Thinking through the Home: Work, Rent, and the Reproduction of Society

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores the tensions between two positions on revolutionary subjectivity. The first confines it to the production process and the creation of value, and the second ignores the value-form as economistic Marxist orthodoxy. I consider a third position that tries to capture the reach and open-endedness of capitalism, and in the process imagine a more expansive conception of revolutionary subjectivity. Accounting for the vastness of capitalism’s reach entails thinking with and beyond the production of value—about the preconditions that make the wage-relation possible—that is the reproduction of society, broadly conceived. This not only encompasses reproductive labor but also implicates broader gender and race relations through precarity and the gig economy, as well as struggles over homes and housing, health care, and border crossing.