The Anthropology of Labor

The Anthropology of Labor

Sharryn Kasmir, Hofstra University

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.97
Published online: 30 April 2020

Summary
In the final decades of the 20th century, market reforms in China and India, post-socialist transitions in Eastern
Europe, deindustrialization of historic centers of factory production, and the international project of
neoliberalization ushered billions of people worldwide into a range of labor relations—waged and unwaged,
relatively stable and wholly insecure, formal and informal, bonded and free. The heterogeneity and fragmentation
of these labors require new insights about capitalism, class, politics, and culture.

One position holds that inequality on a global scale creates people and communities who are permanently outside
of capitalism. Many terms catalog capitalism’s failure to incorporate vast numbers of people, and they denote the
irrelevance of surplus populations for capitalist value production. “The precariat,” “bare life,” and “disposable
people” are among those classifications. More optimistic thinkers see capitalism’s outside comprised of “non-
capitalist” spaces, where “alternative modernities” and “ontological difference” flourish.

Marxist anthropologists counter that capitalism incorporates, marginalizes, and expels people on shifting terms
over time and on a global scale. Capital and labor accumulation are always uneven, creating differences within and
between working populations, especially along axes of race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, skill, and work
regime. The proletariat or any similar uniform designation does not adequately capture this broader,
heterogeneous social formation. Class analysis is nonetheless critical for understanding these actually existing
social relations.

In turn, this approach is criticized for too closely following surplus-value-producing labor, whereas cross-culturally,
and especially in the global south, non-capitalist regimes of value persist. Disagreements between two overarching
perspectives—one emphasizing political economic factors and the other culture—influence many debates within
the anthropology of labor.

Scholars extend the study of labor to engage theories of social reproduction, value, and uneven and combined
development. New organizations address the problem of precarious work in academia, and a network connects
labor anthropology researchers.

Keywords: labor, class, global capitalism, uneven and combined development, dispossession, Marxist anthropology,
precariousness, value

Subjects: Sociocultural Anthropology

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Primitive Accumulation and Dispossession

The “multiplication of the proletariat,” “primitive accumulation,” and “dispossession” are

foundational concepts for grasping the heterogeneity of labor. The first is Karl Marx’s phrase for the
continual expansion of people pressed into general market dependence; this is the mirror process of
capital accumulation. Dispossession is a related term that points to the separation of masses of
people from the means of production. Marx’s chapter, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” in
Capital remains the paradigmatic formulation of these ideas. There, Marx listed the acts of enclosure
that launched the preconditions for capitalism in England and reduced human beings to
commoditized laborers. “These new freedmen,” Marx explained, “became sellers of themselves only
after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of
existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements.” Contrary to political economists who
naturalized the appearance of capitalist property, Marx emphasized violence: “In actual history it is
notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. . . . [. . .]The
history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”
Force and plunder would give way with the steady advancement of capitalist relations. Thereafter
the continued multiplication of labor would be accomplished through the “silent compulsion of
economic relations” and the inculcation of tradition and habit (Marx [1867] 1977, 874, 875).

European imperialism and the rise of fascism returned theorists to primitive accumulation and to
the necessary conclusion that force and terror were not consigned to the past but were equally
foundational for the expansion of capital in every epoch (Luxemburg [1913] 2003; Polanyi 1944).
Geographer David Harvey (2003) introduced the concept of “accumulation by dispossession” to
further the critical insight that primitive accumulation is a persistent feature of capitalism.
Economic reforms imposed by the Washington Consensus (IMF, World Bank, and US Treasury),
neoliberal state policies, and finance capitalism unleashed accumulation by dispossession on a
massive scale in the late-20th to the early 21st centuries. Geographic mobility facilitated by
technology and communications (prominently, containerization and the internet), financialization,
privatization, and the creative destruction of assets typified the epoch. This regime marked a
departure from the expanded reproduction of Keynesian economics that prevailed in much of the
post-World War II global north, where mass consumption, a growing welfare state, and government
expenditures for infrastructure went a long way toward absorbing surplus value. In much of the
global south, neoliberal states enacted structural adjustment programs at the behest of the IMF and
World Bank, privatizing national industries and inviting speculation in land and resources (Harvey
2003). Others describe this phase of mass immiseration and social upheaval as the “new
enclosures” (Midnight Notes Collective 1990).

Dispossession explains widespread social changes associated with neoliberalism, both in the global
south and north—endangering indigenous and tribal common rights and land tenure,
commodification of land, privatization of water, ritual and cultural losses under post-socialism, and
the suppression and disorganization of labor. It became a well-used conceptual tool for interpreting
ethnographic data.

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Protests in 2011 in Wisconsin against the twin attacks on labor rights and public services can be
understood as a budding social movement against accumulation by dispossession. Unionized
workers, middle-class professionals, social service users, and students—social groups often set
against each other—joined in a sustained takeover of the state capitol building. They welcomed
expressions of solidarity from Arab Spring protestors who simultaneously occupied Cairo’s Tahrir
Square (Collins 2012). The construction of a dam in the Narmada Valley, India removed whole
communities, stripped them of common resources, and made them dependent on wage work
(Whitehead 2010). In the downtrodden cities of Manchester, New Hampshire, Halle/Salle, Germany,
and Mardin, Turkey, immigrant and native-born residents may find connection in common
experiences. Migrants were first displaced by war or loss of agricultural lands in their home
countries. They subsequently lost leases on their shops or homes when the downtown areas they
inhabited became desirable for capitalist speculation and state and municipal revitalization plans.
Native-born business owners and renters, previously dislocated from livelihoods and ways of life
associated with the city’s industrial past, suffered the same fate. These shared dispossessions
encourage friendships and social ties across the native–immigrant divide (Caglar and Glick Schiller
2018).

