Household Production and the Essence of Separation that Appears in Commodities | Kirstin Munro

In this talk, I will build on the work of Paddy Quick and Roswitha Scholz to make the case that it is only the partial rather than complete separation of working-class people from the means of subsistence that necessitates household production in capitalist society. Previous attempts to find a source of women’s subordination in in Marx’s theory of value (a “unitary theory” of sexism and exploitation) have largely resulted in transhistorical theories of household production that are based in biological determinism and presuppose a bourgeois family-household form that was never universally adopted by the working class. Regardless of the specific social form, one output of the household production process is always labor-power. It is the dependence on commodities that makes capitalist household production different from other forms of household production. Thus, to adequately grasp the ways that capitalism organizes production and reproduction in our everyday lives, we need to begin our critique at an earlier point: not with the household labor process and its outputs, but with the essence of separation that appears in commodities.

Speaker Bio

Kirstin Munro is Assistant Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. The major theme of her research is the overlapping relationships between people, the economy, and the environment, with an emphasis on everyday life and work outside the wage relation. Her book, The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households: Compromise, Conflict and Complicity, was published in March 2023 by Bristol University Press. Her second book, which will be published by Verso Books in 2026, shows that Marxist Feminist theories of household production must go beyond notions of “women” and “wives” in order to fully grasp the contradictions between human needs and the imperatives of accumulation. She is currently editing a collection of essays by Lise Vogel for the Pluto Press “Mapping Social Reproduction” book series. She serves on the Editorial Board of The Review of Radical Political Economics and the Editorial Advisory Boards of Global Political Economy and the Critical Theory and the Critique of Society book series.