The Agrarian Question of Gendered Labour

Introduction

The agrarian question is situated in a literature and praxis that emerged out of attempts to understand capitalist development in conjunction with rural and agrarian economies. After freeing themselves of colonial rule in many countries in Africa and Asia, the agrarian question was meant to address both the issues of self-determination, the adoption of a development path that would benefit the people, and remedy the havoc wreaked through colonialism and imperialism.

In its classical form, the agrarian question concerned itself with the development of capitalism in agriculture and the role of agriculture in capital accumulation, class formation, and class struggle We offer in this regard, an attempt to understand the lives of the labouring classes. This is particularly relevant in the current phase of capitalism which has produced differing and fragmented forms of class formation and has impeded the development that was expected for the former colonies. In discussing the labouring classes, we consider the broad class of people whose reproduction -their life and survival -are not guaranteed within the capitalist accumulation process. Unlike capitalists and others in the professional classes who are deemed essential to the operation of the capitalist system, the labouring classes have to engage in their own reproduction. This reproduction may occur as a result of their participation in wage labour, but is not guaranteed. Rather, varying degrees of energy expenditure outside the labour market is required by wage workers, their families and their communities in order to survive, live and flourish.

These have been acknowledged in the agrarian studies literature (e.g., O'Laughlin 2009; Moyo, Yeros and Jha), but not adequately theorized.

In this paper, we highlight the immanence of the problem of gender inequity inherent in labour processes under capitalism and manifest both in households that are reproduced on account of wage labour, but also households that rely on other forms of production that co-exist and articulate with capitalist modes of production. We classify this as the Agrarian Question (AQ) of gendered labour. It pertains to the labour that is expended in producing and reproducing life whether it is relevant for capital accumulation or not. Our objective is to offer better conceptual clarity on gender inequities inherent in agrarian societies as they relate to reproduction of the labouring classes, and decenter the labour-capital relationship to shift attention to the survival and flourishing of the working people. In turn with this clarification we also hope to advance our collective understanding of the immiseration or impoverishment of the labouring classes under capitalism.

The growing global reserve army of labour (Jonna and Bellamy Foster 2011) appears to be inadequately supported by the processes of proletarianisation. The rise of PCPs (Harris-White 2012) and the processes of semi-proletarianisation (e.g., Moyo, Yeros and Jha 2013) indicate the inability or unwillingness of the capitalist system to provide adequately for the reproduction of the labouring classes. The full extent of the degradation of the classes may be mitigated by women's invisible labour that participates in various productive and reproductive activities. In advanced capitalist countries, women's responsibilities for reproductive work have tended to be in the context of care work as the welfare state socialised others aspect of reproductive labour.

But even in these countries, state intervention in reproduction has varied by race and ethnicity (e.g., Davis 1981). But, in many regions in the Global South responsibility for reproduction was never adequately assumed by capital or the state. Women's reproductive labour in these economies then is not merely restricted to care work and also includes participation in noncapitalist forms of production. In order to understand the AQ of gendered labour, our discussion necessarily draws on questions of land and ecological security (See Bernstein 2004; Yeros and Jha 2013) which sustain the reproduction.

Feminist scholarship highlights a link between capitalist development and the exploitation both of 'free' wage labourers and fundamentally, that of non-wage labourers involved in processes of social reproduction comprising both affective and material labour (Fraser 2016). Inherent to every capitalist society as such is a social-reproductive 'crisis tendency' which arises on the one hand because social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation, and on the other because capitalism's orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies (ibid). This crisis of social reproduction has taken historically specific forms through different stages of capitalist transitions: "the liberal, competitive capitalism of the 19th century; the state-managed capitalism of the postwar era; and the financialized neoliberal capitalism of our time" (ibid, 2016: 100). It is in the latter period where we locate our analysis in this paper, in which we deal with the specificity of this care deficit as it manifests in agrarian societies. Aspects of this crisis have been broadly addressed in some of the literature on the Global South (e.g. Mies 2014), but this work retains a linear historical trajectory in which underdeveloped nations are expected to follow the industrialisation trajectory of developed nations, and does not account for the specificity of agrarian societies in which capitalist accumulation is not reducible to industrialisation.

