Written by Eva
Swidler and first published at Monthly
Review
The Marxist
analysis of work under capitalism has long been associated with a preoccupation
with wage labor: waged workers as wage-slaves, industrial workers as the
revolutionary proletariat, and factory workers as the vanguard. The labor
theory of value has been widely seen as applying to the wage form of work and
no other. But Marx’s own writings describe other forms of labor under
capitalism, and Marxist theorists have long pushed to expand our understanding
of exploitation beyond the classic waged relations of production.
Capitalists
have always used more than the wage form alone to extract surplus product from
workers. However, this century is particularly distinguished by its growing
reliance on alternate methods of extracting surplus. It’s time for Marxists to
rethink our preoccupation with the wage and develop a theory encompassing a
common ground of exploitation across a wide variety of extractive relations
under capitalism. A recognition of that shared exploitation may prove key if
the exploited “class-in-itself” is to become a “class-for-itself,” able to
unite and act in solidarity.
Marx himself
analyzed two major modes of capitalist exploitation of workers outside the wage
form: “so-called primitive accumulation” and reproductive labor. Already in
1913, Rosa Luxemburg proposed in The Accumulation of Capital that primitive
accumulation (better translated as “original” accumulation) was not a one-time
event somewhere in the past, but instead an ongoing process under capitalism.
Capitalist growth, she argued, required continual expansion into
“non-capitalist” spheres: “accumulation is more than an internal relationship
between the branches of the capitalist economy; it is primarily a relationship
between capital and a non-capitalist environment.”1
It is worth
noting here that discussions of original accumulation tend to focus on the
material objects of appropriation, such as seized oil fields or privatized
water, minerals, or land. But much or even most original accumulation—sometimes
also called, accumulation by dispossession or accumulation by
theft—appropriates both raw materials and labor simultaneously. When
infrastructure such as railroads, produced goods such as ships, tools,
buildings, cleared and improved fields and lands, crops, mined metals, and so
on are plundered, the labor used to modify and maintain those resources is also
seized.
Another form
of capitalist labor expropriation, slavery, can likewise be understood as a
form of original accumulation, a direct theft of human labor power. The case
for capitalism’s foundational need for slavery was made at least as early as
1944 by Eric Williams, although at the time he assumed that slavery was a labor
form of the past.2 However, from reports of workers padlocked into factories, a
global traffic in women for coerced sex work, confiscated passports of domestic
servants, and children held to work on cacao plantations, it is clear that
unfree labor is not a pre-capitalist relic, but continues to thrive.
In addition
to original accumulation, Marx studied the role of reproductive labor in
capitalism: the unpaid work needed to reproduce labor power by creating and
raising children, and by feeding, clothing, sheltering, and caring for adult
workers. However, orthodox Marxism has tended to draw a sharp line between
productive and reproductive labor, suggesting that the latter is necessary to
capitalism’s function and expansion, but it does not in economic terms generate
surplus value for capital.
Beginning in the 1970s, Marxist feminists and movements like the Wages for Housework campaign countered this consensus by arguing that women’s domestic work was unpaid but nevertheless commodity-producing work; indeed, it created and sustained the most important commodity of all—labor-power. Women’s “reproductive” work was actually foundational to capitalist exploitation, and very much a productive activity.
Beginning in the 1970s, Marxist feminists and movements like the Wages for Housework campaign countered this consensus by arguing that women’s domestic work was unpaid but nevertheless commodity-producing work; indeed, it created and sustained the most important commodity of all—labor-power. Women’s “reproductive” work was actually foundational to capitalist exploitation, and very much a productive activity.
Yet “women’s
work” was and remains largely invisible as labor, instead defined as a
naturally occurring “labor of love,” allocated to the private rather than
economic sphere. As Maria Mies famously pointed out in Patriarchy and
Accumulation on a World Scale, under capitalism, with the creation of the
category of “housewife,” “women’s labor is considered a natural resource,
freely available like air and water.”3
In her
influential 1988 book If Women Counted, Marilyn Waring brought a feminist
critique of conventional economic measurements to a broader audience, arguing
that from carrying water to caring for the elderly, the worth of women’s work
was unaccounted for in money-based metrics of wages, profits, and productivity.
