There are hostesses, baristas, sex workers, housewives, best friends.

What do these types of workers have in common?

According to writer and organizer Alva Gottby, they are all involved in a form of social

reproduction that we should start thinking about as emotional labour, the kind of paid

and unpaid care work responsible for binding the fabric of capitalist society together.

In Alva's new book, they call it love, the politics of emotional life.

She takes up the mantle of the wages for housework movement and asks how we might apply its

lessons and provocations to our most intimate lives.

I'm your host Ellen Peney and this week I talk with Alva about social reproduction,

our work and disentangling the ways we love from the systems that exploit us.

Alva, hello.

Thanks for having me.

Your work is in conversation with the idea of social reproduction.

We hear this word, this phrase being bandied around a lot and so for the uninitiated,

I would love us to just have a bit of a chat about what we are talking about when we

talk about social reproduction.

What is this process that we are trying to describe?

The theory of social reproduction is basically that capitalism depends not just on the production

of goods and services but also that the reproduction of work is and what we mean by that is that

as people we all have a lot of needs for food, shelter, clothes and so on, that sort of

need to be satisfied in some way and some of that we can do through buying various things

but those things sort of in themselves can't really meet all the needs that we have.

...