Further, past literature discusses non-capitalist production in the context of self-exploitation in specific terms related to internal household demand and the subsumption or subordination of agrarian and peasant economies to capital. Neoliberal economic policies implemented in much of the global south throughout the1990s have afforded capital the benefit of mobility, informal and flexible labour markets, and formal capital markets. However, evidence of growing unrest among peasants, and agrarian and industrial workers in many countries suggests that gains from these economic growth paths may be inequitably distributed, and demands greater attention to the conditions under which the working poor and marginalized satisfy minimum consumption and reproduce themselves (Naidu & Ossome, 2016). We seek in this regard to reorient our analysis away from discussions of value creation and hence exploitation to reproduction of life, or the political economy of survival of the labouring classes under conditions of a global surplus population.

Surplus population and social reproduction

The process of reproduction is historically specific and the historical development of capitalism in different contexts subject to specific economic, social, and political conditions pertaining to each context. Late capitalism's tendency towards massive depeasantisation of the countryside, accompanied by casualisation of semi-proletarianised labour has had an acute impact on agrarian households that are both articulated and disarticulated to capitalist production. In light of these tendencies we discuss below the significance of social reproduction, surplus population, and the relationship between the two.

The Basis for Capitalist Production: Reproduction of Labour

The capitalist mode of production may treat labour as a commodity, but its production and reproduction falls outside the realm of capitalist production. Under a high degree of proletarianisation, wages provide the means of subsistence for the working classes and pay for consumption of goods and services. Yet, while workers exchange the capacity to labour for a wage, the actual processes of reproducing both workers as well as those not incorporated into the value-producing economy remains within the family-household sphere. These processes include the expenditure of wages on consumption goods, production of simple-use goods and services using household labour, and acquiring and maintaining a private domestic sphere (Dickinson and Russell 1985). Necessary labour therefore is not just expended in the value-producing economy but also within the family-household, even though the latter is unwaged.

As Dickinson and Russell argue, the family household not only appears as the primary institution of individual consumption, but deceivingly "as an island of self-determination in an otherwise very large ocean of externally-manifested hierarchical power and discipline relations" (Dickinson and Russell 1985: 9). This role played by the family-household may therefore, at least in part, explain the varying degree of importance of the family in different capitalist societies even if the specific form of the heteronormative family has undergone significant changes. Primacy of wages to facilitate 'self-managed reproduction' depends on workers' access to employment and decent wages (Dickinson and Russell 1985: 10). The gap between actual consumption and consumption afforded by wage income has to be fulfilled either through state intervention or additional household production. The persistence of economic insecurity in the absence of adequate wages and state intervention forces households from working classes to engage in subsistence production and care work, and the labour expended in these activities constitute reproductive work that is often, but not exclusively, the bastion of women's invisible work. Thus, while capitalism heralds a separation of workers from the means of production and hence reproduction, this separation may not be complete as household production of goods and services is non-trivial in both advanced and less-advanced capitalist economies, even though the actual magnitude may vary regionally.

The existence and persistence of such household production particularly allows capitalists to expect the reproduction of labour in the absence of a living wage and inadequate social welfare programmes. Here we want to highlight the fact that workers simply do not earn a living wage: the expectation that becoming part of the proletariat would result in better living conditions has, in reality, not materialised particularly for workers of the Global South. This material reality expands the scope of production of simple use-values within the domestic sphere. Consequently, non-capitalist social formations of household and family labour shoulder a large proportion of the burden of meeting minimum consumption levels essential for daily and generational reproduction, and as Luxemburg (1951) suggests, continues to subsidize capital accumulation.

The means of subsistence in this case are not merely acquired through the expenditure of wages, but also through means outside the capitalist mode of production. While we are not claiming a priori causality between wage labour and domestic labour, what is clear from feminist analyses is that labour performed within the household in social reproduction has a direct relation to the degree of subsidy obtained by capital though its manifestation of changes over time, space, class and race.

Social Reproduction and Relative Surplus Population

Workers not only undertake the reproduction of the current and future labour pool, but also relative surplus population. As Marx (1986: 603) noted, even though the reproduction of the labouring and relative surplus population, including pauperism, enters the 'faux frais' of capitalism, it systematically shifts the burden on to the working classes and the lower middleclass. Surplus population, i.e., surplus relative to capital, can be divided into the floating part that constituted those who are cyclically unemployed, the latent population constituting those with insecure unemployment and those not fully integrated into capitalist production, and the stagnant population of people who are rarely employed, or are engaged in outwork and are likely to sink into pauperism (Marx 1986: 603, Li 2009Foster, McChesney and Jonna 2011).

