Social Reproduction Theory versus Intersectionality: Towards a unitary theory of capitalist social relations


Lucely Ginani Bordon, York University

This paper will argue that what separates Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) from Intersectionality theory is the absence of an ontological theoretical explanation for the structural relationship between intersecting independent systems and the causes of this intersection. Although many Intersectionality theories have insisted upon the co-constitution of social relations, they lack the dialectical understanding of totality. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze how the SRT allows us to identify the organizational logic of these intersections through the Marxian category of totality and propose a unity between relations of exploitation and oppression. The commitment of SRT, as a unitary theory of social reproduction that recovers Marx’s conception of totality, is to interpret social relations of gender, race or sexuality as concrete moments of the articulated, complex and contradictory totality that is contemporary capitalism. Intersectionality has been the most influential approach, especially among emerging Black feminisms in the 1990s, that sought to develop an integrative theory of multiple social oppressions. Gender, race, and class are commonly explained within this theoretical framework as static, autonomous, and preexisting relations that intersect within an abstract social field. In this sense, because they are autonomous parts, their interactions occur externally. Therefore, when they intersect, they affect each other and create a new reality - hence the notion of systems that add up. Nevertheless, still, these perspectives suffer from a foundational ontological atomism: the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that, in some circumstances, intersect (McNally, 2017, p. 96). McNally (2017, p. 99) criticizes the inability of intersectional theorists to extract some kind of order or social system from these parts. Consequently, they are not able to explain why independently constituted axes of oppression would come into contact or why, when they interact, an ordered pattern of oppression emerges rather than random chaos. This approach fails to explain the social logic of the relationship between oppressions and the social totality they integrate (Ferguson, 2016, p. 44). By not exploring an internal relationship between partial relations and social totality, this theoretical field fails to return these abstract categories to the disordered-but-unified realm of experience. It considers a fragmented experience of social being, as if differences were experienced separately (Ferguson, 2016, p. 45). As Himani Bannerji (2020, p. 5-6) points out, the social experience is not lived as an intersectionality because one’s own sense of being in the world cannot be perceived fragmentally. Therefore, SRT demonstrates first that the racialized and gendered form that reality presents is neither an accident nor its finished and complete form, and second that the tools for understanding this reality can neither reject the empirical facts nor consist of a simple amalgamation of them (Bhattacharya, 2017, pp. 15-6). In the dialectical method, social relations would not need to be intersected because each is already within the other, co-constituting each other in their very essence (McNally, 2017, p. 107). SRT, therefore, understands capitalism as a social relation composed of a contradictory totality of relations of exploitation, alienation, and domination, which cannot be conceived as purely accidental and contingent intersections (Arruzza, 2014). In other words, racial oppression and gender oppression are not understood as autonomous systems apart from capitalism but as moments of capitalist totality. Theorists who propose a unitary theory do not understand patriarchy as a system or mode of production that has its own rules and mechanisms that reproduce autonomously, and neither do they understand capitalism as a set of purely economic laws. The significance of this unitary theorization is to reject fragmentary views that reduce relations of oppression to gender and race and relations of exploitation to class.

This paper will be presented at the following session: