Abstract
What significance does the concept of social reproduction have in the United States today? To explore this important question, and to celebrate our reprint of Mimi Abramovitz's book chapter, “From the welfare state to the carceral state: Whither social reproduction?” first published in 2017 in Democracy and the welfare state: The two wests in the age of austerity (Kessler-Harris & Vaudagna, 2017) and reprinted in the February 2023 issue of Affilia (Abramovitz, 2023), we asked Professor Abramovitz to reflect upon contemporary trends in social reproduction, the continued relevance of the theory of social structures of accumulation, and the importance of political economy in our understanding of the welfare state.
As I explain in the book chapter, social reproduction is commonly defined as the activities established by societies to further procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Often referred to as care work, especially today, it includes the biological reproduction of the next generation of workers and ensuring the health, productivity, and socialization of the current workforce. Reproduction requires making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption. It also includes providing for those too old, young, sick, disabled, or jobless to care for themselves. The work of social reproduction takes place not only in the family but also in schools, religious organizations, and other societal institutions. It is most often carried out by women's unpaid labor in the home (even when they work outside the home) as well as women's low-paid labor in the market.
They are closely linked. In fact, to understand social reproduction, we must first recognize that in patriarchal societies, the gender division of labor assigns the work of social reproduction to women both in the home and on the job, and then devalues it. Both the assignment and its devaluation are justified on the stereotypic grounds that women naturally, normally, and inevitably nurture and care for others (e.g. think of “maternal instinct” or “women's place is in the home”). In contrast, feminists argue that the gender division of labor is a social construct that contributes to the economic dependence of women—long the linchpin of women's subordination.
Economists define productive labor as the production of goods by workers for which they receive a paid wage. Reproductive labor refers to unpaid activities in the private sphere that people do for themselves or others such as cleaning, cooking, and having children. Economists along with many others did not consider women's unpaid reproductive labor in the home to be work!
In the 1970s, feminists began to challenge the distinction between paid work in the labor market (i.e. productive labor) and unpaid work in the home (reproductive labor). They argued by not defining women's unpaid reproductive labor as work, society devalued, ignored, and rendered it invisible. They added that the false distinction also created an incomplete and distorted historical record of women's relationship with the family, the market, and the state. By way of corrective, feminists named and analyzed how women's reproductive labor contributed to the wider society. They documented that this labor converted the wages of paid male and female workers into the means of subsistence for the entire household, helped to ensure the health and well-being of all family members, and sustained the productivity of the current and future workforce. In so doing, it also contributed to both the profitability of business activity and the smooth functioning of the entire social order.
The early welfare state scholars tended to focus on the dynamics of class, markets, and men. Their otherwise insightful research failed to notice that the welfare states treated people differently based on class, race, and gender. When feminists began to look at the welfare state through a gender lens, they learned that, first of all, women reformers played a central role in the origins of the welfare state, and that women comprised the majority of welfare state clients and workers. The gender lens also made it clear that welfare state benefits underwrote the unpaid work of social reproductive work carried out by women in the home and otherwise shifted the cost and some of the burdens of this labor from women to the state.
The earliest feminist research focused on white women reformers and workers. It took a while—too long—for white feminists to bring women of color and LGBTQ people into the analysis. Today, the literature details and documents how the welfare state enforced poverty but also gender division of labor, systemic racism, and heteronormativity. By reproducing the racism and heterosexism embedded in wider society, the welfare state placed all people of color and white people on a different footing in ways that fell especially hard and unfairly on poor women of color.
The concept of social reproduction helps us understand why we have a welfare state in the first place. Once we understand the dynamics of social reproduction, we see that a basic contradiction between profitable economic production and effective social reproduction gave rise to the welfare state. On the one hand, the ability of households to successfully carry out the work of social reproduction requires high wages, adequate public benefits, and low unemployment. Households need enough income to buy goods and services, to ensure the productivity of the current and future workforce, and to care for those who could not support themselves. In contrast, high business profits depend on the opposite: low wages, low benefits, and high unemployment—all of which undercut the capacity of families to effectively carry out their socially assigned caretaking tasks.
Yes. Successful social reproduction depends on the smooth running of the economy. At the same time, the smooth running of the economy depends on the capacity of families to maintain themselves. However, the requirements for profitable economic production that I just described, periodically undercut the conditions necessary for successful social reproduction. That is, market economies often fail to generate the levels of income, employment, education, housing, and healthcare needed to sustain the average household. When the standard of living falls too low, when families cannot carry out their socially assigned caretaking and reproductive tasks (on which both business profits and family functioning depend), we end up with a crisis in social reproduction. While crises occur periodically over time, at some point in history, the welfare state emerges and helps to mediate the tension between the requirements of profitable economic production and the requirements of social reproduction by, among other interventions, underwriting the work of social reproduction.