Accumulation by dispossession places the differently valued and spatially distinct laborers of global
capitalism within a web of connection. This comes close to Eric Wolf’s (1982) reconfiguration of
anthropological subjects within relations of mutual constitution. Wolf aimed to bridge the cultural
and political divides between those made visible by the capital-wage labor relation and the invisible
labors outside that relationship—the manifold labors of slaves, petty commodity producers, coerced
laborers, plantation workers, and domestic labor, as he described the early colonial period (see also
Carbonella and Kasmir 2014; Mintz 1985; Roseberry 1989; Wolf 2001).

August Carbonella and Sharryn Kasmir outlined a research program for “a global anthropology of
labor” to highlight these connections. In their formulation, labor is different from class as an already
achieved consciousness. Instead, it points to myriad ways of working within temporal and spatial
processes of capital accumulation, and it refers to the social protests and quietude, organizations,
and cultures that reflect engagements with capital and state, as well as relationships with other
workers locally, regionally, and globally. In this regard, labor is a political formation. Rather than
reiterating familiar oppositions of north and south, working class and poor, waged and unwaged,
formal and informal, this project is concerned with the power-laden processes of categorizing,
differentiating, or unifying those labors (Carbonella and Kasmir 2008, 2014, 2015; Kasmir and
Carbonella 2008, 2014).

Critics respond that a focus on dispossession impedes a full understanding of the impact of
neoliberalism in many parts of the world. In their estimation, “dislocation” better expresses the
range of emotions and experiences, including “other senses of disruption or disorientation, such as
the sentiment of feeling out of place, or of losing your bearings or sense of self as things move and
change around you.” This phenomenological approach emphasizes “the structures of feeling and
the affective forces that color contemporary experiences of labor” (Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018,
12).

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The Disorganization of Working Classes

Anthropologists intimately document the structures of feeling associated with the passing of a way
of life rooted in industrial work and rhythms. In the United States, middle-income families in the
1990s fought to stave off poverty in the face of corporate downsizing. Heads of households got
second jobs, teenagers and non-wage-earning parents searched for waged employment, and
families cut spending and extended their credit through subprime mortgages that quickly put their
homes in jeopardy. They feared a “fall from grace” as they saw middle-class status elude them
(Newman 1999). Christine Walley chronicled the lives of her own parents as they tried to make
sense of the sudden, unannounced closure of the Chicago-area steel mill where her father worked
for decades. The event resounded within Walley’s working-class family, since their livelihood was
tied to the factory and their social networks were enmeshed in their white-ethnic neighborhood.
Walley’s father never again found steady employment, and her mother became the main
breadwinner. Meanwhile, their neighbors moved away, leaving houses uninhabited and boarded up,
contributing to the sense of decline (Walley 2013).

Historical ethnographies aim to situate these feelings of dislocation in the rubric of “the
disorganization of working classes.” These studies chart the unmaking of working classes. They cite
E. P. Thompson’s (1963) pioneering formulation of the making of the English working class that
traced the experiences and organizations of working people as they shaped their shared identity.
The inverse process of unmaking witnessed the disempowerment of working classes who had been
organized in unions and political parties, and who had been allied with other social sectors locally,
nationally, and internationally. Only decades earlier, these same workers confronted their
employers, made demands on the state, commanded space, and built social institutions. Their
unmaking was not an immediate achievement, but it was delivered systematically through social,
martial, political, and cultural processes. In the aftermath, workers’ livelihoods were insecure, their
social lives fragmented, and they were left without collective power (Kasmir and Carbonella 2014).

Shipbuilders in Galicia, Spain lived such an unmaking. Workers had organized the underground
communist union CCOO (Comisiones Obreras) and participated in a broad-based, popular
movement that helped bring down the Franco regime and force a democratic transition in the
1970s. However, Spain’s entry into the European Union (EU) in 1986 and state-imposed neoliberal
reforms initiated a sustained attack on their way of life. Large-scale employers subcontracted to
smaller concerns, and casual labor and underemployment edged out permanent jobs and family
wages. In what were once shipbuilding households, family members strategized and networked to
find waged work and pursue social mobility. Their individual endeavors contrasted with the
collective action in unions and left-wing political parties that had been their main avenue for
security and advancement. Residents felt bereft of the social meaning they had previously derived
from their union membership and political beliefs (Narotzky 2014).

The rise of ultranationalism among disaffected industrial workers in post-socialist Poland is

likewise intimately connected to political defeat. Poland’s entry into the EU and the wider capitalist
market was achieved after 1989 via “shock therapy” (Klein 2007). Purportedly, these liberal market
reforms underwrote a successful democratic transition in Poland; in actuality, they authorized the

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“hidden history” of working-class dispossession. Workers had won control of their factories during
the Solidarity movement in 1981, but their political aspirations for self-management were betrayed
by a new class of technocrats who engineered the sale of the factories to transnational capital.
Widespread unemployment resulted, and workers felt deceived and disillusioned. These
resentments attracted them to right-wing populism and anti-liberalism (Kalb 2014).

