At a time when “keeping families together” was one of the most effective rhetorical slogans against border regime policies, Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now (2019) reinvigorated a decades-old call for feminists to abolish the family. Lewis’s book sparked a fire among her readers, intervening in Marxist value theory and accounts of social reproduction by arguing that the communization of care is the best way to rid ourselves of the value production of global capitalism. Yet Lewis ultimately distances herself from the elevation of reproductive labor to the realm of capitalist value by arguing that full surrogacy would entail building a world beyond profit-driven care industries, the heteronormative nuclear family, and the value-producing system of capital itself. It is worth returning to this book as the family becomes ever more present in debates around climate, refugee, and migrant struggles, for, as Lewis reminds us, the family is a primary vehicle of exclusion, dispossession, and enclosure within the global capitalist economy.

Building on older critiques of the family form from Shulamith Firestone, Melinda Cooper, and Friedrich Engels, Full Surrogacy Now argues that the private family is a key governmental unit of capitalism, which makes babies “in the shape of personal mascots, psychic crutches, heirs, scapegoats, and fetishes, not forgetting avatars of binary sex” (116). In using commercial surrogacy as a case study for capitalism’s reach into the reproductive realm, Lewis builds upon Kalindi Vora’s analysis of the surrogacy industry by using it to highlight the contradictions of capitalist reproduction. As Lewis puts it, commercial surrogacy is “capitalist industry,” while noncommercial surrogacy is “capitalist hinterland” (59), and it is this dualistic relationship between industry and hinterland, exchange and use, paid and unpaid reproductive labor, which forms the cornerstone of capitalist reproduction.This cornerstone results in raced, classed, and gendered reverberations throughout the family form, a form which privileges the continued reproduction of white, heteronormative, and capitalist nuclear family in the Global North. This particular form is responsible for the boom of commercial surrogacy because it uses the reproductive labor of women in the Global South to produce white babies for export and sale in the Global North.

Lewis uses commercial surrogacy icon Dr. Nayna Patel as an example of someone who benefits from the contradictions of use and exchange in commodified reproduction. Patel’s Akansksha Infertility Clinic exploits both naturalized conceptions of birth and the commercial value of gestation. Patel is so successful, in part, because she extracts surplus from her workers while at the same time describing gestation as “priceless” (63). By exploiting a female surplus population, she also pays well enough that her gestators cannot find a better-paying job. Lewis seizes upon the opportunity of commercialized surrogacy to question the distinction between “naturalized” pregnancies and those assisted by biotech, or undertaken for the market, in order to pull apart the “two alienations” these forms of pregnancy represent (128). In first recognizing that the violence and labor of gestation should be worthy of a wage, and by embracing the denaturalization that results from seeing gestation as value-producing labor in commercial surrogacy — in for, example, seeing the violent effects of gestation as a workplace hazards —

Lewis uses the case study of commercial surrogacy to push back against romantic notions of the family, motherhood, childbearing, and the womb. This denaturalization, she argues, is essential for moving beyond the capitalist hinterland which continues to obscure the labor and violence of partum and post-partum — and the classed, raced, and gendered character of the family model — in service of capitalist reproduction.

Lewis argues that feminists against capitalism must be feminists against the family and vice versa, precisely because the heteronormative, nuclear family helps guarantee the reproduction of divisions between paid and unpaid work, public and private work, and between the gendered labor of the global North and South.In deconstructing the ideological role of the family in these processes, Lewis also draws attention to the connections between commercial gestation and sex work. If sex work is the “oldest profession,” Lewis writes, then gestation is that “other oldest profession,” and — in both cases — the family remains at the center of what gets counted as legitimate or formalized work. This contribution builds upon the work of other social reproduction theorists who argue capitalism specifically uses the family form to privatize and separate the reproductive and productive spheres, in eliding how much we are all, as Lewis puts it, “the makers of each other” and in obscuring from us how much we would all gain by “collectively acting like it” (19). In a literary and political sense, this is also a fight between capitalist realism and utopian possibilities, which is why Lewis engages with feminist utopian and dystopian literature from Maggie Nelson, Ursula K. LeGuin, Marge Piercy, and Octavia Butler to imagine what an alternative organizations of reproduction might look like. Surrogacy, of course, would have to change beyond recognition for this to happen.

