Social Reproduction Theory as Vulgar Empiricism: Jaffe’s Attack on the Process of Abstraction
October 29, 2026
Tibor Szamuely
I
When we refer to Social Reproduction Theory, it is necessary to clarify that our target is not the theorization of the reproduction of the social totality or of labor power within that totality per se. Rather, the term here denotes a specific iteration of this theoretical practice which developed a certain hegemony within some spaces of academic knowledge production in the 2010s.
This iteration, we argue, is inseparable from a broader preemptive neutralization of proletarian politics among progressive intellectuals in favor of the continued hegemony of a radical petty bourgeois democratic idealism which forecloses the possibility of constituting a social subject able to contend for class power, with the objective of transformation of the relations of production through seizure of state power.
Our case study of how this neutralization is implemented in discourse will review Aaron Jaffe’s 2020 text Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon: Work, Power and Political Strategy.
According to Jaffe:
Beyond traditional left circles, there is increasing awareness that anti-capitalism in theory and practice must be informed by women’s, anti-racist, Indigenous, anti-colonial and LGBTQIA+ struggles. Migration and disability have also become widely understood as key features when analyzing the harms produced by our class societies. Socially, there is an increasing openness to exploring the ways exploitation must be considered alongside and even a part of so many distinguishable oppressions. Those already organized in left groups are less and less committed to dogmatic economism. These developments are precarious, but have already begun to transform movements for social change.
This sounds nice. After all, who could object to greater inclusion of historically oppressed social groups? In much the same way, the alleged openness and pluralism of perestroika struck a certain kind of person as self-evidently benign. In both cases, for those able to read between the lines, a more concerning picture emerges. Specifically,the paragraph where “anti-capitalism” is counterpoised to “women’s, anti-racist, Indigenous, anti-colonial and LGBTQIA+ struggles” and we are informed that the latter must “inform” the former. “Anti-capitalism” as the unity of the workers’ struggle over the terms of the wage relation with a scientific consciousness of the necessity to overcome the terms of this relation itself is situated in a relation of subordination to the struggle of cross-class ethnic and sexual groups for the right to democratic equality within bourgeois society. Socialism becomes an appendage to bourgeois democracy in the best Millerandist or Popular Front style, and resistance to this annexation is painted as “dogmatic economism”, just as reformers in the Eastern bloc castigated defense of the monolithic state economy of the working class as “dogma” and “Stalinism”.
Jaffe continues:
From Engels and Zetkin on, Marxist feminists have developed Marx’s social theory to criticize social relations that exploit (use workers to grow capital) and oppress (systematically harm some) at the same time.
These definitions may be appropriate for grade school, however they lack something in the way of scientific precision. Exploitation is not the “use [of] workers to grow capital,” it is the appropriation of surplus labor from the immediate producers via the institution of private property in its various historically given forms. It is the specific type of exploitation which defines the dominant relations of production that, articulated as a mode of production, are necessarily associated with certain articulations of the political and ideological superstructure. It is the dominant historically-given form of exploitation which defines the character of the social totality. The specific way in which surplus labor is appropriated from the immediate producers is the foundation of the entire edifice of every determinate type of class society. When history is examined through the optic of exploitation, its rule-governed regularity becomes clear. Even before Marxism, Linguet approached this understanding with the dictum “the spirit of the laws is property”.
Oppression, on the other hand, is something to which any group can be subjected by any other group regardless of the position said group occupies in the production process. An oppressed group can, and more often than not does consist of the two classes whose mutual dynamic defines the given class antagonistic mode of production. The conflation or equation of oppression with exploitation functions to obscure the defining antagonism of class society in relation to cross-class contradictions which united and continue to unite the exploited with the exploiters. The nominal inclusion of “the oppressed” as a special category serves to mask the actual inclusion of exploiters.
Whether training their focus on individuals and their labor power in the family or the enveloping social relations through which different labor powers are produced and reproduced, theories of social reproduction help us see how experiences and histories of oppression and exploitation are mutually determining. [emphasis ours]
In the above formulation, we see on the one hand that “experiences” and “histories,” instead of being understood as the raw material of a process of scientific synthesis through which it becomes possible to grasp patterns structuring the dynamic of the social totality and not simply the polyphonic chaos of biographical subjective immediacies, are assigned their own autonomous validity. On the other hand, exploitation and oppression are again equated within this claustrophobic terrain of subjectivism unleashed, as “mutually determining”. Which indeed is how they tend to appear through the lens of the individual: a non-reflective succession of experiences. However, as always, if appearance corresponded to essence there would be no need for science. The pure unmediated authenticity of being qua being would be the only prerequisite of effective political practice, which would not require a protracted process of scientific synthesis but simply as Japanese feminists once put it a “scream from the vagina”.
This book will develop and defend what I take to be the best, most powerful version of SRT. I mean to develop an argument showing that SRT is the best approach at first, grasping the harms suffered in capitalism and second, providing a full-throated justification for socialism. [emphasis added]
This is a misunderstanding of the function of theory in relation to the class movement. Scientific theory is not merely required to “grasp” the “harms suffered” in capitalism. Weitling, Proudhon and Owen were just as acutely aware of the harm inflicted by capitalism as Marx and Engels. The difference is that the former objected to capitalism simply on the grounds of its contradiction with their moral values. Marx and Engels conjoined their moral outage at the bourgeois regime with a comprehensive scientific understanding of its characteristic features and dynamics. To shift the plane of the purpose of theory from the comprehension of the inner structure of capitalism as a process to a fixation on the harm this structure inflicts within the flow of experience is to reduce the specific function of theory entirely back to a mere moral outrage without understanding.
Furthermore, theory is not required to “justify socialism,” which is again reducible to a prescientific moral appeal. Theory is required to elucidate the strategic and tactical lines of action required for a political subject to advance the process of development towards the seizure of state power by the proletariat as precondition of transformation of the relations of production. It is then required to guide the implementation of this transformation. No theory is required for a moral justification of socialism, which could already be found in ancient philosophical and religious views remote from any scientific understanding.