A social movement against precarity in South Korea gained force after 2011 when a worker occupied
a crane in the Hanjin shipyard for nearly a year. She refused to leave even in the face of threats to
her well-being and life. The transnational shipping corporation planned to transfer the crane to
Subic Bay, Philippines, where the state established a freeport zone that eliminated taxes and duties
and restricted collective action and labor rights. The crane occupation was a remarkable challenge
to the physical dismantling of the shipyard and to the loss of stable jobs, and it resonated with the
suicides of unionized workers that were then increasingly common in South Korea. Korean and
Filipino activists mobilized workers and their supporters around the affective themes of despair and
hope that the crane protest evoked (Schober 2018).

These historical ethnographies lend counterweight to stories of rust-belt communities that depict
the collective injuries wrought by plant closure but marginalize class politics. Youngstown, Ohio, in
the Midwest, is regularly called upon to represent the ravages of deindustrialization. Yet the forceful
community organizations that fought plant closings—including by making the very radical claim
that the community had a right to seize the abandoned industrial property—are erased from the
dominant narratives of “loss and victimization.” Popular and academic accounts memorialize the
Youngstown working class, even as they eclipse resistance and struggle (High 2002). Furthermore,
narratives that mourn Fordism tend to overlook the heterogeneity of working classes, and they
mistake the demise of Fordist working classes for a decline of class itself (Carbonella and Kasmir
2014; Carrier and Kalb 2015).

Race and Gender Enclosures

Fordism never provided cover for all workers, neither in the United States, where it reached its
1
fullest expression, nor internationally. In the United States, domestic and farm work were
exempted from the 1930s National Labor Relations Act that established the right to organize unions.
African Americans and women were overrepresented in these sectors. As a result, the wage bargain
and union protections were achieved unequally along lines of race and gender. It is a mistake,
therefore, to take Fordist arrangements as the common starting point for enumerating working-
class dissolution: Fordism was more the exception than the rule (Baca 2004, 2017; Mullings 1986).

Radical geographers convincingly argue that unevenness is not merely the consequence of capital
accumulation, but its staging ground. Crises of profitability are resolved by spatial, temporal,
technological, and organizational “fixes,” wherein geographic nodes of fixed capital are abandoned
and assets are redirected to new regions, sectors, and production regimes (Harvey 2006; Massey
1984; N. Smith 1984, 2006). These observations greatly sharpen the understanding of the logic of

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The Anthropology of Labor

capital and its spatiality, but they are less attuned to the politics of labor (Herod 1997, 2006). To be
sure, union organizing influences the spatiality of investment, and capital mobility is a shadow map
of the geography of labor unrest (Silver 2003).

In emphasizing the role of labor, it is imperative to underscore that “labor is not ‘an undifferentiated
mass’; it is rather a divided and struggled-over social formation” (Mitchell 2005, 92). Racial and
gender divisions accompanied the rise of capitalism; the accumulation of labor was the
accumulation of difference. These divides gave life to understandings of who counted as a
proletariat, and by what measure—whether waged, unwaged, or enslaved people were to be included
or excluded from the designation “worker” (Federici 2004). They consequently shaped how
laboring people construct alliances, command space, and conceptualize struggle.

W. E. B. Du Bois’ reflections on the 1917 race riot in East St. Louis deepen this insight. A labor
shortage during World War I drew African Americans to the city from the south. There they met
unskilled eastern and southern European immigrants in the mills. Refused membership in the
white-dominated (Anglo and German) craft unions, black and immigrant workers together joined
the fledgling laborers’ union. When employers cut wages across the city, their union called a strike
but their budding alliance was soon extinguished by the employers’ unyielding response. Capital
counted upon the wartime US government’s nationwide reign of terror aimed at forestalling
emergent forms of working-class solidarity such as this. In East St. Louis, the not quite white
eastern and southern European immigrants faced lower wages and the “shadow of hunger,” and
turned their allegiance to the white craft workers. They tried to secure their own position by
banishing black laborers from the city’s wage labor force. The immediate aftermath of their racial
violence was brutal. Du Bois writes that eastern and southern European immigrants grasped at the
“wages of whiteness,” including its psychological advantage. In his account, however, this racial
privilege does not stem from a psychological drive (contra Roediger 1991). Instead, whiteness came
to fruition within fields of power in which capital, the state, and workers acted in a world structured
by a global color line (Du Bois [1920] 1969; see Carbonella and Kasmir 2008).

Boundary making and racial enclosure likewise defined 20th-century Detroit. The onset of Detroit’s
deindustrialization is typically dated to the 1970s, contemporaneous with neoliberalism and the
wholesale restructuring of capitalist space. But systematic disinvestment began in the late 1940s to
1960s, when race and class segregation hardened. Capital, state, and civil society, including white
workers and labor unions, played a role in bringing about these starkly uneven conditions. Auto
executives installed discriminatory hiring policies from the outset. African Americans were
assigned the hardest, most dangerous, and lowest paying jobs in outdated plants, where they were
vulnerable to layoffs. The United Automobile Workers (UAW) labor union did little to improve these
conditions, although some local chapters pressed the national union to act. Job loss in Detroit was
accelerated by state-financed expressways and highways. Suburbanization and decentralization
were not the result of market forces but instead arose from policies that weakened organized labor,
siphoned jobs out of the city center, where most African Americans lived, and underwrote
homogeneous white suburbs. Real estate agents and white homeowners used racial steering and
threats of terror to maintain residential segregation, and the urban core was drained of industry,
employment, a tax base, and housing investment. In this way, Detroit was transformed from a
“magnet of opportunity to a reservation for the poor” (Sugrue 1996; see Gill and Kasmir 2016).