For example, the collapse of the economy in the 1930s led to crises in economic production and social reproduction but also the birth of the U.S. welfare state. That is, the federal government now had the size, capacity, and resources to support this new institution. The emerging welfare state initially helped businesses, labor, and farmers, as well as the poor, working, and middle classes to get back on their feet. From 1935 to the mid-1970s it expanded in response to prosperity, population growth, the emergence of new needs, and the demands made by increasingly militant social movements.
Throughout the post-war period, the welfare state mediated the tension by subsidizing economic production and underwriting the cost of social reproduction. Its policies increased consumer purchasing power and supported job creation in the private sector. The minimum level of cash, food, and housing benefits it provided supported family maintenance. By absorbing some of the costs and responsibilities of family maintenance, the welfare state reduced women's care work at home. Some say that the welfare state helped to “save capitalism from itself.” It also created new public-sector jobs many of which women—mostly white women filled. Over time, however, welfare state jobs also became the major route to upward mobility for many women and men of color excluded by the private sector.
Good question. When I started teaching social welfare policy at Silberman School of Social Work (then Hunter College School of Social Work), I had to explain this very question to myself and to my students. I knew this paradigm shift was neither accidental nor simply mean-spirited. Yet I could not explain the backlash. It was a real puzzle to me and probably to many others as well. The social structures of accumulation theory helped me understand what had happened. It explained both the expansion and the contraction of the U.S. welfare state as a response to two major economic crises in the 20th century.
The social structures of accumulation refer to the major institutional arrangements, policies, and ideological paradigms put into place by the state to maximize capital accumulation (McDonough et al., 2021). They sustain profits, ensure social stability, and otherwise promote economic growth, key to the success of market economies. The arrangements can succeed quite well for several decades. But, at some point, changes in the political economy cause them to falter. Once the social structures of accumulation fail to sustain economic growth, their decline can lead to a long-term economic crisis that, by the way, differs significantly from the shorter ups (prosperity) and downs (i.e. recessions and depressions) known as the regular business cycle. Should the long-term crisis reach a point that cannot be resolved by regular fiscal and monetary policies, a major restructuring of the system may become necessary, leading to a new social structure of accumulation, usually after a protracted political struggle.
You’re right to say that this theory does not show up in social work. In fact, I learned about it from an economist colleague – and found that this analysis was exactly what I was looking for. The social structures of accumulation theory provided an easy-to-understand, dramatic, and convincing way of explaining major changes in social welfare policy. Using an economic crisis model, the theory details how and why the economic crisis in the 1930s created support for Keynesian economic theory which held that economic growth required more government spending and a national welfare state among other new social structures of accumulation. A second major crisis in the mid-1970s unleashed support for neoliberal theory that argued for its opposite—economic growth through less government spending. I said, “oh, that's it!” The change I was looking at was not accidental or just happenstance. Instead, both the rise of the welfare state and its later contraction reflected responses to larger societal upheavals. The idea that an economic crisis can lead to a major paradigm shift made sense to me. I also believed that most social workers could get it! After all, social workers know about or learn that the Great Depression and the stock market crash in 1930 gave us the New Deal, the foundation of the U.S. welfare state. While it is true that fewer know the details of the economic crisis in the1970s, they do know or feel that something went wrong. The rise of neoliberalism can, in fact, be introduced and reviewed in class along with what we teach about the New Deal.
As I just noted, the first crisis of the 20th century, the collapse of the economy in the 1930s, led to new social structures of accumulation that replaced the institutional arrangements that had supported the prior laissez-faire policies (e.g. free markets and small government policies) until the stock market crashed. Pressed by social movements and informed by Keynesian economic theory, possessing adequate administrative and fiscal capacity, the federal government began to create new social structures of accumulation (aka the New Deal) that called on the government to step in as never before. Seeking to redistribute resources downwards and expand the role of the state, the New Deal raised taxes and spending, de-privatized social services, regulated markets, and supported the rising social movements. Both the post-war expansion of the welfare state and the victories of the trade union, civil rights, and women's liberation movements led to policies and programs (cash, food, housing, health care, education, and other benefits) that supported social reproduction.
As I describe in the article, the Keynesian arrangements held until the mid-1970s when deindustrialization and globalization led to the second major economic crisis of the 20th century and the emergence of a new social structure of accumulation. In what became known as neoliberalism, the new paradigm revived standard conservative ideology and free market economics to undo the New Deal and the post-war welfare state. Seeking to redistribute income upwards and downsize the state, especially the welfare state, neoliberalist policies reduced taxes, cut government spending, privatized public services, deregulated markets, and weakened social movements. The new arrangements shifted the cost of social reproduction back to women in their homes and increasingly used public policy to punish the growing racially marginalized populations.
