The financialisation of social reproduction: domestic labour and promissory value

This chapter is concerned with transformations to domestic labour in contemporary financialised capitalism, and especially with the place of domestic labour in the process of capital accumulation via finance and financial innovation. Much of the recent literature on domestic labour, particularly - although not only - that concerned with the provisioning of such labour as well as caring labour in the global north, has charted how this work is increasingly the subject and object of commercial transactions. This literature has also stressed how such labour is very often supplied via complex global care chains whose organisation and arrangements have opened up new divisions between women. In contrast to this literature, this chapter underscores a transformation to domestic labour operating along a rather different axis. Specifically, rather than stressing shifts in who is providing domestic labour, by what means and under what conditions and arrangements, this chapter stresses transformations to domestic labour itself, including the circuits of value to which it contributes. It elaborates and stresses in particular the entanglement of domestic labour not in the reproduction and maintenance of labour power, people or persons, or in the maintenance of the social body or of life itself, but in the creation of promissory financial value. This chapter therefore outlines a financialisation of domestic labour. The implications of this process of the financialisation of domestic labour are explored for two related assumptions found in recent literature on the operations of contemporary capitalism. First, the implications of this process are examined for the assumption that the global north is experiencing a crisis of social reproduction, and second, the implications are explored for the assumption that the workings of finance are far removed and indeed separate from the dynamics and operations of domestic labour and hence require different modes of analysis. To begin to lay out these interventions, and to set the background for them, we turn first to shifts in the provisioning of domestic and caring labour