This paper argues that every form of capitalist society harbours a deep-seated social-reproductive ‘crisis tendency’ or contradiction: on the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other, capitalism’s orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies. The paper first proposes an account of the social contradiction of capitalism, as well as sketching an account of its historical unfolding in the two earlier phases of capitalist development.