Marx drew a link between the relative surplus population and capital accumulation, arguing thus: the greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth.

But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation (Marx 1977:798, emphasis in original).

The link between surplus population and capital accumulation, however, is not limited by national boundaries or by economic crisis. As the global economy has grown and integrated countries of the global north and south, albeit unevenly, it has affected the working classes and there appears to be convergence in the conditions of survival for relative surplus populations (Foster, McChesney and Jonna 2011) impacted by economic expansion and contraction, and primitive accumulation.

When capital accumulation increases, there is a tendency to increase employment, hence reducing the relative surplus population, all else constant. This is the direct relationship that is noted between economic growth and employment, and contributes to the growth fetish. This result may manifest in a closed economy with a stagnant labour pool, but is less likely to occur in an economy under globalisation. The availability of a large global labour pool of wage workers either through the mobility of capital, vertical and horizontal integration of capital, or migration owing to a rise in the dispossessed rural population due to grabs of private and common lands, debt, or the non-viability of agrarian livelihoods that is not absorbed into the wage economy increases the possibility of relative surplus labour. Further, as the global economy has changed, decreasing labour intensity of output and de-skilling is not an uncommon phenomenon in many industries. Not only does the rate of employment generation appear to be insufficient, but also the employment structure is increasingly fragmented and characterized by informal employment in countries of the Global North and South (Mingione 1985). (2011) estimate that the size of the relative surplus population in the age group 25 to 54 years to be around 2.4 billion. This makes the surplus population 70 percent larger than the estimated 1.4 billion in the active labour army (Foster, McChesney and Jonna 2011). The surplus population, relative to its utility to capital, is a potential reserve army of labour that is an important condition for capital accumulation. The surplus population depresses wages and keeps existing workers in check, it offers a release for workers in recessionary times, and is a pool of potential workers to draw from in times of economic booms.

Foster, McChesney and Jonna

But acknowledging the need for a surplus population does not address how this population will be kept alive in order to be useful to capital when needed (Li, 2009), and especially when this population is irrelevant and not useful to capital.

As we have already mentioned, household labour plays an important role in reproducing both the labour pool as well as the relative surplus population. In the case that the state intervenes in social welfare, it eases pressure on household labour and socializes reproduction. In societies with a high degree of social provisioning, we can expect the majority of the surplus labouring population to be either latent or floating that is affected by economic cycles, technological change and spatial changes in productive activities (McIntyre and Nast 2011). But with an increasing surplus population, the burden of these responsibilities is higher with ever decreasing means of reproduction.

As long as the cost of labour was favourable for capital accumulation and the living standards of the workers was increasing productivity, the state was able to engage in welfare primarily in countries in the North (Mingione 1985) in the post-war period. However, with higher international competition, capital mobility and global surplus population, the possibility of socialized reproduction has fallen significantly. While even in the neoliberal milieu the state does not disappear, its role has however, shifted from the provision of collective services such as public transport to contributing money or basic consumption to ensure survival of the population that is surplus to the demands of labour, to maintain it in its "frozen state" and maintain political consensus (Mingione 1985).

In societies in which social provisioning has been less than adequate, there exists a likelihood of a larger proportion of the stagnant population relative to floating and latent populations. Yet, in many countries of the global South the stagnant population has been displaced from agrarian and rural livelihoods and have not been integrated into the capitalist production process (Yates 2011).

The existence of a large relative surplus population represents the failure of the capitalist growth model, yet is often represented as the misery that the population brings upon itself for failing to subject itself to the "torture" represented by wage work as Marx called it (McIntyre 2011). This attitude is particularly reserved for the stagnant portion of the working classes. As society evolves its definition of who is deserving of public assistance, the stagnant working population reflects the erosion of stable and homogenous wage work and the decomposition of the solidarities of class and culture (Wacquant, 2009: 4;Tyner 2013).

