The New ‘Hidden Abode’: Reflections on Value and Labour in the New Economy

Abstract

In a pivotal section of Capital, volume 1, Marx (1976: 279) notes that, in order to understand the capitalist production of value, we must descend into the ‘hidden abode of production’: the site of the labour process conducted within an employment relationship. In this paper we argue that by remaining wedded to an analysis of labour that is confined to the employment relationship, Labour Process Theory (LPT) has missed a fundamental shift in the location of value production in contemporary capitalism. We examine this shift through the work of Autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Lazaratto and Arvidsson, who offer theoretical leverage to prize open a new ‘hidden abode’ outside employment, for example in the ‘production of organization’ and in consumption. Although they can open up this new ‘hidden abode’, without LPT's fine‐grained analysis of control/resistance, indeterminacy and structured antagonism, these theorists risk succumbing to empirically naive claims about the ‘new economy’. Through developing an expanded conception of a ‘new hidden abode’ of production, the paper demarcates an analytical space in which both LPT and Autonomist Marxism can expand and develop their understanding of labour and value production in today's economy.

Working the fields: The organization of labour in community supported agriculture

“…Braverman's work builds on Marx's theory of Labour Process, which has given rise to an extensive body of literature (see Böhm & Land, 2012 for a brief review), but others have extended research more explicitly centred on the theme of alienation in Braverman's work (Shantz, Alfes, Bailey, Soane, 2015;Chiaburu, Thundiyil, & Wang, 2014). Even so studies drawing on alienation are relatively rare and focus on its manifestation in capitalist spaces of work and production, rather than those resisting it.…”

Organization studies of inequality, with and beyond Piketty

“…Such complaints are frequently confronted with the achievements and drawbacks of an evolving institutional predicament (Parker, 2014;Bridgman and Stephens, 2008). We will forego a rehearsal of the long-going and frequently ill-tempered divisions between LPT and CMS here (although see Hassard et al 2001 andBohm andLand, 2012): rightly or wrongly, practitioners of CMS have been held responsible, by practitioners of LPT, for their shared discipline's underwhelming engagement with inequality.…”

Varieties of contestation: The comparative and critical political economy of ‘excessive’ demand

“…As a result, the working day (and indeed all activity within the workplace) is invariably contested, as much of the labour process theory literature has consistently argued (Knights & Wilmott 1990;Böhm & Land 2012). The capitalist seeks to maximise surplus value, the worker to avoid working beyond (and, indeed, up to) the exchange value she receives for her labour power: 'Hence in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e.…”