"On Being and Appearing: Social Reproduction and the Family Form": An essay by Tatiana Llaguno (Keywords: Reproductive Labour;Anti-Social Family; Freedom;Alienation)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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“[It]is yet, without being any secret, hidden.”

Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy

“The children are always ours.”

James Baldwin

In her 1987 lecture Does Marx have a method?, philosopher Gillian Rose plunges into the question of what methodological procedure can be attributed to Marx: what is his specific proposal when it comes to providing a ‘logic of the social’, a ‘socio-logos’. Two important questions stand out in Rose’s analysis, which I will take as the starting point for my proposal of a Hegelian-Marxist feminist philosophical method.

First, Rose argues that the abstract and illusory aspect of our immediate experience of capitalist society stems from our inability to grasp and comprehend the social totality. Marxist feminists are specifically concerned with one of the fundamental internal divisions within that totality – a dimension sometimes occluded by short-sighted analyses of exchange relations and the commodity form. While fully aware that, whenever dominant, the capitalist mode of production delineates the contours of social reproduction, they rightly observe that a dédoublement between waged productive activity and unwaged reproductive activity persists. Marxist feminism is our collective attempt at sense-making of this division.

Feminist thinkers have long theorized the nature and status of the reproductive sphere –all those activities (caring, cooking, cleaning, etc.) in which we engage to sustain life and reproduce labour power, both daily and across generations. This includes, of course, the reproduction of structures of inequalities embedded in the capitalist social order. From heated debates in the 1970s over whether reproductive activities produce value to contemporary attempts to theorize them as something both essential to and yet othered by capital, Marxist feminists have sought to develop a form of critique that yearns the totality and resists reproducing the compartmentalization of the social enacted by capital.

Second, as Rose rightly underlines, Marx’s method is not a simple materialist repudiation of idealism. Marx’s approach follows an idiosyncratically modern way of thinking about social reality – a methodological procedure initiated by Hegel, in which essence and appearance are no longer understood as opposites, but are instead seen as existing in a dialectical relationship to each other. Following this path, Marx maintains that modern societies, and in particular, his object of study, capitalist ones, are characterized by a set of ‘necessary appearances’. These appearances are not simply false; rather, these illusions are systematic, unavoidable – they persist even if we become aware of them. However, to address this conundrum, Marx does not impel us to search for the content behind the form, the matter behind the idea. Certainly, one of Marx’s purposes is to unveil the ‘commodity form’, showing how, behind what seems to be a natural property of the thing – its exchangeability – we find concrete social relations. But to conclude from this that Marx is merely a content-seeker would be a mistake.

As Marxist feminists, we are compelled to ask: What is the form assumed by unpaid reproductive labour and thus the object of our critique?

Doing so would reduce Marxism to a sort of positivism, which it emphatically is not. Marx had, in his own words, ‘a very poor opinion’ of ‘Comtism’ – an epistemological and political distancing largely continued by the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Critical knowledge of society, for Marx, cannot be reduced to a concern with what is measurable and empirically observable. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek contends that Marx’s and Freud’s interpretative procedures coincide in one fundamental way: both manage to ‘avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the “content” supposedly hidden behind the form’. Instead, in their analyses of the commodity form and the form of dreams, the secret to be unveiled is not a ‘hidden kernel’, but rather the answer to the question of why latent dream-thoughts have assumed such forms and ‘why work assumed the form of the value of a commodity, why it can affirm its social character only in the commodity-form of its product’. To understand this is, among other things, to reclaim Marx as a philosopher.

But, if this is true, then as Marxist feminists, we are compelled to ask: What is the form assumed by unpaid reproductive labour and thus the object of our critique? And how should we respond to the task set before us, that is, the task of practically and theoretically partaking in the de-formation of the social totality? If, as Beverley Best puts it, ‘capital’s social forms serve the perceptual delinking of the production of surplus-value from its source in people’s cooperative labour’, then what is the form that enables this ‘perceptual delinking’ in the case of unwaged reproductive activity? In what follows, I advance an argument tentatively suggested – but philosophically underdeveloped – within feminist theory: that the family constitutes the social form of appearance of unwaged reproductive labour. Marx’s philosophical method, the critique of capital’s necessary forms of appearance, is also our method – therefore, our Marxism. Our object of study is reproductive labour, particularly the part that has remained other to, or outside of, the commodity form and is not mystified by the wage – therefore, our feminism.