When a social theory offers a set of principles to develop a picture of the world, those principles always highlight some parts of the picture while allowing other parts to fall into the background. Different theories provide differing ways of picturing the world and conceiving valuable points of intervention into it. Since there can be different theories, the choice of which theory one works with is actually practically quite important. For instance, consider a social theory offering principles that help explain the necessity of conflict, and assesses agents in terms of political/military formations put in tension by rising and falling powers. This is not a theory we can use to explore the way the division of labor is highly gendered. Likewise, a social theory assuming that hierarchies are divinely ordained or are biologically intrinsic will have a hard time highlighting potential avenues for any revolutionary aspirations of a dominated class.
Jaffe fully embraces the pragmatist subordination of theory to practice in which theory is justified not by its relative correspondence or non-correspondence with objective reality, but simply through its immediate utility within the domain-specific terrain of a given complex of tasks. The value of theory must be judged in accordance with its congruence with the dynamic of the social totality as a whole which requires a complex, multi-step process of synthesis of the results of social practice in general. Practical efficacy is dependent upon truth content not the reverse. And the determination of truth content depends upon an ascent from the superficial immediacy of vulgar empiricism through a scientific synthesis that cognizes the development of the whole. An apologia for the practical efficacy of a given eclectic bundle of disconnected principles or “rules of thumb” is a retreat from science to folk wisdom.
Following Marx, SRT sees labor power as key to producing capital. But it also sees labor powers as the keys to capitalist social relations more broadly...SRT thus widens Marx’s lens, expanding the narrow aperture through which the logic of capital’s valorization, and only this logic, can be seen clearly.
This is meaningless obfuscation. The production and reproduction of capital itself is precisely the key to capitalist social relations as a whole, which is a key already formulated in Marx’s economic writings. The expansion of the “narrow aperture” of analysis of the relations of production into a vulgar empiricist review of the chaotic mass of appearances which constitute the social whole as seen from the standpoint of unmediated subjectivity is the dissolution of reason.
SRT’s approach to “class” is valuable because it can combine the logical conception of class with the social forces and lived experiences that flesh it out...For this reason, SRT ties the logical notion of class to other social forces of domination that help determine it. Doing so allows us to see that working class powers are produced and reproduced in ways that are also gendered and racialized, to name just two powerful social forces.
On the one hand there are the general preconditions and determining features of the capitalist wage relation in general. On the other hand there are the particular historically determined forms of appearance of this relation, within different strata of the class constituted by the division of labor within the production process and different national and regional articulations of the class relation.
For SRT however, class only appears at the general, logical level of analysis, while at the concrete level it dissolves into gender and race. That is to say the “logical abstraction” of class is first and foremost experienced via the “lived reality” of racial and sexual embodiment. This ignores that the concrete material actuality of the class relation is first of all not particular states of racial or sexual embodiment but the waged condition as such. The essential content of the wage relation whose characteristic features are brought to light by the process of abstraction is already the substance of the direct experience of those subordinated to this relation. And it is insofar as they face subordination to this relation that they have the capacity to constitute themselves as a force able to overcome it. The wage relation is the essential content of capitalist society and contains within itself the secret of its overcoming.
The struggle against racial and sexual oppression on the other hand can only be a struggle for full rights within capitalist society, a struggle to actualize the abstract universality of bourgeois emancipation against the contingent mass of caste type divisions that obstruct the full realization of this bourgeois universality. To insist that the concrete form of working class subjectivity can only be a racially or sexually defined subjectivity is to insist that the concrete form of working class politics can only be bourgeois.
At this point we are gifted with the claim that:
The need for Social Reproduction Theory then stems from two facts—one social and one theoretical...Theoretically, it stems from the fact that a focus on capitalist production alone has failed to provide the resources needed to craft a clear picture that integrates the gendered circuits through which capital passes—particularly the production of embodied labor powers—into an account of how capital reproduces itself in unstable but dominating ways.
The above claim is provided with concrete illustration in the person of Nai, a wage worker, who is part of a household with her brothers and mother who are all also employed. She is frustrated by her own disproportionate share of household tasks. We can only ask, would Nai’s employer care if her own burden of household chores was reduced and a regime of equality was introduced in her household? Would this affect the profit interests of her boss per se? The answer is clear, it would not. Indeed if Nai were to express her frustration by moving to a trans-inclusive polyamourous lesbian commune, the profit interests of her boss would similarly remain in placid security.
According to Jaffe, however:
These pressures have pushed some social theorists to adopt dual (or more) systems theories. These tie two or more oppressions to two (or more) distinct causes or logics. However, giving up on a social theory for many partial theories risks never developing an account of how the parts add up to the workings of a whole. Yet, such an account seems necessary if we are to see how distinct forms of oppression operate together in compounding ways. A picture of the whole allows us to craft accounts of their integrations and the underlying motor force that moves oppressions forward in their distinctions, and mutually determining relations.
There is a clear confusion between the theory of historical materialism in general, which provides a methodological basis for interpreting the structural dynamics of all possible modes of production, class and non-class alike, and the application of the theory of historical materialism to the interpretation of the dynamics of one such mode, specifically the capitalist one.
To understand that the current oppression of women is contingent on the capitalist mode of production, but that this oppression has a logic and genealogy prior to this mode of production, is in no way to split the understanding of the social world into an eclectic mass of partial theories. It is precisely to understand the social totality in its heterogeneous complexity via historical materialist methodology. Ironically, as much as SRT protests against an alleged “reductionism” of the concrete diversity of the social world to the abstract categories of Capital, it is an actual perpetrator of the same.
The capitalist mode of production undergoes a multiplicity of concrete historical trajectories dependent upon its admixture with complexes of practices inherited from past periods of the dominance of other modes of production. None of the racial and gendered characteristics which SRT insists on conflating with the essential features of the capitalist mode of production are in fact inherent to it. Both the customary or legal subordinate status of women in the family and caste, or racial oppression, far from being logically necessary attributes of capitalist production are remaining vestiges of defunct modes of production. And although capitalists certainly are agnostic at best or opportunistic at worst with regards to these relations, the logic of the system they embody tends to dissolve and weaken them. Under the predominance of pre-capitalist, class-antagonistic modes of production, Nai would not simply face frustration with the backwards behavior of her brothers, she would face comprehensive, crushing, personality annihilating legal and customary subordination to father and husband. If anything it is Nai’s frustration which embodies the emancipating logic inseparable from capitalist development itself, while it is the attitude of her brothers which expresses this archaic residue of prior caste and estate orders.
