Beyond engaged pluralism? The question of labor in labor geography

Abstract

Labor geography is a vibrant, variegated subdiscipline, but there are also concerns over its lack of theoretical coherence. In this paper, I examine Open Marxist approaches that engage with post-structuralism and feminism based on Marx's concepts of abstract and concrete labor to frame a review of recent labor geography and related contributions on (a) social reproduction, difference, and class; (b) work, technology and precarity; and (c) labor's agency. I make three main arguments. First, while many conceptual tools for the analysis of social reproduction and difference exist within Marxism, because of their engagement with feminism and post-structuralism, these are being more fully developed. Second, Open Marxist contributions to this dialogue require greater emphasis upon the dialectical relationship between concrete, non-wage workers struggles against abstract labor and wage worker struggles of abstract labor within the totality of capitalism. Third, while important engagements are ongoing between Marxism, post-structuralism and feminism greater integration is neither needed nor desirable precisely because of Marxism's unique combination of conceptual coherence and open-endedness, which means that this interaction is a source of its theoretical development.

Introduction

For more than three decades, labor geography has challenged conceptions of both work and workers in the Global North and South and is now a highly variegated perspective (Peck, 2016; Strauss, 2018). This variety in part reflects a long interaction in economic and labor geography between Marxism, feminism, and post-structuralism (Harvey, 1989, 1996; Herod, 2001; Massey, 1991; McDowell, 2008; Peet, 1998). Recently, however, there has been concern that the subdiscipline's pluralism is challenging its coherence, especially its understanding of labor (Ekers and Loftus, 2020; Peck, 2016; Strauss, 2018). Yet, calls for an “engaged pluralism” (see Barnes and Sheppard, 2010), defined as a “lively and respectful engagement across epistemologies, methodologies, and theoretical traditions” in which agreement on the “best” approach is not necessarily a goal, have been criticized for not only being limited in practice, but for not establishing how greater engagement might occur (Rosenman et al., 2020: 511).

Given this apparent impasse, the focus of this paper is on more recent initiatives to develop a stronger engagement about labor, based on “Open” Marxist perspectives (Ekers et al., 2020; Gray and Clare, 2022; Hart, 2018). In particular, Ekers and Loftus (2020) stress that the possibilities of a greater interaction between Marxism, feminism, and post-structuralism lies in Marx's distinction between concrete labor—the physical labor involved in the transformation of nature into qualitatively different use values—and abstract labor—materialized labor that is exchanged as qualitatively equal value within capitalism. It is concrete labor as a conscious life activity, which is viewed as not only promoting resistance to abstract labor under capitalism but permitting a greater dialogue between Marxism, post-structural, and feminist accounts emphasizing difference.

In the following paper, I briefly review labor geography's epistemological and ontological development. I then critically examine the contributions of Open Marxism to debates around labor. Informed by this critique, I argue from a Marxist position while reviewing recent labor geography and related contributions regarding debates at different sites and scales of work in the Global North and South, around (i) social reproduction, difference, and class; (ii) work, technology, and precarity; and (iii) labor's agency.

Based on this critical review, I argue three main points. The first is that while many conceptual tools for the analysis of social reproduction and difference exist within the Marxist tradition, it is necessarily an incomplete paradigm. As such, because of its engagement with feminism and post-structuralism, these insights are being more fully developed—including via Open Marxism. Second, Open Marxist contributions to this dialogue require greater emphasis upon the dialectical relationship between non-wage workers struggles against abstract labor and wage workers struggles of abstract labor within the totality of capitalism. Third and finally, I conclude that while important interaction is ongoing, there is not necessarily conceptual congruence about labor between Marxism and especially post-structural feminist approaches. However, greater integration is neither needed nor desirable precisely because Marxism's unique combination of conceptual coherence and open-endedness means that such differences can be a source of its continued theoretical development.

Labor geography's epistemological and ontological journey

In many ways, labor geography “…. exists both within and beyond economic geography” (Gray and Clare, 2022: 7). As Marxist approaches were adopted by economic geography in the 1970s, there was increasing attention to capital's subjugation of labor via spatial fixes (Harvey, 1982; Massey, 1984). However, Herod (1997, 2001) critiqued Marxists such as Harvey for neglecting worker agency. Shifting from a geography of labor to a labor geography, Herod deployed a “non-essentialist” Marxism emphasizing labor's capacity to “actively produce economic spaces and scales in particular ways … as they implement in the landscape their own spatial fixes” (Herod, 2001: 46).

This emphasis on labor's agency informed new geographic research and focused initially upon Global North abstract labor—especially manufacturing workers in trade unions (Martin et al., 1996). However, since the1980s, many workers have been integrated into Global Production Networks (GPNs), and labor geographers have also recognized the struggles of Global South unionized and non-unionized workers (Bair and Werner, 2015; Cumbers et al., 2008).