To work through this, I would like to propose – albeit in a very condensed form – the following: first, inspired by an assertion made by Italian feminist Leopoldina Fortunati, I will defend the need for Marxist feminism to integrate the philosophical discussion on essence and appearance. As I hope to show, this language – central in the Hegelian Marxist tradition – enables a specific type of social analysis that can benefit current debates on reproductive labour and the forms of mystification upon which it depends. As value-theoretical feminists have suggested, Marx’s method of exposition – in particular his concern with capital’s phenomenal manifestations – must remain central to feminist analysis. Second, I will argue that a productive site for situating this social form critique, for feminist purposes, is Marx’s critical engagement with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Despite being a text that has attracted relatively little attention from Marxist feminists, I contend that it contains, in a disavowed manner, key insights into the centrality of the family form in modern societies. In doing so, I aim to bring together value-theory-oriented feminist interventions with contemporary political calls to abolish the family. Perhaps, the fact that both have recently gained so much traction speaks to a latent interconnection.

***

In The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital, Leopoldina Fortunati declares that the real difference between production and reproduction is that ‘while production both is and appears as the creation of value, reproduction is the creation of value but appears otherwise’. How should we understand this puzzling claim? What does it mean for reproduction to appear otherwise? And wouldn’t our task, as critical theorists, be to identify this form, expose its contradictions, and prefigure alternatives not foreclosed by its logic? Rather than merely revealing the content behind the form –a move that would maintain an undialectical approach to such dualism – feminist theory must be capable of untangling the form of appearance of reproductive labour. As we know, most of it does not fit the characteristics of waged labour – the defining form of capitalist societies. Unwaged reproductive labour is indirectly market-mediated and ultimately subsumed within the capitalist social totality; yet, it does not appear in the mystified form of the wage (the key to this mystification being its appearance as a payment for labour, rather than for labour-power).

Although unpaid reproductive labour does not fall under the wage form – there is no employment contract, or salary, for such activity – it is crucial to see that there remains a form of mystification upon which it depends, a form that must be unpacked. Like the market, the family simultaneously privatizes and socializes labour. It is the social enclosure that formally sanctions the privatization and extraction of reproductive labour, while providing a minimal cooperative framework within which reproduction can occur. Under capitalist relations, labour is not immediately social: independent individuals engage in private acts of production, whose sociality is only retroactively validated through the market. A shoe-maker, for instance, makes shoes without knowing in advance if anyone will buy them; only when the shoes are actually sold in the market, is the shoe-maker’s labour confirmed as socially useful.

Much like commodity exchange and money, which realize social connection in an alienated manner, the family realizes interpersonal relations within the bounds of capitalist life.

Granted, when it comes to unwaged reproductive activities, Marx’s notion of ‘commodity fetishism’ does not quite obtain. Nevertheless, both fetishism and mystification – as, respectively, the reification of a social relation as the property of a thing, and the necessary presentation of reality in an inverted form – can still be traced. Like gender, which acquires a fetishistic character insofar as it is made a thing-in-itself; the family represents the fetishistic manifestation of unwaged reproductive labour. By making such labour appear natural, inherent to that social form, it obscures the concrete social relations underpinning it. Mystification seems more complex. But could this inverted aspect not be precisely what Marxist feminists are pointing to when they declare: ‘They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work’? The problem with the family form, authors like Silvia Federici would claim, is that is, quite literally, a ‘fraud’: although it ‘goes under the name of love and marriage,’ it ultimately hinders the free establishment of genuine loving and caring relationships.

‘Family relations are capitalist relations and only appear to be interpersonal relations,’ says Fortunati. This appearing nature does not negate the possibility that our existing family ties can hold deep meaning for many of us. Nor does it imply that such relations are false. As a matter of fact, these relationships often constitute some of the most foundational interpersonal experiences available to modern subjects. The family is, in this sense, a necessary appearance of the capitalist form: much like commodity exchange and money, which realize social connection in an alienated manner, the family realizes interpersonal relations within the bounds of capitalist life. Like the market, it does so on the basis of an unfree form of labour. Under capitalism, as the saying goes, it is often better to be exploited than to be excluded from exploitation altogether. So too, most of the time, it is better to have a family than to have none. But none of this makes capitalist exploitation, or the bourgeois family, emancipatory social forms. We must, one should hope, do better.

Perhaps it is the very intricacy of this inversion that explains why, against all odds, the family form endures. Its persistence should be understood as lying in capital’s logico-historical compulsion toward its maintenance: the family is objectively necessitated as the form of appearance of unwaged reproductive labour. This, as many feminist thinkers have already argued, has far-reaching implications for gender relations and sexuality –even if, interestingly, the family form continues to be upheld even as a certain elasticity emerges in these realms. To speak of capital’s logico-historical compulsion to the family is to engage in the effort to untangle the social totality in a way that remains historically indexed; it is to name a not-that-easily dispensable socio-political tendency. For despite the increasing incorporation of women into waged labour outside the home, the family, as a gendered mechanism for the privatization of care work, cyclically, yet persistently, reasserts itself. To say all this is not to deny that the family serves at times as a refuge from the violence wrought by the market (though it, too, inflicts its own violence), nor to suggest that meaningful interpersonal relations cannot or do not flourish beyond it. It is simply to say that capitalist societies privilege the family as the primary site where such relations are expected to take root and reproduce themselves because it functions as the form through which unwaged reproductive labour gets expropriated and occluded. 

