Working-Class Soldiers, Social Reproduction, and the State

Abstract

The explicitly harmful role of working-class soldiers in capitalist society is nevertheless reproductive. The working-class soldier reproduces capitalist social relations via the reproduction of the working class, the capitalist state, and imperialism. Drawing on Marxist feminism, it becomes apparent that the household and state production processes of soldiers’ concrete labor constitute state force, and in doing so collect a wage to use in household production and reproduction, and perform reproductive domestic labor in institutional and/or private household settings. Typically, soldiers are part of the working class by virtue of their mostly, and counterintuitively, indistinct relationships to value. However, this does not necessitate a general extension of solidarity to soldiers as a sub-class, considering the nature of the concrete labor they perform. Ultimately, the case of the soldier brings into relief the impossibility of resolving the capitalist contradictions constitutive of the state and the working class.