Social Reproduction by Antonella Picchio - 9780521418720

Social ReproductionThe Political Economy of the Labour Market\nAuthor(s): Antonella Picchio\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521418720, 978-0521418720\nSynopsis\nThis book focuses on the relationship between the process of production of commodities and the process of social reproduction of the labouring population, and seeks to restore that problematic relationship to the central place it had in the analysis of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. The argument is directly opposed to that of the wages-fund theorists, who rejected the classical view of labour as a very special type of commodity whose price was determined exogenously by material, historical and institutional factors. By substituting a strict supply-and-demand mechanism they and their followers effectively removed the whole question of social reproduction from economic theory. This rendered marginal or analytically invisible certain fundamen.