Intersecting Labor in the Social Factory: Trajectory of a Migrant Woman in South China

Abstract

Abstract With the simultaneous growth of the manufacturing and service industries and the rapid expansion of information and communication technology, what do Chinese workers actually do in order to survive, and what methodological approaches are useful for exploring their subjectivity? In this article, the labor trajectory of Zuo Mei, a young migrant woman, is traced over six and a half years. The author relates Zuo's experience to what Mario Tronti calls the “social factory,” where the extraction of surplus occurs not just on the factory floor but also through social relations inside and outside multiple workplaces; at the intersection of factory, service, volunteer, and domestic labor; encompassing urban and rural, waged and unwaged, (re)productive and distributive, and on- and offline work. By detailing the interactions between these multiple forms of labor, the article argues that Zuo's suffering does not end outside the factory but extends to wherever social relations are capitalized, unveiling how alienation results from the resistance to that alienation.