In the past decade, we have seen renewed interest and engagement with Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory. This trend significantly increased in the wake of the outbreak of Covid-19 and the unprecedented nationwide lockdowns, which laid bare the “essential” nature of social reproductive labor—whether in the form of supermarket stackers, garbage collectors, or healthcare workers. Indeed, this scholarship has reenergized older debates about the dependency of capital production on often unremunerated—and if renumerated underpaid—reproductive labor. At the same time, we have also seen increased scholarly attention to notions of care and how feminist theories of care, mostly drawing on the ethics of care tradition, differ from or supplement theories of social reproduction (i.e., Emma Dowling’s 2021 Verso book, The Care Crisis).
Shirin M. Rai’s Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring is one of the most recent and incisive interventions in these discussions. Even as Rai wades into the fraught territory around the distinctions between social reproduction and care (as well as the divergent theoretical traditions from which they have emerged), she is clear where she stands and, with characteristic precision, she lays out the stakes involved in choosing one term over another. For Rai, it is social reproduction rather than care that captures the “intimate relations in the home,” including “paid and unpaid work to reproduce and maintain life,” as well as the ideologies that legitimize the particular ways social relations are reproduced (p. 9).
The book’s overarching concern is not social reproduction theory per se, nor reconciling Marxist feminist theory with theories of care. Rather, Rai is interested in determining the human costs of care—what she aptly terms “depletion.” Her insistence on adopting the term “depletion” to describe these costs constitutes her key intervention. Depletion through social reproduction—a process which is always shaped by the structural inequalities of gender, race, class, and geographical location—is, according to Rai, one of the greatest existential threats to human and nonhuman life. Consequently, we need not only to take depletion seriously, but we also need to develop tools for identifying where and how depletion occurs in order to measure the harm it causes. Only once we are able to recognize and measure the multiple, relational harms that depletion causes will we be able to mitigate and potentially reverse these harms.
Depletion occurs when the outflow of social reproductive labor exceeds the inflow of resources that sustain individuals, households, and communities. Crucially, the harm caused by depletion manifests itself, according to Rai, in four distinct modes: through discursive harm, where mainstream public discourse negates and thus disavows social reproductive work; through emotional harm, when negative burdens accrue from this work; through bodily harm, which describe the physical tolls of this labor; and finally, through harm to citizenship entitlement, which result from a “lack of access to formal modes of justice” (p. 25). These harms are clearly interrelated and need to be thought together. Furthermore, in order to assess the full extent of the harm inflicted and the costs of social reproduction as depletion, we also need to ensure that our analysis is intersectional, taking into account how harm is incurred unevenly across race, class, sexuality, ableism, location, and other axes of difference.
Rai maintains that we need to develop tools to measure the scope, scale, and levels of depletion across each of the four modes of harm. She stresses the need to adopt mixed-methods models (such as the Feminist Everyday Observatory Tool [FEOT] that Rai and Jacqui True developed). She posits that the act of measurement constitutes a form of recognition, thereby bestowing value to social reproductive labor. While Rai is perfectly aware of the potential critique of this approach—i.e., that it could fit too easily into a neoliberal cost–benefit metrics system—she nevertheless insists that measuring depletion is crucial if we are serious about reversing harms. After all, in order to address these harms, we need to first be able to identify and evaluate them.
The conceptual scaffolding that Rai carefully lays out in the introduction and first two chapters sets the scene for four case studies, where she demonstrates the utility of her approach. The following chapters move from stories of eight women in New Delhi who navigate social reproductive labor (alongside other forms of labor), through a fascinating examination of the costs of commuting (a liminal temporal and spatial activity) focused on three Indian women the reader already met in the previous chapter, and a discussion of the unpaid cost of child caring in the UK’s Midlands, and, finally, to a chapter on the articulation of the future harms the Xolebeni community in South Africa face as global companies push to mine the titanium deposits on their ancestral land. These chapters highlight the different aspects of depletion through social reproduction, where geographical and social location matter, where intergenerational care work depletes the generational care chain (which often operates in tandem with global care chains), and where the depletion of human care is shown to be inextricable from the depletion of the planet.
Rai is not content to merely expose harm, however, and woven throughout the book are suggestions for how to respond to the harm that depletion incurs. The book outlines different ways we can and must address the intersectional harms caused by the mal/misrecognition of social reproduction. She discusses mitigation, which consists of mostly individualized solutions; replenishment, which includes substantial changes in social policy, the redistribution of care responsibilities, state investment in social infrastructure and revising how GDP is calculated; and finally, transformation, which consists of struggle and solidarity building—and most importantly, entails thinking anew about practices of world-making.
As someone who has engaged over the years with the harms generated by neoliberalism and the ways it shapes both human life and how people imagine and experience the world, I do have concerns about the pitfalls—or even the dangers—of attempting to measure depletion in the way Rai proposes. As scholars in the neoliberal university, we have seen just how easily measuring models and metrics can be mobilized for surveillance (and self-surveillance) purposes and end up atomizing and pitting people against each other. I also wonder whether the meticulous work that has gone into developing tools for measuring and addressing depletion or into highlighting the kind of transformative solidarity we need to reverse harm will ever be enough to carry out the change we want to see. But these are reflections on the times we live in, where we are witnessing the rise of authoritarian ultra-nationalist politics, impunity for genocidal violence, and, more generally, an escalating crisis of the liberal democratic order.
The Human Cost of Caring is an ambitious book. Its conceptual frame of depletion is incredibly useful and will undoubtedly have a long afterlife. Moreover, Rai manages to ensure analytic precision, even as she is attentive to and in solidarity with the women and children whose stories she brings to life. These are powerful stories of people across the globe who navigate a world shaped by violence and inequality. Their journeys extract huge costs to their health and well-being, yet they can also and sometimes do generate moments of satisfaction and even joy.