Some of the greatest challenges to labor geography came from feminist and post-structural approaches (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Hanson and Pratt, 1995; Katz, 2001; Strauss, 2018, 2020a, 2020b; Werner et al., 2017; Wright, 2006). Feminism and post-structuralism are quite variegated perspectives, but post-structurally informed feminism has been very influential in labor geography (McDowell, 2008). In some cases, post-structural and feminist approaches also critically engaged with Marxism (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Katz, 2001; Mullings, 2021; Wright, 2006). This was accompanied by a questioning of modernist fixed categories of class, race, gender, and even capitalism itself, while also stressing difference and the contingent, intersectional nature of oppressions (McDowell, 2008; Strauss, 2018). Reflecting this influence, labor geography moved from being a critique of capitalism by labor to a critique of labor within capitalism (Castree, 1999). This also led to greater attention to the laboring body and the performative, affective, emotional nature of work and life (Houston and Pulido, 2002; McDowell, 2008; Orzeck, 2007; Strauss, 2018; Wright, 2010).

Responding to these developments, Marxists such as Harvey (1989) initially critiqued postmodernism but was criticized for neglecting the issues raised by feminism (Massey, 1991). However, Harvey (1996) focused more on reconciling difference and class within social justice movements. Furthermore, labor geographers also examined community unionism strategies that involved agency and identities beyond class (Houston and Pulido, 2002; Savage, 2006; Tufts, 1998; Wills, 2002).

Feminist and post-structural approaches also decentered labor geography's focus on the formal capitalist economy toward non-waged and social reproduction work in both the Global North and South, including as part of diverse, non-capitalist economies (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Katz, 2001; Mullings, 2021; Strauss, 2018, 2020a, 2020b; Winders and Smith, 2019). In so doing, these approaches stressed the concrete, differentiated nature of labor. Labor geography was also criticized for ignoring and devaluing social reproduction work and assuming a “Fordist Marxist” gendered binary between production (masculine) and social reproduction (feminine) (Smith, 2016). In some cases, the household was viewed as effectively displacing the capitalist workplace “as the site of theoretically elevated forms of labor and social relations” (Winders and Smith, 2019: 120).

Attention to social reproduction also spurred labor geographers to address the racialized nature of workers and capitalism. Gilmore (2007) for example made a direct link between a restructuring capitalism, the rising surplus of redundant labor, and the rapid increase of a racialized prison population in California. More generally, in the Global North and South, the ongoing legacies of colonialism, dispossession, and slavery were viewed as leading to a systematic gendered and racialized devaluation of work, people, and their resistances (Pulido, 2017; Strauss, 2020b). This devaluation also led to questions regarding the relevancy of orthodox Marxist conceptions of labor and value based on free wage labor (Buckley, 2018; Mullings, 2021).

Re-theorizing labor in labor geography? The possibilities of Open Marxism

“I can put it best with a phrase Marx used, when he spoke of the way we can rub different conceptual blocks together to make an intellectual fire. Theoretical innovation so often comes out of the collision between different lines of force. In a friction of this kind, one should never altogether give up one's starting-point ideas which will only catch fire if the original elements are not completely absorbed in the new ones” (Harvey, 2000: 81).

Engagements between Marxism, post-structuralism, and feminism have led labor geography to undergo considerable epistemological and ontological development. However, it has also been subject to growing critique—especially its apparent lack of conceptual coherence. Thus, Das (2012) argues that labor geography is only a quasi-empirical project, whose focus on labor's agency in exchange (the labor market) means that it does not engage with Marx's emphasis on capitalist production and the relational nature of class. For Peck (2016), labor geography's selective focus on worker “success stories” reflected agency's abstraction from capitalism's structures and noted that while invigorated by its pluralism, labor geography had not consolidated theoretically. Similarly, Strauss (2020a: 155) lauds labor geography's pluralism but raises concerns regarding “from what foundations we find the ground to move forward.”

No system of knowledge is complete, and many labor geographers desire greater engagement between perspectives (Strauss, 2020a, 2020b; Ekers and Loftus, 2020). Some economic geographers (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010) have called for an engaged pluralism; however, in both economic and labor geography, there is no consensus on how the often very different approaches can be reconciled, and debates occur more within rather than between perspectives (McDowell, 2016; Rosenman et al., 2020). ¹ Moreover, there is a concern that any synthesis or integration of approaches will necessarily marginalize diverse voices including what kinds of work and places “count” in such analysis (Strauss, 2019; Werner et al., 2017). Finally, there remains the question of whether pluralism is simply an end-in-itself or a means to greater understanding and explanation (Pike, 2019).

In addressing this question of greater inter-perspective engagement, Ekers et al. (2020: 1578) argue that simply taking a middle path between approaches is not necessarily productive. Furthermore, Orzeck (2007: 509) warns that accepting other approaches’ findings is not necessarily the same as agreeing with their assumptions. There is no a priori reason to privilege epistemological convergence over divergence. However, as several Marxist interlocutors argue, Marxism's capacity for what Harvey (2000) terms “intellectual fire” when engaging with other perspectives stems from it being a theoretically rigorous yet necessarily incomplete tradition characterized by an “open-ended, materialist analysis” (Foster, 2018). In particular, “Open Marxism” is viewed as able to reconcile the perceived essentialism of Marxism with the situated emphasis of post-structural and feminist scholars within labor geography (Ekers and Loftus, 2020; Ekers et al., 2020; Hart, 2018; Gray and Clare, 2022).

