Alan Rudy:
> so writing about strong separations of ecological, personal and communal
> reproduction, on the one hand, and the expanded reproduction of capital
> (and its political regulation) is kinda weird.
Yeah, sure, I don't mean to imply that those spheres of society that are not mediated by the value-form are somehow "outside" of capitalist society, I'm merely taking issue with the notion of trying to apply categories of the critique of political economy to phenomena that by definition cannot be the object of such an application.
A big perpetrator here are various strands of (Post-)Operaismo that argue that housework is "productive labour" in a Marxian sense. No, it's not, since Marx's definition of productive labour is by definition labour that sold in the form of a commodity (or more correctly, labour that has been performed after labour-power has been sold as a commodity) to a capitalist.
That is not to say that domestic labour is not in some sense vital to capitalist society, but it is not "productive labour" in any sense that is compatible with Marx.
So I have no problem with having an expanded theoretical toolbox (Biopolitics, Queer theory, etc.) in dealing with phenomena that are by definition outside the purview of the critique of political economy, but I do have a problem with the notion that apply Marxian categories in a way that they by definition cannot be applied somehow constitutes an "extension" or "correction" of Marx.
Perhaps here Poulantza's distinction between "capitalist societies" and the "capitalist mode of production" is useful here. The critique of political economy only applies to the latter, while it is obviously not sufficient for dealing with the former.