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The Anthropology of Labor

Portuguese state policies designed to attract foreign capital similarly generated patterns of extreme
labor exploitation. During the dictatorship (1933–1974), the corporatist state built a dual society. In
core sectors, there were fixed working hours, labor contracts, and minimum wages. In
disadvantaged sectors, wage earners received less than the cost of social reproduction for
themselves and their families. Household members were therefore pushed into low-paid
agricultural and artisanal work, and rural and industrial oligarchs were guaranteed a super-
exploited labor force that was largely young and female. The state proffered the myth that Portugal
was a “naturally rural country” to legitimate this state of affairs, and it further naturalized these
conditions through ideologies of gender and family (Matos 2018). As well, Southeast Asian states
carved zones of exception from their national territories to accommodate the demands of
corporations and global regulatory agencies. States ceded control of these zones and the people in
them to corporate rule. Ethnic minorities suffered the most repressive exercise of labor control and
are now, as of the early decades of the 21st century, deprived of many rights of citizenship (Ong
2006).

Inside or Outside of Capitalism and Class?

Precarious versus stable employment is one key axis of difference among workers. Many people the
world over have been thrown out of the wage contract, while others have never worked for a wage
and pursue multiple livelihood strategies. Mumbai slum dwellers pick garbage and sell their takings
to entrepreneurs of recyclable waste (Boo 2012). In Rio de Janeiro, people leave garbage dumps for
formal jobs but return when their life circumstances make it impossible to accommodate the
demands of regular work schedules (Millar 2014). Women make food for sale in public squares or on
roadsides, and children are bonded to small producers who contract for multinational corporations
selling shoes or toys. Self-employed freelancers, professionals on temporary contracts, and interns
and part-time faculty do the work of corporations and universities as internet-based platforms host
putatively self-employed drivers and service providers (Morton 2018). Testifying to the
pervasiveness of casual employment in academia, the American Anthropological Association passed
a resolution in 2103 in support of workplace rights for contingent and part-time labor. In 2016, PhD
students and postdoctoral researchers in Europe founded the interest group PrecAnthro during the
annual meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and they later formed the
Anthropology of Labour Network.

Do these people inhabit the permanent outside of capitalism? Are their labors outside of class
relations? Or do they engage in many, varied laborers, better understood in class relationship to
each other, capital, and states (see Kasmir 2018)?

Biopolitics
One line of thought extends Michel Foucault’s “biopolitics” to name a permanent outside of
capitalism. Foucault argues that “biopower” is exercised through surveillance, counting, and
categorizing bodies and lives. Demography, penal codes, medicine, and other modern forms of
governmentality “qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize.” They assign value and utility to life

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(Foucault 1990, 144, originally published in 1978). Power designates worthy human beings and
denies the political or legal sovereignty of others, reducing them to “bare life” or to mere biological
existence (Agamben 1998). Achille Mbembé applies these insights to colonial regimes and racial
rule. He asks, “Under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to
death exercised? Who is the subject of this right?” His concept of “necropolitics” refers to this
control over life and death (Mbembé 2003, 11).

Ethnographers draw on this literature to explore emotions and subjectivities across cultures. Those
without stable jobs in recessionary Japan experience loneliness, isolation, and the loss of a feeling of
home (Allison 2013). Victims of violence and torture in post-US-invasion Iraq suffer trauma and
persistent insecurity (Al-Mohammad 2012). Marginality, anxiety, and paranoia resound for short-
term contract employees in corporate settings in neoliberal Italy (Molé 2010).

If reducing people to their biology had been the exception, scholars maintain it is more and more
the rule. Unmarked mass graves of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean Sea and on the US–
Mexico border, as well as some quarter million farmer suicides in India would seem to prove the
point. People discarded and excluded from secure work and life—refugees from war and climate
crises, stateless people, torture victims, migrants, the poor—are relegated by international
organizations, states, and capital to bare life. Judith Butler (2004, 2010) writes that the general
human condition of precariousness is experienced unequally, borne by the marginalized, poor, and
disenfranchised. Social value is attributed to some lives but it is denied to others; some are protected
while others are exposed. Anthropologists find these terms helpful for studying “surplus
populations” (e.g., Li 2009; Ferguson 2013).

Marxist scholars counter that surplus populations are not outside but inside capitalist relations.
They are a “reserve army of labor” of those not (yet) incorporated into global capitalist relations or
those pushed out for the short or long term, whose numbers function to cheapen labor and
discipline workers worldwide. However, Tania Li maintains that surplus populations “have very
limited relevance to capital at any scale” (2009, 67). One billion people in the global south who live
on US$1 a day attest that “letting die” is a brutal reality. Li argues that surplus people are not formed
in relation to working classes, contra Marxist theory; nor is their condition a strategy of global
capital. She concludes therefore that class analysis does not suffice to explain their existence.
Consequently, a different politics is needed beyond that of workers and consumers making claims
on capital and the state. Li asks about the kinds of struggles and alliances required to create “make
live” projects as opposed to the let-die option (Li 2009).

Biopolitics provides a forceful language for human suffering, but scholars fear that it risks
rehearsing the ideological terms of capital and the state. Historian Michael Denning cautions that
“to speak repeatedly of bare life and superfluous life can lead us to imagine that there really are
disposable people, not simply that they are disposable in the eyes of state and market” (Denning
2010, 80). From the lens of biopolitics, purportedly disposable people “are seemingly never ‘thrown
back into the breach,’ nor chart an alternative.” The unfortunate end result may be to “remove
laboring people from history” (Carbonella and Kasmir 2014, 24).

