By the 1970s, Marxist feminists were seeking to displace the primacy of the idea(l) of production by positing the centrality of reproduction to capitalist social and economic relations. For Maria Mies (1986), Selma James (2012), Silvia Federici (2012) and others (many of whom were active in the influential Wages for Housework campaign; see Weeks 2011), a focus on reproduction could help Marxist organizers break free of what had, up to that time, been its singular focus on the industrial (male) working class. A focus on reproduction had the potential to reveal the reliance of capital on patriarchy, sexism and misogyny that created a situation in which women supplied the system (and men) with the free reproductive labour necessary for its reproduction. Such a perspective also had the potential to shift the terrain of struggle from the factory to all those sites (including the factory) where capitalist social and economic relations were being reproduced, and where the reproduction of life itself was interdicted by capitalism: the classroom, the nursery, the grocery store, the fast-food joint, and so on.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 119