Open Marxism begins from capital and labor's class antagonism but emphasizes the openness of categories and struggles “within and against capitalist relations” (Gray and Clare, 2022: 14). Engaging also with Gramsci (1971) and Ollman (1971, 2003), these scholars stress core Marxist categories of dialectics, alienation, articulation, and historical-spatial conjunctures. Open Marxism is considered as being closer to Marx's understanding of the political and social nature of capitalism in the Grundrisse (Ekers et al., 2020: 1581) in which he minimized the essentialist “violence” of abstraction by it always being subject to the material or concrete (Foster, 2018). ² As such, the concrete is viewed as a “product of multiple relations and determinations,” including its discursive representations (Hart, 2018: 388).

Ekers and Loftus (2020) are careful to stress that they do not seek to synthesize nor necessarily resolve the differences between approaches. However, in their view, Open Marxism can better engage with post-structuralism and feminism because Marx's emphasis on the dual abstract and concrete nature of labor provides a point of conceptual congruence. Both waged and non-waged workers produce concrete or useful labor, but concrete labor by non-waged workers can take place outside of, and in antagonism to, capital's exploitative prioritization of abstract, waged labor. It is especially the subjective aspects of concrete labor's resistance to capital that give it both important political possibilities and as site of engagement with feminist and Black feminist scholars. Noting that not all Black feminists reject labor as a category, Ekers and Loftus (2020: 92) emphasize how concrete labor is a unity of diverse determinations, including race, gender, and non-wage work, and whose form is bound up in culturally constructed meanings. Because of these qualities, they also critique falsely universalizing the concrete—that is, analytically or politically generalizing labor from historically and geographically specific situations.

Open Marxist perspectives offer important insights but are also subject to critique. ³ Its focus on engaging other perspectives/knowledges is a strength, but it can also lead to concept “overstretching” (Ferguson, 2022). There is also the question of how Open Marxism views capitalist totality. Ekers and Loftus (2020) rightly stress the need to “embrace” complexity via what Gramsci termed translation of concepts such as labor vis a vis historically, geographically, and politically-specific conjunctures. However, while they acknowledge “a loosely structured whole or totality,” they are unclear regarding its relationship with conjunctures. Yet, as Ollman (2003: 140) argues, capitalist totality is not simply a sum of differentiated processes but has a dialectical “relative autonomy” enabling it “to have relations as a whole with other parts whose order and unity it represents.” Similarly, Gramsci (1971: 177) emphasized that conjunctures were part of a wider social totality via “relatively permanent” organic movements. ⁴ Dialectics eschews mono-causality, and totalities are co-produced by different conjunctures of processes, places, and actors (Hart, 2018). Nonetheless, some processes and conjunctures have a greater impact than others (Ollman, 2003: 71). As Vidal and Peck (2012) emphasize, capitalism is characterized by a “valorization imperative.” This imperative means that conjunctures exist within a developing totality of dead labor homogenizing differentiated forms of living, concrete labor (Jaffe, 2020). If the relationship of conjunctures with capitalist totality is not fully analyzed, Open Marxism risks viewing these as what Arboleda (2017) refers to as “hyperconcrete” rather than dialectical relationships.

Finally, especially in its autonomist versions, Open Marxism focuses more on struggles against labor (through useful non-waged work) rather than struggles of labor (by waged workers) and what might be the prospects of unity between them (Gray and Clare, 2022; Holloway, 2010). However, this concrete/abstract labor binary is problematic for as Bhattacharya (2017: 10) argues, concrete non-waged labor can also be as “saturated/overdetermined by alienated social relations” as waged work. Ekers and Loftus (2020) citing Elson (1979: 174) acknowledge that the social aspects of abstract labor give wage worker struggles a relative autonomy that is the basis of (especially) collective resistance against exploitation, but their analytical emphasis is much more on concrete labor. Therefore, while Open Marxism offers real insights, a qualified adoption emphasizing a more dialectical understanding of concrete and abstract labor within a capitalist totality may have more potential engaging with feminist and post-structural perspectives.

Social reproduction, difference, and class

The potential and challenges confronting Marxism and its open variants in its engagement with post-structuralism and feminism are evident in recent debates over social reproduction and difference. Marxists have written extensively on gender and social reproduction, but as feminists have stressed, until recently they did not attempt to fully theorize these (Brown, 2014). Feminists also argue that a spatially distinct sphere of social reproduction is related to capitalism's separation of producers from the means of production in which gender and race are intersectional oppressions just as specific to capitalism as class (Smith, 2016; Winders and Smith, 2019). To address social reproduction, Katz (2001: 711) drew on Marx's concept of capitalism's wider systemic reproduction to focus on the daily and intergenerational social and biological reproduction of labor from the household to the state, which she argued occurred in a dialectical relationship with production “with which it is mutually constitutive and in tension.” Yet with some exceptions, subsequent labor geography feminist research has paid less attention to this dialectic and has been more post-structurally informed and focused on the subjective, situated, and embodied conjunctural aspects of social reproduction and oppression (Rodríguez-Rocha, 2021). These are valuable, but as Winders and Smith (2019: 884) conclude, feminist social reproduction arguments “need to shift the theoretical and analytical focus to the interface or nexus between the two spheres or domains that merge, overlap and pull apart in historically specific dynamics.” As Smith (2016) also notes, thus far, feminist social reproduction accounts lack the systemic treatment of sex, gender, and difference equivalent to Marx's analysis of capitalist wage labor.

