Part 2, Chapter 5 : The nature of labour power

5. The nature of labor power

The above leads us now straight into the core of Fortunati’s work: her original ‘demonstration’ that housework produces value. In fact, it is not a demonstration, but simply, the declamation of a ‘truth’ based on an initial assumption that labor power is ‘a commodity like any other’ (p. 19). If this is the case, labor power must contain value, as the crystallization of the abstract labor expended by its producer. Thus the labor of the housewife, the producer of the labor power of the chief wage-earner of the family, must be abstract value and must create value.

There is a general tendency in Autonomist theory to gloss over the nature of labor power as a special commodity different from others. For example in Reading Capital Politically Cleaver treats labor power in the same way as other commodities, (food and energy) without any specification. In fact, after having discussed labor power, he says: ‘let us now turn to food as a commodity and apply the same approach’ (p. 101). Surely, this does not mean that Cleaver does not know that there are important differences between food and labor power as commodities — it means only that he neglects the relevance of these differences for a ‘political reading’ of Capital.

Fortunati is surely more ‘complex’ than Cleaver. By maintaining that, as far as its content in value is concerned, labor power is like all other commodities, she admits that it is nevertheless a special commodity, but only because:

Its use value is produced and consumed separately from its exchange value; its use value is produced within the process of reproduction and consumed within the process of production; its exchange value is produced within the process of production and consumed within that of reproduction (pp. 78–79).

But this ‘complexity’ does not touch upon the real reason why labor power is a special commodity, and it is precisely in the fact that it cannot contain value as the crystallization of abstract labor! Let us see why.

In order to exist, capital needs a precondition: the material dispossession of the producers from the means of production. What does this dispossession mean? That I do not have the means to produce what I need. Because our relations are mediated by the market, the way in which our dispossession manifests in our society is precisely the fact that as proletariat we cannot produce value by ourselves, a fact that appears to Fortunati intriguingly contradictory.

Dispossession of the means of production is a specific feature of wage-work relations. In previous modes of production, a shaman or a hunter was one with his herbs or weapons. There was no such a thing as a shaman without her herbs or a hunter without his arrows ‘looking for employment’ because a shaman or a hunter were not under waged-work relations. In capitalism, where the wage-work relation is the base of production, the unity of man and his activity is split into: labor power on the one side and capital (the result of human activity turned against the human) on the other. In contrast to the shaman, a baker without an oven cannot make cakes. The baker has the labor power, the faculty of making cakes, but if the oven is the private property of someone else, the baker’s faculty is suspended in the air. It is useless — unless it is reunited with the oven. But this reunion can be possible only if the capitalist, owner of the oven, hires the baker, and only through this reunion can value be produced. The value that the baker then subsequently produces will belong to the capitalist, the owner of the means of production, as his capital.

This dispossession is even more striking if we think that our same skills are shaped in order to be useful within a capitalist process, and find no reason of existing outside it. Bakery is still an example of a traditional craft, whose skills have been defined within a non-capitalistic context. But if we think, for example, of the skills of working with a computerized spreadsheet, we can understand how tragically our skills are not only useless but even unimaginable without capital.

In a society based on exchange, the fact that our dispossession obliges us to hire ourselves to a capitalist for a wage takes the form of commodity exchange, of a purchase and sale of labor power. This is why labor power is not a commodity like a cake, but just the way our dispossession and our exploitation by the capitalist appears, and the expression of the ontological inversion that makes capital enrichment, knowledge, science, creativity and us the opposite of all this: nothing without capital.[108]

This is why saying to the proletariat, as Fortunati does, ‘All right mate, you cannot create value but considering everything, is not the result of your reproduction a commodity and a value? Is not your labor power a commodity like any other?’ means just taking the piss out of our real conditions. The very existence of labor power, of a ‘capacity for producing’ helplessly separated from the possibility of its realization as production, is one with the very fact that we cannot produce anymore by and for ourselves, but we can produce value only as appendages of capital. It is one with our experience of alienation both in production, in our relation with our products, and in any other activity shaped by capital.

If we want to scream the truth, we have to scream that we are dispossessed, that we cannot create value with our reproduction, and that labor power is not a commodity like any other. These are aspects of the same truth: of our condition as proletariat! The idea that we produce labor power in the same way as the independent baker produces cakes to sell is a petty-bourgeois delusion, and not a contribution to revolutionary theory at all.