Waring’s work inspired the introduction of new statistical methods, on a
national and international scale, that sought to assess the hours and imputed
market value of domestic labor, caregiving, and other feminized forms of unpaid
work performed by wives, daughters, and mothers. However, in her sophisticated
introduction to the second edition of her book (entitled Counting for Nothing
in some later editions), Waring notes a double edge to these attempts at an
economic account of women’s unpaid work.
While arguing
for the theoretical and practical importance of recognizing the scope and
volume of unpaid labor in the economy, she also makes clear the dangers of
attaching narrowly numerical values to women’s work, which has strong
qualitative, ethical, and affective dimensions: “what is the cost of
‘visibility’ in a patently pathological value system?” she asks. “Do we want
all of life to be commodified in an economic model?”4 Waring stops short of
wondering whether a recognition of shared capitalist exploitation could provide
a common political and strategic ground between house-working women and other
exploited parts of the population.
While work on
the capitalist exploitation of women’s unwaged labor has flourished in recent
decades, versions of this critique can be found much earlier, for instance in
an article by the American Marxist Mary Inman entitled “The Role of the
Housewife in Social Production,” published in 1940. She presciently observed
that “the labor of a woman, who cooks for her husband, who is making tires in
the Firestone plant in Southgate, California, is essentially as much a part of
the production of automobile tires as the cooks and waitresses in the cafes
where Firestone workers eat.… [T]heir labor is as inseparably knit into those
tires as is the labor of their husbands.”5
This cursory
survey shows that throughout the last century, various currents in Marxism have
focused on the role of unpaid labor in the creation of capitalist profits,
through original accumulation, slavery, and housework-as-labor. Yet for much of
that time, most Marxists still placed waged work at the center of their
analysis of capitalist exploitation, to the exclusion of other forms of labor.
Some even welcomed the expansion of waged relationships into economies where
unwaged labor predominated as marking the arrival of “real” capitalism—itself
seen as a disruptive but necessary stage in the progress toward socialism.
In the
current era of neoliberal globalization, however, original accumulation,
slavery, and housework, far from being replaced or superseded by wage labor,
have instead continued and even expanded. And now we also see that even more
forms of non-waged and sometimes even extra-monetary capitalist exploitation
have been created. It could perhaps be argued that more exploitation takes
place through these various mechanisms than in the conventional realm of wages
and salaries.
While the
theories discussed above have made great advances, Marxism as a whole has still
yet to fully reckon with its preoccupation with the wage. What follows is an
attempt to enumerate just some of the many pathways of capitalist surplus
extraction, not only beyond the wage form, but also beyond original accumulation,
slavery, and housework, and an argument that these other forms of exploitation
are intrinsic and essential to capitalism.
We might for
convenience’s sake divide capitalist forms of exploitation beyond the wage into
several categories. First, wage work itself is being reorganized so that more
of what is demanded of a worker is claimed not to be “work” at all, and is
therefore not waged; workers are paid for less and less of their necessary
labor time.
For instance,
precarious waged workers are increasingly expected to log unpaid “on-call”
time: Starbucks employees must remain available for constantly changing shift
assignments, which daily appear and disappear on their schedules. Similarly,
restaurant employees must do prep work before clocking in or clean up after
clocking out, home care nurses take home paperwork to finish at night, and
white-collar workers check their email in the evenings, on weekends, and on
vacation. Although these workers are waged, much of their work is not.
Other
familiar forms of labor exploitation that are entirely outside the formal wage
model are also expanding. Long recognized in the global South, various kinds of
piece work and contract labor have a growing presence in the North as well.
These include entirely unpaid or nominally paid labor, such as internships or
prison labor, and workers labeled “independent contractors” if their jobs are
menial or “freelancers” and “consultants” if they are slightly higher up the
economic scale, from adjunct professors and Uber drivers, to TaskRabbit workers
and day laborers, to self-employed copy editors and dog walkers.
While
“original accumulation” remains an academic term, the phenomenon itself is
widely recognized as a form of capitalist profiteering, despite its lack of a
wage form. The seizure of natural resources, for example, has never ceased, as
in the eminent domain exercised by pipeline construction companies in the
United States, or the encroachment on indigenous lands for mineral extraction
and other uses, part of a broader privatization of the commons.
