Care Work, Labour Control and the Gendered Social Reproduction of a Semi-Landless Class in 19th Century Sweden

Abstract

This article shows how the reproductive work in the households of the semi-proletarianized Swedish group termed crofters (Sw: torpare) ensured subsistence for the crofters and increased capital accumulation for large landowners. Crofters lived under partly proletarianized, partly feudal conditions and their labour organization illuminates the proletarianization during the 19th century. Through two concepts from the field of Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, Alessandra Mezzadri's ‘value theory of inclusion’ and Nancy Fraser's ‘contradictions of care’, it is shown how the landowner externalized the costs of reproductive care work to be absorbed by the crofter households. This increased labour control, and the reproductive labour of the crofter household increased the value of the land for the landowner, allowing for capital accumulation. The analysis shows a process in which the crofter institution underwent a formal subsumption of labour, keeping the forms intact but increasingly contributing to capital accumulation through the organization of reproduction.