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.