But original
accumulation has also taken on new forms, such as civil asset forfeiture in the
United States, which totalled over $5 billion in 2014, according to the
Washington Post, and which is set for a revival under Trump’s Department of
Justice.6 Subsidies, tax benefits, and bailouts for large corporations and
financial firms, which clearly provide significant and ongoing profits, could
also well be categorized as primitive accumulation, an upward redistribution of
public money to the capitalist class, without even a gesture to the wider
public in return. The age of “too big to fail” has made it entirely clear that
these transfers of value are not just occasional windfalls, but are inherent to
the very structure of contemporary capital accumulation.
The dizzying
and ever-expanding suite of financial and monetary instruments used to drain
cash from households are further forms of exploitation. Predatory housing
lending and ballooning debts to credit card corporations and student loan
companies point to the increasing prevalence of this mode of extraction. For
many workers, “financialization” is no abstraction, but instead a daily
reality, a ready means of appropriating value by paying with one hand, and
taking back that pay with the other, through mounting debt, interest, and fees.
Just as the
exploitative forms of primitive accumulation and piece work are common to the
global North and South alike, financialization as a form of bleeding workers
prevails across the globe. International debt—including its attendant interest
payments, budget rules, and monetary restrictions—is one obvious means of using
finance to extract value from workers in the global South.
Less
discussed today, but still important, is the global system of unequal exchange,
first named in the early 1960s by the economist Arghiri Emmanuel.7 The subject
of much theorization and debate, unequal exchange might be summed up as a
phenomenon in which international trade conditions and foreign exchange
relations tend to value (or undervalue) labor in a way that transfers profits
to capitalists in the North. Any tourist in the global South who has noticed
the lopsided value of the U.S. dollar or the euro vis-à-vis the currencies of
former colonies and neo-colonies has experienced unequal exchange firsthand.
Still other
forms of exploited labor appear less obviously as work, or even as mechanisms
of exploitation. Housework has already been mentioned, but feminist economists,
along with scholars studying peasant societies, have expanded the discussion of
housework to include all kinds of subsistence work that support and subsidize
capitalism.
The socially
necessary wage, in Marx’s conception, was the amount required for workers to
survive and reproduce themselves under prevailing social conditions. The unpaid
labor of women and other subsistence workers, by producing essential use values
at no cost to capital, serves to lower that necessary wage. When women cook
meals for free, or raise children at home rather than send them to day care, or
care for ill household members—all as unpaid “labors of love” —they provide
direct economic subsidies to the socially necessary wage.
If workers
had to pay for those services, their wages would need to be far higher.
Similarly, if women or other household members grow food in kitchen gardens or
fields, or repair houses and make their own clothes, as they often do in the
global South, this subsidy, combined with variations in living standards and
labor conditions, enables even lower wages, and therefore higher profits. To
use Maria Mies’s formulation, this unseen labor represents the submerged bulk
of an iceberg, of which formal waged work forms only the tip.
Another form
of unwaged exploitation is often called “shadow work”— something we all engage
in and often loathe, yet usually do not think of as work, or even a means of
exploitation. Coined by the philosopher Ivan Illich, shadow work encompasses
unpaid labor created by capitalist enterprises, yet which in itself is entirely
unproductive, with no purpose other than to service profit-making enterprises,
for free—casting a kind of “shadow” outside the economy.
Examples
include activities novel enough to still draw our attention and frustration,
such as slogging through endless automated phone trees to argue with health
insurance companies, or installing endless updates to computer systems. Older
forms of shadow work that we now take for granted include time spent paying
bills, or checking bank accounts.8
In short, the capitalist exploitation of labor outside and beyond the wage form has been well documented for many years. Yet many Marxists continue to focus on the wage as the singular embodiment of capitalist exploitation. An expanded Marxist understanding of capitalist exploitation is long overdue. This is not merely an academic question, but a problem with profound implications for anticapitalist movements and organizations around the world.
Centuries
ago, to become a waged worker was to suffer a steep decline in status, a
condition that workers fought against as they clung to self-provisioning and
self-organized, subsistence-based work. As original accumulation proceeded, the
means of both subsistence and production were privatized, and access to those
means of production was denied to all but the capitalists.