It is thus Marxist social reproduction theory (SRT), which building on earlier Marxist feminist works such as Davis (1983), Vogel (1983), and Katz (2001), has sought to address the relationship of social reproduction and intersectionality within a capitalist totality in which “human labor is at the heart of creating or reproducing society” (Bhattacharya, 2017: 2). SRT places less stress on abstract and concrete labor power than labor per se and aims to explain the existence of labor power within capitalism, and how this is dialectically shaped by both the valorization imperative and different social oppressions (Jaffe, 2020: 4). SRT is also informed by Marx's distinction between capitals’ singular focus on only wage labor being productive (i.e. producing value) and productive labor as such—that is, the production of concrete use values including social reproduction tasks (Brown, 2014).

SRT's arguments have sparked debate among feminists. For example, autonomist feminists such as Federici (2004) and Mezzadri (2019) argue that all social reproduction work creates value. However, for SRT, while concrete activities such as cooking and care work can produce value when they are performed by wage labor, this is not the case when they are provided by non-waged work (Gavroche, 2019). Thus, for SRT scholars such as Ferguson (2022), the claim that all social reproduction work creates value is viewed as overstretching this concept by collapsing the distinction between abstract and concrete labor.

The other main debate stems from post-structural feminists’ contention that SRT possesses a totalizing narrative that is dismissive of intersectionality perspectives (Rodríguez-Rocha, 2021; Strauss, 2020b: 1217). However, while Marxists have sometimes misportrayed it, intersectionality's conjunctural, contingent emphasis means that it does not have an adequate treatment of capitalism's relationship with oppressions (Bohrer, 2018). As such, SRT stresses that both social reproduction and the class, racial and gendered oppressions associated with it, are not simply functional to capital but must be viewed as co-constituting “different moments of contradictory unity” (Arruzza, 2016: 27). Oppressions then are viewed as representing a “diverse unity … diverse in gender, race etc. [with] each of these discrete moments … complexly unified insofar as every differently-constituted labouring body participates in the reproduction of a shared social reality, and is an expression of that social whole” (Ferguson, 2016: 54, emphasis by the author). SRT thus views oppressions as part of an organic whole within capitalism rather than simply an aggregate of conjunctural moments (Bhattacharya, 2017: 17). Yet, as Rodríguez-Rocha (2021: 11) emphasizes, despite tensions between SRT and post-structural feminism, they are engaged in a useful dialogue that is fostering SRT's development. This includes decolonizing Global North and South knowledges and recognizing the more bodily, intimate aspects of social reproduction while integrating these with SRT's emphasis on the institutions and structures of global capitalism.

Debates over social reproduction and difference also have important implications for class. Post-structural and intersectional accounts focus on classes’ identity aspects and argue against giving class any a priori analytical primacy in capitalism (Smith, 2016; Stenning, 2008). By contrast, while Das (2012: 29) recognizes that class is “…. an important condition of race and gender, although the latter are not reducible to it,” class's structural determinants and involuntary nature give it analytical priority. Yet Das is more focused on class formation processes, then the epistemological issue of how people come to know class. The latter stressed by Gramsci (1971: 366) is constituted through “historic blocs” based on a mutually constituted structure and superstructure dialectic. Within such blocs, concrete experiences including those around identity inform relatively autonomous ideologies that can contribute to internal differentiation within class (Gray and Clare, 2022).

How class is subject to internal differentiation is illustrated by racial capitalism perspectives (Strauss, 2020a, 2020b). These argue that class's concrete formation has been deeply influenced by race in ways “… cannot always be contained by capital” (Pulido, 2017: 527), but which have also served to intensify class and other oppressions such as gender by devaluing and dividing labor. Racial capitalism, however, is subject to debate some of which stems from different interpretations of Marx (Go, 2021). For example, while post-structuralists contend that Marx only examined economic exploitation and abstract labor, Bakan (2008: 242) argues that he also paid considerable attention to alienation and non-class forms of oppression. This includes race-based slavery that, like gender and social reproduction, Marx wrote about extensively but did not theorize (Mullings, 2021). Nonetheless, Marx regarded slavery as a “relation of domination” and an integral part of capitalism (Foster et al., 2020: 10). Thus, as Bakan argues, “if racism cannot be reduced mechanistically to a system of exploitation, it is also important not to reduce Marx's conception to a purely economic category isolated from oppression and alienation.”

