Collectively performed reciprocal labour: reading for possibility

Sage Handbook of Marxism, 2021

Given the centrality of labour-power to the accumulation of capital, struggles to transform the production of labour-power as a commodity into the production of physically and psychologically healthy, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, loving, caring human beings is an absolutely vital part of the class struggle against capitalism. Myriads of such struggles are taking place around the world, and researching, documenting and analysing them so that others can learn from their successes and failures would be an extremely useful contribution to the debate on domestic labour as well as to the struggles themselves.

Capital & Class, 2010

Recent debates on abstract labour have highlighted Marx's ambivalent conception of this important term. This article criticises current physiological definitions of the term, and against the background of earlier debates in Capital & Class, develops abstract labour as a specifically capitalist form of labour which entails a specific conception of social labour time-a time made abstract. The political implications of these rival accounts are formidable.

Review of Radical Political Economics, 1999

Simon Mohun's article (Mohun 1996) defending a version of the famous distinction between productive and unproductive labor is addressed, in large part, to an earlier study of mine (Laibman 1982; 1992) which questioned the validity and coherence of the distinction. David Houston's comment (Houston 1997) usefully addresses some of its practical and political implications. I would like to add some remarks on the theoretical issues. Although Mohun refers to my work (along with that of several others), he does not provide a summary of its major argument. I begin with a brief statement of that argument, which presents a challenge that I believe must be met by any attempt to theorize unproductive labor in a satisfactory manner. I then consider Mohun's proposal. After a brief look at the "allocation problem," I conclude by addressing Mohun's claim that, without the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, Marxist value theory itself necessarily becomes &hinged some version or other of neoclassical economics.1 and veers off into 1 This comment does not address the empirical literature on measurement of unproductive labor: since its point is to question the coherence and validity of the productive/unproductive distinction as such, it would be meaningless to examine attempts to apply it to actual cases.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Is labour a useful concept for anthropology today? This essay attempts to respond theoretically to the challenge that the contributions to this special issue empirically pose. The essay rethinks the concept of labour by addressing three questions that deal with the relation of human work effort and capital accumulation: the first refers to alienation; the second to the difference between abstract and concrete labour; and the third to ambiguity. Over the years, these issues have addressed particular aspects of social reproduction, helping define labour as a concept, albeit a heterogeneous one,that is relationally linked to capital. Dislocation, together with the parallel concepts of dispossession, disorganization, disconnection, and differentiation, emerges prominently in the analyses of contemporary labour transformations and spacificities. Finally, the essay engages with seemingly disappearing labour futures and what this means for the concept of labour. What is the value of work for capital and, conversely, the value of labouring for people today? lntroduction: a problem of method This special issue on labour raises important questions that we will probably not be able to resolve but which should not be hastily dismissed. First, there is the epistemological question of the value of concepts cross-culturally and cross-historically, in this case the value of the concept of 'labour'. Anthropologists (but also historians) have been struggling with this thorny issue from the outset. How useful is an extraneous concept to understand the processes, conflicts, settlements, tensions, and harmonies that take place in a historically and culturally different environment where our present-day Western categorizations may not exist, or may be embedded in a very different reality? As many have argued, the nature/culture divide or the self-contained individual may not be significat, whereas other unknown forms of categorization may be present that we cannot fathom or imagine. In sum, this epistemological question determines our method and the internal tension that makes its value. If we abandon the quest for universally applicable concepts, we are at pains to justify the worth of our discipline for we cannot compare, and the terrifying 'so what?' dilemma emerges as we become cornered into being mere consumers of native theory. If we do not acknowledge the concreteness of living experience and its eventual incommensurability, on the

Radical Philosophy, 2019

Radical feminist analyses have always placed considerable emphasis on the crucial role played by social reproduction for the development of capitalism. Early social reproduction analyses-primarily premised on housework but also more broadly concerned with wage-lessness-developed a robust critique of Marxian views that identified processes of value-generation only with the productive sphere, and de facto deployed 'productive' and 'paid' labour as synonyms. 1 Some more recent approaches , by contrast, propose social reproduction as a 'theory' (SRT), and deploy the concept in order to focus on how labour is regenerated daily and inter-generationally through private and public institutions in contemporary contexts. 2 This second set of studies seem concerned with analysing the circuits of care that reproduce the worker as connected yet distinct to those of capital and value-generation. At the same time, however, they are committed to avoiding what they consider 'dual theories', conceptualising patriarchy and capitalism as separate systems. 3 Starting from a review of the social reproduction debate , old and new, and focusing on the rise and spread of informal and informalised labour, the following analysis argues that only interpretations of social reproduction activities and realms as value-producing can advance our understandings of labour relations of contemporary capitalism. In fact, reproductive activities and realms play a key role in shaping such relations and in the processes of surplus extraction they are embedded in, particularly, (al-beit not only), developing regions; that is, in the 'majority world'. Specifically, this analysis argues that reproductive realms and activities contribute to processes of value-generation through three channels: first, by directly reinforcing patterns of labour control, expanding rates of exploitation; second, by absorbing the systematic exter-nalisation of reproductive costs by capital, working as a de-facto subsidy to capital; and, third, through processes of formal subsumption of labour that remain endemic across the majority world. I conclude that the exclusion of informal and informalised labour from debates on the relation between social reproduction and value creation will inevitably lead to problematic-in fact, dualist-understandings of capitalist development. I discuss by way of conclusion the political relevance of stressing the value-producing nature of wagelessness for a politics (and theory) of inclusion, able to capture the leading features of the contemporary world of labour, and aimed at building solidarities between productive and reproductive struggles. Social reproduction debates, new and old The recent publication of Tithi Bhattacharya's edited collection Social Reproduction Theory (2017) has revamped debates on social reproduction, and its role and (re)con-figuration under capitalism. The collection aims at making a number of contributions. First, it proposes to engage in a Marxian theorisation of class where social op-RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.04 / Spring 2019 33