ILPC 2024, 3rd-5th April 2024, Göttingen

Labour and/as value in the context of global crisis: ethnographic insights

Over the past years, ILPC has seen a new interest in theory led debates around value, surpassing the well-trodden path of labour theory of value. The embrace of the Global Value Chain approach has enabled LPT scholars to reconnect the labour process with wider processes of valorisation on the global scale (Newsome et al 2015). Social Reproduction Theory (Bhattacharya 2017) gained attention at ILPC 2018 in Buenos Aires, reinforced in David Harvey's keynote on the blind spots of the labour theory of value (Harvey 2018). Still, we argue, many debates around value lean towards a focus on Marx’s definition of commodity value as being produced through ‘socially necessary labour time’. The parameters of what is ‘socially necessary’ are set by the dominant mode of production. However, the dominant and hegemonic definitions of what is ‘socially necessary’ are often disputed and resisted by both waged and wageless labour (Millar 2014). As others have noted, commodity value is created from non-capitalist value forms through specific practices, it is not inherent in things and actions (Tsing 2013). We can apply similar thinking to labour and how we value labour; the value of labour as it is practiced and/or experienced under neoliberal capitalist economy is produced through specific practices of production, policy design and implementation, management, and so on. Simply put, it is produced through specific social relations.

We argue that these social relations have been changed dramatically over the past years. The global disruptions across supply chains provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic have been felt in workplaces and on trading floors alike. Contingent measures adopted to contain the spread of the virus imposed new forms of labour exploitation, including the overworking of ‘essential’ workers in the health and service sectors, the flexibilization of office workplaces that blurred the lines between home and work, the increasing precarisation of casual workers that were barred off the formal economy, and the intensification of work created by high levels of sickness and vacancies. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has added to the disruption of supply chains, further impacting trade relations as well as labour relations across the globe.

Inflation has reached a historic high in many advanced capitalist economies, reigniting conflicts between managers and stakeholders seeking to protect profits and growth on the one hand and the working masses trying to make a living amidst public health and climatic catastrophes on the other hand. In the context of these multiple global crises, it is increasingly important that we as scholars and as society critically reflect on the meaning and location of value and how it relates to labour and work.

This stream welcomes contributions that critically engage with the concept of value and its relation to labour, work and workers. As Anthropology of Labour Network, we seek to contribute from our ethnographic analyses and theorisations around value and labour as processes embedded in social relations. We also aim at engaging with different theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary approaches, enabling reflections that expand the theory of value beyond the circuit of capital, into other realms of social life (see eg. Elson et al 2015; Graeber 2001; Skeggs 2013; Tsing 2013), including activities that have often been perceived as not being part of the capitalist mode of production and consequently devalued, such as reproductive, informal, and emotional forms of labour. Critically reflecting on and interrogating the concept of value, its relation to labour, and how different forms of labour (and other human activities) are valued can constructively inform discussions around issues such as fairness, decent conditions of work, inequality, and commodification.

The stream seeks to establish an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the following topics:

• Deservingness and undeservingness: the stratification of civil society and the differentiation in access to social rights (for example, how different labouring bodies are valued and the impact of gender, race and migration status in the workplace)
• The value of skills: where is the line between ‘high skilled, ‘essential’ and ‘low skilled’ workers and who draws the line?
• Four-day working week and the value of ‘leisure’ time: understandings of temporality and productivity
• Theoretical discussions of value and its use in current labour studies
• Trade unions, activism, their potential for re-negotiating the meaning of value, and the implications for labour
• The value of academic research in general, and of ethnography in particular, and how ethnographic research methods can contribute to the study of labour

Bibliography

Battacharya, Tithi, ed. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press.

Elson, Diane, ed. (1979) 2015. Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London; New York: Verso.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Harvey, David. 2018. The Limits to Capital. London; New York: Verso.

Millar, Kathleen. 2014. “The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil”. Cultural Anthropology 29 (1): 32-53.

Newsome, Kirsty, Philip Taylor, Jennifer Bair, and Al Rainnie, eds. (2015) Putting Labour in its Place: Labour Process Analysis and Global Value Chains. London and New York: Palgrave.

Skeggs, Beverley. 2013. “Values Beyond Value? Is Anything Beyond the Logic of Capital?”. The British Journal of Sociology 65 (1): 1-20.

Tsing, Anna. 2013. “Sorting Out Commodities: How Capitalist Value is Made Through Gifts”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (1): 21-43.