Another point of debate is that post-colonial versions of racial capitalism can rest upon a “west versus the rest” binary in which racism is viewed as exclusively European (Virdee, 2019). Similarly, in the United States, some interpretations of racial capitalism are premised upon a seemingly irredeemable White working class whose racial advantages are secured by the “wages of whiteness” (Johnson, 2019). Yet these arguments do not fully recognize the dialectical nature of oppressions under capitalism. This includes not only racisms’ active concrete reproduction—especially by class interests—but how class experiences within concrete and abstract labor can provide an important basis for anti-racist unity (Kleinheisterkamp Gonzalez, 2022).

Paraphrasing Hall et al. (1978: 394) then, Reed (2023: 7) has recently argued that while difference such as “Race may indeed be the modality in which class is lived …. class is the framework within which race attains meaning.” Nonetheless, historically, capitalism seems to have required some kind of differentiation such as race within class (Go, 2021: 44) Developing this further, Conroy (2022) has concluded that while race and racialism may not be “logically necessary to capitalism …. it is an enduring yet logically contingent phenomena” that necessitates an understanding of its grounded, conjunctural aspects. For example, especially in the Global South, what Harvey (2004) terms accumulation by dispossession has implications for class's relationship with racialized and indigenous subjects, especially their struggles against both commodification and abstract labor or exploitation (Burawoy, 2010). ⁵ Thus, large swaths of informalized workers and indigenous peoples are viewed as living “at once, within and beyond the Marxian theory of value” and are considered less engaged in class struggle per se as in “struggles over class” (Mezzadri, 2019: 39; see also Gidwani, 2018). Nevertheless, in Latin America and Southeast Asia, indigenous resistances often have important class-based aspects, especially by poorer peasants and landless laborers, who can also engage in struggles of abstract labor as their intersections with indigeneity change over time and geography (Baird, 2021). Class then must be dialectically situated in concrete historical-geographical conjunctures with other oppressions, but it remains vital ontologically both in relation to abstract and concrete labor under capitalism and for mediating survival in all modes of production.

Work, technology, and precarity

Debates about class are relevant to ongoing arguments regarding work—both its formal abstract waged and its non-waged concrete forms. This also includes questions regarding the role of the formal workplace. Marxist and feminist scholars have long recognized that oppressions and identities besides class influence workplace and labor market social relations (Rutherford, 2010; Wright, 1997). As noted earlier, many post-structuralist feminists emphasize the concrete, affective nature of “micro-space” social relations of employment rather than the employment relation (i.e. class) itself (Ettlinger, 2003; Strauss, 2018). Thus, Wright's (2006) post-structurally informed study of female factory workers in China and Mexico argues their labor is devalued because they are viewed as “disposable” by managers. As such, women workers’ value is determined by both this representation and their embodied individual concrete labor. However, as Yates (2011: 1686) argues, this view is at odds with Marx's usage of value as the dominant form of social wealth and what labor produces at the scale of a capitalist social totality. For Yates, by focusing on their representation and conflating female workers’ concrete with their abstract labor, Wrights’ analysis is more a form of identity politics than an examination of labor. The performative and identity aspects of workplaces are important, but post-structural feminist analysis can rest on a social relations of employment/ employment relations binary in which employment relation structures exist largely external to the workplace itself. Yet, the employment relation and hence abstract labor is also reproduced—and transformed—within workplace micro-spaces, and as Houston and Pulido (2002) argue is part of necessary dialectic with identity performance informing both class formation and resistance.

The role of the formal workplace is also challenged by autonomists “social factory” arguments, Global South “dormitory labor regimes” and subcontracting strategies blurring sites of value production and extraction (Gray and Clare, 2022; Mezzadri, 2019). The increasing exploitation of both Global North and South workers including involving the use of piece, contract and platform work is an important phenomenon (Gidwani, 2018; Swidler, 2018). Indeed, Marx argued that exploitation of concrete labor could exist beyond the free wage relationship and did not pre-suppose the complete separation of workers from the means of production (Swidler, 2018). This “exploitation beyond the wage” and subjugation to the law of value can affect petty commodity production and informal social reproduction labor (Brown, 2014; Vrousalis, 2018). However, as Marx also observed, the real subsumption of labor in the formal workplace matters because it involves the radical transformation of the conditions of value production and extraction—including intensive surveillance and discipline, as workers enter the private property of the employer (Ollman, 1971). For example, during the COVID pandemic in the United States, the great majority of workers—disproportionately poorer, female, of color, and less healthy—were deemed “essential” and continued to have to work on site (Marshall et al., 2021). The ability of employers to exert greater control over employees is a major reason why they have been eager to have the latter return to the workplace as COVID subsides and equally, why many employees are resisting such demands (Hsu, 2022). Even if the formal workplace does not have a monopoly on surplus labor production and appropriation, it remains an ontologically specific and critical site both for value production and for individual and collective worker struggles (Hastings and Cumbers, 2019; Jordhus-Lier et al., 2022).

In the Global North and South, debates over the formal workplace and indeed the future of abstract waged labor itself have taken on heightened importance about the impacts of advanced automation—including robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and digitalization (Arboleda, 2017; Chatterton and Pusey, 2020). Global North feminist and post-structural scholars such as Richardson (2018, 2019) have examined the implications of digital platformization for worker agency and the blurring of production and reproduction, gender, humans, and machines. In Global South, nations such as Jamaica where communities of color have been largely excluded from formal wage labor, worker displacement by enhanced automation is expected to further blur production and social reproduction as it intensifies non-wage livelihoods (Mullings, 2021).