In most contemporary societies the state-capital nexus, even when it has taken on a significant role in provisioning, has fallen short of assuming the full costs of reproduction. Nevertheless, in states where social provisioning has been minimal, the practical problem of reproduction has been mostly disregarded (McIntyre and Nast 2011). This follows from the capitalist demand for abstract and not concrete labour such that as long as the class of labourers perpetuates itself, it does not matter which individual labourer is unable to show up for work, a fact which allows capitalists to hyper-exploit their workers without regard for their health, of well-being (Tyner 2016). displaced onto the working classes, historically, the burden has been particularly borne by women of these households. Beyond a particular threshold, many of these lives are expendable and the labours of the women who keep the labouring populations alive are outside the interest domain of general society and policy makers. In addition to wage work, the labouring classes may rely on other forms of production in order to satisfy reproductive needs. Some of these may be purely to satisfy consumption needs of the labouring classes while others, including petty commodity production, may be linked to capitalist relations of production through exchange, the insufficiency of only one form of reproduction in this regard suggesting extreme strain.

Furthermore, the articulation of petty commodity production to wage labour and peasant production is rendered most visible through gendered labour relations, necessitating a discussion of reproduction under different labour processes operating in agrarian economies in the global south.

Development of the global rural populace

Given the marginality of reproduction of the labouring classes to capital under neoliberalisation, reproduction ought to be viewed not from the perspective of capital but rather in its relation to the development of the global rural populace. We focus here on three stylized forms of production and reproduction associated with different labour processes --subsistence production, petty commodity production, and wage labour. In each of these forms, we locate the role of gendered labour.

Under the subsistence form, production may be indistinguishable from reproduction. Value takes the form of use value (though not exclusively as it also produces for consumption), and yet differentiation can occur within the narrow confines of consumption. Due to the inability to distinguish production from reproduction, gender roles, despite being delineated, do not sufficiently interact with capitalist market forces to deepen the divide, and hence the usefulness or 'productiveness' of activities is not gender delineated. Male as well as female labour may be subject to extreme exertion and drudgery in order to ensure minimum consumption when conditions of production/reproduction are unsatisfactory, and when the household is exposed to economic, socio-political or ecological shocks.

Capitalist forces, however, may impact the conditions under which subsistence production is possible. Decreasing availability and degradation of land and other natural resources may further increase the intensity of work that is required to make production and reproduction possible.

Beyond a threshold, it may make subsistence production unviable as the primary source of livelihood. As Quick (2004) argues, "[t]he need for wage labour arose not from the total inability of labouring people to engage in production but rather from their inability to provide in full for the reproduction needs of the labouring family through their own labour, which takes the form of household production and the form of petty-commodity production" (emphasis in original). The specific manifestation of subsistence production under the dominant capitalist mode of production may differ significantly based on historical contexts as well as the intensity of competition between the two production processes for land and other aspects of nature (Levien 2015;Moyo, Yero and Jha 2012) Under petty commodity production (PCP), which falls within the realm of simple commodity production, wages are indistinguishable from profits. This result may be true for PCPs both in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Either due to the inherent character of the production and labour process, or due to the contracts that PCPs enter into, the accumulation process is limited even if it harbours the potential to turn entrepreneurial. While the realisation of this potential is contingent on the different exchange processes and contracts entered into, at the very least PCPs aims to fulfil the subsistence requirements of rural households. There is, here too, a high potential for extreme exertion in order to compete with other capitalist and noncapitalist producers.

Harriss-White's (2012) argues that since capital and labour are embodied in the same enterprise, and since the capital of PCP (land, artisanal tools, etc.) is not to be presumed fungible, the petty commodity producer does not seek to alter the material content of his/her capital in a way that would correspond to a search for profit maximisation. It follows, she argues, that there is no particular internal dynamic leading to differentiation, and that if differentiation occurs, it must be due to external dynamics. (Saka, 2014). The concentration and centralisation of capital in this period has considerably eviscerated the earnings and income pace of PCPs, including peasants and led them into a "PCP trap by capital" such that the peasantry can sustain itself only by deepening its subjection to capital, and in which peasant labour is open to cycles of proletarianisation and re-peasantisation (Saka 2014: 100). This precarity is also imposed on those engaged in PCPs in non-agricultural sectors as well.

