The political economy of social reproduction in crisis: the United States in the 21st Century

I. Introduction: Social Reproduction as a Hidden Condition of Capitalist Accumulation

In capitalist society, the production of surplus value—the lifeblood of capital accumulation—rests on the daily and generational renewal of labor-power. This renewal, or social reproduction, includes all the labor and institutions required to sustain human life and capacity to work: from food, housing, and healthcare to education, caregiving, and environmental conditions. As Marx observed, the reproduction of labor-power is indispensable to the reproduction of capital itself. Yet, as feminist Marxists like Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, and Tithi Bhattacharya have argued, capitalism systematically externalizes the costs of social reproduction, displacing them onto households, communities, and especially onto women.

Under neoliberal capitalism, the institutions that sustain social reproduction have been gutted, privatized, or financialized. This is not an anomaly or deviation—it is a logical development of capitalism’s core contradictions. In the 21st-century United States, the crisis of social reproduction has intensified to systemic levels, threatening the basic conditions of life for millions. This analysis traces the historical development of this crisis, diagnoses its structural causes, and explores its political implications for revolutionary transformation.

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II. The Marxist Concept of Social Reproduction and Its Feminist Development

A. Labor-Power as a Special Commodity

Marx, in Capital Vol. I, described labor-power as a peculiar commodity: it must be consumed (used) in production, but also continuously reproduced through a complex set of non-commodified and commodified activities. Unlike machines, labor-power requires food, rest, shelter, medical care, education, and emotional support—much of which has historically taken place outside the wage relation, particularly within households.

This reproductive labor—often unpaid, often gendered—remains largely invisible in mainstream economic theory. Feminist Marxists extended Marx’s framework to include what they termed “the hidden abode” of reproduction. They emphasized that unpaid domestic labor is essential to capitalism, functioning as a subsidy to capital by ensuring that the costs of producing labor-power do not appear on the capitalist’s balance sheet.

B. Historical Materialism and the Reproduction of Class Relations

From a historical materialist standpoint, the reproduction of the working class is not a natural or apolitical process—it is socially organized and contested. Class relations are reproduced not just at the point of production, but also in the institutions of family, education, welfare, and healthcare. In the U.S., these institutions have always been shaped by racialized, gendered, and colonial logics that help structure capitalist social reproduction along hierarchical lines.

The development of capitalist social reproduction must be seen in its conjunctural forms: from the family wage system of Fordism, to the welfare retrenchment and household precarity of neoliberalism, to the asset-based and debt-fueled reproduction system of financialized capitalism.

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III. Neoliberalism and the Commodification of Reproduction

A. Privatization, Austerity, and the Assault on the Social Wage

Since the late 1970s, the U.S. capitalist class has waged a sustained counter-offensive against the remnants of the postwar social contract. This neoliberal turn, beginning in earnest with the Volcker Shock and Reagan’s presidency, sought to restore declining profit rates by restructuring the political economy of labor and life itself. Central to this effort was a frontal assault on the social wage—the ensemble of publicly provided services and supports that partially offset the cost of reproducing labor-power.

As corporate profits recovered, real wages stagnated. Despite a more than 60 percent increase in worker productivity since 1979, inflation-adjusted wages for most U.S. workers remained flat throughout the following decades, severing the historical link between labor output and compensation.¹ At the same time, the cost of essential reproductive services escalated sharply. Childcare, for example, became increasingly unaffordable, with costs rising by 214 percent between 1980 and 2023, while household incomes failed to keep pace.²

The social wage was further decimated through the systematic defunding and privatization of public infrastructure. Federal investment in public housing—once a modest but important pillar of the welfare state—was slashed by approximately 75 percent since 1980, displacing low-income families into increasingly precarious rental markets now dominated by private equity firms and corporate landlords.³ This strategic erosion of public support mechanisms functioned not merely as an economic restructuring but also as an ideological project. Under the banners of “personal responsibility,” “market discipline,” and “efficiency,” neoliberal policymakers and think tanks reframed social reproduction as an individual burden rather than a collective obligation.

The consequences of this transformation have been most acutely borne by working-class women, people of color, and immigrant communities, who are disproportionately tasked with absorbing the rising costs of care, housing, health, and education within their households and informal networks. In this way, the dismantling of the social wage has not only intensified exploitation at the point of production but also deepened inequality and precarity in the sphere of reproduction, laying the groundwork for the contemporary crisis.