Some radical observers have also argued that a “cognitive capitalism” is emerging in which knowledge work is largely monopolized by AI technologies, thus contributing to an “end of [waged] work” post- capitalism (Chatterton and Pusey, 2020). However, such prognostications overread Marx's Grundrisse speculations regarding capitalism's ultimate substitution of machinery for living labor's “general intellect” and conflate concrete and abstract labor production (Karakilic, 2022). Furthermore, past predictions of technological job loss have proved misplaced, and contemporary arguments that Global North technological change is leading to a bifurcation between cognitive, immaterial work and meaningless, low wage “bullshit” jobs or a post-work capitalism rest on questionable evidence (Thompson, 2019: 5). As Benavav (2019a, 2019b) underlines, the major problem confronting a global capitalist totality is not automation-led displacement per se but structural underemployment and overall economic stagnation. This is contributing to a declining quality of wage work, lower labor shares of income, and an actual underinvestment in technology.

Following Arboleda (2017), these critiques suggest the need for viewing technology dialectically—simultaneously subjective and objective, concrete, and abstract. Drawing on Marxist and feminist scholarship, Arboleda (2017: 9) argues that while technology is shaped by a capitalist totality's value imperatives, it also necessarily reflects “… the heterogeneity of the human and non-human actors involved.” In contrast to post-work optimism, Arboleda emphasizes that advanced technology can be used by capital for surveilling and deskilling workers. However, he also recognizes its potential to expand the productive “subjectivity of the collective worker” in ways that in some conjunctures challenge abstract laws of value.

This latter point is also stressed by Upchurch (2018: 213) who argues that worker “…. resistance [to technology] is not futile but inevitable.” Such emphasis on worker resistance contrasts with some Foucauldian and post-structural research on technology and work that overstates managerial control and neoliberal subject formation (Arboleda, 2017). However, the contradictory, dialectical nature of control strategies including the ability of workers to develop their own meanings can contribute to the devolution of such systems (Glassman, 2013). Indeed, Global North and South workers have formed new alliances and oppositions around platform work including freelancer unions and other associational activism (Ettlinger, 2019; Graham et al., 2017; Johnston, 2020).

Debates about work and technology are also intertwined with those regarding precarity. As feminist labor geographers stress, the focus on the post-1980 rise in the Global North of “non-standard” work often neglect gendered and racialized exceptions to the Fordist standard employment model (Strauss, 2018; Waite, 2009). Furthermore, precarity is not simply a lower labor market condition but one that is an increasingly generalized, affective phenomena including in higher skill creative industries (Cockayne, 2018). Even those in standard full-time employment have been subject to increasing “status precarity” via work intensification, reduced autonomy, and pay (Benach et al., 2014; Choonara, 2020).

Precarity involves both labor and life including in non-waged and social reproduction care work (Strauss, 2018; Winders and Smith, 2019). As more social reproduction tasks become waged, neoliberal state retrenchment is putting increasing pressure on Global North households’ care work and is contributing to greater migration of Global South female workers to address these care needs (Pratt, 2012). Besides such migration contributing to care work shortfalls in the Global South, care worker positions in the Global North are often highly precarious—both because of their citizenship status and being increasingly subject to robotic and digital technologies (Schwiter and Steiner, 2020). These technologies can lead to a revaluing of care work, but they can also increase care giver work intensity, surveillance, and hence their precarity.

Like debates over work and technology, care must be taken that precarity does not become a falsely universalized concrete (Strauss, 2020a, 2020b). Rather, spatially and socially specific conjunctures of concrete and abstract labor need to be identified. Thus, in most Global North nations, the great majority of wage workers remain at least formally in permanent contracts. This reflects not only worker struggles for employment security, but also to increase value production capital may require longer term stability in many workforce segments, including greater attention to their social reproduction (Choonara, 2020). Furthermore, as Thompson (2019: 5) argues “despite a growing gap between what work—as specified by many employers—wants of us and what we want from work,” wage workers continue to have high levels of attachment to their jobs. Even in the United States, surveys find that wage workers derive significant meaning from their jobs with over one-third having remained with the same employer for over a decade. Nonetheless, this is also contingent on the concrete qualities of labor with younger, female, and workers of color enjoying significantly less job attachment (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020).

Automation and precarity can also intersect dialectically. Advanced technological change is often presented as an ultimate triumph of dead over living labor but is also shaped by waged and non-waged work and livelihood practices. For example, the availability “cheap, flexible” precarious, waged and non-waged workers can actually reduce incentives for capital to automate (Stelzner and Cerruti, 2018). Yet, new technologies can also increase precarity via making waged and non-waged workers more vulnerable to surveillance and displacement including around difference (see Petersen et al., 2022).