II
According to Jaffe:
Appreciating the internal working of value allows us to understand the underlying logic of any capitalist society. The degree of abstraction in these ideas is essential to finding something shared across tremendously diverse capitalist societies. Yet the strength of this universality comes at a steep cost. Value-centered concepts do little on their own to flesh out the bare logic that they describe.
Here again theoretical “abstraction” is subjected to a denigration driven by a unilateral vulgar empiricism. Capitalist societies are not in fact “tremendously diverse”, on the contrary, the basic structural features of capitalist production set narrow limits to their possible variation. The determining features of the economic structure also condition the political, juridical and ideological superstructures restricting them to certain characteristic forms. This is precisely why the abstract model of the capitalist mode of production outlined in Capital continues to elucidate the reality of capitalism today. And contra Jaffe, not only can this abstract model “help” to clarify “why some people have to choose between poetry and care work, why some don’t seem to face that forced choice, and more pointedly, why still others experience neither poetry nor care work as conceivable choices in the first place”, it can specify these exact things with precision: it is the extraction of surplus labor by capital that sets the limit to the free time that makes such choices more or less possible. To the extent that an individual belongs to the proletariat, these choices are restricted. To the extent they have access to the social surplus extracted from the same, they are not.
Jaffe would of course insist that the oppression of women is negated here. On the contrary, it is placed in its real relation to the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. Insofar as women are able to access the labor market on increasingly equal terms to men, an indisputable product of the past century of capitalist development, women are increasingly less inclined to accept unequal division of household responsibilities. This results in both increasingly equal division of said responsibilities and in a tendency for economically (via labor market access) and legally (via their recognition as formally equal judicial subjects) emancipated women to evade men’s ideological backwardness in this area via avoidance of marriage and child bearing, a noteworthy global trend.
The structural dynamic of capitalism is precisely to facilitate the bourgeois emancipation of women as equal proletarians alongside men. The persistence of archaic patriarchal relations in broad regions via the juridical and ideological superstructure does not feature in the abstract model not because this model is lacking, but precisely because these relations are contingent and incidental in relation to the reproduction of capitalist production relations. “Women, Life, Freedom” was not an anti-capitalist but a democratic revolt. Socialists are the most enthusiastic supporters of democracy, but by the same token, democracy itself is no more socialist than secularism.
What is crucial to note here is that this work of preparing embodied labor powers for the market is done predominantly by women. And thus the social realities of valorization, and the conditions that make capital valorization possible, are far from gender-neutral.
By a similar logic, the argument could be, and is, made that, because in the US, higher education has become predominantly female, the “social realities” of training qualified labor power are not “gender neutral”. In both cases, the mistake would be misreading quantitative ratios as qualitative distinctions.
It is indeed an empirical social reality that, despite the massive gains of the women’s movement to which Jaffe thankfully alludes, partnered heterosexual women continue to perform disproportionate household labor in advanced economies. Similarly it is an empirical social reality that thanks to these very same gains, women now form a majority of those in higher education in the US. However, in both cases, these quantitative disproportions occur on a terrain of substantial equality between men and women as judicially autonomous vendors of the commodity labor power. Women find it increasingly and justifiably easy to use their economic independence and judicial autonomy to evade male entitlement, and sex-caste-type subordination of women has been reduced to a self-evidently absurd and economically unviable subculture in a broad spectrum of bourgeois societies.
Jaffe insists:
There are real social consequences to not having access to the means of production. It is the basis of class relations—in which one is either a buyer or seller of labor power. But there are further consequences to lacking access to the means of production while also facing social inequalities that make it harder to develop or exchange labor powers for a wage.
What is occluded here again is that it is precisely capitalist development that has made it ever easier for women to develop and exchange their own labor power with capital. The capitalist future is certainly female, and by extension the workers’ movement of today is the natural terrain of action for contemporary women, without any demeaning and gratuitous sex- and gender-based adjectives required.
A socially reproductive approach recognizes that capital’s valorizing logic is temporal and always housed in a social organization that reproduces itself. Accounts of capital are therefore stronger when, in addition to uncovering capital’s logic, they develop social and historical analyses as well.
The logic of capital and concrete social and historical processes are not two processes occurring in parallel, and never the twain shall meet. The “account” of capital is valid precisely because it is a synthesis of the dynamics which structure and define these processes, constructed on the basis of “social and historical analysis”. Severing the organic connection between the two is a necessary part of any theory which sets out to deny that abstract universal equality constitutive of the capitalist mode of production is an ever more overwhelmingly predominant concrete empirical experience itself.
Understanding the abstract dynamic of capital as the core of the concrete historical process in the societies it dominates is what allows us to understand how the great democratic victories of the women’s and civil rights movements in the US were conjoined with a great capitalist offensive against workers power. It likewise allows us to understand that there is no buried socialist essence in today’s democratic movements of bourgeois equality, whether of dalits in India, women in Iran or Kurds in Turkey. The welcome victory of any of these movements is perfectly possible on the terrain of capitalism, and far from humanizing that system, such victories will only further unveil the brutal contradiction between social production and private ownership, which rather than being “solved” by democracy is brought to a fever pitch.
What should be clear here is that capital’s imperative to valorize is only possible through so much work that does not directly produce value. As a result, a narrow focus on value-productive work provides only partial and incomplete understanding of capitalist society. We would certainly be missing a lot about capitalism if the only thing we thought was important to understand about Nai is the fact that she also works outside the home for a demolition company.
On the contrary, it is precisely wage-dependent labor under the command of the owners of capitalist property which defines a society as capitalist. It is value-producing labor which determines the specific characteristics and historical trajectory of this society.