Footnotes:

1. Economic Policy Institute, State of Working America Wages 2023.

2. Economic Policy Institute, Childcare Costs in the United States, 2023.

3. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Federal Housing Assistance Fact Sheet, 2023.

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B. Financialization and the Creation of “Fictitious Reproductive Commodities”

In response to the long-term decline in industrial profitability, capital in the late 20th and early 21st centuries increasingly shifted its focus from production to speculation. This process—financialization—involved the extension of credit, debt instruments, and investment logics into all areas of social life, including those essential to the reproduction of labor-power. In this context, housing, education, and healthcare—once considered public goods or basic needs—were reimagined as lucrative domains for private capital accumulation.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the housing sector. Following the 2008 financial crisis, private equity firms like Blackstone took advantage of mass foreclosures and state-backed liquidity to consolidate vast swaths of the residential rental market. By 2024, Blackstone alone had acquired over 600,000 single-family homes, transforming rent into a stable revenue stream for securitized investment portfolios.¹ These homes, once part of the material infrastructure of working-class life, were converted into speculative assets—vehicles for wealth extraction rather than social stability.

Education followed a similar trajectory. The withdrawal of public funding from universities, coupled with the aggressive promotion of student loans, led to an explosive rise in higher education debt. Between 2006 and 2024, outstanding student debt in the U.S. ballooned from $500 billion to $1.7 trillion.² For an entire generation of young workers, access to the basic credentials of employability now comes at the cost of decades-long indebtedness, delaying major life events such as homeownership, child-rearing, and political participation. This form of debt functions not only as a revenue stream for private lenders and loan servicers but also as a mechanism of discipline and depoliticization.

The healthcare system, too, became a major frontier for speculative investment. As hospitals were absorbed into vertically integrated healthcare conglomerates, the logic of profit-maximization supplanted the imperative of care. By 2023, over 50 million Americans were uninsured or underinsured, and medical debt became the leading cause of personal bankruptcy.³ Access to life-sustaining services—emergency care, prescription drugs, chronic treatment—was redefined as a financial transaction, contingent upon ability to pay and governed by actuarial calculations of risk and return.

Through this process, the core functions of social reproduction were not merely commodified, but fully subsumed under the logic of speculative finance. Housing, education, and healthcare ceased to be valued for their role in sustaining human life and instead became fictitious commodities—essential needs priced not by their use-value but by their potential to generate future profits. This transformation deepened the irrationality of capitalist reproduction, further alienating working-class life from the conditions necessary to sustain it.

Footnotes:

1. Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Single-Family Rental Market Report, 2023.

2. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, 2024.

3. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Medical Debt and Bankruptcy in the United States, 2023.

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IV. Sectoral Breakdown: Crisis Across the Terrain of Life

The social reproduction crisis in the United States is not confined to a single institution or demographic—it is a systemic breakdown that spans across all the essential sectors of life. Each domain responsible for the maintenance and reproduction of labor-power has been hollowed out by the logic of commodification, austerity, and capital extraction. What follows is a mapping of this terrain, sector by sector, to reveal the scale and interrelatedness of the crisis.

In healthcare, the contradiction between profit and human need is especially stark. The United States allocates over 17 percent of its gross domestic product to healthcare—more than any other advanced capitalist country—yet tens of millions remain uninsured or underinsured.¹ Far from ensuring universal care, the system is organized around revenue maximization, leading to medical debt becoming the leading cause of personal bankruptcy.² The consequences are particularly lethal for Black and Indigenous women, who experience maternal mortality rates two to three times higher than their white counterparts—a disparity that reflects the convergence of racialized neglect, structural poverty, and capitalist reproductive violence.³

Housing, likewise, has become a site of profound instability for the working class. As rents have soared under speculative ownership, one-third of all renters now spend more than half their income on housing costs, pushing them into permanent precarity.⁴ The burden of eviction falls heaviest on Black women, who are disproportionately targeted by landlords and property managers. Sociologist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has described this pattern as a “racialized regime of displacement,” whereby dispossession is used as both a business model and a mechanism of social control.⁵ The privatization of housing has not only undermined working-class stability but also reinforced patterns of racial stratification rooted in the legacy of redlining and segregation.