In the Global South, the technology/precarity dialectic differs because Fordist social contracts were rarely experienced at any time and the great majority of work (about 70%) is performed informally (Benavav, 2019a; Mullings, 2009). Nonetheless, millions of workers have shifted into the formal wage and manufacturing economy (Haung and Fold, 2016). Thus, Indian and Chinese manufacturing sectors employ 57 and 128 million workers, respectively, and the share of formally employed wage workers has been growing (ILO, 2017; Majid, 2015). However, the main problem confronting Global South manufacturing waged workers is not automation per se, but “premature de-industrialization” caused primarily by intra-Global South trade that is displacing mainly female workers (Benavav, 2019a, 2019b; Sorgner, 2021). Furthermore, contract labor systems and outsourcing by GPNs—often to informal workers—are also eroding formal employee wages and work conditions (Barnes, 2018; Gidwani, 2018). The impact of new technologies on Global South formal and informal work, though, is unclear. Thus, while in Africa advanced automation investment is being hindered by high costs, digitalization is integrating household concrete labor into global value and market systems (Fox and Signe, 2022: 25). Such integration can give Global South informal and household workers greater choices (see Mullings, 2021), but equally it can also make them subject to both abstract wage labor and exploitation beyond the wage.

Thus, rather than the “end of (waged) work,” what is occurring is a restructuring of the concrete/abstract labor relationship. While not a new phenomenon, precarity is being reinvented by capital and mediated by technology as a value or accumulation strategy. False universalisms must be avoided by paying attention to the concrete, situated and geographically specific conjunctures of precarity and technology. Such conjunctures are not reducible to the valorization imperative, but to paraphrase Jenson (1990), while they are always different, they are also not necessarily exceptional, for they both co-constitute and are subject to a capitalist totality.

Labor's agency

What are the implications of the above debates for understanding worker agency? Examinations of labor's agency have moved from selective celebration to a more careful defining and embedding of when, where, and for whom labor can assert itself within the geography of capitalism (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Katz, 2001; Peck, 2016; Strauss, 2018, 2020a, 2020b). Labor's agency is not a negation, but it is contradictory in that it has only what Gramsci termed a “relative” rather than an “integral” autonomy vis a vis capital and other subaltern classes subject to racial and other oppressions (Las Heras, 2019: 235). Labor's agency must thus be placed within its concrete forms relative to its subordination to capital within a wider social totality. As Strauss (2020b: 1216) argues, “The active negotiation, resistance and insurgency of racialized capitalism in multiple and constituted systems of oppression requires attention to embodied and situated experiences as well as more abstract or systematic systems of devaluation.”

Understanding labor's agency within specific forms of concrete labor is thus important. For example, Gidwani (2018: 172) finds that many Indian informal workers engage in struggle against labor in which some forms of informal piece work beyond the wage are viewed as preferable to the surveillance and disciplines linked to waged, abstract labor. In the case of migrant wage workers in Dubai construction, their extreme exploitation and its threat to their social reproduction can serve as the basis of successful collective worker actions (Buckley, 2012).

The Dubai example reveals that while dismissed by some autonomists (Holloway, 2010: 916) struggles of abstract labor retain a strategic relevancy. As Las Heras (2019: 235) argues, not all relations of subordination have the same historical force, and waged workers’ capacity to produce (or withhold) their concrete and abstract labor sustains their critical agency vis a vis capital. This is illustrated by Jordhus-Lier et al. (2022) recent study of Norwegian and Nigerian petroleum workers positionality around the wage relation and social reproduction systems. Engaging with post-structural assemblage perspectives, they draw upon Marx's alienation theory to situate the diverse concrete labors of Norwegian and Nigerian workers. In contrast to assemblage arguments that represent human and non-human actors as loosely connected and hence easily changed, Jordhus-Lier view workers as strongly embedded in “carbonscapes” characterized by flows of abstract and exchange value (Jordhus-Lier et al., 2022: 324–325). However, because labor's commodification is never complete, hydrocarbon systems are also open to worker de-alienation through a politics of reconnection between their unions, the state, and others actively involved in struggles against capital and carbon consumption.

Unions may represent only a minority of workers, but they occupy strategic positions in global value chains, and as Jordhus-Lier et al. (2022) argue, differentiated forms of concrete labor intersect with abstract value systems that shape varied Global North and South union responses. Unions confront challenges over difference and colonial legacies (Cumbers et al., 2016; Mills, 2018), but in Global North nations like the United States, they also play a critical role in promoting gender and inter-racial solidarity within and outside the workplace (Frymer and Grumbach, 2021).

Finally, what if any kind of wider political projects should labor's agency be directed? The situated and often community orientation of labor geography is primarily one in which workers and oppressed groups seek justice and progressive spatial fixes within capitalism while for Gibson-Graham (2006), post-capitalism is achieved through the existence of diverse, non-capitalist economies. The latter in particular focuses on struggles against abstract labor and for post-structural feminists, interventions are also about “challenging and redefining the conditions under which knowledge about material processes is produced” (Werner et al., 2017: 3). Less discussed, however, is the role played in projects by formal political representation within and around the state (Routledge et al., 2018). Indeed, some scholars such as Pulido (2017) are deeply skeptical of the state as a prospective ally in anti-racist struggles. As Gough (2010: 132) underlines, post-structurally influenced labor geographers are also uneasy regarding transformational political projects such as socialism that are viewed as inevitably leading to new oppressions.