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The Anthropology of Labor

Denning offers the concept of “wagelessness” as a better start for inquiry. Dispossession produces
diverse outcomes: “truck and barter,” informal and formal work, bonded work, and unwaged labor.
Waged employment is only one possible life condition among many. Following this, the imperative
to earn a living rather than the wage relation as a singular form is the foundational moment of
capitalist class relations. This proposition invites careful historical and political analysis of the
interrelated making of surplus and incorporated populations; capitalism’s shifting outside and
inside; and let die, make live and worker and consumer struggles and projects.

The Precariat?
A second kind of outside argument is presented by Guy Standing. Neoliberal reforms created a
global “precariat,” he maintains, comprised of several strata of part-time workers, the self-
employed, and subcontractors. The precariat’s self-interest is not shaped through work-based
identities, collective forms of solidarity, or union membership. According to Standing, the precariat
sees unionized workers in protected jobs as their adversaries, and they reject labor unions and leftist
political parties. New forms of association and state policies are therefore in order. Standing believes
that the basic income grant is particularly necessary to subsidize livelihood activities for the
majority who will never be stably employed (Standing 2011). Partha Chaterjee (2004) similarly
argues that since India’s subaltern population is fated to remain on the permanent outside of the
wage relationship, a novel politics is required. He foresees social movements based on citizenship
rather than work-based struggles or class demands.

These formulations echo earlier reports of those permanently expelled from the wage relation. In
the 1970s, Keith Hart (1973) authored the concept of the “informal sector” to describe the
prevalence of informal work in the urban economy in Ghana. José Nun (1969) and Anibal Quijano
(1974) debated whether vast numbers of laid off workers in Latin America would ever be reabsorbed
into capitalist enterprises or would instead comprise a perpetual “marginal mass.” Kalyan Sanyal
(2007) distinguished between the capitalist and non-capitalist “need economy,” comprised of
charity, nonprofits, and government transfers. He argues that this distinction is apt because for
postcolonial India where capitalism is neither universal nor fully established.

Whereas these interventions offer a much needed “corrective to teleological readings of capitalism,”
they do so by proffering a “reified view of capitalist social relations as being reducible to the
production relation between free wage-labor and capital. . . .” They also artificially wall off the
capital–labor relation and separate informal from formal activities (Jan 2013, 334). A critique traces
connections of the informal economy to surplus value. For example, domestic work in middle-class
homes, petty commodity production of food, forms of credit, and a “rent gap” in the face of
encroaching real estate speculation connect Indian slum dwellers to circuits of capital, even when
they do not work directly in capitalist enterprises (Whitehead 2014).

Moreover, Standing’s argument is geographically and historically circumscribed. Standing focuses

on changes in labor markets of the neoliberal United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany,
Japan, and South Korea, while capital in the global south always produced insecure, unprotected,
and super-exploited workforces (Breman 2013). Andre Gunder Frank’s and Walter Rodney’s

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writings on underdevelopment are germane to this rejoinder. By their count, dependency and
underdevelopment were not a failure of economic modernization, nor would they be remedied by
more capitalist expansion. To the contrary, dependency elites did the bidding of transnational
capital, and neocolonial regimes in the Third World carried on the extractive political and economic
relations of colonialism whereby resources and wealth flowed from poor, ex-colonial nations to
benefit dominant countries or metropoles. Surplus and informal labor are closely tied to processes
of capital accumulation and neocolonialism (Gunder Frank 1966, 1967; Rodney 1972).

Precarity is the historical norm in much of the world. For Jan Breman, the precariat question
necessarily turns on Marx’s theory of the reserve army of labor. The theory charts the relationships
to capital and to working classes of those not yet brought into or episodically pushed out of the wage
relationship. Their presence depresses wages and helps contain restive working classes. The global
labor force has grown exponentially over the past four decades, from the late 1970s on, creating a
large, varied, and stratified reserve army that cheapens the price of labor and strains the capacity for
collective action worldwide (Berman 2013; Marx [1867] 1997, 781-794; Roseberry 1997).

Academic declarations of a permanent outside of capitalism uncomfortably parallel the “myth of

disposable women” in the Third World. This myth is told by factory managers, corporate executives,
and consumers around the world to narrate women workers’ putatively inevitable progression from
youth to being used up in a very few years. This progression is supposedly propelled by women’s
biological and culturally scripted lives rather than by super-exploitation and the purposeful abuse
of their bodies. During the worker’s rapid descent, the woman produces many valuable things. Her
labor power is exhausted before it becomes expensive—either because she, with others, demands
better pay and treatment or because her physical breakdown diminishes her productivity. The story
legitimizes severe forms of discipline, constant surveillance, and overbearing paternalism that
constitute the hyper-exploitation of this worker until she is replaced by a younger woman. A critical
analysis of the story as it played out in factories in Mexico and China reveals the dialectical
relationship between her disposability and her super-exploitation (Wright 2006). This dialectic is
also on view in China’s rustbelt and sunbelt, where geographically distant processes of
abandonment and investment simultaneously threaten the pensions of retired workers and render
young factory operatives afraid to fight for labor rights (Lee 2007).

From this Marxian perspective, precarious workers are inside of class relations, and solidarity
between social sectors is one possible development. In Buenos Aires, public sector unions are
figuring out how to effectively represent temporary workers and to nurture alliances between
contract and permanent workers (Lazar 2017). Migrant laborers established long-term residence in
Baja, California to accommodate year-round fruit and vegetable production for US and Canadian
markets. In these more permanent communities, migrant women turn to petty commodity
production and aspire to open their own small shops. At the same time, new unions mounted a
successful strike that nurtured cross-ethnic solidarity among the Mixtec, Zapotec, and Triqui
migrants and counted on cross-border organizing in the United States and Mexico (Zlolinski 2018).
During union-led strikes in Zambian copper mines operated by Chinese state-controlled
subsidiaries, laid-off casual workers joined and escalated the conflict. Informal workers reasoned
they had “nothing to lose and everything to gain from a strong show of force against the

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mines” (Lee 2014, 50). Close accounts of struggle may influence how academics understand
precariousness, whether as bare life or as grounds for alliance and political-economic claims on
capital and the state.