With similar “good sense”, we could argue that a “narrow focus” on the servile status of the slave or the corvee obligations of the serf gives only a “partial” and “incomplete” understanding of prior class-antagonistic modes of production. That, in fact, what is truly important is the home life and sentimental ties of those subject to a nebulous “exploitation.” The bourgeois humanist character of this line of thinking is obvious: the specific features of the relations of exploitation which constitute class society are minimized in favor of a Victorian-styled fascination with domesticity and the alleged selflessness of women. The fact that Nai works for a demolition company is in fact the only important thing about her: it is her work for the demolition company that makes her a participant in social production and, by the same token, it is this work that grants her the capacity to act on the world historical level to transform this process. For the relations of production, Nai is first of all not a woman, she is a worker. And it is her identity as a free wage worker producing surplus value in bourgeois society which both undergirds her capacity to freely develop her personality and her power to completely overturn this society. SRT in theory drags women back into the narrow realm of domesticity and care which precisely thanks to the potent equalizing-abstract force of capitalism they have increasingly escaped in practice.
Capital’s logic of valorization can be put to a halt by stopping any activities necessary for accumulation, whether productive of value or not. As any good elder-care worker knows, a blood clot in the legs can be just as deadly as a clot in the heart.
Firstly, “capital’s logic of valorization” cannot be “put to a halt” simply by groups of workers stopping “activities necessary for accumulation”. Even the syndicalist Sorel knew that the general strike was a myth. The balance of power between the classes within this logic can be modified via partial stoppages and it is these which constitute the normal substance of class struggle. Ruptural break with capital itself entails a transition beyond this economic conflict over the terms of sale of labor power at the enterprise or sectoral level into a wholesale political and military struggle for state power.
Secondly, on the terrain of the economic struggle, all proletarians do not have equal structural leverage. Those not involved in the production of value broadly defined, but specifically those involved in the production and distribution of material goods have greater immediate economic leverage than those involved in the reproduction of labor power, who in turn have greater structural leverage than the unemployed and lumpenized strata of the class. A national strike of railroad workers would have a qualitatively greater impact on economic activity than a national strike of sex workers. Recognizing that both would have a positive impact in terms of promoting trade union consciousness and organization in the class in general is no excuse for an obfuscatory concealment of the vast difference between the two in material efficacy against capital as a whole. Metaphors about “blood clots” are simply a childish distraction from this.
It is hard to maintain a firm boundary between production on one side and reproduction on the other. While perhaps analytically satisfying, this divide would be conceptually cutting the world into pieces that are needlessly difficult to link back together again in a coherent and readable picture.
This boundary is only “hard to maintain” if you are desperate to evade its political implications. And it is “analytically satisfying” because it is necessary to understand objective reality and by extension to intervene in that reality effectively.
At its core, the issue is simple. The sphere of production is the sphere of extraction of surplus value via the production and distribution of material goods, which is the sphere which conjoins production in both material-technical, transhistorical and specifically capitalist terms. This is the determining core of the social organism and the site of maximum leverage of workers against capital. Activities occurring in the household on the other hand lie at the opposite extreme. They are not of direct significance to the class struggle even as they condition it ideologically insofar as they are structured either in accordance with norms of bourgeois equality which facilitate proletarian comradery and collectivism or preserve backwards norms of masculine privilege which corrode the possibility of class cohesion.
To say, as SRT does, that we reproduce society is not only to name an unevenly distributed burden. It is also to say that we are the social agents producing and reproducing our opportunities and powers to change these structuring realities in the future. This means that, even when not functioning as social “activists,” we are agents for social construction and crucially, agents of social change. How we work, refuse to work, or are prevented from working in trying to satisfy our needs is socially formative and transformative. These are the paths through which we first develop and then actualize our powers by setting them into motion. Sue Ferguson developed the immense breadth of this insight by calling all such activity “life-making.”
This is in no way an “insight”, but rather a shockingly simple minded banality packaged as something profound. It is worth reflecting on the ideological mechanism embodied in the promotion of such “insights”. SRT theorists shout from the rooftops about such banalities because they have nothing coherent to say about the specific functioning of the capitalist system and the specific strategic and tactical lines required to create the preconditions for the overcoming of this system. In much the same way bourgeois ideologists in general evade any discussion of the specific features of the capitalist system which they are neither capable of, or interested in understanding, in favor rather of meditations on human nature “in general”, economics “in general” and so on. To announce that it is a “task of theory” to inform us that we are all subjects and capable of action in general abstract terms is to make a backhanded denial of any role for theory in the first place.
At the level of the individual, in addition to a bundle of commodities and the wage needed to acquire that bundle, we share basic needs. We all need love, patience, respect, education, encouragement, and guiding criticism. We need these, and so much more.
Nobody, even the most crudely mercenary bourgeois reactionary, would deny these empty humanistic platitudes, as anyone familiar with HR managers is all too well aware. SRT theorists want to repackage the obvious fact that workers are human beings with feelings, aspirations etc. as if it is some kind of revelatory threat to an “economist” and “reductionist” Marxist orthodoxy which exists only in their slanderous petty bourgeois imaginations.
This is not new, neo-Kantians at the time of the first revisionism controversy found Marxism too “cold” and “amoral” for their tastes, and the new leftists who objected to Stalin on the eccentrically audacious grounds that he was not bourgeois enough, found Marxism to be downright inhumane. Catholic Social Teaching of course would say the same. The purpose of Marxism has always been to provide for the greatest possible satisfaction of the needs of concrete human beings. But through the scientific analysis of society, not the repetition of sentimental trivialities.
III
What counts as a labor power? The term conjures images of muscle-bound, masculine workers using their potencies in construction, demolition, or other heavy industries. However, in a world where women’s labor is serially under-respected—when not outright ignored—and social power is disproportionately wielded by men, we can see where this limited and limiting image comes from.
This “image” may come from somewhere, but certainly not Marxism. Marxism has always promoted, celebrated and advanced the maximum involvement of women in social production as a precondition of general social emancipation; a precondition whose foundations have been laid with ever greater force by the operations of capitalist production itself. Even in the 19th and 20th centuries the paradigmatic symbolic figure of productive social labor tended towards feminization: consider the Lowell Mill girls or Rosie the Riveter. The fallacious assumption of productive labor as “masculine coded” is not an innocent one, it is a depraved attempt to tag any political position which recognizes the objective fact of worker centrality with the tar brush of misogyny.
