Social Reproduction: the political Eeconomy of the labour market

This book seeks to restore the relationship between the process of production of commodities and the process of social reproduction of the labouring population to the central place it had in the economic analysis of Smith Ricardo and Marx.The argument is directly opposed to that of the wages-fund theoriests, who rejected the classical view of labour as a very special type of commodity whose price (the 'natural wage') was determined exogenously by material, historical and institutional factors. By susbstituting a strict supply-and-demand mechanism they and their followers effectively removed the whole question of social reproduction from the macro foundations of economic theory.