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Radical feminist analyses have always placed considerable emphasis on the crucial role played by social reproduction for the development of capitalism. Early social reproduction analyses–primarily premised on housework but also more broadly concerned with wagelessness–developed a robust critique of Marxian views that identified processes of value-generation only with the productive sphere, and de facto deployed ‘productive’and ‘paid’labour as synonyms. 1 Some more recent approaches, by contrast, propose social reproduction as a ‘theory’(SRT), and deploy the concept in order to focus on how labour is regenerated daily and inter-generationally through private and public institutions in contemporary contexts. 2 This second set of studies seem concerned with analysing the circuits of care that reproduce the worker as connected yet distinct to those of capital and value-generation. At the same time, however, they are committed to avoiding what they consider ‘dual theories’, conceptualising patriarchy and capitalism as separate systems. 3

Starting from a review of the social reproduction debate, old and new, and focusing on the rise and spread of informal and informalised labour, the following analysis argues that only interpretations of social reproduction activities and realms as value-producing can advance our understandings of labour relations of contemporary capitalism. In fact, reproductive activities and realms play a key role in shaping such relations and in the processes of surplus extraction they are embedded in, particularly,(al-