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Paper short abstract:

I offer a theoretical exposition of the overlap of the circuits, processes, and labours of production and reproduction for agrarian and non-agrarian petty commodity producing households.

Paper long abstract:

Petty commodity production (PCP) is not simply capital in its infancy or labour in disguise, but a being to itself, a being that sustains. It is that combination of capital and labour in one unified entity that both exploits and accumulates—from itself, to itself, for (some parts of) itself (Jan and Harriss-White, 2019). As capital, PCP must create surplus value and expand. However, since the same entity is also the home and provider of the labour power used in production, biological and social reproduction must be accomplished by the same entity. While capitalist firms are able to “export” the costs and labours of social reproduction on to gendered households and the State, PCP households cannot do such exporting and must meet the bulk of both production and reproduction needs internally. Gender relations and kinship structures shape the division of the PCP household’s labour power between productive and (social) reproductive activities (Harriss-White, 2010). Moreover, PCP challenges the separation of the spheres of "life-making" and "thing-making" and so pushes against conventional Marxist value theory (Mezzadri 2021). Through this paper I develop theoretical language in the form of circuits of production and reproduction to explore the nature of the interweaving of production and reproduction processes in PCP households, both agrarian and non-agrarian. I extend the theoretical construction to include the hiring out of labour by PCP households, with implicaitons for the subsidy to capital by gendered and generational divisions of labour within the PCP household.