In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reproduction Housing Labor Power THE “MAINTENANCE AND REPRODUCTION OF the working class is, and ever must be, a necessary condition of the reproduction of capital,” Marx argued, but that is step two. First comes the development and reproduction of labor power. Labor power is labor in its commodity form. Labor power is the ability to do work (i.e., its use value), rather than doing work itself. That ability to do work must present itself in the market as a commodity for sale. There is little incentive for workers to do so unless they either have no other option (they possess no other means of subsistence), or the option of selling their labor power—realizing its exchange value—is somehow more attractive than whatever other options they may have. The world-historical transformation at the root of capitalism, therefore , was the mass dispossession of people from the land and their means of production. The throngs of aspirantes gathered outside the Mexican National Stadium in the early years of the bracero program, or sleeping in the parks outside the vetting center in Hermosillo or other Mexican cities in later years, are proof, as if any is needed, that this process of dispossession, this making of labor into labor power is ongoing; it did not end with the end of the era of “socalled primitive accumulation.”1 The problem with the commodity labor power is that it is not quite like other commodities. Once other commodities are sold, their use-values are totally the property of the purchaser. They are fully alienated from their seller. But with labor power that kind of alienation is pretty much impossible. The commodity labor power resides in the body of the laborer; it cannot be divorced from it. Each day it must be restored—reproduced—ready to be sold again. Laboring bodies, then, “are themselves obstacles to capitalism,” as George Henderson (once again) makes so clear. Like the crops, “workers are sites of biological processes and energy flows for which capital has only partial solutions (e.g. robotics). . . . Bodies persist.” And if they don’t then they die and their labor power dies with them. Control over labor power—the exercise of capital power—becomes paramount. Marx is at least partially wrong when he says that the reproduction of labor power can be “safely left to the labourer’s instinct of self-preservation.” Rather, as Henderson shows, the wage intervenes as a (partial ) capitalist solution to the capitalist problem of labor-power reproduction. Housing Labor Power • 71 As he pithily puts it, “That they are waged bodies is a capitalist solution,” even as the fact they are “waged bodies” remains “a capitalist problem.”2 But what is the wage? It’s the price of labor power (exchange value realized). It is also a crucial, struggled-over cultural marker of the worth of labor power, as Geoff Mann details so brilliantly. But neither price nor worth is precisely the same thing as value, and as a commodity, labor possesses not only use value and exchange value but also value. The value of any commodity is the total of all the values (which take the form of means of production and raw materials) that go into its making, plus new labor expended on its manufacture. This is true of labor power, too. The value of labor power, of whatever quality, is the sum total of all the values that have made it: from food and shelter to education and training . Even more, since the value of labor power is embodied in a living being, the value of labor power must somehow encapsulate the values that will go into that body’s making, even after it has reached the end of its useful working life. The vital thing about the commodity of labor power, of course, is the sheer amount of labor and stuff (from food and shelter, to education and training) that is not, at least primarily, itself purchased as a commodity, but is instead provided gratis (from the perspective of capital at least): the practices of mothering and housework, of community life and companionship, or of course, of the physical act of sex, which literally reproduces bodies (that may or may not end up being defined as the embodiment of labor power). While it is true, then, that the value of labor power can be “practically known” as Marx says and as all manner of cost-of-living indexes and state-defined poverty-lines make clear, such...

Share