Under Capitalism, Even Kids’ Playtime Is Alienated

A central concern of feminist Marxist theory and practice has been how to understand the relationship between paid and unpaid labor. Marxist feminists have drawn on Karl Marx’s observation that capital leaves workers to ensure their own reproduction, a process that depends on their instinct for self-preservation. They have shown how capitalist accumulation depends on reproductive labor, work that has fallen primarily to women. But what, exactly, is being reproduced? Workers must replenish their strength so that they can work again the next day; importantly, reproduction also encompasses bearing children and creating future labor power.

But it does not stop there of course: children must then be shaped into capable workers, a process that does not happen by itself and in which social reproduction is by no means simply left to the workers themselves. For anyone who has attended school, and perhaps even more so for those of us — myself included — who are now experiencing school all over again through our children’s education, it is more than apparent that school is, in many ways, an institution designed to socialize children into their future roles as wage workers.

As E. P. Thompson writes in Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, schooling can be understood as an acclimatization to the factory’s temporal discipline. Today, however, this involves more than the straightforward discipline Thompson identified. It also entails producing flexible, self-directed learners who can seamlessly retrain and acquire new skills in an ever-changing and volatile labor market.

Playtime for Future Workers

Despite this recognition of the importance of shaping working-class children in particular ways, children, and their role and position within capitalism, have remained marginal concerns within Marxist theory, as well as within feminist social reproduction theory. Perhaps this is precisely because children are not regarded as workers: neither productive nor reproductive. In her new book, Child’s Play: Childhood in and Against Capitalism, Susan Ferguson turns her attention to children, challenging the idea that they do not participate in reproductive activities. Ferguson argues that children are constantly involved in processes of creating and sustaining life, but primarily through play rather than through reproductive labor in any conventional sense.

While Marxism has shown limited interest in children’s creative and life-sustaining activities, Ferguson argues that capitalism has a contradictory relationship with children, and particularly with children’s play. On one hand, the ideal of childhood as a sacred time for play, exploration, and curiosity emerged under capitalism and has since become firmly established. On the other, the regulation of children’s play, along with models from developmental psychology for determining whether play is age-appropriate, has become increasingly pronounced. Under capitalism, not only schooling but play itself becomes a preparation for the future. In this way, play acquires a kind of constructive dimension, with a clearly defined purpose, rather than being something free and open-ended, with no explicit goal beyond the sheer satisfaction that play itself provides. Learning to play properly becomes part of learning to work. In this sense, we are dealing with a form of alienated play.

Beyond learning to play properly, it is also important to learn how to stop playing: to make the transition from being a “player” to being a “worker.” Children who deviate from the expected developmental trajectory, or who fail to acquire certain abilities according to an imagined timeline, quickly become targets of intervention. It is partly against this backdrop that we can understand the dramatic increase in ADHD diagnoses and other neurodevelopmental diagnoses that we are witnessing around the world. Children who cannot seamlessly adapt to the routines of school, whose minds wander during lessons, who are too lively or struggle to sit still, children who want to play rather than work, become problems to be solved, sooner rather than later.

The Power of Play

But what problem is solved by these interventions? Rates of depression and burnout are particularly high among women aged forty to fifty who work in health and social care. Women experiencing these problems are often medicated them rather than offered changes to their working conditions — changes that would require a redistribution of economic resources.

Following a similar logic, instead of creating a school system that does not systematically produce failure, children are increasingly medicated so that they can cope with school. More than one in ten boys aged ten to seventeen in Sweden has an ADHD diagnosis. Surely this should prompt us to reconsider what counts as normal, and to place the school system that sustains this state of affairs under scrutiny, rather than focusing on how individual children can be helped to integrate into this abnormal normality?

But Ferguson’s book is not only about how play has become subject to capitalist control; it is also about how children’s play can be understood as a site of resistance to capitalist logic. Although children’s games can, of course, be cruel, exclusionary, and governed by clear norms, Ferguson nevertheless sees the possibility of something transformative in children’s play. She describes this as “the embodied capacities of imagining and acting on and in the world in ways that fulfill our needs while nurturing human connections to the self, others and our environments.” Just as play can be utopian in its creation of new worlds, political organizing can also adopt a playful — that is, open-ended — attitude toward what might become possible. This does not mean that we can play capitalism to pieces, but that we can resist capitalism’s attempts to instrumentalize our creative impulses.

Despite attempts to curb children’s play, whether through direct intervention or by restricting it to specific times, the games children play cannot be understood as exclusively capitalist or alienated activities. Rather, they can be seen as practices grounded in the sheer pleasure of playing, in the possibility of exploring, imagining and creating together without the activity necessarily having to lead to anything beyond itself. In this sense, play holds the potential to elude the capitalist logic that seeks to make every activity productive, measurable, and purposeful. Perhaps it is precisely in this openness, in the unpredictability of play and its capacity to imagine other ways of being together, that its political potential lies. Remember that you were once a child.

This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.