Now that reproductive technology makes it possible to gestate for someone else, Lewis argues, we can begin to imagine the possibilities of a reproductive horizon that would destroy the commercial demand for such gestation.Not only women can gestate, and not only heterosexual/wealthy/white couples want to raise children. Lewis suggests that the idea of surrogacy itself can push against familial self-replication and sameness for a queer futurity beyond heterosexual and capitalist reproduction. A queer and communized surrogacy would seek to destroy the differences between “natural” and “unnatural” pregnancy, as well as the legacy of heterodox sameness that perpetuates the logic of the family form. A full surrogacy utopia, she argues, would allow us to parent “politically, hopefully, non-reproductively — in a comradely way” for a counter-reproduction of the social through a queer commons of care (117). Lewis defines full surrogacy as a gestational commons that would entail “a classless commune on the basis of the best available care for all” (44), which is why sheurges us to struggle for and against surrogacy, towards a common horizon that rejects the economic, gendered, and racialized supremacy of the nuclear family and all of its genetic hang-ups (130). Such a world would first need to move beyond the dual-sided exploitation of capitalist reproduction.

Lewis’s book comes at a time when a long-standing debate between Marxists on the value of reproductive labor remains fraught. Some Marxists have argued that to conflate gestation with value-producing labor is to fetishize labor itself.Kevin Floyd, for example, argued in an issue of Historical Materialism that because there is no “automatic subject” of value production — that is, no guarantee that every life created under capitalism will produce labor power for exploitation, many accounts of social reproduction tend to isolate labor from its primary dependence upon capital.1 Instead, Floyd argues that commercial surrogacy creates rentier value from the “lived biology of particular women,” and that this mode of reproduction is an emergent variation of capital’s “reduction of living labour to a condition of value-dissociated abstract life.”2 Because only capital can define labor, he writes, the surrogacy industry and its equivalent industries of biotech should be thought of as part of an expansion of capital relative to labor. This distinction crucial for Floyd because it is only by “assuming that value has been reduced to pure political command or by insisting, contradictorily, that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between value and wealth” that he argues Marxists can sustain what has become a “religiously optimistic narrative of labour’s vitality in the present.”3 Floyd sees this “religiously optimistic narrative” extending into accounts of social reproduction that assume all labor is productive labor, and that all labor is value-producing.

In response, Alessandra Mezzadri has argued that reproduction under global capitalism does indeed produce value for capital. For Mezzadri, all realms of reproduction play a key role in capital’s processes of surplus extraction, which is why she argues that onlyinterpretations of social reproductive activities as value-producing can advance our understanding of contemporary capitalism. Mezzadri argues that reproductive realms are value-producing because of their ability to deepen labor control beyond the working day, absorb external costs of reproduction, and expand the formal subsumption of labor through fragmenting and decomposing labor processes worldwide.4 This is especially true, she argues, in non-Western experiences, which is how “the majority toils on this planet.”5 In similarly arguing that the white supremacist reproduction of the Global North capitalizes on both reproductive technology and a global division of labor, Lewis points to how capitalism is already using both human and nonhuman resources in dualistic ways for capitalist reproduction. She argues, in contrast, that weshould be collapsing those distinctions for a non-capitalist counter-reproduction. For Lewis, gestation is a technological, material, and biological example of extracting a gestator’s bodily nutrients in deploying “all manner of manipulation, blackmail, and violence” in making a fetus (162). That the commercial surrogacy industry can places a higher price on fetuses for white capitalists highlights what is really under surface in creating the raced, classed, and gendered subjects of global capital.

In a recent issue of Spectre, Sue Ferguson takes more of a middle ground in arguing that while Lewis is correct in seeing babies produced for commercial surrogacy as commodities that circulate on the capitalist market, she argues along with Floyd that this does not make them value-bearing commodities. Both Ferguson and Floyd see this distinction as crucial for understanding how value works as well as for recognizing the real terrain of struggle. Both also follow Marx in seeing reproductive processes as “free gifts of nature,” whether gestation is commercial or not, and argue that the womb, like land, is “rented” for its use and fertility during commercial surrogacy. Gestational processes, according to Ferguson, cannot constitute labor because the womb’s fertility — like the fertility of soil — is a “natural process of life-making” that contradicts capitalist value-creation with its own natural limits.6 Babies made and sold on the capitalist market are therefore pseudo-commodities, because they are not capitalistically reproducible and involve natural processes of fertility that fall on the side of production rather than labor. Like Floyd, Ferguson maintains that the essential problem with Lewis’s analysis is that she equates all labor with abstract or value-producing labor under capitalism. It is also imperative to recognize, she argues, that we have yet to fully commodify the womb. This is a good thing because natural limits imposed upon capital can be points of resistance. In recognizing and prioritizing such limits, she argues, we are better positioned to resist capital’s demands upon both labor and nature in moving toward a more equitable system of human-nature reciprocity.

