The laboring body is a curious thing. In the modern sense of homo faber, it enacts the psycho-physical activity through which humans produce their modes of life, and in doing so, produce themselves as substantial, sensuous, value producing beings. If, in Western thought, the capacity for mindful work sets
humankind apart as a distinctive species, the endless need to generate the means of their subsistence ensures that laboring bodies are incessantly immersed in a wider universe, both of living and inanimate form. For they must act upon this environment to sustain themselves, thereby making nature into their own “inorganic body,” to cite Marx’s suggestive phrase (Butler 2019:5); for him, the more alienated human beings become from their own labor, the more estranged – separated — they become from this second nature. Nineteenth
1 Original emphasis.
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century novelists, Elaine Scarry (1983:96) shows, dwelled in exacting detail on the ways in which new habits of labor resculpted the toiling body and, in the process, injured it: ”wounds-as-signs” made plain that “the human being in work puts himself, by the very depth of engagement, continually at risk – that he alters the world only by consenting to be himself deeply altered.”
One might question the word “consent” here. But if we take bodily self creation as a brute reality, the nature of that body remains somehow obscure, occluded – both in life and in theory. This is especially the case in modern capitalist society, where human work becomes labor (i.e., a tradable commodity). For this means that it participates in the strangeness of the commodity form itself: like the fact that, as visible incarnation, it tends to obscure the means of its own production. Indeed, commodities are animated as valued objects by the largely unseen labor invested in their making. The ambiguous existence of embodied toil, its absent presence, is no accident. It is all of a piece with the nature of labor itself; all of a piece with the ways in which the working body, and the value it creates, move in and out of visibility and social reckoning, both as an instrument of fabrication and as the unacknowledged source of wealth as surplus value.
The mysterious nature of this generativity was captured in early modern tales like The Elves and the Shoemaker2 and Rumpelstiltskin (Schneider 1989),
2 The story was first published by the Brothers Grimm in the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812), based upon the accounts of Gretchen Wild (1787–1819). “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” Wikipedia.
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or the Estonian figure of the Kratt.3 Each is a popular figuration of the dark alchemy that turns labor into riches; just as the zombie made palpable the visceral extraction of profit from Black colonial subjects. These “appearances” serve as what Hylton White (2020:2, after Postone 2003) calls “proxies,” fetishized representations of the less explicit process through which toiling bodies yield wealth-as-surplus-value under capitalism.
This poorly credited feature of the laboring body, it simultaneous appearance and disappearance, continues to spook popular imaginings in our contemporary world. Take Jordan Peele’s celebrated movie, Us (2019), 4 for instance. In it, a middle-class black family confronts its ghostly proletarian doubles who appear one night in the driveway, clad in overalls and hard hats; the revenants proceed to invade the family home and attack them with their own domestic goods – as if to force upon them an awareness of the hidden producers of their wealth. The body has an enigmatic presence, too, in social analysis: Foucault (1978) has famously insisted that it has simultaneously been suppressed yet made ubiquitously present in modern history. Thus, the body has
3 A figure, from Estonian folktale, concocted from hay or domestic implements so that it might labor ceaselessly for its “master” once he paid the devil three drops of his blood to bring the creature to life. I thank Daivi Taylor for making me aware of this figure. See “Kratt;´
https://www.bing.com/search?q=The%20Kratt%2C%20Estonia&pc=0BLN&ptag=C24N1832A27461191ED &form=CONBNT&conlogo=CT3210127, accessed 4 October 2022. 4 See “Jordan Peele’s Us Turns a Political Statement into Unnerving Horror,” Tasha Robinson, The Verge, 22 March 2019; www.theverge.com/2019/3/9/18257721/us-review-jordan-peele-get out-lupita-nyongo-winston-duke-elisabeth-mosstim-heidecker-horror, accessed 23 May 2019. Also “Us’s Jason/Pluto Theory, Explained and Debunked,” Alex Abad-Santos and Aja Romano, Vox, 2 April 2019; www.vox.com/2019/4/2/18290380/us-movie-jason-pluto-tether-theory explained-true-false, accessed 23 May 2019.
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never actually been absent from discourse; in fact, it has become an ever more marked scholarly concern, virtually an obsession in recent humanist writing. Yet it somehow remains “elusive” (Crossley 1995; Cecci 2014), “evaporat[ing]” Schilling 1993:80), “bracketed” (Lock 1993; 2017), melting into metaphor (Sontag 1978). In this sense, despite its materiality, it sems to remain “indefinite” (Butler 1989:601), ontologically obscure, impossible to know as real object, apart from its infinite representations (Colebrook 2000; Davis 1997; Žižek 1989)
Of course, one might argue that the problem here is epistemological, born of a crypto-empiricist preoccupation with bodies as would-be discrete things, tangled up in discourse, rather than as subjects enmeshed in social and material relations. It is instructive, in this regard, to examine more precisely where and how the laboring body moves in and out of sight and acknowledgement in the ordinary practices that configure particular modern capitalist worlds. In our own times, the cataclysmic COVID pandemic, for example, flashed unprecedented light across the contemporary global landscape, making visible “new” categories of essential labor — like “front line workers,” who had, in fact, long carried out discounted forms of care and repair largely unrecognized. How have particular politico-economic conjunctures, like the onset of industrialization, colonization, and more recently, liberalization, reconfigured patterns of in/visibility as they reshape the division of labor and the calculus of value assigned to human effort along lines of difference – such as gender, race, age, geography (Comaroff and Comaroff 2020)? The global supply chains wrought by expanding capitalist production, and the restless quest for profit, often rest on earlier moments of
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dispossession and infrastructures of exploitation, among them the mining in the Eastern Congo of “blood minerals” vital to digital technology (Smith 2022; Fraser n.d.) And the Canadian fur trade that, as Joan Sangster (2007) shows, has historically been subsidized by the racial and gendered labor of First Peoples; female trappers and preparers of skins here remain largely invisible, and often unpaid, beneath more visible, long-standing links of masculine command.
