The Social Reproduction of Value, Body Depletion, and Wages for the Wageless across the Global Social Factory

Abstract

In this article, I reflect on the entanglements between production and social reproduction in structuring the process of value generation and exploitation, and how one can scale-up classic debates on domestic work to capture trends more broadly at work for the vast world of informal employment. I also reflect on how – in relation to patterns of exploitation co-shaped along the productive and reproductive continuum - bodily depletion should be understood as both input and output of what I call the process of ‘social reproduction of value’. This reading of value-generation not only centres the experience of millions of women worldwide, but also that of wageless workers across past and present histories of capitalism.