The Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor

Sharryn Kasmir, Lesley Gill, Sharryn Kasmir, Lesley Gill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367745509
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000571691
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor offers a cross-cultural examination of labor around the world and presents the breadth of a growing and vital subfield of anthropology.

As we enter a new crisis-ridden age, some laboring people are protected, while others face impoverishment and death, as they work in unsafe conditions, migrate to gain livelihoods, languish in the unwaged sector, and become targets of law enforcement. The contributions to this volume address questions surrounding the categorization and visibility of work, the relationship of labor to the state, and how divisions of labor map onto racial, gendered, sexual, and national inequalities. In addition to the emotional dimensions and subjectivities of labor, the book also examines how laborers can articulate common experiences and identities, build organizational forms, and claim power together.

Bringing together the work of an impressive group of international scholars, this Handbook is essential for anthropologists with an interest in labor and political economy, as well as useful for scholars and students in related fields such as sociology and geography.

PART IDivisions of labor

1To have a lifeLabor reproduction, value, and negative value

Susana Narotzky

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158448-2

Introduction

Reproductive breakdowns have been the norm for a large majority of humans around the world in colonial and post-colonial settings, as well as in core capitalist countries. In recent years we have witnessed in Europe the “revolt” of groups of people expressing their reproductive distress and making claims to the state to intervene in their favor: Marchas de la dignidad (Spain) (Narotzky 2016a), Gilets Jaunes (France) (Fassin and Defossez 2019; Camell Galí et al. 2020). Some protests have been focused on particular processes of dispossession of public services; the Spanish “tides” in support of public health, public education, public pensions or the right to housing movement (Victims of Mortgage Platform [PAH]) or Tenants’ Union [Sindicato de inquilinos]) are such cases (Palomera 2018; Sabaté Muriel 2018; Suarez 2017). Others air general grievances against “the state” which appears as colluding with finance and large business while abandoning its duty to care for and protect its citizens. Among the laboring classes and around reproduction grievances (health, education, pensions, welfare, housing) a parallel set of hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion develops based on legal citizenship, deservingness, and moral worth. In Spain and Europe more generally this is expressed through ethnicized and racialized categories that underscore the uneven social valuation of potential workers (Carbonella and Kasmir 2014; Gill and Kasmir 2016).

In the conjuncture of the most recent reproductive breakdown during the COVID-19 pandemic two overlapping categories of working poor with attached valuations of worth have emerged in Europe: the “essential” but disposable people working in food provisioning and care jobs—often migrants—in intensive labor processes; and those working in industrial, clerical, and petty entrepreneurial jobs who, while doing non-essential tasks, are less easily discarded, as they are better organized and are enfranchised to vote. Struggles to find income-providing opportunities or everyday resources—labor and reproduction struggles—in a context that follows a decade of austerity cuts become traversed by the multiple social hierarchies that define the ability of people to access livelihood goods and services, and to be recognized as worthy of protection and respect. Essential tasks are performed by disposable people, while the emergency restructuring of non-essential tasks has underscored the possibility of reducing the human labor attached to them as well as brick-and-mortar costs by shifting to digital frameworks, robotization, and homework spaces (tele-work) when feasible, and in the process increasing the disposability of the erstwhile secure labor and externalizing costs. The trends seem to point toward a generalized expansion of surplus population in the global North. Is curtailing the life resources of so many people useful for capital accumulation in the long run? Can capital accumulation feed on the continuous de-accumulation of life as it feeds on dispossession? Will a Polanyian protection movement follow what appears at present as an unyielding destructive force of the basic fictitious commodities of labor and nature?

The above-mentioned distinct categories of labor (essential/non-essential) highlight the centrality of social reproduction for capitalist value extraction. Beyond the various scales at which we can analyze social reproduction (systemic, institutional, personal) and the plural spatial and temporal dimensions that frame its realization materially and symbolically, what emerges in the present conjuncture of capital accumulation is the expanding trend of extracting surplus not from exploiting life in production but rather from exploiting death worlds. Theories of uneven development have described capitalism as particular spatio-temporal constellations of connections and disconnections (Makki 2015; Gill and Kasmir 2016) that created diverse forms of producing and extracting surplus value based on historical, political, social, and cultural constituted differences of investment and disinvestment—in people and place. In the present, the reckless despoliation of life—of humans and nature—seems to expand without limits or reconnections. It appears that dispossession and disposability have become key to the accumulation of capital as systemic reproduction rests on the decaying environments, bodies, and lives of the many, making their social reproduction increasingly difficult and apparently meaningless to capital.

Two contradictions come to the fore: first, the contradiction of accumulating capital through extracting surplus not just from the benefits of transforming living into dead labor—as in dead labor crystallized in technology increasing productivity—but also from what is already a barely living labor—the working poor. Capital is simultaneously a predator and a scavenger. Second, the increasing contradiction between the systemic reproduction of capitalism as a social whole and the deficient reproduction of life, hence the growing social reproduction dysfunctionalities of the present system. I address these contradictions that connect the accumulation of value, the reproduction of life, and systemic (dis)continuity in the following manner. A first section presents four ethnographic cases that span four decades and express different forms of labor devaluation and their relation to reproduction. A second section analyzes the ethnographic cases in reference to necessary value as distinct from surplus value. A third section will review theories connecting the devaluation of life and value accumulation, in particular racial capitalism and necroeconomic perspectives. A final section considers the interlocking aspects of value, living value, and negative value and their potential effect on systemic social reproduction.

