Concrete Labor Research Articles

Artificial Intelligence, Post-Work and Music Labor

The recent – purportedly rapid – development of AI tools has again resurrected the actuality of post-work u-/dystopias. Drawing on discursive topoi which have become popular since the post-WW2 automatization surge, AI post-work now advances into the field of white-collar labor, but also creative, artistic, and even music labor. In this paper I aim to analyze the emergent arrival of the post-work thesis into music labor. I will draw on prominent critics of automatization, AI and post-work discourses, such as Pierre Naville, Aaron Benanav and Jason Resnikoff, to show that these discourses are not only unsubstantiated, but are instrumentalized in order to depreciate the value of concrete labor in music production.

A note on the two approaches to the distribution of surplus value

Abstract In a recent issue of this Journal, Cogliano (in ‘Marx’s equalized rate of exploitation’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2023, vol. 47, no. 1, 133–69) provided a theoretical basis of the hypothesis that the rates of exploitation are uniform across industries. In this paper, we compare the hypothesis and an alternative approach that assumes that the value creation per unit concrete labour is uniform. As neither approach considers skill differentials, we provide an extended framework that incorporates skills explicitly for the comparison. In addition, our framework considers the value creation of workers as a function of their skills and efforts of labour and, following Yoshihara (in ‘Wealth, exploitation and labor discipline in the contemporary capitalist economy’, Metroeconomica, 1998, vol. 49, no.1, 23–61), we define the ratio between effort and wage as labour discipline. Within this framework, we show the following. The equalisation of the rates of exploitation is eventually assuming that the ratios between the value creation and wage are equalised and it implies that high-skilled workers experience proportionately weaker labour discipline whereas low-skilled workers experience stronger labour discipline. On the other hand, the alternative approach that assumes the equalisation of the value creation per unit concrete labour implies that high-skilled workers work proportionately less intensively whereas low-skilled workers work proportionately more intensively.

Queer Singaporean futures after 377a: establishing homonormativity as concrete labour

ABSTRACT In 2022, the state of Singapore decided to repeal section 377a - a law that criminalizes sex between men. Although it was heralded as an important step towards inclusion, along with the ever-growing global reach of neoliberal capitalism, there has also been an increasing criticism of the ways in which LGBT and queer values have been absorbed by, and sustains, the very systems which creates the oppression it aims to dismantle. Thus, I illustrate homonormativity in Singapore by rereading the state discourse surrounding the repeal of section 377a. In this article, I read homonormativity and concrete labour together in order to reveal how neoliberal states subsume, exploit, and reconfigure queerness by integrating it into expanding neoliberal logics of use values. The repeal of section 377a subsequently reveals the use values of gay sexual labour power in Singapore: one that is private and upholds the heteronormative social order. This article contributes to a growing materialist understanding of queer studies linked to Marxist political economy.

Beyond engaged pluralism? The question of labor in labor geography

Labor geography is a vibrant, variegated subdiscipline, but there are also concerns over its lack of theoretical coherence. In this paper, I examine Open Marxist approaches that engage with post-structuralism and feminism based on Marx's concepts of abstract and concrete labor to frame a review of recent labor geography and related contributions on (a) social reproduction, difference, and class; (b) work, technology and precarity; and (c) labor's agency. I make three main arguments. First, while many conceptual tools for the analysis of social reproduction and difference exist within Marxism, because of their engagement with feminism and post-structuralism, these are being more fully developed. Second, Open Marxist contributions to this dialogue require greater emphasis upon the dialectical relationship between concrete, non-wage workers struggles against abstract labor and wage worker struggles of abstract labor within the totality of capitalism. Third, while important engagements are ongoing between Marxism, post-structuralism and feminism greater integration is neither needed nor desirable precisely because of Marxism's unique combination of conceptual coherence and open-endedness, which means that this interaction is a source of its theoretical development.

