March to the National Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to commemorate “Ni Una Menos” on June 3, 2026. Photo © Susi Maresca.
Books • Verónica Gago • October 30, 2026 • Leer en castellano
This is an excerpt from the book Laboratorio Argentina: on the Fascistization of Everyday Life by Verónica Gago, set to be published by Tinta Limón in November. We are sharing it because we believe it is an important contribution to understanding how social reproduction is conceived from the south of our hemisphere. —Eds
Social reproduction refers to a set of relationships essential to the reproduction of life, upon which invisible capitalist exploitation is built, where labor goes unrecognized as such, and where unpaid labor is forced to be free of charge. This is all made possible by the mechanisms of race, class, and gender that enable exploitation through the interplay of various forms of violence—violences that are, moreover, naturalized, biologized, and dehistoricized.
The very definition of social reproduction involves discussing which activities, subjects, and geographies it encompasses. It is not a simple list, but rather a contentious historical mapping of exploitation, invisibilization, and dispossession. Capital requires exterminating other economies if it cannot repurpose them to its advantage.
Discussing social reproduction allows us to adopt an inclusive understanding of the multiple subjects who produce value: domestic laborers and the unemployed, grassroots economies and precarious workers, small farmers and those active in the gig economy.
For this very reason, the lens of social reproduction—which frames value as a political issue—is a key counterpoint to the capitalist lens that limits the concept of value production to wage-earning workers, who are deemed the only ones whose reproduction matters.
Establishing a definition of social reproduction requires debating the production and appropriation of value. This is linked to specific decisions regarding the two previous points (who is considered a worker and who is deemed “worthy” of reproducing!) which are not merely theoretical, but profoundly theoretical and political.
Here, value is a shift: what does the notion of social reproduction of the labor force, of the physical bodies that bear it, signify once it has been torn away from the exclusive domain of the reproduction of capital?
The power of social reproduction
The power of social reproduction’s “dual character” lies in its ability to reveal the possibility of transforming bodies and territories into forms that refuse to exist solely as labor power and buying power for the realization of capitalist profit.
Rediscovering the other side of social reproduction means revealing its dual character, in accordance with feminist, anti-colonial, and ecological thought. This is an approach rooted in antagonism: fighting what prevents the reproduction of certain lives and social fabrics, against that which reduces their reproduction to a one-dimensional process through the subjugation and exploitation of life. This is a process that is today controlled by financial instruments.
That is why we speak of the social reproduction of the personal and collective lives of people and territories (human and non-human life) under historical conditions of patriarchal colonial capitalism, which always engender struggle against the accumulation of capital, and the setting of horizons of autonomy.
The notion of autonomy allows us to weave diverse traditions and practices of liberation within social reproduction, including rural, Indigenous, community-based, grassroots, and transfeminist practices. It is this constantly renewed corpus of collective practices that capital seeks to attack (as part of its insatiable appropriation of non-capitalist time and space).
Within financialized capitalism, we consider social reproduction as an open field of struggle rather than as the default conditions capital produces for its own reproduction and expansion. Capital fails to guarantee social reproduction through wages, as has long been the case, as well as attacking economies that offer alternatives to this model.
Extractivism and reproduction
There are some key areas worth noting in thinking through social reproduction today. First, it is no longer merely an arena of exploitation but of permanent extraction.
Present-day capitalism tends to be extractive in a very precise sense: it does not even indirectly pay for what it appropriates. The financial sector (as a mechanism, platform, and set of practices that has infiltrated everyday life) seeks to both normalize and intensify the violence generated by impoverishment and dispossession.
As a result, social reproduction is becoming less of a guaranteed process, despite the class, race and gender biases it contains. It instead presents as a constant struggle over which lives will be able to ensure their reproduction. In other words, it has become a realm of shifting and constant production of hierarchies.
Second, in extractive financial capitalism, a shift in the relationship between reproduction and production has taken hold. As Leopoldina Fortunati argues, this involves a shift in power between the two spheres (the production of commodities and the reproduction of the labor force).
Today, capital extracts more value from the unpaid labor we perform through the financialization and digitization of reproduction by platform technologies. The generalization of unpaid labor—which appears to be done out of love, for entertainment, or for self-realization—is exported to the productive sphere, in which rules are imposed and normalized as precariousness and hyper-exploitation.
Third, there is an extractivist dimension, which refers both to organized plunder aimed at extracting the raw materials that sustain digitalization as well as to the generalization of “extractive operations” as a mode of capital operation that extracts value without recognition or remuneration.
Building on these concepts, we highlight a notion of social reproduction that serves as a systemic perspective that is at once situated and tangible. It does not take the reproduction of wage workers as its starting point, but rather the forms of reproduction in the Global South that sustain life. In its failure to do so, it drives migration to the Global North.
Orienting our efforts to defend reproduction
Understanding how forms of violence, appropriation, pacification and hierarchization originate in the conditions of everyday life—and are later institutionalized via the labor market—can help us grasp their strategic centrality. This also allows us to interpret the shift we are witnessing in the relationship between reproductive and productive activities.
Understanding the pluralization of productive subjects through the lens of social reproduction allows us to reshape political theory around class struggle, favoring alliances rather than the search for a unitary subject. The power to take action from within social reproduction—”re-enchanting” it, to use Silvia Federici’s term—is a specific task. We must produce shared moments, circuits, and resources that are governed not by profitability but instead by guaranteeing ways of being.
Given the strategic centrality of social reproduction, it becomes clear that the far right is investing significant effort and resources there.
To develop a hypothesis around the fascistization of social reproduction, we must first explicitly state that when we speak of social reproduction, we are accounting for various simultaneous dynamics and processes.
This connects to a series of struggles over how the conditions of existence for the majority are guaranteed, using criteria that challenge the unilateral nature of reproduction for capital and by capital.
It aso requires a lens for analyzing the reorganization of life and work under conditions of neoliberal capitalism and war capitalism, when the very possibilities of existence are systematically under attack, to the point of genocide.
We understand this to be a heterogeneous space in both spatial and temporal terms. Therefore, it is more accurate to speak of “social weavings,” following Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, and of heterogeneous regimes of social reproduction. “Pluralizing” social reproduction, as Alessandra Mezzadri proposes, through the multiplication of its spatialities allows us to understand the unequal and combined forms in which it has historically been produced, differentiated, and hierarchized, and to recover other historical genealogies.
To do this, we must recognize how the perspectives of feminist political ecology, Indigenous struggles and knowledge, together with anti-extractivist struggles, contribute fundamental dimensions to the expansion of the very notion of social reproduction, beyond an androcentric perspective.
This is a realm where the capacity for resistance is at stake due to its “dual nature.” This is also expressed as a dispute over the notion of value.
Given all of the above, the strategic nature of capital’s extractive trajectory becomes evident—a trajectory that seeks to generalize what is already happening in the realm of reproduction: direct, violent appropriation without any form of remuneration.