The cycles of proletarianisation and re-peasantisation are uneven within regions and lead to complex processes of social and class differentiation based on race, ethnicity, caste, and gender.

Gender roles in these process may be delineated but may manifest in a host of different ways.

For instance, when it creates a distinction between 'productive' work that generates income for the household, and reproductive work that may be invisible and considered unproductive, it deepens not only the sexual division of labour, but also excludes women from participating in market exchanges thus making them dependent on male members of the household in order to sustain themselves. In other cases, we observe an increased incidence of women's interaction with market forces through home-based production that is also a manifestation of gender roles within the PCP framework. Home-based work or outwork features lower in the hierarchy of informal work and is predominantly performed by women. It may be disguised wage work, or may subsidize commodity production that is controlled by male members of the household.

Women's increased and continued dependence (based on historical contexts) has two aspects because the self-exploitation that is the hallmark of PCPs is dependent not on the self-exploitation of the labour engaged in production to satisfy capital's thirst for "value" creation, but is supported and subsidised by the productive and reproductive work by women. Their productive and reproductive roles themselves may be intertwined and interdependent. Women then take on a double burden of production and reproduction with little, if any, acknowledgment of, or compensation for their role in the capitalist production process.

A third labour process frequently observed in agrarian economies is wage labour, which is subject to specific capital-labour dynamics. Even though reproduction of workers constitutes a pre-condition for the capital-labour relationship, the production process is not geared toward the fulfilment of the reproductive needs of the workers. From the perspective of the labouring classes, who are divorced from the means of production, wage labour provides the means to reproduce themselves and hence the prime motivation for subjecting themselves to capitalist exploitation. The impacts of wage labour itself are varied depending on the informality of the employment contract, labour laws, the degree of sex, race or ethnic-based occupational segregation, and bargaining power of the wage workers.

However, even when wage employment fully satisfies the consumptive needs of the workers, household labour is still required to process consumptive goods. Care work has historically not been commodified or recognized, and has been provided by women within the household, thus subsidizing the cost of reproducing the labour pool for capitalist production. In the case that women also join the ranks for wage labour, they then engage in a double-shift burden of commodified wage work and un-commodified care and other reproductive work. In either case, labour expended in reproductive activities is subject to the vagaries of the labour market and state support. has significantly changed the role of agriculture and peasants in economies, yet this has not resulted in the promised prosperity for the labouring classes. Labour absorption is low and at the same time there has been a marked rise in PCPs and surplus population. Hansen's (2015) observation that the challenging aspect about the re-actualisation of the theory of surplus populations today is that it is not predicated on a thesis of gradual embourgeoisement of the world, or on the homogenisation of the proletariat. The reality of surplus-populations, he argues, "poses instead the issue of a generalized crisis of reproduction, and the multitude of survival strategies that arise from it, including modes of wealth appropriation that are far short of revolution proper, women's struggles, and various forms of state and para-state violence".

Our intention in providing these stylized accounts is not to engage in a stagist thesis that advocates a linear progression from subsistence production to wage labour. Nor are we suggesting that these labour processes operate homogeneously spatially and temporally. Rather, the forms of labour processes described above represent different states of commodification in society as well as different moments of integration in capitalist societies. In reality different societies and different points in time possess a different combination of characteristics from the different labour processes discussed above. The economies of the global South have, for the most part, not witnessed a transition in which wage labour constitutes the only form of reproduction for the rural populace despite much lower contribution of agriculture to GDP and employment.

Instead, subsistence production continues to thrive in rural economies, and in many economies we are also witnessing a resurgence of PCPs (Harris-White 2012), which may be carried out in conjunction with both subsistence production and wage labour. specificities differ based on historical and sociopolitical factors. The impact of these labour processes are also not uniform and are differentiated by class, gender, race and ethnicity depending on access to productive resources, "external extractive claims of their labour product," legal and other conditions of production, including socially provisioned "social and productive service infrastructure," and the degree of risk undertaken in the production process (Bryceson 2000). Global economic conditions have forced a high degree of livelihood diversification away from subsistence production (e.g., Harris-White 2012; Shah and Harris-White 2011). This in turn has created or intensified differentiation among peasant producers based on their reliance on PCPs and wage labour. The global economic conditions, however, do not facilitate nor have demonstrated the capacity to complete the process of full proletarianisation, hence the significant role that subsistence production continues to play in offering a way to cope with market conditions (Naidu and Ossome 2016). The semi-proletarianisation thesis that links peasant production to PCPs and wage labour has nonetheless, not sufficiently accounted for the gendered labour that sustains all three realms in more or less permanent articulation and contradiction. To the extent that neither subsistence production nor wage labour nor PCPthe primary realms of production in agrarian economiescan proceed without reliance on the reproductive realm, gendered labour poses a key contemporary agrarian question.