At this
point, wage work slowly rose to a status of relative privilege among the
working classes, and “access to the wage” became access to more power than was
available to other workers.9 When a worker was waged, he (for it was usually a
“he”) and his work were at least acknowledged, and the terms of engagement with
bosses could be perceived, delineated, and contested.9
Meanwhile,
workers who labored under other, non-waged terms were reclassified as
“economically backward,” and sometimes were defined as not-even-working. For
familiar historical examples, think here of tenant farmers framed as a kind of
feudal holdover, or the bourgeois creation of the housewife. Even when their
low position in the capitalist hierarchy was acknowledged, unwaged workers came
to be seen as “marginalized” or at best as “oppressed,” rather than as
exploited. In fact, far from being peripheral to capitalism, the labor of
unwaged workers is central to both the production and maintenance of capitalist
profits.
This preoccupation
with waged labor, and the associated perception that modern economics could not
explain the supposedly vestigial and non-economic oppression of women or
sharecroppers, may partly explain why many communities began to see a politics
of identity, rather than economic solidarity, as their best path to public
visibility and progress. Access to the wage foregrounds some workers while
obscuring the laboring reality of others, fracturing the potential for unity
across the multiple working classes. The wage has been used to divide us.
Every day
shows us the advancing and expanding grip of capitalism, as it invades and
commodifies ever more areas of personal life and experience. Yet at the same
time, the number of conventionally waged workers is shrinking, with the rise of
temporary contracts, piece work, informal jobs, and other precarious forms of
employment. An insistence on wage work as the hallmark of labor under
capitalism cannot make sense of this scenario; it must be clear now that the
sphere of capitalism has far surpassed the sphere of waged work.
The orthodox
Marxist vision has long been that workers would meet and unite in an industrial
workplace, with the experience of shared exploitation in a shared productive
endeavor fostering solidarity and class consciousness. Capitalists have always
had other plans. And with the neoliberal assault on unions, labor protections,
and the welfare state, new capitalist strategies have emerged to further expand
the existing realm of unwaged work. For the working classes—waged and unwaged
alike—to recognize their shared condition, the assumption that wages represent
the totality of capitalist labor relations must be rejected.
Workers of
all kinds must focus on the underlying reality of the extraction of their
surplus labor, whether shrouded by wages, piece work rates, unpaid shifts spent
waiting to be called in, usurious interest payments, subsistence labor, or
unpaid care work. The constantly proliferating variety of novel labor forms has
proven an effective distraction from the task of building unity. It is the task
of intellectuals to help reveal the hidden connections among seemingly
disparate modes of exploitation.
Additionally, we are well equipped to draw on the long and rich history of workers’ struggles under the many different work regimes of capitalism and to find and create new models and possibilities, both for resistance and for the creation of independent, worker-based economies.
Additionally, we are well equipped to draw on the long and rich history of workers’ struggles under the many different work regimes of capitalism and to find and create new models and possibilities, both for resistance and for the creation of independent, worker-based economies.
As capitalism
retreats from the wage form in the twenty-first century, it is time to widen
our understanding of capitalist exploitation to include both centuries-old
forms of extraction and those now being invented or newly deployed: the status
of independent contractor, intern, or consultant; the shadow work of
ever-lengthening commutes; and parasitic financial mechanisms. It is time to
connect the dots among these many methods of surplus appropriation, and begin
to build an intellectual foundation for a resurgent and unified working-class
movement, before it is too late.
Notes
1 Rosa
Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964),
417.
2 Eric
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994).
3 Maria
Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International
Division of Labor(New York: St. Martin’s, 1986).
4 Marilyn
Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1999), xxiv.
5 Mary
Inman, “The Role of the Housewife in Social Production,” reprinted in Viewpoint
5 (2015), http://viewpointmag.com.
6 Christopher
Ingraham, “Law Enforcement took More Stuff From People Than Burglars Did Last
Year,” Washington Post November 11, 2015.
7 Arghiri
Emanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1972).
8 Ivan
Illich, Shadow Work (London: M. Boyars, 1981).
9 Silvia
Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist
Struggle (Oakland: PM, 2012).
