I was having a chat about social reproduction with my housemates last night that got me thinking – and maybe this is a crazy idea. I’m pretty allergic to a lot of the theorising of “reproductive labour” that goes on because I think it makes lots of mistakes about what it understand by reproduction. As in, one has to deal with the fact that it is both capital and labour that is reproduced. For Marx the reproduction of capital is pretty much transactional and is merely a matter of circulation, valorisation etc. for example, when I buy an aubergine I happen to reproduce the capitalist totality. But there is this other form of reproduction, which is the reproduction of the workforce. Marx deals with this when he talks about the wage. The problem I have is that the way this problem is addressed is often one-sided (from one side or the other): On one side – a sort of orthodox Marxist position – the matter of reproductive labour is nothing other than a renaming of the valorisation of labour power itself by circuitous means. The danger of this argument seems to be that production and consumption are made identical, and suddenly refusing to eat the aubergine might be seen as equivalent to going on strike at work. On the other side would be a strain of feminist thought that works on this through an account of feminised suffering. I don’t really much like either of these ways of thinking this, but the ways the positions divide do occasion a question of the relationship between necessity and suffering in Marx’s thought, that is, the place of reason in Marx. Each version of the argument seems to lack one of these aspects. The orthodox Marxist position would normally make claims on the general and most abstract irrationality of capitalism in showing that it is founded on certain false claims to necessity. But in doing so, it runs short on experiential content, on how and why the commodities we are forced to use to sustain us damage us in certain ways. The other perspective, which founds its thought on suffering alone can only seem to amount to a Schopenhauerian nihilism (Schopenhauer was a great philosopher for understanding the consequences of his position, but a terrible philosopher for the position he took.) Maybe then the way to break through this seeming contradiction is to try to give a more extended thought to what Marx understands by surplus value. It is generally assumed that surplus value matters only to the side of production, not reproduction. Quite strictly in Marx, the wage functions with complete necessity to reproduce life, while the production of commodities drains life to create profit. But maybe this can be pushed a little: if one were to imagine a surplus involved in reproductive labour it would be a strange one: it would be that aspect of reproduction that serves not life but the shaping of a lifetime, from childhood to birth to death. In the form of true necessity the labour of reproduction, which would cease to be labour at all, would serve the eternal, integral life, as infinite in variety in every moment as its extent.