***

Now, in reflecting on the logico-historical nature of the family, one particular philosophical work comes to mind, one that deftly weaves together logic and history: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. There, Hegel offers a triadic vision of modern society in which Sittlichkeit (Ethical Life) unfolds in three moments: the family, civil society, and the state. While I cannot fully develop this here, one of my underlying claims is that each of these moments should be understood as a necessary appearance of the modern capitalist form of life. Whether Hegel provides conceptual resources to move beyond these forms is, of course, an open question (I, for one, am inclined to say yes, though one need not share that view for the purpose of this argument). What matters here is that Marx himself took Hegel’s schema quite seriously, and devoted considerable effort – with his characteristic sarcasm and implacable tone – to expose the contradictions within it. While Marx’s criticism focuses largely on the state, I want to suggest that his insights remain illuminating for feminist concerns. 

Let us briefly recapitulate what unfolds in Marx’s critique of Hegel. In his discussion of bureaucracy, Marx is intent on showing how the latter thwarts the possibility of an organic unity between state and society. For Marx, Hegel’s state emerges as an entity that remains exterior to society: the state is disconnected from the real social forces that bring it into being, thereby taking on an abstract universal form divorced from its concrete foundations. The state is severed from its effective presupposition, cut off from the social conditions that give rise to it. And though Hegel is astute enough to perceive the modern contradiction at the heart of this division, Marx goes on, he cannot resolve it. We must push the critique further. Marx explains the separation itself, revealing the state as the political and legal ratification of the atomization of civil society. Bourgeois political rights become, as is made even clearer in On the Jewish Question, the juridical recognition of modern man’s diremption – his split from himself and from the social whole.

Neither more democratic corporations nor more democratic families will do the work of emancipation.

Now, why should this discussion matter for feminist theory? My hypothesis is the following: if Marx’s notion of society, as an economic-political reality, emerges partly through his critical engagement with Hegel (with whom he disagrees but whom he nonetheless credits for having named the problem), then it is worth recalling that, in Hegel’s system, not only civil society but both civil society and the family operate as the social presupposition of the state. If, as Pulgar Moya and Clochet argue, in Marx, ‘the concept of society emerges as the general category and last concrete moment of the critical exposition of the economy,’ then what falls within that category bears critical importance. In modern capitalist societies, the family and the market form the twin pillars of the social – they constitute the texture through which the social materializes, becomes intelligible and reproducible. However, and despite Hegel’s claims, like the civil society –the paradigmatic unethical moment within his ethical totality – the family, too, remains an unethical institution. For Hegel, the civil society is an unethical moment because of its atomism; in it, individuals do not pursue unity as their purpose. The civil society socializes by separating. But this too is what the bourgeois family does: this, I believe, is how we should interpret Barret and MacIntosh’s description of the modern bourgeois family as the ‘anti-social family’ – the main source of this anti-social force being the privatization of reproductive labour.

It is worth noting that in modern thinkers such as Hegel, the family, despite its patriarchal character, is nonetheless conceived as a free social institution: marriage can take place only between two independent and self-determining wills. Like exchange, the modern family posits and generates equality and freedom. And like exchange, it is precisely through this positing that it sanctions relations of domination. Just as the wage relation is the source of the semblance of equality and freedom in waged productive labour, so too is the modern marriage that sustains the family the source of the semblance of equality and freedom in unwaged reproductive labour. For feminist theorists like Cristine Delphy, it is crucial to understand that women do not enter the marriage contract from a pre-existing position of subordination; rather, it is the institution of marriage itself that produces and sustains the inequality between men and women. Its political equality sanctions its social inequality.

Of course, both market relations and family relations have undergone historically significant transformations. Some of the initial inequalities inscribed in them –along the lines of gender, race, and sexuality – have been, partially and to varying degrees, circumvented. As valuable and necessary as these transformations have been, their insufficiency remains clear: so long as the privatized form of labour that the family embodies is not abolished – so long as all necessary labour is not fully socialized – relations of domination will persist. From his bourgeois vantage point, Hegel misses the fundamental character of the family as an institution for the organization of labour. Marx, by contrast – though he left this question largely underdeveloped – grasped that something essential was at stake. For Marx and Engels, ‘that the supersession of the individual economy is inseparable from the supersession of the family is self-evident’. 