This dialectic of dis/appearance is not merely a feature of a few specific, even dramatic, translocal histories of production. Modern capitalism at large tends to mask the conditions of its own production. To grasp this, Marx (1974: 175) suggests, we must leave the “noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men” and enter “the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business’.” Here lies “the secret of profit making,” where, contrary to all appearances – i.e. that capital and labor work freely together to mutual advantage — we discover not merely how capital produces commodities, but how capital itself is produced: that it is the it is labor’s surplus value animates those commodities with apparent intrinsic worth. Here the laborer seems “timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.” A hiding, too, one might add, in the sense of obscuring this essential alchemy of profit-making, at least from ordinary street-level
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perceptions of reality. Yet this mystery has a tendency to erupt in various fantasy forms, like the elves and zombies of a musing collective awareness.5
In what follows, I seek to examine precisely how the laboring body surfaces and fades from social awareness at a particular historical moment: the consolidation of structures of work and world-making in nineteenth-century Britain and – complementarily — in its African colonies. The two, as it turns out, were conditions of each other’s possibility. It is this historical moment, this time and location, that was the birthplace, at once historical and conceptual, of most modernist theories of labor and its embodiment – and its iconic nightmares, like the poltergeists and ghosts of popular Victorian fiction. Or, more elaborately, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who moves to London from the European periphery to pursue his campaign of vampiric accumulation (see below). At issue is a dialectic of front and backstage work and value production, playing out both within the metropole and in relation to the distanced imperial periphery with which it became quite intimately articulated.
But how did this division of labor, already in a significant sense transnational at that time, take form amidst an increasing impetus to expand production and maximize profit? How did it emerge in prevailing public discourse and communicative practices? And what does it tell us about the location, at once spatial and value producing, of the laboring body and homo faber in a world
5 Nancy Fraser (2014), who has usefully explored Marx’s hidden abode in relation to the qualities of labor under capitalism, points to yet further “hidden” dimensions that supplements capital — those of unrequited domestic reproduction and ecological exploitation.
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ever more divided by class, gender, and ethno-racial marking? As we shall see in a moment, many theorists, following Foucault, have argued that the laboring body disappeared as a tangible object from the representations of industrializing cities. But if so, where did it go? How might the secrets of its invisible life – its unique ability to yield surplus value — reappear in the collective awareness and other surreal guises as the stuff of estranged recognition?
The concept of fetishism provides a particularly clarifying lens for examining these corporeal fantasies, for it rests on the productive force of the spectral body. As Rosalind Morris points out, de Brosse described the fetish as a material incarnation or source of power, a kind of “carnal faith.”6 In the Marxian tradition, the fetish also implies various “returns” (cf. Morris et al 2017): as alienated labor, as profit, and as a recurrent figuration of the overall process of capitalist value production; i.e. as a re-presentation of the unrequited yield of the working body as store of ever replenishable surplus.
Proletarianization: The Body Vanishes?
I have noted that scholarly histories of the modern body have stressed its obtuseness as ontological object. In an influential account, Francis Barker (1984) argues that the birth of bourgeois selfhood was marked by the advent of what he calls the “tremulous private body,” a kind of subjectivity vividly exemplified in
early modern texts like the diary of Samuel Pepys. Pepys’ plainspoken
6 Rosalind Morris, “Fetishism: Overview,” Encylopedia.com;
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/fetishism overview, accessed 1 September 2022.
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interrogation of desire, anxiety, and self-admonition centered on the physical person, both as source of base appetites and object of guilt and censure. His searching, often lewd account is testament, for Barker, of the gradual “de realization” of the body as a site of public sensuality, exhibition, punishment, and its reconfiguration as text and discourse (p.12). In true Foucauldian fashion, the body as common spectacle is held to become “effectively hidden from history,” disappearing either into the private domain or into the great disciplinary institutions that enclose the mad, the sick, the poor, the criminal, and others deemed incapable of self-production. There, beyond the gaze of the bourgeois public, these bodies learn to labor as incarnations of a new regime of productivity, bio-political governance, and realist portrayal. Whether herded into the “closed factory” — or made the object of moralizing orders of medical, psychic, or sexual knowledge — the carnal body vanishes as a thing in itself (p.18).
But does the substantive public body actually disappear in so definitive a fashion? Whose body, and in whose eyes? Does Barker’s subtle analysis not fall victim to its own preoccupation with discourse and textuality? Does it not scant what the creators of these representations strove to convey about the contexts that gave life to them?7 Certainly, the rise of industrial society, urbanism, and modernist public spheres was mediated by expansive new regimes of print capitalism and realist depiction. Nineteenth-century urbanization also fostered
7 This concern is sharply captured in the poignant little poem, Hogarth’s Girl, by Ingrid de Kok (n.d.). It asks “Who saw her, who took her hurt,
before or after he engraved her?’
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novel forms of what Simmel ([1903] 1971:14, 16) termed the “immediate sensuousness” of “bodily closeness and lack of space” manifest in all manner of work and busyness, including the exertions of consumption, self-display, and bourgeois flânerie.
