Labor and Its Disavowals

Catalog description

What counts as labor when most of the world’s value is extracted from bodies deemed invisible and illegal? What is the role of the labor movement as more and more people earn a living through arrangements that are not considered labor and are not protected by existing labor laws? As precarity further becomes a defining feature of contemporary life, the fantasy of labor as a source of stability (let alone mobility) is dissolving. In this course, we will approach the nature and limits of labor by way of its historical exclusions, including slavery, domestic work, and the informal/illegal work performed by whom Marx calls the lumpenproletariat. Rather than treating informal, unpaid, and illicit practices of survival as the exception, we will examine disavowed working arrangements as essential features of capitalism. We will begin the course with a critique of the humanism implicit in the ideology of work. We will trace this humanism from labor’s racialized and gendered exclusions to contemporary battles waged over an alleged antagonism between “labor” and “environment.” Topics will include the informal economies, the problem of consent at work, the wages for housework movement, globalization and the feminization of migration, prison labor and the afterlives of slavery, the imperial economies of artificial intelligence, natural resource extraction and the false divide between labor and environment, and antiwork politics and post-work imaginaries. Through this course, students will place ethnographic studies of labor in dialogue with Marxist theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, and the political writings of activist groups. Key authors will include Karl Marx, Angela Davis, Cedric Robinson, Silvia Federici, Kathi Weeks, Kathleen Millar, and Heather Berg. THE CURRICULUM 158 Organizational Theory and Behavior: Thinking Through Practice