Less often noted, the hollowing out of the welfare state also affected the large numbers of women employed in public and nonprofit human-service jobs who perform the government-supported work of social reproduction on the job. The retrenchment of welfare state programs cost many of these women workers their hard-won and union-protected jobs and required the remaining welfare-state workers to perform more public care work with fewer resources, less staff, reduced organizational capacity, and weaker unions. Neoliberalist policies placed the majority of welfare clients, workers, and public-sector union members—the guardians of social reproduction—in triple jeopardy. Some called neoliberalism a “war on women” as well as a war on the poor and people of color.
I’m not sure just what to call it at this moment, but much has changed in recent years. Is it a continuation of neoliberalism? A product of neoliberal policies? Or something else? Only time will tell. Paradigm shifts often become clear only in hindsight.
We know that neoliberal tax and budget cuts, privatization, devolution, deregulation, and the attack on social movements led to higher poverty, greater inequality, and marginalized many people and groups. Instead of mediating the mounting tension between economic production and social reproduction, the neoliberal attack on the welfare state generated a new crisis in social reproduction. The hollowed-out welfare state, the loss of public and private sector jobs, and the decline of social movements left the needs of many families unmet and grew the ranks of the poor and working class. As economic insecurity mounted, the loss of trust in government and the threats (plus the reality) of social unrest (Black Lives Matter, increased unionization, etc.) slowly spread from the poor and working classes to the middle class and from people of color to the white population. Fearing this the state redirected its vast fiscal and administrative resources away from social welfare toward the criminal justice system. The rise of the “carceral state,” a major milestone in American political development, rivaled in significance the expansion of the welfare state in the post-war period. Among many other hardships. mass incarceration and the leaner and meaner welfare state exacerbated the already mounting crisis in social reproduction.
Sure. The federal government used the post-war welfare state, among its other functions, to regulate the labor market behavior and marital arrangements of the poor, especially women. In contrast, to deal with the despair and unrest sparked by the retrenchment of the welfare state, the neoliberal state upped the ante. It used its powers to criminalize the behavior of the poor and working classes—the same populations devastated by the shrunken welfare state. That is the welfare state became a carcel state driven by what Michelle Alexander termed the “New Jim Crow” because of its racial disparities (Alexander, 2010). The staggering growth in the state's capacity to police, punish, and imprison began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The rising carceral state got “tougher on crime,” tightened the pathway to prison, and created and/or enlarged noncriminal punishment and jail sentences. Known variously as the double regulation of the poor, governing through crime, the shadow carceral state, and carceral debt, these harsh punitive policies supported by quick court decisions and prolonged sentences replaced the prior emphases on regulation but also on services, rehabilitation, and prevention.
Mass incarceration, in turn, exacerbated the already deep crisis in social reproduction, especially in communities of color. Removing people from the home and the community deprived too many families of important emotional and financial resources and more generally increased individual family and community stress, especially for women still assigned to care work at home. Over time, persistent poverty, rising inequality, excess punishment, and the sense of being left behind. Laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic the mounting hardships helped to unleash a rightwing populist political response that turned many blue states red and created the condition for the frightening rise of election deniers and autocracy that now threatens the nation's democratic institutions.
Many ask how neoliberalism convinced “the people” to accept a U-turn in public policy that undermined their own well-being, self-interest, and political power. Naomi Klein argues that neoliberalism relied on “shock doctrine,” or the creation or exploitation of a crisis and the manipulation of resulting fears to impose policies that people would not otherwise support. National leaders stoked fears of rising crime rates and suggested that the state could not control crime, political uprisings, or social movements. They hope that a worried public would accept more policing, social control, and punishment (i.e. the carceral state) instead of mediation as the way to manage the poor and working classes.
Yes, of course. On a more optimistic note, the welfare state can be seen to be a site of political struggle. That is, the welfare state contains a liberatory as well as a regulatory and punitive potential. The carceral state has intensified the welfare state's well-known regulatory and punitive function that relies on low benefits, strict eligibility rules, drug tests, fingerprinting, and stiff work requirements to penalize women for departing from prescribed wife and mother roles (see Abramovitz, 2018)
However, the welfare state contains an unexpected liberatory potential that can turn it into a site of political struggle. Rather than foster laziness, and “dependency” as critics insist, access to cash benefits (or what some call the social wage) supports individual autonomy and women's unpaid reproductive labor in the home. Increased economic security makes it easier for individual workers to avoid low-paid jobs; easier for women to avoid unhappy and unsafe marriages as well as dirty and dangerous jobs and to raise children on their own; and for people of color to resist discrimination and otherwise to protect themselves against systemic racism.