The agglomeration of bodies at work and at play in city streets, both in the European metropole and its emerging colonial counterparts, is captured in picture, print, and (increasingly) photography.8 On the one hand, these circulating images of city scapes portray genteel figures walking the streets, embodying the composed appearance of middle-class publicness. But, on the other, these streets were also peopled by working men and women pouring from the mouths of factories, gathered in Dickensian profusion on sidewalks, unloading coaches, or staggering under the weight of unruly bales – all the while dodging more polite persons taking center stage (Figures 1 and 2). The stylized composition of scenes of this kind – especially in England, ground zero of the industrial revolution – are often themselves iconic of an emerging semiotics of the moralizing bourgeois gaze, of an organization of space and social appearance that seeks to order the
8 See Images of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century European Streets;
https://www.bing.com/search?q=images%20of%20eighteenth%20and%20nineteenth%20century%20eur opean%20streets&qs=n&form=QBRE&=%25eManage%20Your%20Search%20History%25E&s, accessed 10 September 2022. Also Wood paving of the street of St. Louis; Wood paving of the street of St. Louis, America, illustration from the 19th century. (Photo by: Bildagenturonline/
Universal Images Group via Getty Images); https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/wood paving-of-the-street-of-st-louis-america-illustration-news-photo/938606522?adppopup=true, accessed 21 September, 2022; “Berlin Street Life at Christmas Time: Stocl Illustration. Getty Images; https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/berlin-street-life-at-christmas-time-royalty-free illustration/1290864972, Accessed 23 September 2022; see Also “Happy New Yesr! Our image of the week is from 19th century Australia.”Bing.com/images;
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=pYI9VtVW&id=CA9F14BC2FB5EAA80DAF4B8 AF0881A7F05C89BF5&thid=OIP.pYI9VtVWfyalmrOagopxbgHaFY&mediaurl=https%3A%2F%2, accessed 23 September 2022.
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seemingly spontaneous press of the urban crowd according to class-based priorities (Figure 3). As such, these images were designed both as representations and re-presentations: they were to be consumed for the most part by a newly self conscious spectator, at a comfortable personal distance from the close choreography of interdependent bodies across sharpening lines of class and gender on the teeming city streets.
The emerging structures and strictures of the bourgeois gaze became evident in works like Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a “Cyclopoedia” of street life.” A critical ethnography avant la letter, this account casts penetrating light on the complex physical contours of urban labor – above all, on the lumpen “frontline” workers who subsisted by performing unsavory but indispensable civic services for a more entitled public. They toiled in full view of that public: road sweepers energetically clearing the horse dung9 so that gentle folk might walk the thoroughfares in their fine clothes; or those who transported the listless elite bodies in sedan chairs or carted the copious possessions that marked the status of what Veblen (1899) called the “leisure class.” Note that the bodies that did not labor performed — in their evident languidness, their lack of urgency — their independence from such toil; though work and worklessness were conditions of each other’s possibility, in true Hegelian fashion. Yet upper-class persons appeared self-sufficient, as if their immediate material context left no mark on them
9 Of course, it was not only human bodies that were caught up in the intense productivity of early industrial production, although I am unable to deal with this matter here.
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and offered no resistance to their self-willed activity. Working bodies, in contrast, were immersed in their physical surroundings, fair and foul.
Mayhew provides painstaking details of the essential work of the sewer hunters, waste collectors, and costermongers who provided for the necessities of urban life, from food, umbrellas, and religious tracts to dog collars, razors, and rat poison. Many of them had recently been expelled from the countryside. They lived hand to mouth, as it were. “Of all modes of obtaining subsistence,” Mayhew noted (1861:6), “street-selling is the most precarious… it is painful to think of the hundreds belonging to this class in the metropolis who are reduced to starvation by three- or four-days’ successive rain.” He noted, too, how the intimate dependence of these bodies on close contact with the material world imprints itself on them: the walnut vender who “lifts her brown-stained fingers to her mouth, (p.9), the “black man half-clad in white” who is “shivering in the cold with tracts in his hand” (p.10).
The workers themselves make plain that they are never fully separable from the settings and substances they subsist on – the stinking mud, coal, and soot (“it’s a roughish smell at first, but nothink near so bad as you think”)10. As they act on the environment it acts on them in return, infusing their beings with qualities that became heritable markers of their abjection.11 But, as such, they
10 “Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor,” Mary L Shannon, Discovering Literature: Romantic & Victorians, 15 May 2014, British Museum; https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and victorians/articles/henry-mayhews-london-labour-and-the-london-poor, accessed 11 September 2022. 11 See “Can the legacy of trauma be passed down the generations?” Martha Henriques, BBC Future, 26th March 2019; https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics, accessed 6 May 2023.
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also merge into the material background against which the new bourgeois subject strikes postures. They are not accorded the conceit of autonomous agency attributed to those subjects, whose reified bodies – despite their dependence on various forms of labor — appear as independent loci of world making (Harvey 2000:118). Informal manual workers, in contrast, disappear into a form of production that has no “identifiable beginning or end” in time or space (Scarry, above). It is toil that usurps their entire identity as persons.
Mayhew’s account was said to have “fascinated and overwhelmed” the middle-class Victorian public. “Suddenly a strange new world was opened up to them, right under their noses,”12 a world of which they had “less knowledge than of the most distant tribes of the earth.”13 This was despite these menial workers “being there” in the everyday environs of the urban bourgeoise; the pictorial realism of the day ensured tha these variously servile bodies were depicted, but purely responding to the wants and whims of those who commanded their labor (Figure 4).14 In what sense, then, are they being seen as if for the first time? And
12 “Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor,” Mary L Shannon, Discovering Literature: Romantic & Victorians, 15 May 2014, British Museum; https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and victorians/articles/henry-mayhews-london-labour-and-the-london-poor, accessed 11 September 2022.
13 According to the 1851 census, for example, personal servants amounted to one in 18 of the population. See “ London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew,” Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Guardian, 15 October 2010; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/16/rereading-henry-mayhew-london poor, accessed 20 September 2022. 14 See “A Poor Existence,” Bing Images/ Victorian Street Life;
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=417wmMpz&id=107691340B3C9BB16107E29 5A6E1B587C9A715C8&thid=OIP.417wmMpzJZK7YN3dedUgBAAAAA&mediaurl=https%3A%, accessed 24 September 2022.
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why the association with “distant tribes” as objects of an exoticizing colonial gaze?