While there is considerable debate about whether the wage and commodity market feeds into the peasant mode of production or vice versa, the continued relevance of subsistence production indicates an on-going process of semi-proletarianisation (e.g. Kay 2000), with subsistence production offering a way to accommodate rather than escape the market (Bryceson 2000). The same appears true for PCPs as well. Though some scholarship has argued otherwise (e.g., Ellis 1998), livelihood diversity does not necessarily offer a pathway out of poverty. Further, neither subsistence production nor PCPs necessarily guarantee minimum levels of consumption for the rural populace independently. Each of these spheres of production and reproduction, however, subject different sections of rural society to varying degrees of vulnerability and security, which we elabourate below through a critique of the notion of self-exploitation.

A critique of self-exploitation viz-a-viz reproductive labour

The predominant framework through which the vulnerability of peasant households has been explained in the literature has been in relation to their tendency towards self-exploitation to meet their minimum consumption needs. We have so far offered stylized accounts of three different labour processes that we are likely to encounter in contemporary agrarian economies. Despite significant differences, the literature has mainly explained their convergence through the role of self-exploitative labour in the different labour processes. However, as we argue above, the fact that gendered labour is not primarily about value production but rather about survival indicates the insufficiency of the self-exploitation framework in theorizing gendered labour as an agrarian question.

Self-exploitation has been viewed as the peasantry's tendency to self-exploit in order to achieve a relationship of equilibrium between family demand satisfaction and the drudgery of labour (Chayanov 1986). Self-exploitation has also been viewed as proof of peasantry's subordination to capital (Kautsky 1988). According to Kautsky (1988), peasants would increase their yield per unit of land land under conditions of overwork and under-consumption due to the self-regulating market. Contrary to Lenin's view, capitalism would thus not be fully able to depeasantise the rural agricultural economy despite large-scale technological advancement in agriculture. Further, Kautsy believed that continuous primitive accumulation was impossible 3 without the peasantry (Kautsky 1988). Luxemburg (1951) provides more insight into the relationship between the non-capitalist realm of production and the conditions necessary for capital accumulation. To her, it is precisely the 'primitive' conditions in the non-capitalist realm of production that allow for accumulation to a far more ruthless extent than could be tolerated under purely capitalist conditions. This noncapitalist stratum is dominated by forms of labour that are unwaged. The recognition of its articulation to capitalist accumulation compels an acknowledgement of the forms of labour that enables its reproduction outside of the wage labour relation as critical to capitalism. Stated differently, this formulation compels the recognition of women's unpaid reproductive labour as a key source of capitalist accumulation. Following Luxemburg, the discussion of the subsidy provided by women's work to capital accumulation is a familar theme among feminist thinkers. Deere, for instance, discusses this particularly with respect to peasant agriculture. She argues,

[i]f the peasant unit must participate in the labour market to assure its full subsistence, then this unity 4 is broken as the non-capitalist unit is integrated into the capitalist mode of production. Semi-proletarianisation requires that the family be still in possession of the means of production from which to obtain some portion of subsistence; thus production of the means of subsistence is still tied to the reproduction of labour power. But the sale of labour power at a wage insufficient to cover at least the worker's subsistence, means that the reproduction and maintenance of labour power only results from the superexploitation of familial labour on the unit of subsistence production. Here then, the division of labour is key in the extraction of surplus labour: women and children are mobilized to produce the means of subsistence for the production and reproduction of labour power for the labour market. The articulation between modes of production in this case assures that the surplus labour which is appropriated from the non-capitalist mode is realized as surplus value within capitalist units of production. For women's labour within the non-capitalist mode reduces the value of labour power to capital, thus the rate of surplus value is increased and capital accumulation enhanced (1976: 13).