However, “anti-projects” are themselves projects and subject to critique. Post-capitalist diverse economies highlight important prefigurative movements and spaces, but they have their own problematic aspects—including their scalability, the exclusion of abstract labor, and the role of the state (Chatterton and Pusey, 2020; Glassman, 2013). Nor in many Global South nations can diverse economies alone confront and resolve a capitalist totality including “… odious national debt, ongoing neoliberal austerity measures and the tyranny of market logics” (Mullings, 2021: 156). These issues are dealt with more directly in Routledge et al.'s (2018) Gramscian-influenced review of the role of the state in climate justice struggles. Acknowledging that because social transformations cannot be delayed, grassroots struggles involving workers and indigenous and racial coalitions from below are critical for the creation of alternatives and fostering collective confrontations with the state. Nonetheless, such struggles should also bring the state into a “space of engagement and negotiation [whose] potential for historical memory and the capacity for redistribution [makes it] a crucial precursor to any embrace of equality” (Routledge et al., 2018: 84). It is important then for labor geographers to acknowledge their political projects and avoid “false universals” privileging and excluding different agents and places. Re-valuing the concrete labor and knowledges of oppressed, marginalized groups including indigenous ones is thus a vital project (Mezzadri, 2019; Mullings, 2021). However, a tendential unity with struggles based on abstract labor is also possible. As Hesketh (2019) has concluded regarding Latin America, situated indigenous oppressions have a dialectical not dualistic relationship with those by waged and non-wage workers including scaling up struggles around the state.

Discussion and conclusions

In this paper, I have reviewed the development of labor geography via a critical examination of Open Marxism's engagement with feminism and post-structuralism. I have argued that this engagement reflects the existence of important conceptual tools within the Marxist tradition, but also because of this dialogue, these are being more fully developed. Open Marxism represents one possible path for greater inter-perspective engagement, but its focus is often more on concrete, non-wage worker struggles against labor than those of abstract labor by waged workers. Emphasizing a more dialectical understanding of concrete and abstract labor within a capitalist totality, I argued for a Marxist approach in critical debates within labor geography.

The ultimate outcome of this engagement between Marxism, feminism, and post-structuralism, however, is not clear. As Harvey (2000: 81) argues, Marxist theoretical innovation “will only catch fire if the original elements are not completely absorbed in the new ones.” Thus, greater Marxist attention to social reproduction and difference also reflects the proactive engagement of feminist and post-structural scholars. Often critical of Marxism, they have, nonetheless, drawn upon and developed its insights including the body (Orzeck, 2007) social reproduction (Katz, 2001), racial capitalism (Gilmore, 2007), and the racial/gendered status of Black labor (Mullings, 2021).

Yet, while considerable interaction is taking place between Marxist, feminist, and post-structural approaches, this has not necessarily been accompanied by a consensus or congruence on key debates and concepts around labor. Thus, as Open Marxists like Ekers and Loftus (2020) concede and Buckley (2018) and Mullings (2021) underline, some feminists remain highly critical of Marxist conceptions of labor. The discursive, situated, and concrete emphasis by feminists on different types of labor power still contrasts with Marxist's greater focus on the value extracted from abstract labor by capital. Both are critical and related if different moments impacting workers and work under capitalism. Here, while noting some feminist criticisms, as suggested by Rodríguez-Rocha (2021), exploring labor's concrete/abstract dialectic through SRT further might allow a greater integration of these different conjunctures.

Whatever the possibilities for further engagement between Marxism, feminism, and post-structuralism, the above issues recall Orzeck's (2007) argument that engagement with is not necessarily an acceptance of another intellectual/political project. As such, concurrence with a perspectives’ findings cannot be conflated with epistemological convergence. Thus, while the richness and diversity of Marxist thought allows it to both address many of the arguments raised by post-structural and feminist labor geographers and explain features of capitalism that these approaches do not, there remain significant differences. Moreover, many feminist and post-structural researchers fearing that a more integrative project would marginalize diverse oppressions and perspectives continue to stress the need for theoretical “promiscuity” (McDowell, 2008: 504; Strauss, 2019).

Therefore, we should not expect that greater engagement between approaches will lead to their integration, nor should this necessarily be a goal. In fact, it can be argued that a major reason integration is unnecessary is because Marxism is one the few comprehensive approaches capable of what Sum and Jessop (2013: 468) term a “creative articulation” with other paradigms while also retaining its internal coherence, and explanatory power. It is of necessity an incomplete project, but because as Foster (2018: 2) has argued, the “greatness and vitality” of Marxism “… derives primarily from its inner logic as a form of open-ended scientific inquiry,” it is one that is better positioned than almost any other to provide the conceptual blocks to initiate the intellectual combustion to which Harvey (2000) refers. For Marxist labor geographers, it is critical that they remain true to this legacy as the basis for a renewed project of inquiry and social transformation.