As this suggests, the laboring body did not disappear. It was hiding in plain sight, toiling within the seams of an expanding imperial fabric, disavowed by a liberal theology of world-making that discounted the exploitative dependence of the rising bourgeoisie on working classes at home (Williams 1973). These workers were also tied – largely by veiled metaphorical allusion – to other, even less acknowledged sweated labor in the colonies, linking the supply chains that fed the appetites and affordances of the new metropolitan consumers in Europe. At the same time, philanthropic discourse would come to speak, quite explicitly, of the “jungles” and “Africa’s” that housed British workers in the slums of industrializing cities (Hebdige 1988:20; Figure 5).15
Later scholars would cast more light on the dispersed sites of imperial production, materialized in iconic domestic commodities: the tea leaves plucked by nimble-fingered women on the plantations of West Bengal (Chatterjee 2001); the sugar processed by enslaved, then indentured workers in the British Caribbean (Mintz 1985); the cotton that linked immiserated child and adult labor
15 Moralizing images of depraved underclass city life were not infrequent in Victorian publications, often deploying the device of holding a penetrating light up to the dark squalor of so-called family depravity. See Gustave Dore, “Dudley Street – Seven Dials,” 1872;
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=Ijc8WEPZ&id=9395C59EF0D02BB92B34ACBD 1653CFDD85BD458E&thid=OIP.Ijc8WEPZgmCN54mLYZo03AHaFh&mediaurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.co m%2Foriginals%2Ff8%2F40%2F58%2Ff840580faa4c8390cc1349925f7e155c.jpg&exph=1194&expw=1600 &q=etchings+of+victorian+poverty%2c+london&simid=607993187205282082&form=IRPRST&ck=5869A8 A2075DB4103C8C1DDEF58132C3&selectedindex=20&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0&vt=0&sim=11&cdnurl=http s%3A%2F%2Fth.bing.com%2Fth%2Fid%2FR.22373c5843d982608de7898b619a34dc%3Frik%3DjkW9hd3P Uxa9rA%26pid%3DImgRaw%26r%3D0, accessed 24 September 2022.
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across the fields and factories in nineteenth century America, India, and the Pacific Islands (Beckert 2014); the rubber, tobacco, and rice produced by fractious estate labor of North Sumatra (Stoler 1985). All these were laboring bodies rendered invisible in the metropole by the diffuse geography of colonial production.
In the British metropole, a vertical stratigraphy of corporeal space, value, and virtue served to organize the bourgeois gaze, a politics of visibility archly captured in its early moments by another set of representations of corporate city life: the pictures of Hogarth, in particular, his famous engraving, “The Industrious ‘Prentice: Lord Mayor of London,” from his series Industry and Idleness (1747; Figure 3). The scene depicts Francis Goodchild, the new Lord-Mayor, on the day of his inauguration, ceremoniously riding in the State Coach through the London streets. This public display is the crowning moment of a cautionary tale, captured in twelve scenes, in which vice is punished and virtue is rewarded.16
In the opening tableau, two apprentices stand before their looms, one clean of face and jacket, with spindle in hand, surrounded by pious texts and virtuously focused on his work: the other, with swarthy face and soiled dress, snoozes on the job, a mug of ale on his loom and a cat playing with the spindle
(Figure 6). As the story unfolds, the first apprentice’s steadfast labor is recognized. He is promoted to overseer, marries the boss’s daughter, and
16 See “ The Industrious ‘Prentice Lord-Mayor of London,” History of Art,
https://www.thehistoryofart.org/william-hogarth/industrious-prentice-lord-mayor-of-london/, accessed 20 September 2022.
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becomes a partner in his textile firm; in sum, he embodies the cliché of the mobile, upwardly nubile, canny entrepreneur. Sober industry permits him to climb the social ladder out of sweated labor while his idle counterpart, consumed by his own appetites, descends into debauchery and crime, ending on the gallows. Printed copies of these scenes were sold to the public for one shilling each, aimed at a wider, less wealthy market than Hogarth’s earlier works (Paulson 1965:19). In the final engraving, the face of the unsubtly named Goodchild peers out of the window of a sumptuous coach, under an oversize top hat. He holds a large sword of office and looks down impassively on the swarming, riotous crowd below. Elevated high above the street, the richly clad city elite observe the scene in postures of languid amusement, each figure carefully spaced at a discrete distance from the next and framed by a window or canopy, secure within the domain of private property. Only the servants, who stand behind them, cluster indistinguishably, their physical individuality rendered indistinct in the shadows.
Those servile bodies, both as lived and represented, would remain largely occluded within the nineteenth-century European world. They were pushed out of sight into the private, feminized domain of domestic service and reproductive labor, “downstairs” in the bourgeois household (Crain et al 2016; Daniels 1987). Or, if they toiled as wage laborers in Mayhew’s “undiscovered country” of the urban poor, they existed in “labyrinthine obscurity”17 within the city, only fleetingly laid bare by the unsparing searchlight shone on them by social critics and moral reformers like Greenwood, Dickens, Gaskell, Gissing, and Engels. Often styling
17 George Gissing, Introduction to Oliver Twist (1900: xvii); Williams (1973:224).
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themselves as explorers – vide James Greenwood’s travels in The Wilds of London (1874; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:315) — they focused above all on the degraded material conditions that ‘housed’ the working body in the factory, alley, or tenement; sordid circumstances, these, incapable of nurturing virtuous human life. Children were depicted as cavorting (rather than sleeping) at night, wandering untended amidst drunken adults, or begging shamelessly in the streets (Figure 6). Such “pauper colonies,” wrote Beames (1852:2-4) produced “pariahs…of the body social.”
But perhaps the most damning portrayal of the effects of alienated labor on the reproduction of human life lay in depictions of the working female body, in which production and nurture were in direct contradiction. Engels (1969;165) writes:
That the general mortality among young children must be increased by the employment of the mothers is self-evident and is placed beyond all doubt by notorious facts. Women often return to the mill three or four days after confinement, leaving the baby, of course; in the dinner-hour they must hurry home to feed the child and eat something, and what sort of suckling that can be is also evident …The mother goes to the mill shortly after five o’clock in the morning, and comes home at eight at night; all day the milk pours from her breasts, so that her clothing drips with it…[O]ften wet through to the skin, and obliged to work in that state.” 18
18 See Engels 1969:165.
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One is reminded, here, of Aiwa Ong’s (2010) haunting account of “Mother’s Milk” as it signified the endangered capacity of the female body to reproduce and nurture in Khmer communities in war and exile (see Hunt 2005 for comparable African instances).
