Since Karl Marx’s original interventions, subsequent generations of Marxists have spilled a great deal of ink fleshing out his powerful social critique. Feminists in particular have drawn our attention to the work performed in homes, schools, and hospitals to sustain people — much of which is not recognized as work at all. But without the labor that goes into raising, educating, feeding, and healing people, which Marxist feminists have termed “social reproduction,” workers can’t survive, and neither can capitalism itself. This theory collapses the traditional distinction between the workplace and the home. It also demands a fuller account of capitalism’s pervasiveness, beyond what we conceive of as the formal economy.

Marxist critical theorist Nancy Fraser is well known for her feminist and Marxist writing on social reproduction. Fraser’s book Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, a dialogue with philosopher and critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi, extends Fraser’s original analysis of social reproduction to capitalism’s other critical underpinnings. Fraser argues that a total analysis of capitalism requires taking Marxism beyond a narrowly economistic view. Hers is an argument against sharp divisions — not just between the workplace and the home but between the economic and political and environmental and between liberal free labor regimes in wealthy countries and raw expropriation on the neocolonial periphery.

In 2018, Nancy Fraser sat down with Daniel Denvir, host of the Jacobin podcast The Dig, to discuss her and Jaeggi’s book, capitalism’s crisis of social reproduction, and the socialist responsibility to provide an alternative.