Locating primitive communism in capitalist social formations

Abstract

This essay argues that examining everyday dynamics in working-class communities, variable as they are through race and gender intersections, gives us a way of investigating the persistence and partial reproduction of primitive communism within capitalist social formations. Visible through occasions and needs demanding the creation of use-values beyond mere consumption, a resistant and non-capitalist set of work and exchange relations exist alongside—and at times in opposition to—institutions and dynamics that reproductive of capitalism. These non-exclusive spheres of kin-constituting work, pooling, and sharing in structurally precarious neighborhoods and transnational networks are ways of trying to ensure relative security, continuity, and sustaining relationships. Within them, we need to reconceptualize work as distinct from labor and query the labor theory of value as inappropriate for appreciating the core relations of primitive communism. By this kind of analysis, we find a way to bring feminist approaches to revitalize articulating modes of production debates in Marxism and to permit appreciating in practice the meaning of making use-values in producing enduring resistance.