Ferguson and Li (2018) consider precarity a useful point of departure for a global research agenda
that decenters the “proper job” as “the universal solution, the obvious telos of a worldwide
developmental process.” Their premise is the multilinear nature of development rather than a
unilinear version of capitalist progress that leads (sooner or later, here and there) to a “proper job,”
from which difference is marked as deviation or absence. They develop an expansive set of research
questions to investigate livelihoods across ethnographic settings. In their reading, precariousness is
not posed as a problem within the historical development of capitalism and class relations, though
they ask some questions about those processes, but it should be placed center stage, framed as the
global norm. They prefer to postpone a project that would seek general theory to explain these
circumstances and instead advocate documenting and describing diverse livelihoods on the ground.

Capitalism and Heterogeneity

There is growing consensus that capitalism is comprised of many social relationships beyond wage
labor, yet this heterogeneity is explained in competing ways. One strand of scholarship ascribes this
state of affairs to cultural particularities rooted in ontological differences that purportedly flourish
outside of capitalism. Feminist economist J. K. Gibson-Graham asserts that caring and reciprocity in
the domestic and community spheres and shared prosperity in cooperative workplaces are among
the practices that escape capitalist value and logic. Instances of non-capitalism are numerous and
are the proving ground for egalitarian ethos and new economic relations (J. K. Gibson-Graham 1996,
2006).

Anna Tsing draws upon Gibson-Graham’s approach to analyze the hunting, sorting, and sale of
matsutake mushrooms in Japan. At some points in the supply chain, labor is alienated and the
mushrooms are commodified; at others, both labor and mushrooms have a gift-like quality. Supply
chains expose the “rough edges” of capitalism. Against “striving to show how capitalism fits
together as a whole” or seeing capitalism as singular, Tsing believes that the study of mushrooms
reveals how non-capitalist social relations and other historical contingencies are “awkwardly
woven into capitalism” (Tsing 2013, 39). Heterogeneity nurtures utopian possibilities for a better
world that can emerge from the “interstices between capitalist and non-capitalist spaces” (Tsing
2009, 172).

Arturo Escobar likewise holds that capitalism is not all-encompassing. Place-based knowledge and
alternative world-making projects purportedly thrive on the Pacific coast of Colombia. In a region
threatened by rapacious development and environmental destruction, there are spaces and forms of
economy removed from capitalist imperatives. Afro-Colombian activists nurture alternative
modernities that manifest an essential form of knowledge at odds with capitalist ontology.
Reservoirs of local knowledge, relations of reciprocity, and minority subjectivities arise from the
“counterwork” of local people. Capitalism, in this formulation, is only one economic logic among
many others (Escobar 2008; see also de Sousa Santos 2007).

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The Anthropology of Labor

There is reason to be skeptical of this line of thought, first for championing thick description over
theory and second for neglecting the role of struggle in social change. In these accounts,
transformation seemingly flows from the simple fact of heterogeneity. (See critiques by Kalb
2015a,b, 2018; Kalb and Mollona 2018; Narotzky 2016; and Kasmir and Gill 2018). Gavin Smith
argues that the shift from the global dominance of industrial to finance capital since the 1980s
changed how power is exercised. The Keynesianism hegemonic project was aimed at incorporation
(even though incomplete). The prevailing mode of hegemony is now “selective,” leaving whole
sectors of national populations to press claims and organize politics in new ways (G. Smith 2014,
2016). Ida Susser (2018) applies this useful epochal framing toward examining the changing class
alliances that animated social movements in New York City from the 1960s. In these tellings,
difference is structural and historical, not ontological, and instances of capitalism’s outside or non-
capitalism are better explained by the power-laden projects of incorporation and exclusion that are
fundamental to capitalist accumulation.

The classic monograph All Our Kin makes the ethnographic case. Carol Stack did fieldwork in the
United States in a low-income, black urban community in the 1970s. At the time, the “culture of
poverty” reigned in social science and policy circles. That thesis attributed enduring poverty across
generations to cultural values and psychocultural traits. Chronically poor families reportedly
suffered from a lack of future orientation, distrust of formal institutions, and feelings of
powerlessness. Conversely, Stack showed that poor people ameliorated their circumstances by
sustaining networks of care based upon reciprocity and non-monetary exchanges among kin and
across households. Importantly, Stack situated those practices within the larger fields of power that
created and reproduced zones of poverty. Although she did not register the precise terms of the
inside–outside debate, these can nonetheless be read from her analysis. She did not consider that
sharing or extended and fictive kin were external to capitalist processes, nor culturally essential
within black communities, but gave readers to understand that non-market relations were
produced fully within capitalism’s inside, at the intersection of structural racism, labor market
segmentation, and state welfare policy (Stack 1974).