Given the way this image has dominated for so long it may be surprising to notice that, for Marx, nearly anything can count as a labor power...There are a few things to notice about this expansive account. First, this definition tells us that labor powers are not simply those powers that, when set in motion, create surplus-value for capital. The notion of labor powers being used here is much broader. Labor powers are those capacities that produce everything that we find valuable — “a use value of any description” means nearly anything useful at all. Since use-values are of any description, they can include useful things besides the commodities that transform labor powers into profits for capital.
Just as we were previously informed that human beings have needs, we now make another awe inspiring discovery: they have capacities as well! Indeed in every possible mode of production every human being has labor power. What is worthy of note is not this empty transhistorical category but the specific actuality of value producing labor in capitalism, and the capacity of this labor power to organize to place the productive forces developed by capital under rational control via working class dictatorship. What is not only not necessary but actively harmful obfuscation is endless humanistic prose poetry on the human being in general and her marvelous, unique etc. “capacities.” Indeed when such prose is written by humans (as it always was until recently), the reader is left with an unseemly aftertaste of narcissism. The SRT theorists should be reminded that Lukacs already went down this sterile road with a vast culture that neither they, nor likely any of us alive today, can match. The result was the Ontology of Social Being, an indigestible brick of a book that despite some fine observations, on balance, only wastes our precious time.
I’ve argued that what it means to be a human being is to be needy, active, socially situated, and capable of choosing amongst strategies for satisfying a rich set of needs. It follows that a social organization that ignores and reduces needs, forces some into inactivity, produces isolation, and needlessly constrains our ability to choose how to satisfy our needs can be considered a bad one. A social organization is bad because it uses what we are to do violence to what we are.
Instead of a strategic and tactical line in the struggle to impose the will of our class on society, SRT wants to feed us idealist utopianism. A social organization may be bad not only because it “ignores and reduces needs” or does violence to its members. It is bad specifically if and only if this violence conflicts with the historically given potential for maximum development of the productive forces for the benefit of the broad masses of humanity, the working class. When a NKVD commissar shot a Red Army conscript for indiscipline with civilians, or Northern draft dodgers were arrested in one of the great civil wars of modern times, this was not bad, and it was on the contrary quite good. The same goes for the sacrifice of consumer needs to industrial development in the historical workers states which certainly “reduced needs.” What is good is what serves the general historical interests of the class. If this means our personal deprivation and destruction, we exclaim, so be it! The rational society will not be built by years of rest and relaxation. Insofar as social progress occurs through class antagonism, humanistic bilge about violence and deprivation in general above and beyond classes is a demoralizing toxin.
On this view there is something deeply violent going on beyond the description that workers under conditions of capital have to sell their labor powers.
Indeed there is. But this violence is wrong not because “violence is wrong”, but because the very development of this violence itself has created the possibility for a higher form of actualization of the human species. Such a possibility can certainly only be actualized through even more violence, crime and tragedy. If man were not a wolf to man, there is little doubt that we would still be dwelling in caves, an outcome which perhaps the SRT theorists would find congenial. This is precisely what Engels was alluding to when he endorsed slavery.
Yet, capitalism’s violence can never totally deny what we are.
On the contrary! For a dialectical and historical thinker, capitalism’s violence has created and molded us out of a pathetic shame of primitive barbarism and rural idiocy where it found our ancestors vegetating like stupid animals. The violence of capitalism is the sacred dawn of our self reflection and the beginning of our struggle not to negate it, but to complete its work with the same inhuman ruthlessness which began it.
Jaffe now treats us to the story of another salt of the earth everywoman, Ana. Ana is a migrant in the United States who wants to study computer programming, but instead finds herself constrained to engage in unskilled labor without access to the education she seeks. According to Jaffe:
Given the just-developed view, a social reproduction theorist can say that Ana is being damaged, even dehumanized. The social organization of capitalism that Ana is immersed in reduces rather than enlarges the depths of her powers as a free, active, needy, and socially empowered being.
Apparently it takes SRT to understand that Ana is being “damaged” by her exploitation at the hands of the capitalists. At this stage, someone else is being dehumanized here as well: the reader! To understand that Ana is a proletarian and that the exploitation of the capitalist system inhibits her development to the level given by the potential of the productive forces is no discovery of SRT, it is an elementary premise of not just Marxism but socialism in general. It requires an audacious spirit of academic fraud to paint this as a novel discovery.
We return to the ongoing obfuscation of the specific characteristics of value producing labor in capitalism. For Jaffe on the one hand:
We would be missing a lot about the particular ways Ana’s living personality is embodied and disempowered if we sidelined these aspects of her experience. It would not improve our insight if we insisted on only talking about the disconnected fact of labor powers sold for a wage.
And on the other hand:
As we have seen, labor power as an abstract idea applies trans-historically to all human beings. When approached as part of social analysis, however, we need to see just how labor powers are actually produced and reproduced in a given social context. And this is precisely what SRT does. SRT shows how capitalist societies are formed by capacities limited by citizenship status, language, and family situation. Of course that is not all—the list of socially disempowering influences can be expanded to include other constraining social dynamics like the processes underpinning racialization, misogyny, gender-binarism, ableism, religious persecution, and so much more.
That is to say, the empty, trans-historical abstraction of labor power which Jaffe previously spent some time playing games with is conflated with the exact, historically determined specific form of value producing labor under capitalism. This is done in order to minimize the unique significance of the latter in order to clear the way for a focus on the innumerable individual biographical particularities of individuals who sell the capacity for this labor, including “language” and “family situation”. In short, the scientific analysis of capitalist society which produces as a necessary conclusion the universalist unity of value producing wage labor is shoved aside in favor of the first person sob story, beloved of left-liberal petty bourgeois trauma vultures.
IV
Perhaps for the first time over the course of this text, we finally approach a sober grounding in material reality when Lisa Vogel’s work on the labor market disadvantage imposed by motherhood is brought up.
