The Wages of Care: Reproductive Labour as Fictitious Commodity

In her lecture series, Professor Nancy Fraser will create a Polanyian-feminist framework for theorising capitalist crisis in the 21st century. Following her first lecture on ‘The Great Transformation’, Professor Nancy Fraser will in her second lecture reconstruct the idea of “the fictitious commodity” in a form that can be used to analyse burgeoning markets in reproductive labour. Polanyi’s concept of the fictitious commodity traced the roots of crisis to what he called the “fictitious commodification” of labour, land and money and diagnosed the tendency of a “free market society” to undermine the shared understandings that underpin social life. Despite its relevance, this concept fails to appreciate that the commodification of one portion of social labour, often called “productive,” necessarily rests on the non-commodification of another portion, often called “reproductive.” Therefore, “the fictitious commodity” is not adequate in its classical form for a feminist theory of capitalist crisis but needs to be reconstructed for present-day theorising.