>From gimenez@csf.Colorado.EDU  Mon Feb 27 14:21:30 1995
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Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 14:21:27 -0700 (MST)
From: Martha Gimenez <gimenez@csf.Colorado.EDU>
To: PPN@csf.Colorado.EDU
cc: Tom Hoffman <HOFFMANT@OSIRIS.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject: Re: production and reproduction 
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This is a reply to Tom Hoffman's message of 1/31/95
Tom stated:

"I just finished reading Wally Seccombe's 'Marxism and Demography:  
Household Forms and Fertility Regimes in the Western European 
Transition".  I must add that this article really struck a cord with me.  
Secombe makes the observation that dialectical marxism tends to ignore 
the productive contributions of population change.  He suggests that 
there seems to be a tendency to subordinate population to economy."

It is not clear to me what "the productive contributions of population 
change"  might be.  Population changes might or might not be positively 
welcome by different institutional sectors depending on the kind of mode
of production dominant in a given social formation and, consequently, the 
kinds of decisions investors and policy makers are likely to make.  
I may add that Seccombe does not identify the Marxists he criticizes, nor 
he cites passages so we can see who said what where, so we can make up 
our minds about the offending views.

"Fertility relations seem to be conceptualized to be either in the social 
super structure or out the picture entirely." 
By whom?  The ubiquituous vulgar determinist economistic marxist? :-)

"Seccombe, however seems to conceptualize fertility relations to be
interrelated with social base.  He suggests that social production itself
includes 1.  production of the means of production, 2. production of
subsistence, and 3. production of labor (i.e., fertility relations - in
the context of their interplay with mortality and migration relations). "

As Engels pointed out in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and 
the State, production is twofold; it entails the production of things 
(e.g., means of production and subssistence) and the production of life 
itself.   But the production of life and the production of labor are not 
the same thing.  Fertility relations (or relations of reproduction as I 
have conceptualized them in my work, searching for a broader concept) 
reproduce people, members of different social classes;  capitalist, 
laborers, rentiers, etc.   Marxists make a distinction between the 
reproduction of workers and the production and reproduction of labor power.
The two seldom coincide.  Seccombe, in listing the three kinds of 
production conflates the production of people with the production of 
labor power.  The relations that produce the former overlap with the 
relations that produce the latter but they are substantively different.

"Are fertility relations productive economically?  Secombe seems to think
so.  It seems that his hypothesis is internally consistent and well
grounded in historical materialism. " 

  It occurs to me that among the poor peasants studied by Mamdani in The
Myth of Population Control, one could argue that in so far as their
children were needed as sources of labor for their farms, their relations
of reproduction were "productive" for they reproduce an important factor
of production.  But among the wealthy peasants he studied, who could
afford to purchase and use machinery in their large farms, their relations
of reproduction had to include efficient use of birth control, otherwise
they might turn "unproductive."   But this is not a theoretically well 
grounded response.

I think that it is impossible, theoretically, to conceptualize 
reproduction as "productive" or "unproductive" in isolation of the 
socio-economic and therefore political relations within which reproduction
occurs.  Also, I am not very clear about the meaning of productivity in 
this context.

In my view,  this is not a very useful line of thought.  I think
it is, perhaps, more useful, to focus on the historically specific processes 
that either integrate people into the productive process or exclude them. 
And this leads to the determinants of quantitative and qualitative 
changes in the demand for labor which, again, is not equivalent to the 
demand for laborers or owners of labor power.

Tom, I hope you find these comments useful - If you have additional 
questions, just ask!  I will do my best to answer promptly next time :-)


in solidarity,

Martha
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       *           Martha E. Gimenez           *
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