Deere's assertion that women's subsidy to capital constitutes actual extraction of surplus value is instructive but insufficient, 5 as is her notion of articulation (between modes of production) in this regard. We instead propose three significant ways in which to rethink women's productive and reproductive labour in the context of agrarian economies.

First, we locate the problem not just in the relation of exploitation, which lends itself in a derivative fashion to value creation for capitalist accumulation and the industrialisation myth, but rather in the requirements of sustenance and survival of households. Such a reformulation moves beyond the reproduction of various agrarian classes that sustain monopoly capitalism (that presumes gendered labour) to encompass the conditions of possibility of social reproduction (which poses gendered labour as an agrarian problem in relation to various agrarian classes).

Second, gendered labour is immanent to capital to the extent that it is crucial for the capitalist form of production, but has to reproduce itself by means other than capitalistic ones, or means not readily supplied or guaranteed in the capitalist milieu. Even when considered within noncapitalist forms of production, i.e., the conditions in which non-wage agricultural income subsidizes part of the cost of labour production and semi-proletarianisation absorbs the costs of social reproduction (Moyo and Yeros 2005), the notion of exploitation is theorized as being in constant articulation with capitalist production through the production of exchange value, and hence value for the market.

Analyses of the reproduction of the labouring classes has typically been subordinate to capitalist production. Yet, reproductive labour is rarely about competition and exchange value despite its constant articulation with capitalist production and articulation. For the labouring classes the primary concern is that of ensuring the survival of the family, household or community rather than a concern with the creation of value. In other words, the primary preoccupation is with the sustenance of life. This distinction suggests the need for an analytical shift in the analysis of value in relation to gendered labour. From the perspective of the working classes the distinction between production and reproduction may be irrelevant, i.e., human energy is allocated to various forms of labour processes whether categorised as 'productive' or 'reproductive' to sustain or reproduce humans (Naidu 2018). Nevertheless, the allocation of human energy continues to be gendered, racialized or ethnicized because it necessarily articulates to social institutions that support capitalist accumulation.

(rather than merely converting them to use value or purchasing them with wages). Such production requires some degree of uncommodified resources, mostly lands or nature that are part of the commons. When land and nature become highly commodified or degraded, then the other options are: a) what is considered as theft or expropriation; or b) extreme immiseration.

Under the current globalised conditions of monopoly finance capitalism that has been accompanied by massive displacement and dispossession of the peasantry, the thesis of selfexploitation is not sustainable on its own. This means that for gendered labour, land and nature are also sites of contestation and competition. If we recognize that this gendered labour is essential for survival, then in addition to the workplace and markets which are primary sites for those involved in petty trade and wage labour respectively, we also are forced to contend with the fact that land, nature and gendered labour are not irrelevant despite the diminished significance of agrarian economies. They continue to allow rural households to survive despite immiserating conditions. It is these analytical and conceptual points that concretely rearticulate the AQ of gendered labour. It is essential to fully grasp the scale of the task undertaken by reproductive labour to ensure that the labouring people, including the ever increasing surplus population, survives in the context of global capitalist accumulation which renders as insufficient independent sites of survival. Capitalist accumulation draws to a great extent from household workers whose labour does not enter into the labour market relation and is in effect concealed by wage work (e.g. Federici 2006). Moreover, under neoliberal capitalism an increasing amount of production has also been shifted to the household. This not only includes informal home work in which elements of capitalist production are carried out by household waged and unwaged labour and may be disguised wage labour or PCPs, but also significant elements of production required for consumption or what is often referred to as wage goods. Due to their historical roles as caregivers, women are particularly burdened with the drudgery of domestic labour. Yet, the work of daily reproduction of labour power and potential labour, i.e., surplus population, is being performed by men and women as they scramble to eke out a living in a global economy that appears disinvested in their survival and has increased the precariousness of their lives. Their labour appears both in the context of what has been commonly distinguished as reproductive and productive work, yet labour expended in both categories is primarily focused on ensuring survival. The AQ of gendered labour as such highlights the shifting trajectories of productive and reproductive labour under the changing phases of capitalism.