In response, I want to turn to one of the more provocative and underdeveloped claims in Lewis’s book, which challenges us to see beyond either the womb or nature itself as a passive receptacle of reproduction. Lewis refuses to see either the fertility of the earth or people as “free gifts of nature” in insisting upon the technological cyborgicity of human gestation. Further, Lewis’s use of the term “gestational commons” shows an attention to possibilities of a fusion between an ecologically-minded and cyborg inter-species communalism. In her last chapter, Lewis lingers on the connectionsbetween reproductive justice and water justice: “Blood and amniotic liquid, baby-food and baby-drink and soil and brains and plants and river and sea are largely water as are people” (166). Instead of naturalizing either pregnancy or nature, for example, recognizing that “water is life” is merely a medical and technical fact that points to our complicated relationship with the cyborg fluidity of gestation and life-sustaining activities. In recognizing that these processes can be violent, difficult, and dangerous, Lewis is pointing us to a reproductive vision that does indeed recognize and embrace technological and environmental limits. Here Lewis aligns more with Donna Haraway’s call for multispecies environmental and reproductive justice that “must be practiced against human exceptionalism and in resistance to colonial capitalist divisions of species, landscapes, peoples, classes, genders, populations, races, natures, and societies.”7 Lewis is suggesting here that regenerative policies of gestational and ecological commoning could remain counter-reproductive against white supremacist and ecocidal tendencies of capital, if we can movebeyond the idea of “free gifts of nature.” For Lewis, value-less reproduction for capitalism is neither natural nor free.

This is why Lewis is ultimately uninterested in quantifying or categorizing gestation as value-producing labor in her utopia. Putting a price on reproductive labor, she argues, “conjures a world that is even worse than the alternative” (76). Lewis certainly sees women workers as outnumbered by a global population of surplus labor, yet she argues that the distinction between naturalized labor as a “free gift of nature” and the “work” or technology of commercial gestation is what enables the surrogacy industry to exploit both sides of the gestational coin. The irony that the commercial slipperiness of gestation, a water-based cyborgicity, is so profitable in India — a post-colonial region wracked by class stratification, water shortage, and the rapidly increasing heat of climate change — is not lost on Lewis. To this end, she posits thinking through amnio-technics in order to pull reprotech away from privatization, for if we can “recognize our inextricably surrogated contamination with and by everybody else,” then the nuclear family, the surrogacy industry, and capitalist itself becomes unthinkable: “if babies were universally thought of as anybody and everybody’s responsibility, belonging to nobody, surrogacy would generate no profits” (167). Truly seizing the means of reproduction would mean taking deliberate steps to regenerate those other forms of gestation (water, the soil) as part of a queer commons of non-capitalist reproduction, while also de-emphasizing the human-nature and technology-nature divide.

Before we can establish a queer commons that could move beyond the contradictions of capitalist exploitation, reproductive technology must be wrested from for-profit lean-in feminists like Dr. Patel, from its position of privileged reproduction for the Global North, and from the “still-active ideologies that construct the womb as a passive object of efficient and expert harvesting, a space of waste, surplusness, or emptiness that is being profitably occupied” (73). Like the air we breathe and the water we drink, reproduction, Lewis argues, must belong to all of us. Thus while the slogan “keep families together” responds to a system that keeps certain families outside of the benefits of white supremacist capitalism, and within its worst ecocidal tendencies, ending capitalism would mean seizing the means of reproduction in fighting for a “levelling up and interpenetration of all of what are currently called “families” (44). As Lewis puts it, fighting for our shared social and economic freedom entails decoupling from capitalist dependency, and the name for this decoupling is full surrogacy: “beyond cooperativization, toward the commune” (33). And the goal must be regeneration, not replication.

1. Kevin Floyd, “Automatic Subjects” Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory24.2 (2016) 74.
2. Floyd, “Automatic Subjects” 70, 82.
3. “Automatic Subjects” 81.
4. Alessandra Mezzadri, “On the value of social reproduction: informal labour, the majority world and the need for inclusive theories and politics” Radical Philosophy 2.4 (2019) 11-12.
5. Mezzadri, “On the value of social reproduction” 13.
6. Sue Ferguson, “Notes on Sophie Lewis: Wombs, Value, and Production,” Spectre 1.1 (Spring 2020) 72.
7. Donna Haraway, “Making Oddkin: Telling Stories for Earthly Survival.” Duke Franklin Humanities Institute.