While in Britain, child labor peaked with nineteenth-century
industrialization, it also triggered mounting calls for regulation as the century wore on.19 Childhood was increasingly being viewed as a state of innocent pre maturity, properly given over to socialization and nurture at a safe distance – at least in middle-class homes — from the workplace. Again, reformists like Dickens pressed their plight on an unseeing readership, the body of the juvenile laborer becoming anathema to a morally nourishing domestic order. Engels again:
Children and young people who are employed in transporting coal and iron-stone all complain of being overtired… It is constantly happening that children throw themselves down on the stone hearth or the floor as soon as they reach home, fall asleep at once without being able to take a bite of food, and have to be washed and put to bed while asleep; it even happens that they lie down on the way home, and are found by their parents late at night asleep on the road.20
19 See “What is child labour?”. International Labour Organization. 2012;
https://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang–en/index.htm, accessed 3 October 2022.
20 Engels 1969:167.
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The intensifying competition for cheap labor and limited, low-cost skills pitted the working body against the machine,21 making the former the residuum of the latter. It dismembered the human person by assigning worth to ever more discrete body parts and tasks needed to complement the capacities of mechanical manufacture. The full-bodied male strength that was useful at an earlier moment of production is thus made redundant by steam power, to be replaced, as if by nature, by nimbler, cheaper fingers that stand in for whole persons. This makes evident a never-ending process of separating value from waste, a form of dehumanization that is inherent, argues Melissa Wright (after Marx;1999)22 argues to capitalist wealth creation.
The human labour, involved in both spinning and weaving, consists chiefly in piecing broken threads, as the machine does all the rest. This work requires no muscular strength, but only flexibility of finger. Men are, therefore, not only not needed for it, but actually, by reason of the greater muscular development of the hand, less fit for it than women and children, and are, therefore, naturally almost superseded by them. Hence, the more the use of the arms, the expenditure of strength, can be transferred to steam or waterpower, the fewer men need be employed; and as women
21 This process is immortalized in the “Ballad of John Henry,” one of the first ever recorded country songs in the US, in which a man with a hammer pits his strength against the newly introduced steam-drill. The song is thought to refer to a black prisoner in the Virginia State Penitentiary, sent to work on the C&W Railroad in 1866. The Ballad of John Henry Documentary; https://balladofjohnhenry.com/true-story/, accessed 18 November 2022.
22 Wright (1999) examines the rapid labor turnover of Mexican women working in maquiladora factories near Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Here, she argues, there is a common image of women as models of capital with oscillating worth, their value decreasing over time because it is held never to grow into skill.
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and children work more cheaply, and in these branches better than men, they take their places.23
The famed missionary David Livingstone, soon to enter our story, was himself once a child piecer in a Scottish mill.
Discrimination – by gender, age, physical dis/ability, and so on – is built into the core workings of capitalism as it sizes up the human body to maximize the surplus value it can extract. Race, too, was becoming an ever more salient vector as English industrialists sought to discount labor and cultivate a growing “reserve” army of workers” – structurally available, but otherwise out of sight. Most immediately employed were Irish immigrants, held to be of different physical constitution and willing to work for lower wages than their English counterparts.24
Those who sought to draw the attention of a distracted urban public to the momentous upheaval occurring just beyond their lines of sight often enlisted the signifying power of the body to amplify their call. Dickens was especially adept at mobilizing corporeal qualities to highlight the conditions of labor exploitation. Thus, his account of the fictitious Coketown in Hard Times, whose brick facades were like “the painted face of a savage,” and whose monstrous steam-engine “worked monotonously up and down…in a state of melancholy madness.” Again, we find masked reference to an occluded, racialized imperium in the dehumanization of local populations, whom Dickens identifies as the
23 Engels 1969:109. 24 Engels 1969:81-2.
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unacknowledged source of the town’s real wealth.25 Coketown’s polluted rivers and “interminable serpents of smoke” make plain the cynical corruption of the once nurturing relationship between laboring bodies and their natural environment.
At the same time, the European countryside became a more palpable foil to the industrializing city, notwithstanding the rapid disappearance of a traditional peasantry and the growth of agrarian capitalism (Williams 1973:2). Here pastoral nostalgia served as a lament for the vanishing of unalienated work. Writers like Hardy paid homage to a lost world of harmony, fulfilment, and plenitude vested in the image of a sustained symbiosis of homo faber and natural fecundity, that calle agrarian labor back into visibility:
What [Giles] had forgotten was that there was [sic] a thousand young fir trees to be planted in a neighboring spot which had been cleared by the wood-cutters, and that he had arranged to plant them with his own hands. He had a marvelous power of making trees grow. Although he would seem to shovel in the earth quite carelessly, there was a sort of sympathy between himself and the fir, oak, or beech that he was operating on, so that the roots took hold of the soil in a few days.26
25 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Chapter 5:16-17. 26 Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders Chapter 8: 99; chrome
extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://freeclassicebooks.com/Thomas%20Hardy/Novels/ The%20Woodlanders.pdf, accessed 28 September 2022.
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Yet the nineteenth century countryside was also the mise-en-scene for disturbingly dystopic images of an immiserated population of landless rural workers, epitomized by bodies broken in servitude.