Southern Catalan peasants sustain a worldview that is at odds with capitalist value. Transnational
energy corporations pursue access to agricultural terrain for wind turbines and deem the plots
under peasant cultivation to be a “waste.” They proffer more efficient and profitable uses of the
land. Catalan peasants express their resentment of the energy corporations through the cultural
code of “dignity.” Their language evokes local knowledge, ethos, and subjectivities. Yet the same
community members were active in antinuclear mobilizations in the 1980s when they endorsed a
renewable energy alternative. They may well have supported wind power, Franquesa reasons, had
the neoliberal Spanish state not handed over the energy sector to transnational capital. Dignity,
self-provisioning of foodstuffs, and alternative moralities are not culturally essential or enduring
rural Catalan values but historically produced and intertwined with global processes (Franquesa
2018; also see Palomera and Vetta 2016).

Dene, Metis, and Inuit women in the Northwest Territories of Canada work for wages and they
undertake subsistence production—hunting, trapping, fishing, foraging, and elaboration of skins.
The same beadwork or sewing, for example, is performed both for the household or wages. This
situation calls to mind anthropological modes of production theory of the 1970s–1980s, which held

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The Anthropology of Labor

that kin or tribal modes of production in Asia and Africa were sustained and encouraged rather than
destroyed by colonial capitalist penetration, although capitalist logic was finally dominant over
these other economic systems (e.g., Wolpe 1980).

Rebecca Hall argues that kin-ordered labor in colonial settings is a site of struggle that is located
both inside and outside of capitalism. Indigenous women respond to the demands of capital when
they shoulder the costs of social reproduction with their non-paid work, yet they also resist and
elude capital. Hall ’s postcolonial perspective engages feminist social reproduction theory. She sides
with feminist critiques that orthodox Marxist definitions of production eclipse women’s social
reproductive work. Nevertheless, she rejects the feminist equation of reproduction with domestic
activity, since indigenous women also carry out subsistence production outside of the home (Hall
2016). Gavin Smith argues along similar lines and suggests substituting “expanded reproduction”
for the concept of social reproduction so as not to artificially separate social and economic
processes. Subsistence practices, petty commodity production, peasant household production, rent,
credit, and debt all combine in a quasi-totality of capitalist social relations (G. Smith 2018).

Hall recognizes that non-wage labor contributes to circuits of capitalist value, but she maintains
that subsistence production falls outside of capitalist relations as well. Subsistence draws upon and
preserves local place-based knowledge. “Non-capitalist subsistence production is more than its
relation to capital [. . .] ultimately enacting resistance to capital as the only alternative, and carving
out spaces of well-being, meaning and hope” (Hall 2016,106). However, Hall does not explore the
relationship of indigenous women to other laborers in Northern Canada and farther afield. Neither
does she tease out when and under what conditions spaces of well-being, meaning, and hope
nourish ontological difference, nor when and in alliance with whom they are bases for struggle
against capital. The anthropology of labor attends to these latter concerns.

Conclusion: New Theoretical Projects and Research Programs

Labor is at the center of several new research agendas, including a revived interest in value. One
point of departure is a critique of the productivist (and gender and race) bias in Marx’s labor theory
of value (see, e.g., Collins 2017; Narotzky 2018a).

Value Regimes
Marilyn Strathern’s writing on Melanesia motivates anthropologists who propose to make labor a
more cross-cultural and comprehensive concept that incorporates affect and non-capitalist values.
Strathern saw two discrete spheres of value and work during her fieldwork: In the domestic realm,
women raised pigs for food. In the realm of exchange, men accrued renown. Men dominated but did
not exploit women’s labor when they exchanged the pigs because the animals were never wholly
separated or alienated from the relations that produced them. The Melanesian case is summoned to
affirm that culturally particular value regimes persist in contradistinction to abstract surplus value
(Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018; see also Bear et al. 2015).

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Keir Martin (2018) troubles this typology for the Melanesian context. After their village was
devastated by a volcanic eruption, residents of Matupit were allocated three hectares of rain forest
land by the provincial government of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. To safeguard the blocks
as individual or nuclear-family property for cash crops, villagers resisted reciprocity and moral
obligations that would embed the plots in clan relations. They strategized how to reliably access the
considerable labor needed to clear the forest, plant crops, and establish a household without
admitting claims on the land. One villager paid relatives individually rather than accept their “help.”
He separated the activity of labor from the person doing it. This act of alienation, Martin affirms, is
the same as that named by Marx for the wage labor–capital relation. Martin challenges the
ontological divide between commodities and gifts at the heart of Strathern’s “distinction between
Western society and Melanesian sociality” (Martin 2018, 92).

Susana Narotzky (2018b) further warns that the anthropological propensity to reify commodity and
gift value, and therefore to enumerate culturally particular ontologies, foregoes general theory for
description and fails to envision a connected world. Marx distinguished between two manifestations
of labor: concrete and abstract. Concrete labor refers to historical particularity and the specific
conditions of embeddedness. Abstract labor denotes a quantity of “human energy and time
necessary to reproduce the social totality as a meaningful whole, and this encompasses any
collective effort in whatever form it is coordinated” (Narotzky 2018b, 30). Abstract labor is present
in all societies, whether kin or market ordered. For Narotzky, labor is a useful general concept for
explaining otherwise inequivalent and unrelated processes in different parts of the world (Narotzky
2018b; see also Narotzky and Besnier 2014).

Exploitation–Oppression
People the world over undertake manifold labors, and they are differently situated in connection to
circuits of value. It is thus imperative to fully account for the relationship between the organization
of exploitation and the organization of oppression (Carbonella and Kasmir 2014, 25).

