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On the way to the social reproduction theory

Publication at Faculty of Humanities, Faculty of Arts |
2020

Abstract

Discussion of housework, which was in progress among Marxist or other socialist feminists on both sides of the Atlantic, reached its high point in the 1970s. As explained in Ľubica Kobová's introduction to a Czech translation of the concluding chapter of Lisa Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (1983), this work is one of the culminating points of this discussion, which played out on a field shaped by Marx's labour theory of value.

If perhaps even the strands of this discussion often petered out in undecidable or scholastic disputations, it was Vogel whose thinking presented reproduction as a central framework of Marxist feminism. That is the thought-frame within which currently social reproduction theory continues to be elaborated.

The Czech and Slovak readership, after several translations from an opposing theoretical current in the discussion on housework (represented by activists of the Wages for Housework movement, among others the above-mentioned Silvia Federici), have an opportunity to make more detailed acquaintance with Vogel's reworked argumentation and judge for themselves to what extent the foundations of social reproduction theory are structurally sound.