Under the current stage of capitalism, labour processes are not divorced from each other as most households engage in various kinds of labour processes including PCP, wage labour and peasant agriculture. Non-waged productive and reproductive labour, particularly that which is gendered, gains greater significance in light of the fact that capitalism's surplus populations are trying to survive under increasing unavailability of means of survival, whether they are filtered through the capitalist or non-capitalist modes of production, or through the state. The ensuing social differentiation that this causes warrants further theoretical and empirical investigations of its scholarly and political implications.

Conclusion

The agrarian question in its simplest political expression a century ago was concerned with how the mass of the peasantry could be drawn into a revolutionary movement whose main force was the proletariat. This question gains additional significance in the present milieu of neoliberal capitalism, among whose greatest casualty as we show in this paper, has been the mass of surplus labour that does not in itself represent a class, but which places significant demands on both the peasantry and proletariat classes burdened with ensuring its survival. This surplus population is being cast into the three realms of production and reproduction: subsistence production, wage labour, and petty commodity productionnone of which separately or in combination with each other appear able to secure sufficient resources and wages to support the surplus population. Past literature has attempted to address the problems associated with peasant economies by offering us theoretical concepts of 'self-exploitation' and 'subsidy'. We contribute to these earlier discussions by reorienting our analysis toward reproduction of life, which is of utmost importance to the labouring classes, and shifting the focus away from value creation and exploitation. Semi-proletarianisation means that the peasant path itself constitutes significant livelihood diversity. We have attempted to capture this diversity in three stylized categories of subsistence production, PCPs, and wage employment, by showing that the survival of the labouring classes (those that labour for a wage or are categorized as the surplus population) requires a high degree of reliance on gendered labour to meet minimum consumption needs. All three realms, we argue, are integral to the agrarian economy, and yet represent no more than a desperate scramble for survival. And while it is now more apparent that they cannot be counted as accumulative strategies, it is also increasingly unclear whether they even satisfy basic consumption needs of the labouring classes. The point we emphasise in this regard is that gendered labour exists whether or not people are employed. The focus on the reproduction of labour as such does not sufficiently capture this rapture, and warrants greater attention to reproduction of life, whether it is useful to capital or not. Expressed as an agrarian question, this shift in the theorisation of social reproduction also contains within it the possibility of resolution of the political and social dimensions of the classical agrarian question.

The surplus population has become so massive that we do not in fact know if the labouring classes that supports it is a revolutionary subject. The mere existence of precarity is likely leading to tremendous social upheaval -an expression of extremes that could either go down a revolutionary or a reactionary path. The internal coherence of this surplus labourthat is, the present dynamics of its stabilisationcannot be gleaned in any concrete way outside of the social relations that reproduce and socialize them as humans and potential workers on a daily basis. Furthermore, despite significant differences in the social, economic, and political context across societies, there is evidence of a degree of convergence in the conditions of reproduction faced by the working classes, particularly working-class women result from a patriarchy that appears to operate in tandem to the capitalist economic system (Naidu and Ossome 2018). The labour of the working classes is thus shaped as a response to a potential crisis of reproduction and the immiserating tendencies inherent in the specific context of individual countries' growth paths.

This cost of social reproduction is imposed on non-capitalist realms of the family/household, which while not exempt from the commodification of labour, time and resources, does not concretely enter into value production. As with Lenin's concern with charting a political strategy of political class alliances in a society characterised by several forms of economy, our concern here views the articulation between the peasant, petty-commodity and wage economies as fundamentally expressing an imperative for survival that approximates men and women's unpaid, unremunerated and invisible reproductive labour. We have argued elsewhere that while capitalist production enhances cooperation in the organisation of production, it also accumulates differences and divisions within the proletariat through its organisation of social reproduction (Naidu and Ossome 2016). This point is crucial, given that economic policies have ostensibly paved the way for women to participate in the wage economy without mitigating the historical burden of reproduction while at the same time also intensifying this burden on account of global economic conditions. The implication is that the peasant economy, apart from posing the question regarding its usefulness as potentially revolutionary classes, poses the question of gender inequity due to contradictions internal to itself that require greater attention from agrarian scholars. These contradictionswhat in this paper we refer to as the agrarian question of gendered labourcompel further reflection on what kinds of solidarities the current conditions of the labour under neoliberal capitalism entail, and the particular difficulties that a peasant path upon which reproductive labour greatly relies, is likely to encounter.