Capital and World Labor: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

Objective/context: The boom-and-bust of New World slavery in the nineteenth century has always been a major topic of scholarship. In this essay, I suggest that the literature devoted to this theme, the so-called “capitalism and slavery debate,” has made capital invisible as a category of analysis due to its over-reliance on classical and neoclassical economics. As a result, slavery itself has been poorly historicized. My purpose is to put forth an alternative framework to restore the historicity of capital and slavery. Methodology: The article explores critical value theory to conceptualize capital and capitalism in historically meaningful terms. It argues that value creation is never confined to one country. It requires a historically transnational social formation that turns concrete labor into abstract labor and use-values into commodities through the multi-scale operatives of world money and world markets. The history of slavery should be narrated within this broader globalizing setting. Originality: The article’s claim is that the global value relations of industrial capital redetermined spatial relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering overlapping layers of a world geography of accumulation that both stimulated and challenged slavery. Conclusions: While most scholars present the relation between slavery and capitalism as constant for the period 1780-1880, I conclude that New World slavery went through two moments of boom-and-bust (c.1780-c.1820 and c.1830-1880), which were formed through, respectively, the global value relations of cotton production and coal-and-iron industrialism.

The End of the World as We Know It

The End of the World as We Know It

Ontology as ideology: A critique of Butler's theory of precariousness

Ontology as ideology: A critique of Butler's theory of precariousness

Inviting the Vampire in: Value and Thermodynamic Depth

We refute the objection raised against Marx's theory of value by Philip Mirowski (that it is an internally inconsistent amalgam of the substance and social model of value) by identifying value insofar as it subsists between production and exchange with the property in statistical mechanics known as thermodynamic depth. In production, concrete labor time is converted into the thermodynamic depth embodied in commodities. In exchange, the thermodynamic depth of commodities is converted back into time again, albeit, at this point in the circuit, the time into which it is converted is socially necessary labor time, i.e., abstract labor. Consistently with the social model of value, value increases can (as Mirowski points out) arise where changes in the conversion factor between time and thermodynamic depth take place between production and exchange, but (consistently with the substance model) the thermodynamic depth of commodities can only be increased in production.

Hybrid hilltops: metabolism and the ecology of labor and capital in colonial central India

ABSTRACT Using a case study from colonial central India, we argue that centering concrete labor in analyses of capitalist appropriation and metabolism allows ecological Marxism and posthumanist political ecology to complement each other. We show how the practice of shifting cultivation enrolled people in ecological relations with soils and trees that, along with acts of resistance, shaped the speed, location, and extent of capitalist appropriation and the ensuing metabolic rift. Centering concrete labor allows for explorations of how exploitation and appropriation occur in specific historical circumstances, and how ecology produced feedback effects on capitalism.

Labor, Humanism, and the Play of Mediation: A Rejoinder

This rejoinder focuses on two issues discussed in Samuel Mercer’s review of Ana C. Dinerstein and Frederick Harry Pitts’s book A World beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia. The first concerns the authors’ alleged defense of concrete labor against abstract labor; the second concerns the accusation of humanism. First, the rejoinder clarifies the authors’ understanding of concrete and abstract labor as dialectically intertwined, and also the implications of this for class struggle in and against the “play of mediation” between the two. Second, the rejoinder pleads guilty to the charge of humanism in how the authors approach work and alienation. The authors argue that the related criticism is based in the idea of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s work, but they situate their work in a countervailing reading of Marx that sees a humanist core and continuity characterizing both Marx’s “early” conceptualization of alienation and estrangement and his later conceptualization of real abstraction in the critique of political economy.

A World beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia

Ana C. Dinerstein and Frederick H. Pitts’s A World beyond Work? collects in one volume a series of essays that critically appraise the new wave of postwork and postcapitalist thought that has emerged since the middle of the last decade. The authors argue that the “postwork prospectus” focuses too heavily on the abolition of concrete labor, leaving its abstract social forms—and with them the social relations of capitalist society—unthought and unmoved. Though this fetishism of concrete labor forms the body of their critique, Dinerstein and Pitts reproduce this fetishism in their own political recommendations, offering a Marxist-humanist thesis of counter-alienation located in their own celebration of the “social” characteristics of concrete labor.

Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?

Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?