Unlike significant portions of Marxist feminist discourse, this touches on a question of authentically fundamental significance for the class struggle. Any realistic view must balance an understanding of the deficit imposed on motherhood by the labor market and social policy of actually existing capitalism, with a recognition of the equally salient fact that women’s increasing emancipation within the same historical dynamic gives them decisive leverage for evading unfavorable outcomes by choosing not to reproduce. Capitalism indeed tends to structurally disadvantage women, but on the terrain of equality and freedom it creates. The formal-legal emancipation of proletarian women, like the formal-legal emancipation of the proletariat in general, is not an empty illusion but the actual content of bourgeois dictatorship in its fullest development.
It is not surprising that Vogel’s sober observations incite Jaffe’s ire:
The problem is that, for Vogel, gender oppression is linked, through capitalist social relations, only to women’s biologically reproductive powers. Vogel indeed supposed that “biological differences constitute the material precondition for the social construction of gender-differences.”
Here it is important to keep in mind that SRT is constituted as a legitimizing text by, and on behalf of, the left-liberal petty bourgeois who, on the one hand, aspire to operate as functionaries in the ideological reproduction of bourgeois hegemony and, on the other hand, face the ever more inescapable reality of proletarianization themselves as overqualified labor sellers of diminishing value to the bourgeoisie. This strata is both subjected to intensifying market despotism and uniquely incapable of contributing to the reconstruction of the proletarian world outlook, due to its own intensive education in bourgeois ideology. It is therefore drawn to a celebration of a limitless fluidity of subjective identity construction.
From this standpoint, a necessary recognition of the grounding of sexual (not gender!) difference and its ideological expressions in biology and the division of labor entailed therein is seen as an oppressive limitation on transgender self-fashioning. Such a limitation must be vociferously denied, objective scientific sexual (not gender!) reality be damned. This tendency has in fact done tremendous harm to the struggle of trans people for democratic rights by associating this struggle with idealist positions on sex and gender.
The inescapable fact that the historical oppression of women and social practices of masculinity and femininity in general are downstream from biological difference does not have and should have no bearing on the right of individuals to modify their own biology or gender expression. Just as SRT seeks to efface the strategic line given by the differentiated material structure of capitalist society in favor of a utopian “yearning for freedom” that permeates an undifferentiated totality, so “queer theory” seeks to fully emancipate individual self-expression from any biological, scientific reality that grounds it. In both cases, an absolute subjective freedom is “won” at the cost of a refusal to understand constraints of the objective world. And in both cases, there is a refusal to understand that this maximum fluidity of individual self-fashioning, far from being a subversive threat to the logic of valorization, is its exact ideological expression. Jaffe insists that:
Gendering in capitalism is for only the vanishingly few an easy, comfortable, or remotely fulfilling process.
but fails to remind the reader that “gendering” before capitalism was simply the imposition of a tightly compulsory position defined by legal and customary norms which had a complete negation of individual freedom as their precondition. Pride is a celebration of a bourgeois emancipation that is already largely realized in much of the Western world, not an essentially communist event burdened by a false consciousness. As communists, it is our duty to defend bourgeois emancipation precisely with more consistency than any bourgeois party, but it is equally our responsibility to clearly draw a line between the defense of individual self-ownership against patriarchal-feudal ideological residue and our own specific class program.
V
After the quick pledge of loyalty to queer theory (which no housebroken leftist can avoid on pain of bogus accusations of transphobia, itself a real movement pathology), we proceed to the bog-standard genuflection before intersectionality. Jaffe is pained to declare that “...too often, proponents of Marxist and Marxist-inspired social theories have rejected intersectionality.” This is an injustice because:
As with SRT, there is a long and radical history that precedes the kinds of intersectionality that are commonplace today. Intersectionality has roots going at least as far back as Sojourner Truth’s 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech.
The idea that Sojourner Truth can contribute much to the scientific analysis of capitalism is as laughable as the idea Robespierre, Pugachev or Weitling could do the same. The moral outrage that fueled petty bourgeois democrats and pre-scientific socialists in their admittedly heroic struggle against oppression has much to teach on the level of personal conduct, but remarkably little on that of sociology or economics. Sojourner Truth had no access to the work of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg and Lenin. We, however, do. We should take advantage of this inheritance to purge our minds of the idealist gobbledygook which encumbered the minds of our ancestors, not glorify the same in a kind of infantile regression as some misguided sign of “respect.”
This glorification is in fact the focus of Jaffe’s work, applied below as apologia for intersectionality as a kind of “aw shucks” common sense wisdom:
None of this seems very controversial. Who could disagree with the ideas that we are all different, that some are harmed differently and in more overlapping, confounding ways, or that we ought to be aware of that fact and sensitively respond to it?
In fact any sober, scientifically minded person can and should disagree with all of the above.
Historically determined social formations characterized by the predominance of one or another class-antagonistic mode of production are not a chaos of innumerable differences extending down to the level of the individual. They are characterized in their fundamental dynamic by the relation of exploitation between the immediate producers and the exploiting class in the dominant mode of production.
What is politically salient is not that “we are all different” (in fact quite the opposite!) insofar as our individual subjectivities are constituted by complex conjunctions of contingent circumstances, but rather that we are all the same insofar as we occupy the same objective economic position in relation to the exploiting class. Nor is the fact of our being harmed, or the need to relate to these various harms sensitively, the main point in relation to the constitution of political subjectivity. Rather, it is in our capacity to exert power to create an order more congruent with our common happiness. Intersectionality functioned exactly as one of many character masks of the neoliberal restoration through its rebranding of a class capacity for common power into a differentiated series of individual experiences of harm.
As a framework for integrating intersectional harms, Collins’ “matrix of domination” is beyond the standard issue criticisms of “identity politics” leveled at intersectionality by both the right and class-reductive or class-only Marxists. Collins’ “matrix” is a specifiable universal shifting through time, and comprised of further specifiable, overlapping, and evolving nested matrices. It can situate the oppressions experienced by individuals or groups with shared identities. It explains situations in view of their trajectories and illuminates how agency evolves in more or less dominated ways within a social whole. Any politics rooted in an identity would need to be linked up to others—in an increasingly universal response to the way matrices of domination are actually organized.