Look at the arm of a woman labouring in the harvest field – thin, muscular, sinewy, black almost, it tells of continued strain. After much of this she becomes pulled out of shape, the neck loses its roundness and shows the sinews, the chest flattens…There is so much in the wheat, there are books of meditation in it…Behind these beautiful aspects comes the reality of human labor — hours upon hours of heat and strain…. The wheat is beautiful, but human life is labor.27
This was Richard Jefferies, an increasingly radicalized chronicler of the English countryside, in 1885. The sylvan image of the wheat, in this account, seems sustained by the fat drawn from the laboring body, that loses its integrity, its capacity “to be seen” as fully human. Want is more, the blackening of the worker links her in the flash of an image to other racialized bodies, simultaneously despoiled by toil in the colonies. By this stage, only a small percentage of the agricultural products consumed in England were produced at home (Williams 1973:2). Why do they toil so? Jefferies mused. “Because Hunger and Thirst drive them: these are …the whips worse than the knout, which lie at the back of Capital and give it power.”28 As with Marx’s “hidden abode,” Jefferies seeks to
27 Richard Jefferies, 1885, in The Open Air, cited in Williams 1973:194-195. 28 Richard Jefferies, “Thoughts on the Labour Question,”Pall Mall Gazette, 10 November, 1891; http://www.richardjefferiessociety.org/p/articles.html, accessed 5 January 2023.
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render visible the shrouded dynamics of expropriation that compel ostensibly free rural workers to labor in the field almost to the point of extinction. Hidden behind the fetishized images of picturesque rural life – the rippling wheat, the healthful grain – lies the capitals’ lash.
Relevant, too, to the imaginary apprehension of working bodies, both rural and urban, was the popular genre termed “supernatural realism” in nineteenth century Britain (Smajić, 2009): the folk myths of poltergeists that took possession of repressed young female servants to imbue the ordinary objects in their care with false life, thus to wreak havoc on domestic order.29 Or the ghosts in popular Victorian fiction, like Dickens’ Jacob Marley (A Christmas Carol), a figure eternally tortured by the weight of what might be called “dead labor:” cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses. Or Mrs. Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story,” spinning spooky yarns about the ill-gotten wealth of the family to which she was bound in servitude. Or, most epically, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in which a foreign aristocrat, who lives by sucking the blood of the living, makes his home in Britain to create a new order of material beings.
As Franco Moretti (1982:73) points out, Dracula is the very embodiment of Marx’s image of capital “which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.” He has no substantive body: he “is an Un-Dead…impelled towards continuous growth”
29 Assault, Robbery, and Murder: The Dark History of “Bedsheet Ghosts,” Lucas Reilly, October 20, 2017, Mental Floss; https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/507440/assault-robbery-and-murder-dark-history bedsheet-ghosts, accessed 29 November 2022; Ghost stories: why the Victorians were so spookily good at them,” Kira Cochrane, The Guardian, 23 December 2013;
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/23/ghost-stories-victorians-spookily-good, accessed 29 November 2022.
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in his adopted home. His manic monopolism terrifies the local, ostensibly gentler brand of bourgeois capitalism that lies to itself about the monster it has created, and “hides” its factories and extractive institutions beneath dignifying feudal architecture and pious family values (p.75). Here we find an uncanny return to capitalism’s hidden abode, and to a prefiguration, perhaps, of other kinds of specters – like the zombie, or the devil’s bargain (Taussig 1981), or proletarian spirit possession (Ong 1985) in other theaters of imperial production.
The supplement: the body of colonial labor
I have already noted that the presence of coerced, ethnicized
labor in nineteenth-century England is evident not only in the
swelling Irish workforce, but as a subliminal presence, in the public consciousness, of enslaved and indentured black bodies toiling in imperial fields elsewhere: cutting the cane, picking the cotton, and
plucking the tea leaves that had become staple commodities of everyday Victorian life. Modern states have always drawn heavily on the surplus value of hominem sacri, the bare life of immiserated, non-citizens, populations both unfree and often unwaged (Gordon 2020; Denning 2010; Robinson 1983; Federici 1975) that
supplement the wealth of nations. Alienated labor is inherently a condition of displacement, an existential and spatio-temporal exile from visibly rooted, self-possessed being. The ground zero of such
23
estranged labor, of course, was the Atlantic slave trade, which was integral – both structurally and historically — to the evolution of
capitalism as a planetary system. “Black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois (1935:10-11), enabled “new dreams of power and visions of empire.” What is more, as Amy Dru Stanley (2012:119) points out, “the “most intimate human relationship” lay at the heart of the connection between American slavery and the global economic transformation of the nineteenth century: the reproductive labor of black women in breeding chattel slaves for profit.
For abolitionists, both religious and secular, slavery was the original sin against the ethic of liberal humanism. It confused sentient with bestial labor, and persons with chattels to be owned, inherited, sold. Yet classic liberalism remained decidedly ambivalent on the matter. Thus Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government (1690:27), famously declared that:
“[E]very man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”
But Locke also invested in the African slave trade and advocated, consequentially, for the inalienable rights of Carolinian planters over their human property.
24
For Christian abolitionists, like the Nonconformist churchmen who bore the message of emancipation into the Southern African interior in the1800s, the task was to turn the “evil traffic” into civilizing commerce, grounded in the gospel of free labor. Work that was voluntarily given and justly requited was the prime medium of salvation, the means to turn heathen superstition into liberating truth, righteous personhood, virtuous ambition (Roscoe 1787-8:31). In many ways, the aim was to recreate an idealized Christian peasantry — rapidly vanishing from the English countryside – in the African “wilderness.”
Mission stations, like the one established in the 1840’s by David Livingstone in what was to become Bechuanaland, were microcosms of a colonial order of production. Above all, they were designed to tutor African bodies in the motives, habits, and ethical orientation of honest toil (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:198). The Tswana people to whom Livingstone had attached himself were agrarian pastoralists, living in complexly structured settlements that centered on a court of hereditary rulers, surrounded by concentric bands of fields and cattle posts. To the evangelical eye, the native division of labor was “topsy turvy:” herds were the prized property of adult males, tended by younger men and Sarwa (” Bushman”) serfs; i.e. ethnically marked vassals, who also rendered the spoils of the hunt, but were themselves debarred from appearing within the bounds of settlement in the daytime. But it was women who quite evidently did the bulk of what the Europeans considered to be male work – cultivation, brewing, and house building — while manly occupations, the stuff of politics, law, and ritual, were largely invisible to the evangelical eye. As Mary Moffat (Philip
25
[1828] 1969 ,2:189), missionary wife and mother-in-law of David Livingstone, put it;
Picture to yourself tender and gentle women…bending their delicate forms, tearing the rugged earth…dragging immense loads of wood over the burning plains, wherewith to erect their houses, thus bearing the double weight of the curse on both sexes.
