The Political Economy of Social Reproduction: the Case of Cuba in the 1990s

Abstract

Feminist political economy has long been distinguished by its attention to issues of reproduction as well as production. This has entailed several lines of analysis, many of which have aimed at making visible the ‘work’ involved in reproducing human labour power both on a day-to-day basis and in terms of producing the new generation of labour as a factor of production. This discussion has had two roots. First, we engaged with fellow socialists in what was termed the ‘domestic labour debate’ in the 1970s, with the objective of exploring the then novel idea that unpaid work within the household actually contributed in various ways to the ‘value’ in the productive economy, despite efforts by the unreconstructed male left to confine women’s unpaid work to the unseen and unvalued margins of the real economy (Conference of Socialist Economists, 1976; Molyneux, 1979). This debate with socialist political economy was also joined by feminist endeavours to open up the black box of the household (Folbre, 1986) in neoclassical economics as well as in Marxist political economy, exploring the gendered assumptions and claims of the so-called ‘New Household Economics’ (Gardiner, 1997).