This problem leads Jason Moore (2015) to another critique of the labor theory of value. Moore’s
notion of “cheap nature” refers to unpaid and cheap, non-commodified, non-waged human labor. It
also includes extra-human nature—food, energy, and raw materials. Cheap nature is foundational
for the origins of capitalism and for its continued reproduction. Moore makes the case that the labor
theory of value misses the part played by cheap nature in accumulation, since it recognizes only
surplus value captured through direct exploitation in capitalist employment. Accordingly, a new law
of value is required that counts exploitation and forms of appropriation “that identify, secure and
channel unpaid work outside the commodity system into the circuit of capital” (Moore 2015, 17).
The amount of surplus value derived from appropriation grows disproportionately with increasing
labor productivity, and ever more people engage in manifold labors that collectively produce cheap
nature.

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Uneven and Combined Development

Uneven and combined development (UCD) is an emerging research program also focused on
capitalist heterogeneity. The first proposition is that the unevenness of capital accumulation across
space, sector, and time creates social difference and inequality. Furthermore, unevenness is
politically momentous (e.g., Anievas and Matin; Dunn and Radice; Davison 2016; Gill and Kasmir
2016; Kasmir and Gill 2018; Makki 2015; Lem 2018; Kalb 2018; Rosenberg 2006; N. Smith 2006; G.
Smith 2016, forthcoming; Werner 2016).

Leon Trotsky’s original formulation of UCD dates to the Russian Revolution and the seeming
historical anomaly of proletarian power in a country where formal bourgeois democracy had not
emerged. European stock markets were decisive for the path of industrialization in Tsarist Russia.
The dominance of foreign investment and debt made for a weak capitalist class, as the industrial
working class grew quickly and was concentrated in a few sectors in massive industrial installations
in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. These urban centers were “surrounded by a sea of peasant villages
barely touched by modern industry and weighed down by onerous tributary exactions.” This state of
affairs had important implications for political alliance and the direction of the state. “Fear of the
subaltern classes moreover drove the weak bourgeoisie into the embrace of the Tsarist state,
turning it into a subordinate appendage of absolutism with little independent capacity to articulate a
transformative project in its own image.” (Makki 2015, 483, passim; Trotsky [1932] 1960).

Two competing arguments were at Trotsky’s heels as he assessed Russia’s peculiarity. The first was
that all nations must necessarily undergo successive stages of development; hence, a bourgeois
revolution was requisite for progress. The second predicted that Russia would follow a unique
course and detour around capitalism, directly from feudalism to communism. Trotsky advanced the
notion of combination in response to both positions. “Backward” Russia drew on material and
intellectual developments from “advanced” England and France and then manifested new
configurations (Trotsky [1932] 1960, appendix 1).

In Trotsky’s writing, the notion of combination points to the presence of so-called advanced
(capitalist industrial–urban proletarian) and archaic (semi-feudal–rural peasantry) forms and the
revolutionary possibilities that arose from them in early 20th-century Russia. Contemporary UCD
theorists aim to shed the teleology, including the advance–archaic terminology, and the
presumption of revolution. This leads them to ask about the actual and potential political
relationships (regressive or reformist) among uneven populations. There is also an international
dimension in the combined concept. Embedded historical processes in Russia and the international
formation of capital gave rise to the specific class relations that interested Trotsky. The urban
working class owed its revolutionary character to earlier political developments in Europe; the
French Revolution left a legacy, as did the growth of a strong labor movement and World War I. The
historically specific combination of people and power was thus not particular or local, as
anthropologists typically understand those terms, nor was it global. Rather it was made through
causally interacting places and political moments (Kasmir and Gill 2018; see also Kalb 2018; G. Smith
forthcoming).

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The Anthropology of Labor

This research agenda challenges methodological nationalism and ethnography conceived in the
ethnographic present or a bounded field site. It endorses instead causal interaction between states
and regions and the “back and forth movement from epochal analysis towards greater historicity
and the grounding of variant patterns of social change” (Makki 2015, 496, passim; see also Kalb and
Tak 2005; Kalb and Mollona 2018; Buroway 1989). UCD invites anthropologists to think relationally,
at multiple scales, and historically about their field sites. From this perspective, spaces of non-
capitalism or alternative modernities do not emanate from the unfolding of essential cultural logics,
but heterogeneity comes from the geographic and temporal unevenness of states, capital, and labor,
and from the many novel combinations that arise from social and political struggles.

Acknowledgments

This article owes an enormous debt to August Carbonella and Lesley Gill, the author’s partners in thinking through
much of the material covered here, and to rich conversations with Avi Chomsky, Winnie Lem, Gavin Smith, Don Kalb,
and Susana Nartozky. Sincere thanks to all of them. Portions of this article draw from the author’s publications with
August Carbonella on the global anthropology of labor (Carbonella and Kasmir 2008, 2014, 2015; Kasmir and
Carbonella 2008, 2014) and articles authored with Lesley Gill on uneven and combined development (Gill and Kasmir
2016; Kasmir and Gill 2018), as well as the author’s writing on precarity (Kasmir 2018). This work was supported by the
Bergen Research Foundation, the Government of Norway, and Bergen University through the author’s affiliation with
“Frontlines: Class, Value and Social Transformation in 21st Century Capitalism.”

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Notes

1. In his foundational essay “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci conceptualized Fordism as a whole way of
life that encompassed work on factory assembly lines, the family wage, patriarchal family relations, and mass
consumption centered around private homes. Gramsci probed how Fordism secured workers’ consent to exploitative
class relations. His exploration of Fordism provided groundwork for the concept of hegemony (Gramsci 1971).
Scholars later developed the notion of the Fordist consensus that was secured through national labor accords
bargained by bureaucratic unions and by redistributive welfare-state policies.

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