Another European observer dubbed these women the local “working class” (Lichtenstein [1807] 1973:77), underlining how this productive system seemed to invert the gender logic of its contemporary European counterpart. Not only were the women doing men’s work; the toll taken by their toil was shamelessly visible. Thus, while in some ways Moffat’s account anticipates Jefferies’ critical exposé of the blackened woman of the English countryside, there are telling differences. The latter was depicted as wholly consumed by servitude, while African women, despite their exertions, seemed quite well in control of the circumstances in which they toiled. Contemporary accounts describe the forceful response when their fields were invaded by cattle and sheep, deemed the responsibility of men. The women — including recent converts to Christianity — set about hacking the beasts to death; though their action resulted in their being “cut off” from the church, their response was seen as fully within their rights by traditional authorities (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:130).
African women also offended the naked mission eye by being brazenly underclad as they went about their business.
26
Unsurprisingly, the evangelists sought to “domesticate” them. They urged them to don the dark, durable garb the Christians associated with female modesty, and to confine themselves to the secluded, “private” abode of dutiful housewifery – in precisely the manner that a rising bourgeois society in Europe sought to disappear women into the moralized interior of the home. As they were coaxed to move “indoors” and pick up the broom and needle, men were encouraged to take to the fields and assume command of the plough; in short, to accomplish the “revolution” required to turn cultivation into a profitable business (Campbell 1822, 2:60).
Biblical horticultural idiom (“a rich harvest of immortal souls;” Moffat 1842;588) was harnessed here to the rationalizing terms of pious ambition – the latter primed by the power of “British commodities” to stir bodily appetites (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:24) and whet the taste for accumulating wealth. These commodities – the tools, fabrics, blankets, and household utensils produced by unseen working people a world away — were displayed in the windows of tradesmen on the mission stations to kindle a “sacred hunger” (Unsworth 1992). And to stimulate industriousness (Philip [1828] 1969,1: 204f; Mackenzie 1887,1:31). For, as one European observer lamented, “there [was] much to encourage idleness in native life, such as the absence of any motive for working” (Lloyd 1895:169). Yet again, a largely invisible matrix of
27
value-generating transactions was set in motion to link the newly laboring, desiring, consuming bodies at the centers and peripheries of Empire.
At issue, on the Southern African frontier, was not merely the reorganization of an existing division of labor or the refiguring of the semiotics of a lived material realm to mimic the binary world of Euro modernity: male versus female, public versus private, visible versus hidden. What the crusading imperialists proposed was a sacralized economy in which ‘honest’ commerce would draw African converts into the universal Christian commonwealth, both in this world and the next. “Society” became the masculinized world of public transaction and personal appearance, the domain of church and market, whereas “home” became the secluded, private sphere of female consumption and nurture. At the core of this moral configuration was the laboring body, engine of purposive expenditure in acts of production and reproduction, processes that turned physical effort into tangible evidence of virtue – the currency of civility and salvation. While the mills of gods ground slowly, they ground exceedingly fine. For God saw the otherwise invisible toil of the devout worker, and in teaching converts their labor theory of value, the evangelists shone a spotlight on pious effort.
28
Hard work also yielded the small change of everyday life in a commodified world. Protestant evangelists were avid agents of monetization as the material recompense for “proper” work in the world outside the home (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:170). The good Christian life was immersed in a moral economy of earning and spending, with money as a universal equivalent, making all things fungible, urbane, graspable. But this pragmatic ontology, which the evangelists hoped would displace the shadowy specters of “superstition,” was to prove no more plainly transparent.
Here, again, a particular understanding of the laboring body was the key: the dictum that all men — in the marked, gendered sense — were equally in possession of their labor power and could alike turn it into the currency of life in a commodified world. The mission gardens served as the first, exemplary sites for teaching Africans “proper” work as fairly recompensed, self-possessed, “rational” productive activity. David Livingstone (1940:92; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997;134) describes one such “object lesson:”
We have a man and his wife as servants, and a girl as nursemaid. The man is waggoner driver and everything else he can do, his wife a servant of all work. These form our establishment. But they are not all we require. Grinding corn, baking, washing, etc. are done by calling an assistant from the
29
[African] town… These supernumeraries30 are taught reading as well as washing etc…They are paid in beads, a variety of which costs 3/- a pound.
These employees were learning the rudiments of what counted as labor: that it was a commodity to be husbanded, voluntarily
brokered, subject to a contract, and worthy of just recompense. Livingstone’s account also makes plain, however, that the bead currency used along the colonial frontier at the time bore no real
relation to the value of the services rendered. But the conceit of fair trade, calculation, and accumulation, part of a Christian economy of grace, was premised on the assumption that labor performed in righteous service was inalienable; it was the means of redemption. But while the idyll of a self-regulating, devout peasantry was foundational to the early evangelists (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:75), they themselves were products of a more universally capitalized world.
In that world, converts were urged to invest in the surplus
virtue generated by pious wage work – its theology concealed the value extracted from laboring bodies in the expanding imperial economy. Here money was the hallowed means of transacting value: before colonial commerce made cash available in the
30 This term, with its connotation of extra, or unskilled help might express Livingstone’s slight guilt at his large staff, justified here by the fact that these servants were being educated and paid.
