisms regarding the politics that flow from Immanent Externalities.

While Immanent Externalities shows the centrality of finance to capital’s reproduction and makes a compelling case for how this has led to the intensification of interpersonal forms of domination, the book decenters certain concerns implicitly raised by other SRT theorists about the political consequences of this development. Carson’s subsumption of both abstract and concrete labor to the category of wage labor leaves the book with little to say about the politics of lifemaking that might follow from its profound insights. But even without developing a clear politics, Carson creates the space to do so: “to adequately address the way this positive sense of life acquires its determinacy is not the point of this book,” after which she insists, rightly, that “if analysis can locate noncapitalist practices and processes as internal to capital – new arenas of struggles over social reproduction open up to contestation.”20Carson, Immanent Externalities, 175, 2. Social reproduction theory has long argued that there is a need to consider sites of struggle beyond the point of production and that the tension between lifemaking and valueproducing labor represents a central contradiction under capitalism. While theoretically enriching, it is unclear how Carson’s analysis extends or deepens this insight at a practical level.

As other SRT theorists have noted, centering the reproduction of labor power remains important because it reveals the contradiction between capital’s drive to subsume all labor under abstract labor time on the one hand and the persistence of concrete, creative human activity on the other. In a recent piece on social reproduction and time, Susan Ferguson argued that the difference between labor that is productive of value and social reproductive labor is that “only the former is directly and immediately organized by the law of value, by clock-time.”21Susan Ferguson, “Marching to a Different Drummer: Social Reproduction and Time,” Spectre, July 7, 2023,  https://spectrejournal.com/marching-to-a-different-drummer/. Of course, social reproductive labor is not completely immune to the discipline of capitalist clock-time, but its “capacity to resist has much to do with the fact that the products of social reproductive work (clean clothes, healthy bodies, poems, little league baseball games and so on) are not exchanged on the market: they are not, therefore, subject to the law of value.”22Ferguson, “Marching to a Different Drummer.”  As Lise Vogel has shown, capitalism often leaves socially reproductive tasks up to workers themselves.23Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013). This creates a division “between two components of necessary labour, one carried out in conjunction with surplus-labour and the other taking place outside the sphere of surplus-labour appropriation.”24Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, 150.

While the importance of social reproductive labor is obscured because it is often unwaged and not productive of surplus value, it is precisely this temporal and spatial separation that gives it a certain degree of autonomy from the forms of discipline employed during production. These times and spaces represent moments where the worker can more easily engage in what Lebowitz calls labor for self. Despite Carson’s insistence on the existence of multiple and contradictory temporalities internal to capitalist reproduction, she argues that “human life and value form, with their distinct temporalities, are intrinsically connected through abstract labour (which is the substance of value). Abstract labour only appears as value for itself in the form of money, as the abstract objectification of human labour. Here, life itself is really subsumed to the logic of capital.”25Carson, Immanent Externalities, 137. 

Ferguson, on the other hand, sees the tension between productive and nonproductive labor as the potential site of a struggle over time. While the distinction between valueproducing and lifemaking labor is not always clear, particularly as informal forms of labor become more prevalent, it is precisely the fact that lifemaking labor maintains some freedom from capitalist clock-time that, in Carson’s words, “this independence can be retained and developed for purposes other than the reproduction of capital’s abstract forms.”26Carson, Immanent Externalities, 10. 

This effort to “retain and develop” the lifemaking qualities of labor has been exemplified in recent social reproductive struggles, including the revival of the women’s strike, the teachers’ strikes in the 2010s, and nursing strikes during the COVID-19 pandemic. These movements have all demanded “social arrangements that prioritize people’s lives and social connections over production for profit.”27Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2019), 80.Rather than an effort to abolish social reproductive work, social reproductive strikes look to highlight capital’s reliance on such work, while simultaneously striving to reorient them towards the reproduction of life, rather than the reproduction of capital. 

Social reproductive struggles, then, are for both “bread and roses.”28Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, 10. They include traditional working-class demands—higher wages, better working conditions—but go beyond these. By insisting on the need to prioritize life over profit, they seek to direct more of our time towards the reproduction of the worker for themselves, rather than the reproduction of the worker for capital, thereby exerting more substantive control over the labor process; the “goal of this process is not the valorization of capital, but the self development of the worker.”29Tithi Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed., Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 81.

By distancing itself from a focus on labor power, Immanent Externalities passes over many of the important political contributions that follow from social reproduction theory. However, by examining the contradictory relationship between capitalist and noncapitalist relations, the book represents a potential starting point for future strategic interventions in Marxist ecology and Marxist feminism. The book has much to contribute to debates around financialization, social reproduction, and, most importantly, the increasing interrelation between the two.

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