Production and Reproduction: Meillassoux's Femmes, Greniers et Capitaux

a capitalist system. He provides two answers, both based on the role of the family in reproducing labour-power. First, capitalism gets extra surplus from pre-capitalist modes of production based on the domestic community, which provide capital with cheap labour-power. Secondly, in bourgeois society, the family continues to be the place where labour-power is produced and reproduced. Given these answers, it is clear that any understanding of the dynamics of capitalist development requires an analysis of domestic relations. Thus in the first half of this book, Meillassoux develops the theory of the domestic community as a productive system.