30
Southern African interior, the missionaries went so far as to mint their own coinage so as to establish a semi-autonomous regional market in goods and services (Campbell 1813:256). They even encouraged children in the mission schools to “pay” their fees by assigning monetary value to eggs and firewood.31
As noted, the idealized British yeomanry was already the stuff of nostalgia: the independent peasant in England, “much mourned ever since they disappeared” (Mill [1848] 1929,1:256), had been more or less supplanted both by local commercial farmers and by exploitable agrarian counterparts at the colonized peripheries overseas. The fate of laboring bodies at home and abroad was intertwined long before the era of globalization. Already then, in agriculture and in industry, those bodies were being used to
discount each other in the endless quest to render labor cheap, abject, and ethnically devalued — more or less unaware of itself as part of an imperial order of class relations. Meanwhile, in South Africa, most black farmers — including the minority most immediately affected by the “civilizing” mission — would end up as part of a reserve army of unskilled mine or agrarian labor. Or in various forms of semi-feudal service in the intimate reaches of colonial domestic reproduction. Nadine Gordimer (1981:1) writes of the daily ritual that
31 Hodgson, Wesleyan Methodist Mission Society (1829-31) Bootchuana Country: Extract of a letter from Mr. Hodgson, dated Bootchnaap, November 24,, 1828. Missionary Notices Relating Principally to the Foreign Missions, 6 (164):120.
31
woke white South Africans, whether it was in the governor’s residence, in commercial lodgings, or in the ‘master bedroom en suite:’ “ the tea try in black hands, smelling of Lifebouy soap.”
Of course, these colonial regimens were often eluded, refused, or remade in queer ways. My purpose here is to explore the overall thrust of various moments in the interpolation of racially marked bodies into the modern capitalist imperium. Nonconformists like Livingstone (1857:36f.) denounced the Transvaal Boer settlers for forcing Batswana into servitude on their farms. There is plentiful evidence to suggest that most Africans preferred to toil independently beyond the market. But some of them appear to have been very willing to work in properly paid jobs. Even before industrialization sped colonial overrule in the late nineteenth century, intensifying the quest for tractable black labor, mission observers noted that their converts had begun to travel to the colony in search of paid work. “Experienced capitalists,” they said, regarded mission stations as “great depots where labor may be obtained” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:199).
All too soon, settler encroachment, overrule, taxation, and the intentional undermining of the African peasantry would drive ever more men, women, and children to sell their labor on farms, in small towns, at the mines, and in the industrial conurbations surrounding
32
them (Bundy 1979). The influx of migrant workers into towns and public space would increasingly be regulated by legislation: curfews, vagrancy laws, master-servant statutes, and the infamous “pass system” were designed to make black workers vanish into crowded compounds, dormitories, and townships, or into servants’ quarters tucked behind white-owned homes. While race was the dominant principle of expropriating resources and labor from indigenous populations in settler colonies, race and class overlapped almost completely (Wolpe 1972; Fanon 1963:39). Colonial capitalism operated in terms of a double in/visibility, locating the brute alienation of black labor – the not fully guiltless open secret – beyond the scope of the white bourgeois gaze. As JM Coetzee (1988:5) has noted, white writing in South Africa tended to assuage its settler insecurities in pastoral landscapes which “occlud[ed] ..black labor from the scene: the back man becomes a shadowy presence flitting across the stage now and then…” Even celebrated exceptions to this stance, Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country ([1944]1958:1), for instance, express the ultimate brutality of colonial capitalism by way of the impact of land alienation and labor migration on the despoiled countryside, now bereft of those who once cultivated it: once “lovely beyond the singing of it,” it now stands desolate, overworked, the earth “torn away like flesh,” no longer able to nurture its former occupants.
33
But in the colonial context as well, it was left to the popular mythic imagination to grasp the full dehumanization of the laboring body. The corporeal effects of toil on black wage workers in South Africa was made especially evident in the poetics of ordinary communication (van Onselen 1973; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:157). Early migrants from Mozambique, for instance, spoke of the Witwatersrand mines as places where witches (baloyi) extracted their “life essence,” forcing them to toil unseen beneath the earth for days at a time like dlukula (living dead), existing on a diet of mud (Harries 1994:221). Serpell (2019431) describes the ”slave with no will,” a “thing beyond the living” that haunts the history of her native “Zombia.” It is not merely that such labor is coerced. It transforms the worker into an alien being, one whose work is “mortifying” (Marx 1977:71) rather than self-constructive. In that regard, early Tswana proletarians developed a contrast between the domain of wage work, referred to as mmėrėkò (from the Dutch werk) as against tiro, socially contextualized, intersubjective action of the sort that built social relations (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:169). They spoke of the way in which contract labor reduced men to draft animals, even to “tinned fish.” This last image captures the notorious spatial congestion and regimentation of the mine hostels in which workers were enclosed, sleeping in bunks like sardines in a can. Note the flash of insight in this image: as the lid is momentarily drawn back it reveals the hidden abode of value extraction, of existence in a state of invisibility, of living death.
* * *
34
And so, we return once more to the core issues that animate this essay: the nature of the laboring human body as it takes shape under the conditions of modern industrial capitalism. That body, I have argued, presents a paradox
both in life and in theory. It is, at once, the fons et origo of selfhood and human world-making. And yet somehow it also remains obscure, often invisible – at least in its laboring capacity — to the liberal bourgeois eye, in which everything seems to take place “on the surface and in view of all men ” (above: XX), with a little help, perhaps, of a “hidden hand.” This paradox, I suggest, is inherent under conditions in which work becomes monetized and hence participates in the nature of the commodity form itself: that is, when it obscures the essence of its own production as an object of value.
Tracking, ethnographically, the ways in which the working body moves in and out of visibility and social reckoning enables us to cast light on the specific shape of this process in particular times and places. The hidden secret of how human work produces wealth might elude liberal ontology. But it has frequently bodied forth, over the long history of modern capitalism, in the estranged recognition of collective fantasies about the dark process that turns straw into gold. And labor into objectified value. While my story is located in the context of early modern British industrialism and its imperial backstage, it could as easily be told in the myriad other locations in which capitalism — as an ever evolving, diversifying social formation – is embodied in ordinary existence.
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