Thinking social reproduction beyond the household: circuits of capital and social value

Does social reproduction fully participate in capital accumulation? Which specific form does social reproduction take under capitalism? I use ethnographic material from field research in China to make a contribution to the debate on the relationship between social reproduction and societal reproduction, by providing a historicized account that allows locating the changes that occur when capitalism becomes the dominant form of organization of people’s lives and by looking at community and kinship ties that stretch beyond the household and examining the way they produce collective social goods. This article argues that even now China has become capitalist, the circuit of social reproduction may be put to the service of capital accumulation, and even participate in it, but it nonetheless remains a separate circuit, which is not fully subsumed to the circuit of capital. What capitalism entails, rather, is the organization of reproductive labor as well as the distribution of differentiated rights to social reproduction along class lines.