Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring by Shirin M. Rai offers exceptional insight into the toll of unrecognized labors on our bodies, homes and communities. The book sheds light on the unevenly distributed harms emerging from the exploitation of socially reproductive labors. Expanding Marxist feminist understandings of social reproduction—those labors of biologically, materially, and ideologically maintaining families and communities—Rai accounts for the variegated ways caring and domestic labors impact workers across geographical contexts. The case studies Rai introduces highlight how depletion is embodied, differently affecting those doing labors across lines of gender, race and class. Rai also suggests how depletion falls unevenly across diverse political economies and state welfare systems. The book foregrounds carers often overlooked, such as children tending to family members, and communities defending the environment against corporate extractivism.
An undergirding argument of Depletion is that the gendered and racialized commodification of socially reproductive labors leads to physical, discursive, emotional, and rights-based harms (p. 24–5). When the “outflows” of engaging in socially reproductive labor (stress, poor health, social isolation) exceed the “inflows” (familial and community support, adequate welfare policies, health care), carers experience depletion. Rai’s argument unfolds across studies ranging from New Delhi, India to Coventry, UK, and the Eastern Cape, South Africa. This methodological approach itself embodies a feminist commitment to grounded theory—allowing conceptual frameworks to emerge from the world that is, rather than from abstract, normative hypotheses alone. Across each chapter, Rai moves the concept of social reproduction beyond the nuclear home, showing how the blurry lines between public and private space, between paid and unpaid labor, and between labor/“not-labor” demand a more careful reckoning with the ways reproductive labors subsidize capitalism (p. 133).
In many ways, Depletion is also a book about the politics of time and feminist methods for measuring it. Rai offers keen insight into how we can better take stock of the diverse temporalities structuring work across time and space. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the complexities of calculating the human toll of socially reproductive labors and the pitfalls of relying exclusively on either qualitative or quantitative data in doing so. Instead, Rai illustrates how a critical mixed-methods approach is best suited to capture the sheer amount of capital growth that socially reproductive labors facilitate, including GDP growth, while doing justice to workers’ subjective experiences of time. Complementing the quantitative models Rai introduces in chapter 2, chapter 3 presents the time-use diaries of eight women from three different class backgrounds in New Delhi. Together, these chapters demonstrate in vivo how a mixed-methods approach can resist the homogenizing of class, racial, and gender differences. Rai revitalizes and expands upon Marxist insights on commodification and time, showing how the daily rhythms of work are fundamentally embodied and specific, rather than universal.
These chapters also reveal that it is only through an intersectional approach that society can begin to see depletion. A tenet running through the book is that the recognition of depletion (as well as of the material and historical labor relations that are its cause) is a necessary first step in re-envisioning a politics of care. This analysis expands Sylvia Federici’s argument about the necessity of the Wages for Housework Campaign, in which she claims that the end goal of calling for the valuation of housework is not to naturalize the wage relation, but rather to demystify the labors subsidizing so-called “productive” work. Indeed, methodologically, Rai’s stated purpose in introducing the term “depletion” is to “(develop) a counternarrative” (p. 26) to hegemonic discourses of capital accumulation. To this end, Depletion pushes political science as a discipline to incorporate mixed methodologies that have long been central to the work of feminist geographers and feminist political economists, among others.
Importantly for scholars of transnational feminisms—a field examining the potentials and limitations of solidarity across differing material realities—Rai’s analysis offers a method for attuning to gendered and racialized labor arrangements across divergent geographies. As transnational feminist scholars and organizers have argued, attentiveness to the differentiated impacts of capitalism and colonialism across space and place enables the forging of solidarities and movements that can fight these very systems. Such work involves paying attention to what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan call “scattered hegemonies” in their 1994-edited volume of the same name. Rai offers the reader a model for foregrounding shared interests—such as the recognition of depletion or the desire to establish a post-capitalist economy—while not flattening differing material conditions into a counter-productive sameness.”
The final chapter of Depletion turns to environmental extractivism and those who collectively resist it. Expanding the concept of care to think about stewardship over land, Rai looks at the collective mobilizations of the Amadiba people against corporate mining in South Africa. Framing care as a collective orientation that exceeds the household, this chapter is particularly relevant for scholars interested in the politics of resistance in settler colonial contexts. This inspiring chapter moves discussions of household depletion—and individual strategies for mitigating it—to the level of radical societal transformation, adding to rich work on the collectivizing of care among queer of color, Black feminist, indigenous feminist, Marxist feminist, and transgender studies scholars. The struggles of Amadiba women to offset corporate extractivism, even at the cost of their own depletion, underscores the need for analytic frameworks that consider the entwinement of human and environment. But more broadly, this chapter demonstrates how scholars interested in the politics of care can center social movement actors as epistemic experts that have long resisted the domestication and commodification of care.
Ultimately, Depletion not only offers empirical cases for decentering familiar conversations about social reproduction but also presents anticapitalist, feminist methodologies for examining gendered and racialized labors under an ever-changing political economy. For instance, the book provides innovative tools for examining new modes of labor mystification under finance capital. One could readily draw on Rai’s analytic framework to study how debt regimes or artificial intelligence, to name just two growing areas of study, shape social reproduction across borders. Through the questions it raises and the stories it offers, the book provides the theoretical and empirical scaffolding for imagining post-capitalist worlds beyond the confines of colonial extractivism.
