The many workers of capitalism

Abstract

Labor history in the United States and Europe challenged top-down national and political histories, but focused for many decades on white wage laborers. As waged workers’ movements shifted to accommodation with capitalism, and scholars and activists focused on race, the Third World, peasants, women, and non-human nature offered profound critiques of capitalism and its exploitation of the unwaged, but they remained marginalized by labor history. The climate crisis and neoliberal conjuncture of the late twentieth century brought renewed attention to the need to center unwaged labor and nature in studies of labor, class, and capitalism. Labor histories have emphasized wage work and class formation among industrial workers. The discipline evolved from institutional (union) histories to a social and then cultural turn in the later twentieth century, analyzing the nature of class and class consciousness. At the peripheries of labor history, studies of capitalism expanded the focus from the local or national to the global, and addressed reproductive, subsistence, and informal labor, unwaged but essential to the functioning of the system. Feminist, Black studies, and Third World scholars highlighted the labor that articulated non-capitalist modes of production permanently into modern capitalism.