Here, Jaffe, via their summary of Collins, repeats the same empiricist confusion of the essential and the contingent elaborated at length in their prior exposition. The primacy of the specific form of exploitation which characterizes the dominant mode of production in the social structure is effaced via a multifaceted, polyphonic chaos of subjectivity. This is of course the governing logic of the hegemony of the “new social movements” which came to constitute civil society following the historic defeat of the working class by the imperialist counter offensive against the world-historic impact of the October Revolution on the class struggle.
We should also observe that Collins’ work includes a conception of “class.” In fact, for Collins, Marxist notions of class are actually the starting point for the standpoint epistemology she defends. Because the proletariat is the subordinate group in capitalism, it is in a privileged position to know the truth about the violent power of capital.
The idea that because the working class experiences the violence of capital, it is in a privileged position to know the truth about capital mistakes potential for actuality. The daily confirmed fact of the overwhelming submission of the working class in capitalism to bourgeois ideology, outside of revolutionary periods, is the verification of the immense gulf between this potential and its actualization which is accomplished only through the exact abstraction which Jaffe decries. Such an abstraction is not a negation of the truth of practical experience, but its qualitative leap through a protracted process of synthesis from vulgar to scientific empiricism. To resist this leap in the name of the “infinite complexities of everyday reality” is to refuse any social science.
At this point Jaffe confirms their status as a vanguard of regression earned with their attack on Vogel by castigating Martha Jimenez for her sober and reasonable assessment that:
from the standpoint of Marxist theory, intersectionality is a powerful ideology that obscures the meaning and significance of class and class relations, even among those who should know better.
According to Jaffe the danger here is that:
When a class-centric perspective denies Black women and other already deeply marginalized people the space to articulate and fight specific oppressions, then the multiply jeopardized have yet another form of basic denial to add to the matrix.
What this audaciously mendacious statement willfully obscures is that from its origins, Marxism has always been preoccupied with articulating and fighting “specific oppressions” as evidenced by its immense literature and history of practice concerning the national question and the woman question. Intersectionality is not the discourse of historical materialist analysis of “specific oppressions”, it is the discourse of the petty bourgeois seeking to advance its own interests in capitalist society in the role of a disinterested representative of a fictitious cross class community of the “oppressed”. This is easy to observe empirically from the inseparable connection between intersectional theory and the practice of militance on behalf of bourgeois center-left parties, a practice that radicals like Jaffe essentially share.
Jaffe closes their apologia of intersectionality by observing that:
When generously interpreted, the two theories [intersectionality and SRT] seem rather close.
Indeed, when two theories that at their lackluster best work most effectively as fog machines of obfuscation are interpreted “generously”, there is no doubt that conceptual fusion is an easy task!
Here Jaffe, feeling a need to justify a Marxism whose redundancy and irrelevance they have quite comprehensively “proved,” proceeds to a citation of Marx’s well known observation in Capital that:
The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers... which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis—the same from the standpoint of its main conditions—due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances. [emphasis ours]
Jaffe at this point must perform a delicate balancing act. If the specific mode of exploitation of the producers lacks any special significance, then SRT, as a rather vacuous repackaging of some Marxist commonplaces, is itself misguided. On the other hand, if this mode of exploitation is truly determinate, then Jaffe would have to anger the postmodernists with a straightforward avowal of proletarian class politics.
To remain on the tightrope between these two chasms, Jaffe eagerly grabs ahold of Marx’s final qualifications in order to repeat the confusion between essential and contingent which characterizes their entire chain of reasoning:
As we move from the innermost secret of class to what a society actually looks like, we should remember that Marx rejected a unidirectional notion of causality. For Marx, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to social analysis.
The fact that capitalist society, whose structure is dictated by the extraction of surplus value from wage laborers via private ownership of the means of production, appears in a multiplicity of particular forms becomes reason to reject the reality of determination of all these particular forms by that dictating structure. The end result of such a line of thinking is exposed by Jaffe themselves when they immediately proceed to recommend the work of Cedric Robinson. Robinson simply replaced Marx’s analysis of the historical process via the development of the class relation with one grounded in racial categories.
From here it would only be a few steps to endorsing Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century as another “model”. Some would protest an analogy like this as a hyperbolic poisoning of the well. They would be wrong. The openness of a petty bourgeois distorter of Marxism to unscientific, non-class explanations of social phenomena and by extension to irrational mythologies of “authentic” sexual, ethnic, racial etc. communities of belonging, does its part in demobilizing any effective resistance to the most rabid forms of irrationalism. They should be held accountable for this.
Now, Jaffe repeats once more the reduction of the class relation to a logical abstraction in comparison to the concrete realities of gender and race, observing that:
the logic of the class relation needs to be fleshed out. The forms of social oppression translate it, as we have seen, from being a merely logical relation to being one useful for “analyzing empirically given circumstances.” The class relation, in other words, needs to be determined.
On the contrary, what translates the “logical” class relation into the empirical-actual class relation is not simply the “forms of social oppression,” but the entire ensemble of concrete characteristics of the class relation itself within a given space and time. These concrete characteristics are by no means reducible to the prevailing “forms of social oppression”, they include the level of development of the productive forces, the role of the territory in question within the international division of labor, the balance of forces between the classes etc. To single out “forms of social oppression” from among all these factors is an attempt to quietly substitute Marxism with postmodern pluralism.
This substitution is advanced in what immediately follows:
This means that the class relation is not only, or purely, classed. SRT can follow Cynthia’s lead—at once acknowledging that gender violence is everywhere, and making it a priority to explore gender violence as an important part of working class experience. In the Grundrisse Marx himself warrants this move to subjective conditions of experience: “The conditions enabling ... the reproduction of their life, their productive life process, are only posited by the historical economic process itself; both the objective and the subjective conditions, which are merely two different forms of the same conditions.” Here we see that “subjective conditions” are just one side, or one way, of expressing the productive processes and relations at play.
Violence against women is certainly an important part of the experience of those who belong to the working class (and other classes) as are countless other social practices from church membership and wartime combat, to migration and alcoholism. Anyone who wants to grasp the concrete reality of social processes in relation to the constitution of the working class as a subject should be attentive to the particularities of all such practices. However, again the essential and the contingent are confused. None of these practices define the working class qua working class in the same way as the essential features of its objective economic position in the capitalist mode of production. The substance of working class subjectivity is given by its position as labor power severed from the means of production, and united with these via the uncertain mediation of the wage under the command of the private owners of the former.