In the education sector, the stratification of reproduction is embedded in the very structure of school funding. Public K-12 schools remain unequally financed through local property taxes, ensuring that educational outcomes are tightly correlated with class and race.⁶ Meanwhile, higher education has become an engine of lifelong indebtedness. Student debt in the U.S. delays marriage, homeownership, and childbearing among the young working class, with political engagement also taking a hit under the weight of financial insecurity.⁷ The promise of education as a path to liberation or mobility has been replaced by a regime of credentialism tethered to unpayable debt and declining real wages.

Care work—perhaps the most essential and most devalued form of reproductive labor—reveals the depth of the crisis most clearly. The United States relies on a vast, underpaid, and overwhelmingly racialized care workforce to sustain its aging population, its children, and its disabled. Yet childcare workers earn a median wage of only $13 per hour, while 60 percent of home health aides live in poverty despite the indispensable nature of their work.⁸ The extreme undervaluation of care labor is not a market accident; it is a structural necessity of a system that offloads the cost of social reproduction while profiting from its exhaustion.

These sectoral crises are not isolated phenomena. They are deeply interlocking, each reinforcing the other through a shared root in the capitalist organization of reproduction. The result is a society in which the basic requirements for sustaining life—healthcare, housing, education, care—are increasingly unavailable, unaffordable, or unstable for the majority. This reveals a fundamental truth: the generalized commodification of life under capitalism renders the reproduction of labor-power itself ever more unsustainable. In this light, the crisis of social reproduction is not a failure of policy but an expression of capitalism’s internal contradictions—of a system that can no longer afford the very life it depends on to function.

Footnotes:

1. Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), Health Care Costs and Spending in the U.S., 2023.

2. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Medical Debt and Bankruptcy in the United States, 2023.

3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Maternal Mortality by Race/Ethnicity, 2023.

4. U.S. Census Bureau, American Housing Survey, 2023.

5. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, 2019.

6. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Public School Revenue Sources, 2023.

7. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, 2024.

8. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and PHI, Care Worker Wage Data, 2024.

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V. Racialized and Gendered Dimensions of Reproductive Crisis

The crisis of social reproduction in the United States is not experienced uniformly across the working class. It is profoundly shaped by the historical legacies and ongoing structures of settler-colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism, and patriarchy. These intertwined systems of domination have produced a social order in which the burdens of life-making labor are distributed along lines of race, gender, and citizenship status, ensuring that some populations are systematically overexploited while others are insulated from the harshest effects of capitalist crisis.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of care work. Black, brown, and immigrant women are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-paid and most precarious sectors of the care economy—nursing, domestic labor, home health assistance, and food services. These jobs are typically underpaid, lack benefits, and are often excluded from basic labor protections under U.S. law, a reality that traces back to the exclusion of Black women from New Deal labor legislation.¹ This structural overrepresentation is not coincidental but reflects the long-standing racialized and gendered division of labor upon which U.S. capitalism was built.

The ideological apparatus of the state has reinforced this uneven distribution of reproductive labor through targeted policies of social control. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, signed into law under the Clinton administration, marked a pivotal shift in U.S. welfare policy. Promoted as a way to reduce dependency, it functioned in practice to criminalize poor motherhood, especially among Black and immigrant women.² By replacing cash assistance with work requirements and time limits, the policy pushed women out of the domestic sphere and into unstable low-wage labor markets—while simultaneously intensifying surveillance over their parenting, sexuality, and household composition.

Environmental degradation has compounded this reproductive violence, particularly for communities of color, who are far more likely to live near toxic waste sites, industrial pollution, and unsafe housing.³ From lead exposure in Flint, Michigan to cancer clusters near petrochemical corridors in Louisiana, the bodily toll of environmental injustice is measurable in higher rates of infant mortality, asthma, cancer, and chronic illness. These forms of “slow violence” disproportionately disrupt the ability of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx families to sustain healthy, secure lives, rendering reproduction itself precarious and, in many cases, fatal.