Access to the social wage alters the terms of collective action—to the extent that it shifts the balance of power between the powers-that-be and the people. Like a strike fund, access to an alternative income, outside the market (i.e. the social wage) can increase the bargaining power of workers vis-a-vis employers, women vis-a-vis men, and people of color vis-a-vis the white power structure. No wonder the government keeps welfare state benefits so low!
Yes, there is a historical record. From 1935 to the mid-1970s, a more robust social wage also bolstered the power and leverage of collective action by social movements vis-a-vis employers and the state. Together the movements pressed for and won a more responsive welfare state and a more just social order. The neoliberal attack on the welfare state and the rise of the carceral state seek to shut down these threats to the class, race, and gendered status quo. However, recent efforts to raise the social wage suggest new possibilities. The expanded Child Tax Credit, lower cost and expanded health care, higher jobless benefits during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the more recent student debt relief, among other policy initiatives, suggest that the U.S. can revive the social wage. But, as can be seen in these tense days before the 2022 midterm elections, not without strenuous pushback from advocates of the pared-down neoliberal welfare state or what some call the shredded safety net. Even so, given its capacity to both increase economic security and underwrite the unpaid work of social reproduction carried out by women in the home, the welfare state has been and continues to be an important site of political struggle. The new movements such as Black Lives Matter, The Fight For $15, the effort to reverse attacks on women's reproductive rights, the upsurge of new union drives, and other collective actions point to the power and importance of fighting back! In the words of Frederick Douglas, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” (Douglas, 1999)
As we wrapped up our interview, we turned to discuss the profound impact that Dr Abramovitz has had on the study of social welfare policy in social work. We asked her about how she develops theory-based analysis.
Over the years as chair of social policy at my school, I created a social policy syllabus for the division which I always described as having a political economy framework. Like most people, I am a product of my times. As a child of the 1960s, I was active in and influenced by the ideas of the prevailing social movements. I participated in the civil rights and women's liberation movements, I was also a union organizer for several years. I guess my political economy analysis first emerged through my activism. Of course, it was then further developed and refined during my life in the academy—my teaching, scholarship, research, and intellectual exchange with colleagues. I now think of my focus on political economy as an integral part of a broader framework that social workers often refer to as structural analysis. It has also been called an analysis of the power relationships in wider society. That said, given social work's social justice mission those of us who subscribe to this way of thinking often question why the profession has not placed the structural analysis more center stage. As a teacher and social work scholar, one of my goals has been to excite students, practitioners, and colleagues about the power and utility of structural analysis, to equip them to develop their own political framework, and to encourage them to use this framework to motivate and inform social action for themselves and others. I guess my master of social work training in community organizing has never left me. Indeed, today I co-lead the National Social Work Voter Mobilization Campaign (Voting is Social Work). In the same spirit in the1990s, I cofounded the Welfare Rights Initiative at Hunter College which I am happy to say is still going strong.
Well, if you read Regulating the Lives of Women (Abramovitz, 2018), the first cover that the publishers suggested was a window with bars on it. That is, they interpreted “regulating” as basically prison. Though much of my work, especially about welfare, unemployment insurance, and social security—the three topics I cover in that book—analyzed the regulatory and punitive features of the welfare state. However, I never compared it to a prison. During the late-1990s, when I was on the road talking about welfare reform my critique centered on its many punitive measures. We were not using the word carceral then, but we were talking about how the welfare state punished women, especially, women of color, for departing from prescribed wife and mother roles. Less well-known is that even the mostly white middle-class women who received the non-means-tested and more popular social insurance entitlement benefits were penalized in this way. They too were penalized for who they were, though not exactly in the “criminal justice” way.
I think the first time I heard the word carceral was from a doctoral student. I hadn't heard that before. However, it started seeping into my consciousness as I was reading analyses of welfare reform and the neoliberal attack on the welfare state by people who had begun to use that term mentioning Wacquant (2009). Then I was asked by Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University Professor, labor historian, and feminist to write a chapter for her new book (Kessler-Harris & Vadagna, 2017). The book grew out of Dr Kessler-Harris’ three-year-long Columbia University seminar on “Democracy in the Welfare State.” We were each asked to make presentations. Dr Kessler-Harris suggested that I focus on social reproduction. The research for this talk exposed me to the carceral state literature. So, I guess my thinking about the carceral state evolved less theoretically and more, as just noted, experientially or from the ground up. Just as my discovery of the social structure of accumulation theory help to me better understand the shift from the Keynesian to the neoliberal welfare state so my exposure to the analysis of the carceral state helped me to better understand the growing punitive role of the welfare state may be “from the ground up” is a good way to put it. First, I caught up with the theories or maybe the theories caught up with me!