It is exactly organization on the basis of these essential defining characteristics that allows the working class to constitute itself as a subject able to intervene on other essential questions like domestic violence. Confusing the two categories of social positions and practices opens up the danger of a rebranding of diffuse practices of cross-class social movement interventions as “proletarian”. This was confirmed by the absurd farce of the “women’s strike” an exercise whose utter impotence was downstream of its detachment of the concept of the strike from its necessary grounding in the production of surplus value by the wage dependent. A truly powerful political strike against the oppression of women, carried out by waged workers of all kinds, will only be possible insofar as the confusion of the contingent and the essential in social life repeated ad infinitum in Jaffe’s text is decisively rejected.
It is moreover necessary to observe that, just as Jaffe took Marx’s observation in Capital III on the multiplicity of empirical forms of appearance of the basic structural features of capitalist production as a license to ignore the qualitative difference between the one and the other, so now Jaffe deploys a quote from the Grundrisse to facilitate the same erasure. According to Jaffe, Marx’s observation that:
The conditions enabling ... the reproduction of their life, their productive life process, are only posited by the historical economic process itself; both the objective and the subjective conditions, which are merely two different forms of the same conditions.
is an indication that Marx endorsed the conflation of structurally essential and contingent features of working class life. Let’s consider the above citation in its original context:
The bourgeois economists are so wrapped up in the notions of a definite historical stage of social development that the necessity for the objectification of the social powers of labour appears to them to be inseparable from the necessity for their alienation over against living labour. But as soon as the immediate character of living labour is transcended, i.e., its character as merely individual, or as only internally or only externally general, with the positing of the activity of individuals as immediately general or social activity, this form of alienation is stripped from the reified moments of production. Then they are posited as [social] property, as the organic social body in which the individuals reproduce themselves as individuals, but as social individuals. The conditions enabling them to be such in the reproduction of their life, their productive life-process, are only posited by the historical economic process itself; both the objective and the subjective conditions, which are merely two different forms of the same conditions.
It is all too clear that Marx is referring here, with his use of the terms objective and subjective, to the contradiction between objectified and living labor which characterizes the capitalist mode of production and its future abolition. This has nothing to do with Jaffe’s attempt to equate every concrete social practice engaged by working class individuals or strata with the structural characteristics which define the working class as a class.
At this, a postmodernist hack named Derrick Sayer is brought in to further justify Jaffe’s shameful butchery of Marx. Jaffe cites the following “forceful” and “elegant” point from Sayer:
Production relations are, very simply, any and all social relations which are demonstrably entailed in a given mode of production ...To put it the other way around, the production relations of a given mode are all those relations between people, in whose absence they would not be producing in that particular way ... What is, or is not, a production relation in any given instance can only be determined a posteriori, on the facts of the case.
That is: production relations are not only everything but the kitchen sink, they are the kitchen sink as well! The economic base is in fact the totality of social relations! This kind of regression from materialism into a naive idealist concept of “totality” is a common stock-in-trade for many who have sought to dismantle Marxism from the inside. It successfully reduces the analytical power of Marxism to zero.
But thanks to Sayer, we now understand that:
In a deeply misogynistic society, gender violence informs the class experience of women. In a deeply racist society, racial violence informs the class experience of racialized people. And, of course, the particular combination of violent forces named in misogynoir informs the class experience of Black women.
The banal truth of these observations only reinforces their function here as a willful diversion from the priority of the class relation. The working class can only accomplish its coming into self consciousness as a class separate from and opposed to all bourgeois parties when it identifies not with the experiences which unite it into cross-class communities of ethnic or sexual identity, but with the experiences which unite it as a class.
The above formulation simply authorizes the subordination, siloing and indeed marginalization and discarding of the working class as a concept within a pluralistic patchwork of identity-based social movements ultimately led by the bourgeoisie, and reproducing the fragmentation of worker subjectivity that perpetuates its rule. Lenin opposed the Bund for the same reason we need to vehemently oppose SRT and “intersectionality” today.
VI
At this point we are informed via a citation from David McNally and Sue Ferguson that:
racialized, sexualized, gendered bodies, practices, and institutions matter: racism and sexism are not historical aberrations that can somehow be separated from capitalism’s “real” or “ideal” functioning. Rather, they are integral to and determinant of—in the sense that they really and actively facilitate—actual processes of capital dispossession and accumulation.
Let’s unpack this knapsack of conceptual confusion. No sincere socialist, or for that matter sincere democrat (this is precisely the point…), would even consider denying that racism and sexism matter.
Nor would they deny that in countless concrete situations, racist and sexist social practices and their associated ideological discourses served and continue to serve not only to facilitate “actual processes of capital dispossession and accumulation”, not to mention their role in reproducing the political hegemony of the ruling class. None of this equates to the outrageous idea that it is impossible to separate racist and sexist practices and discourses from the functioning of capitalism per se. History has taken pains to illustrate this phenomenon countless times.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the US was a formally white supremacist state, in which the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon race” was the bedrock of the political and ideological superstructure. At the beginning of the 21st century, the US was a cosmopolitan post-racial regime of liberal universalism in which the brick and mortar of the state was provided by the legacy of the civil rights movement, something it proudly advertised with its first black head of state. At no point in this epical transformation was capitalism put into serious question. On the contrary, capitalism was in even less question at the end of the process then at its beginning.
Likewise in many countries today, women have full rights in marriage and broad access to the labor market. In other countries today, marital rape is legal and women largely live under the tutelage of their families, often under the threat of extreme organized violence to enforce compliance. In both sets of countries, capitalism continues its carefree extraction of profit. To ignore or deny these basic facts in order to salvage the concept of capitalism, racism and sexism as an inseparable trinity is to engage in a fanatical act of ideological and historical denial so extreme it demands explanation.
We can see where this delirium leads in practice when Jaffe proudly cites Democratic Party apparatchik Stacy Davis-Gates on “how socialist potentials have actually grown and can continue to develop”. Such obscene and shameless treason to the class is a fitting epilogue to Jaffe’s empty utopianism.