***

In raising the question of the family, my aim is not to undo decades of criticism concerning the limits of categories such as the household or the housewife. After all, isn’t the family the last refuge for many abandoned by the market and the state? Aren’t the bonds of love that constitute the family often the final bastion untouched by the relentless logic of commodification? As thinkers such as Angela Davis have powerfully reminded us, the household, particularly in the lives of enslaved women, has at times been the only space ‘away from the eyes and whip of the overseer’. It has served, and continues to serve, as a shelter from border regimes, from state and police violence, from genocide. In this light, the ethically correct impulse is, indeed, to defend it. But it is as a unit of privatized care, embedded within and indispensable to the reproduction of capitalist relations, that it must be radically interrogated and ultimately rejected. This is not a simple political task. Families express their anti-social character in deeply contradictory ways – they are sites of both lacerating neglect and much-needed affection. We need, then, to think seriously and carefully about what might come after, about how their dysfunctional functioning can be replaced. Mourning this loss will not be easy. Our attachment to the family form is understandably powerful, the logics that permeate it are deeply, psychically, inscribed upon us. But this difficulty must not deter us. In the words of Rebecca Comay, ‘the excessive, uncanny vitality of the undead’ must not be allowed to hold us back.

For love and care to be realized for everyone, the modern family must be overcome, transcended, and its rational core carried forward into a freer world

The philosophical interrogation of social forms – in this case, the family form – is a first step that carries weighty political consequences. Just as we, as Marxists, do not expect individual capitalists to behave in more moral or humane ways, we, as feminists, cannot settle for the hope that individuals will learn and choose to redistribute reproductive labour more fairly within the private home. Subjective and attitudinal changes are desirable and necessary. But they are not sufficient. Only the socialization of reproductive labour can meaningfully confront the structural problem posed by the family as a social form. Socialization has been imagined in various ways, but it typically involves initiatives such as communal kitchens, central laundries, shared cleaning duties, as well as collective crèches and schools. It is a political project that goes beyond the democratization of the existing family. Neither more democratic corporations nor more democratic families will do the work of emancipation.

In sum, my suggestion is that a philosophically grounded Hegelian-Marxist feminism is uniquely equipped to undertake the critical task of tracing the deep interconnections that bind together spheres of human life that often appear separate or unrelated. A central question in accomplishing that task is: Under what conditions does unwaged reproductive labour take the form of the family? By placing the problem of mystification at the center, my contention is that the family must be understood as the capitalist form of appearance of unwaged reproductive labour – a form necessitated precisely to occlude such labour. This claim, I propose, can be substantiated by revisiting Marx’s critique of Hegel, and by recognizing that the notion of society he mobilizes cannot do without the moment of the family. In that sense, Hegel’s objective spirit – the triadic movement of family, civil society, and state – should not be dismissed. It discloses the internal architecture of the modern social order. As an ideological socio-political apparatus, it is both more true and more untrue than we might expect.

The naturalization of the family is equivalent to the naturalization of capitalist economic relations by classical political economists; both are forms of mystification through which their socio-historical specificity and genesis is hidden. If, as Adorno and Horkheimer remind us, all reification is a form of forgetting, then the specific forgetting of the bourgeois family as a historical result enables its reification. It partakes in the generalized amnesia that modern capitalist societies induce in us – an amnesia for which a simple correction of our misapprehension will never suffice. While we must always expose the violent origins of capitalist social forms, overcoming their mystified appearances requires more than theoretical clarity – it demands practical transformation. Today, the latter seems more urgent than ever. The cyclical crises of social reproduction –and their corresponding reactionary responses – will persist. It is no coincidence that hymns to the family are being sung precisely at a time when ‘the abject’ is on the rise – a term Gonzalez and Neton use to describe those activities which, though once waged, have been pushed back into the unwaged sphere due to their costliness for the state or capital, but which, through this very displacement, no longer automatically appear as the natural task of women.

Ours is a political vision that confronts the worshippers of old chains; we seek to abolish the family in order to actualize freedom. For love and care to be realized for everyone, the modern family must be overcome, transcended, and its rational core carried forward into a freer world. As Beckett once claimed, ‘Being is constantly putting form in danger’; all forms, he reminds us, violate Being ‘in the most unbearable manner’. Yet, we cannot do without them. Our task – rooted in both practical knowledge and stubborn, dutiful hope – is to weave new social forms, forms capable of sustaining the overwhelming meta-norm of modernity: our freedom, the freedom of all. 

Tatiana Llaguno is an assistant professor in critical and political theory at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She received her PhD with distinction from the New School for Social Research in New York. Her research areas include post-Kantian philosophy (esp. Hegel and Marx), social and political philosophy, critical theory, feminist theory and political ecology. She is an organizing member of the Marx & Philosophy Society.

 First published online on 1st February 2026

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