Reactionary radicalism and the analysis of worker subjectivity in Marx’s critique of political economy

This analysis starts off from the contemporary relevance of the theory of ‘the radicalism of tradition’, arguing that it presents a challenge to Marxism because Marxist work has not sufficiently attended to elements of a theory of worker subjectivity scattered in the critique of political economy. This theory is located on a lower level of abstraction than is commonly assumed and can be applied to subjective dynamics in labour militancy. However, this requires that some basic categories in Marx’s critique are reconsidered, especially those that do not seem immanent to the capitalist social formation, categories that appear, and have mostly been read, as the ahistorical ground on which properly social forms arise. Therefore, apparently ahistorical categories pertaining to use value and concrete labour’s use value for capital are explored to reconstruct a theory relating capital’s positing of labour to contemporary militancies that appropriate tradition. In contrast to the view of tradition as external to capital, the view advanced is that ‘reactionary radicalism’ relates to how capital, as totalizing social form, abstracts tradition. Furthermore, tradition is radicalized through a negative subjectivity inherent to the commodification of labour power and the real subsumption of labour; proletarian experience is a precondition of radicalized tradition.

Seeing the "Changing Nature of Work" through a Precarity Lens

This article reviews the concept of precarity and offers critical reflections on its contribution to thestudy of contemporary labour and livelihoods. A stock-take of key and recent literature suggeststhat, despite conceptual ambiguity and overstretching, “thinking with precarity” continues to provea valuable and worthwhile exercise – so long as that thinking is carefully articulated. This involvesunderstanding precarity as: 1) rooted in concrete labour market experiences but also connected tobroader anxieties over social and political life; 2) a process-focused concept rather than end-statedescriptor; and 3) speaking to longer histories and wider geographies than its commonplace statusas a residual term or category implies. The analytical advantages of thinking in such a way areillustrated through a critical analysis of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2019 on the“changing nature of work”, and in particular its handling of digital labour.KEYWORDS: precarious work; politics of precarity; livelihoods; digital labour; gig economy

Career centers in the system of vocational education: problems of functioning and ways of their solution

There is noted in the article, that at the modern stage of civilization development, complicated by processes of digitalization and technologization of society, human self-realization as a person, professional, competitive specialist is possible only at the expanse of constant improvement of professionally important qualities, widening of professional knowledge, development of correspondent abilities and skills (depending on specificity of a profession, requirements to the professional activity, peculiarities of actions that is concrete labor circumstances). In this connection a special importance is inherent to centers of vocational career, created at bases of vocational and higher educational institutions, which activity is oriented mainly on forming adequate understandings about conditions and prospects of own career at the modern labor market in future specialists. All the aforesaid conditioned a necessity to conduct a special study. That is why the special attention in the publication is paid to the elucidation of information-analytic information, obtained as a result of studying the real condition of the activity of consulting centers, created at bases of vocational (vocational-technical) educational institutions. There are revealed positive sides and controversial moments of the activity of such structural subdivisions at educational institutions. There are analyzed actual functions of vocational career consulting centers at educational institutions: evaluative-diagnostic, integrative-coordinating, informative-stimulating, learning-communicative and regulative, socialization-consulting. The integral realization of these functions provides resolution of controversies of career consulting of the studying youth, namely mismatch between: ideal understanding and real profile of a concrete profession or specialty, subjective comprehension and ignoring of career orientations by the youth and also allow students to correct their self-appreciation of individual-personal qualities. There are offered constructive ways of solving problems, appearing in the functioning process of vocational career consulting centers at vocational educational institutions

Conscious Organs

In Volume Three of Capital in a striking but somewhat uncharacteristic formula, Marx argues that the labor relation is the “hidden basis” of the entire social edifice including the state and politics. As an attempt to clarify and develop this insight I examine the dual nature of labor as abstract and concrete labor, arguing that the two sides of labor correspond not just to two sides of the commodity, but to different ethics and alienations of labor, and ultimately to different philosophical anthropologies.

