Marx’s ‘costs of consumption’: A new framework for analysing the economic character of ‘reproductive labour’

Abstract

This study resurrects Marx’s concept of ‘costs of consumption’ to resolve persistent theoretical impasses in the domestic labour debate. We argue that attempts to analyse ‘reproductive labour’ through production categories stem from a fundamental methodological mismatch. By systematically reconstructing Marx’s distinction between productive and individual consumption, we demonstrate that ‘reproductive labour’ corresponds to Marx’s ‘labour indispensable for family consumption’, operating within costs of consumption in individual consumption. This labour – whether performed as unpaid ‘expenditure of labour in the house’ or as marketised services requiring ‘increased expenditure of money’ – maintains its character as unproductive labour fulfilling essential ‘family functions’. The two forms of costs of consumption – labour expenditure by domestic labour and monetary expenditure through services – offer theoretical grounds for explaining the dynamic relationship between production and reproduction in social reproduction theory; a genuinely Marxian analysis of ‘reproductive labour’ requires a fundamental theoretical reorientation from production to consumption as the appropriate analytical lens.