In sum, the racialized and gendered organization of social reproduction is not merely a byproduct of capitalism but a central mechanism of its functioning. By devaluing and dispossessing the reproductive labor of the most marginalized, capital is able to sustain accumulation while externalizing its costs. This differential valuation of life ensures that some populations are rendered disposable in order to support the consumption and security of others. It is, therefore, not only a question of inequality but of systemic stratification in the right to life and reproduction itself—a condition that cannot be resolved through reform, but only through the abolition of the capitalist system that produces it.

Footnotes:

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, 2024.

2. Economic Policy Institute (EPI), The Legacy of Welfare Reform, 2021.

3. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, 2023.

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VI. Class Struggle and the Future of Reproduction

The intensifying crisis of social reproduction in the United States has not gone uncontested. Across the country, working-class communities have mounted a series of insurgent struggles to defend and reclaim the material conditions necessary for life. In recent years, teachers’ strikes in states such as West Virginia, Illinois, and California have gone beyond narrow demands for wages or benefits, explicitly linking educational labor to the survival of entire communities. These uprisings illuminated the political centrality of social reproduction, demanding not only better funding for schools but also investments in public services, affordable housing, and student support infrastructure—thereby challenging the neoliberal degradation of the public sphere.¹

Similarly, rent strikes and the proliferation of tenant unions across urban centers have exposed the predatory operations of corporate landlords and financialized housing markets. These movements have brought forward demands for rent control, eviction moratoriums, and, most critically, the transformation of housing into a social good governed by democratic control rather than speculative accumulation.² In the realm of care work, organizations led by domestic workers—disproportionately women of color and immigrants—have mobilized for labor protections, dignity, and living wages. Their struggles underscore the systemic undervaluation of reproductive labor and its foundational role in capitalist economies.³

Yet despite these important flashpoints of resistance, many of these movements remain fragmented, localized, and largely reactive. They tend to emerge in response to acute crises rather than as part of a coordinated offensive strategy. Without a unifying political project that can consolidate these energies into a shared vision of transformation, the potential of these struggles is often constrained by the structural and ideological limitations imposed by capitalist social relations.

To overcome these limits, a revolutionary program must place the collective reproduction of life at its center. This entails the radical decommodification of essential social goods and the democratic reorganization of life-sustaining systems under the control of the working class. Universal healthcare and childcare must be established as unconditional public rights, free from the distortions of market logic. A nationwide program of social housing, publicly owned and managed, is essential to eliminate the parasitic role of private landlords and restore housing as a human right. The abolition of debt—medical, educational, and personal—must be asserted as a class-wide demand, recognizing that indebtedness is a mechanism of discipline and extraction that disproportionately targets women, students, and people of color.⁴

Moreover, any viable socialist program for reproduction must be ecological. The climate crisis exacerbates every aspect of social reproduction, from access to clean water and food to the viability of housing and transportation. Thus, a green infrastructure of social reproduction—one that supports both human and ecological flourishing—is indispensable to any emancipatory vision of the future.⁵

Such a program cannot be achieved through incremental reforms alone. The capitalist state and its institutions are structurally invested in maintaining commodified life and market rule. Consequently, transformative change demands organized class struggle, widespread political education, and the construction of dual power institutions capable of contesting the legitimacy of capitalist reproduction itself. The future of social reproduction will be decided not by technocratic policy or philanthropic intervention, but by the organized power of the working class to reclaim life from capital.

Footnotes:

1. National Education Association, Strike Wave Reports, 2018–2022.

2. Right to the City Alliance, Rent Control Now, 2021.

3. National Domestic Workers Alliance, State of Domestic Work, 2023.

4. Debt Collective, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Debt Abolition, 2022.

5. IPCC and UNEP, Climate Adaptation and Social Vulnerability, 2023.

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VII. Conclusion: The Incompatibility of Life and Capital

The crisis of social reproduction in the United States is not an aberration or failure of governance—it is a structural necessity for capital’s reproduction in a period of declining profitability and intensified competition. Capitalism can no longer afford to reproduce the conditions of human life—it must extract from them. This contradiction has reached a breaking point.

Only a revolutionary rupture, grounded in the working class and rooted in the political project of collective reproduction, can resolve this contradiction. As Marxist-feminists have long insisted: we do not just need better wages—we need a different world.

Social reproduction must be liberated from capital. Not just for justice, but for survival itself.

Jacob Pinton