On “the Concrete”: Labour, Difference and Method

AbstractThis paper develops a genealogy of concrete labour, paying particular attention to debates within marxist, feminist‐marxist and Black feminist writings. Our argument pivots around the dual character of (re)productive activities and an argument that the concrete is both an “aspect” of labour and the concentration of many different relations. We begin with a critique of the false universalisms in certain invocations of the concrete, noting how the far right has mobilised this “false concrete” in the figure of the people. Teasing out long‐standing debates over the dual character of labour enables us instead to better understand the social differentiation within concrete lived activity. Through discussing the internal relations that constitute the concrete as labour and method we propose a critical strategy that challenges false universalisms, provides a way to understand relationally defined positionalities, and that is also a place from which to struggle and organise.

Theoretical Foundation of Dialectics of Economic Development in Karl Marx’s Capital

The article deals with the logical and theoretical structure of K. Marx’s «Capital». In the «Theories of Surplus Value», there is the ascent from the concrete to the abstract in the history of economic thought. This ascent allowed to define the goods as a starting point for the political economy of the capitalist mode of production. But there is no direct way to the economic theory of Marx, whose subject is not the products labour activity, but the material production relations arising during these activities. While researching the goods, Marx uses the «power of abstraction», which allows separating «economic matter» from the «naturally tangible» material basis: use value, concrete labour, etc. An integral system of economic categories is based on the synthesis of natural historical thinking phenomena discovered by Aristotle; Hegel’s understanding of purposive activity; specific goals of social production, which are realized in property relations. K. Marx introduces into scientific knowledge the notion of economic progress as a change of social formations. He considers the significance of different models of the division of labour for determining the concept of value. In A. Smith’s model, the value is determined a posteriori, after market evaluation of the products or services produced. A unit of measurement is not working time in itself, but economic information on the effectiveness of its use, i.e. money. In the model of K. Marx, the value is determined a priori, in the form of labour costs in the physiological sense. Given a choice, the labour expended receives a marginal evaluation in the form of alternative costs (loss of profits). The meaning of the «absolute, universal law of capitalist accumulation» is identified as a causa finalis, which determines the value of the commodity labour, variable capital, surplus value. I conclude that the development of the dialectics of the topic and the focus of an economic study allows using the method of rational eclecticism if the corresponding material is subject to a subsequent dialectical-materialistic interpretation.

Contributions of a materialist ontology to the critical knowledge of labour processes and workers struggles

This essay argues that a materialist ontology can contribute to a renewal of the analysis of contemporary labour processes and indicate new possibilities for addressing workers struggles. An ontological/explanatory critique is indispensable to a transformative praxis that confronts the capitalist organization of labour and creates alternatives for the emancipation of labour and humankind. Part of this critique would have to be directed to theory itself, including Labour Process Theory. The main contributions of a materialist ontology in this respect are related to: commodity production inserted in a wider historical context; the overcoming of the subjectivist/objectivist dilemma; labour processes and struggles as open-ended dynamics in which the possibility of freedom always plays a central role; the focus on the qualitative aspects of value (social form), its manifestations and expressions in concrete labour processes and the ways it conditions or determines social relations of production, actions and struggles; the consideration of everyday life and its ontological deep determinants; the analysis of workers organisations and struggles as social exercises of freedom (conscious choices) under structural historically constructed constrains.

State against industry: time and labour among Dominican furniture makers

AbstractThis essay analyses time and labour among small Dominican furniture producers. The Dominican Republic's small workshops and firms experience much waiting – not speed and political‐economic integration, but, instead, slowness, blockades, and marginalization. The national production of furniture has faced increasingly tough competition from imported commodities. In the early 1990s, the national finances were in crisis. Pressured by its international lenders, the state deregulated and opened the economy, while it has continued to spend little on the development of the country's workshops and industry. In addition, the country's electricity sector is in poor condition and long blackouts are the norm. Because of the situation, the country's small furniture makers are forced to live with contradictory and clashing social rhythms. The diversity among forms of time is navigated through concrete labour and in the everyday. Contemporary global capitalism ought to be understood as a contingent outcome of labour activity in the form of a myriad of localized, mundane efforts to ‘fix’ it. Such efforts always mirror a specific political and social history. By exploring contemporary capitalist time through a focus on particular forms of labour, we can analyse how global capitalism's discrepant rhythms help to give shape to, disrupt, and dislocate forms of labour in a given place. At the same time, we show how the involved agents seek to adapt to, and work on the effects of, the conflicts between rhythms.