Living Labor

From his early economic works on, Marx conceived the labour of any kind of society as a set of production activities and analysed the historical modes of production as specific ways of distributing and exchanging these activities. Political economy on the contrary considers the labour only under the form of its product, and the exchange of products as commodities as the unique form of social labour exchange. For Marx, insofar as the labour creating value represents a specific mode of exchanging the society's living labour, general and abstract labour cannot not only be defined as the substance or measure unit of the commodity, as in Smith or Ricardo, but foremost as an expense of living labour, i.e. of nerves, muscles, brain, etc. Hence the twofold nature of living labour, as a concrete activity producing a use value and an expense of human labour in general producing exchange value. Marx himself claimed that this twofold nature of labour creating value was its main and most important contribution to economic science. This book aims at showing how both determines the original categories and economic laws in Capital and constitutes the profound innerspring of Marx's critique of political economy. The role and function of living labour is highlighted by dealing with the difference between Marx and Classics' theories of labour value; money and the problems of its integration in economic analysis, especially in Keynes; the transition from feudalism to capitalism; the theory of capital through a discussion on the Cambridge controversy and the transformation problem; the labour process and the principles of labour management; unemployment and overpopulation; the formulas of capital in the history of economic thought; finally, an interpretation of the current crisis based on Marx's conception of overaccumulation and speculation after having distinguished it from underconsumption and stagnation theories of crises.

Living Labor considers the increasing subordination of life to work. Despite economic instability, growing income gaps across countries and the rise of a migratory, flexible and underpaid labor force, our commitment to productivity is unflagging. Today, work enlists us to psychologically invest ourselves in a boundaryless work life, which seeks to instrumentalize all of our waking hours. In response to the eroding boundaries between work and life, and against the historic backdrop of the Scandinavian labor movement, the writers gathered in Living Labor propose viable forms of refusal and imagine prospects for a post-work future. Copublished with Henie Onstad Kunstsenter Contributors Will Bradley, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Carl Cedarström and Peter Fleming, Annette Kamp, Michala Paludan, Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve, Ole Martin Rønning, Kathi Weeks

"I write what I eat and smell,"says Diana Garc’a, and her words are a bountiful harvest. Her poems color the page with the vibrancy and sweetness of figs, the freshness of tortillas, and the sensuality of language. In this, Garc’a's first collection of poems, she takes a bittersweet look back at the migrant labor camps of California and offers a tribute to the people who toiled there. Writing from the heart of California's San Joaquin Valley, she catapults the reader into the lives of the campesinos with their daily joys and sorrows. Bold, political, and familial, Garc’a's poems gift the reader with a sense of earth, struggle, and prideÑeach line filled with the sounds of agrarian music, from mariachi melodies to repatriation revolts. Embodied with such spirit, her poems rise with the convictions of power and equality

A groundbreaking consideration of death from capitalism, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century From a 2013 Texas fertilizer plant explosion that killed fifteen people and injured 252 to a 2017 chemical disaster in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, we are confronted all too often with industrial accidents that reflect the underlying attitude of corporations toward the lives of laborers and others who live and work in their companies’ shadows. Dead Labor takes seriously the myriad ways in which bodies are commodified and profits derived from premature death. In doing so it provides a unique perspective on our understanding how life and death drive the twenty-first-century global economy. James Tyner tracks a history from the 1600s through which premature death and mortality became something calculable, predictable, manageable, and even profitable. Drawing on a range of examples, including the criminalization of migrant labor, medical tourism, life insurance, and health care, he explores how today we can no longer presume that all bodies undergo the same processes of life, death, fertility, and mortality. He goes on to develop the concept of shared mortality among vulnerable populations and examines forms of capital exploitation that have emerged around death and the reproduction of labor. Positioned at the intersection of two fields—the political economy of labor and the philosophy of mortality—Dead Labor builds on Marx’s notion that death (and truncated life) is a constant factor in the processes of labor. Considering premature death also as a biopolitical and bioeconomic concept, Tyner shows how racialized and gendered bodies are exposed to it in unbalanced ways within capitalism, and how bodies are then commodified, made surplus and redundant, and even disassembled in order to accumulate capital.

This volume contains an English translation of Karl Marx's influential essay.

From his early economic works on, Marx conceived the labour of any kind of society as a set of production activities and analysed the historical modes of production as specific ways of distributing and exchanging these activities. Political economy on the contrary considers the labour only under the form of its product, and the exchange of products as commodities as the unique form of social labour exchange. For Marx, insofar as the labour creating value represents a specific mode of exchanging the society's living labour, general and abstract labour cannot not only be defined as the substance or measure unit of the commodity, as in Smith or Ricardo, but foremost as an expense of living labour, i.e. of nerves, muscles, brain, etc. Hence the twofold nature of living labour, as a concrete activity producing a use value and an expense of human labour in general producing exchange value. Marx himself claimed that this twofold nature of labour creating value was its main and most important contribution to economic science. This book aims at showing how both determines the original categories and economic laws in Capital and constitutes the profound innerspring of Marx's critique of political economy. The role and function of living labour is highlighted by dealing with the difference between Marx and Classics' theories of labour value; money and the problems of its integration in economic analysis, especially in Keynes; the transition from feudalism to capitalism; the theory of capital through a discussion on the Cambridge controversy and the transformation problem; the labour process and the principles of labour management; unemployment and overpopulation; the formulas of capital in the history of economic thought; finally, an interpretation of the current crisis based on Marx's conception of overaccumulation and speculation after having distinguished it from underconsumption and stagnation theories of crises.

In The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age, Rosanne Currarino traces the struggle to define the nature of democratic life in an era of industrial strife. As Americans confronted the glaring disparity between democracy's promises of independence and prosperity and the grim realities of economic want and wage labor, they asked, "What should constitute full participation in American society? What standard of living should citizens expect and demand?" Currarino traces the diverse efforts to answer to these questions, from the fledgling trade union movement to contests over immigration, from economic theory to popular literature, from legal debates to social reform. The contradictory answers that emerged--one stressing economic participation in a consumer society, the other emphasizing property ownership and self-reliance--remain pressing today as contemporary scholars, journalists, and social critics grapple with the meaning of democracy in post-industrial America.