Valorisation of capital and the externalisation of social reproduction in an era of rising economic inequality

Abstract

As economic inequality has broadened in the past four decades, social reproduction, understood as people's daily and generational maintenance (Bhattacharya 2017), has become increasingly challenging, particularly in the Global South. In this context, households rely heavily on gendered relationships and practices to sustain subsistence through multiple forms of informal, partial, and self-employment alongside a heavy load of domestic and care work (Beneria 2019). In that context, from a critical political economy and Social Reproduction Theory perspective, this paper sets a closer lens into Marx's formula of capital to explore how the heightened pressure on social reproduction serves as a strategy to increase externalities that enable economic inequality to continue growing.