Life and the value of working people

Since the early 1980s I have witnessed different materializations and expressions of labor relations and how workers understand their lives. In rural and urban contexts, among small family farms trying to become viable in the context of impending access to the European Economic Community (EEC) and using “extra” income generated in garment manufacturing for everyday reproduction (in 1986), among homeworkers in the shoe manufacturing industry in the context of firm fragmentation, labor flexibilization, and incipient globalization (in early 1996), and among heavy industry workers experiencing recurring lay-offs and early retirement schemes justified by the injunction to become globally competitive (in the early 2000s), resulting in post-industrial regions where people survive with retirement pensions, subsidies, temporary jobs in services or sub-contract industries (post-2008). Finally, during the March–June 2020 lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been gathering documentary information about the living and work conditions of agricultural day laborers in the fields of Andalucía and Catalonia. By comparing these various situations, I wish to show that not only different historical contexts produce different understandings of labor/capital relations through conjunctural forms of exploitation, but also that the connection of life-as-vitality to capital through the understanding of what continuities are possible and what futures can be imagined has changed.

Case 1. Family farm viability and garment manufacturing in an olive oil producing dryland area of Catalonia was my first ethnographic encounter in the mid-1980s. The main findings of the ethnography referred to the contradiction between production of a competitive commodity (olive oil) by the family farm and the capacity to maintain the household whose members comprised the main agricultural labor power, a contradiction putting at risk the reproduction of future generations whether through the farm or other income-generating employments. The ideological split between production and reproduction created an ambivalence in family members’ investment of labor power in different production processes, and resulted in a differential valuation of gendered labor. The impossibility of reproducing the labor power of the farm (household members) and still have a viable and competitive agricultural “enterprise” pushed female household members to earn an income in underground garment manufacturing within subcontract chains for local and international brands. Extraction of surplus value was increased both in the sphere of agriculture (by avoiding farmers’ family labor costs in order to achieve competitive prices and liberate income for productivity-enhancing investments), and in the sphere of garment manufacturing (by paying wages well below the regulated labor market on the grounds that it was not the main household wage but only a mere “help”). In both cases the accumulation process was based on ideologically discounting—externalizing—a large part of family labor reproduction costs. Neither the agricultural income nor the manufacturing income were supposed to reproduce the labor force (Narotzky 1988). While sustaining and improving life (materially and symbolically) was the objective of people when they entered the labor market, surplus value extraction was based on reducing the value of sustaining life in the process. Here, the socially necessary labor of reproduction was reduced not so much through productivity increases but through the ideologically articulated evacuation of reproduction costs from each respective production domain.

However, all the women and men I spoke to were striving to get a “better life,” to improve their life and that of their children, and the effort, the “sacrifice” as women often rendered it, did not seem in vain.

Case 2. My second case is based on fieldwork conducted by Gavin Smith in 1978–9 and by myself and Gavin in 1995–6 in an irrigated region south of the province of Alicante where agriculture and manufacturing go back a long way. The production, packaging, processing, and distribution of vegetables, fruits, and industrial crops—such as hemp and cotton—have combined locally with manufacturing work in shoe factories, in sweatshops or at home at different historical conjunctures. In 1996 agriculture was suffering from depletion of aquifers and the competition of intensive production for export in the neighboring region of Campo de Cartagena (Murcia). Simultaneously, large shoe factories in the neighboring Elche were being transformed into a disseminated and fragmented regional economy pattern that relied on subcontract networks and unregulated deals deeply embedded in personal relations. We have analyzed in detail elsewhere the historical connections and the various and combined forms of extracting surplus value in the region (Narotzky and Smith 2006). Here I will present just one instance, which is described by our interlocutors as “human mortgage” (hipoteca humana). We found the phrase “human mortgage” alluding to two different historical moments: referring to agricultural relations of production in the 1950s and 1960s and to relations between employers and labor in shoe manufacturing small factories in the mid-1990s.

In the first case, “human mortgage” was mentioned as the situation that a day laborer had to endure when the employer avoided his obligation to put a stamp in the social security booklet that certified his daily work. Stamps in the booklet were the employer’s social security contributions and gave access to health care and eventually to a retirement pension. His refusal to comply with this obligation (representing a part of the social wages) trapped the laborer in a dependent relationship, not because he was indebted to the employer but because—although being the creditor—he had no power to enforce the obligation. On the contrary, his health and his future livelihood were mortgaged as long as the stamps were missing. He was not in possession of his labor power, was not free to go, and was forced to accept whatever conditions the employer demanded if he wanted the stamps that certified his labor to be forthcoming. The stamp acknowledged the contract, it recognized the identity of the parts, and it attested the legal relationship between labor and capital sanctioned by the state. What the phrase “human mortgage” expressed was the embodied realization that the laborer’s life was temporarily mortgaged and did not fully belong to him (Narotzky and Smith 2006, 73).

In the mid-1990s, “human mortgage” was mentioned with two different meanings that were nevertheless presented as entang...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributor biographies
• Introduction—Wages and Wagelessness: Labor in the 21st Century
• Part I Divisions of labor
• Part II Organizing, mobilizing, and resisting
• Part III Workplaces, non-places, and labor regimes
• Part IV Migrant labor
• Part V Affect, values, and subjectivity of labor
• Index