Kevin Floyd Automatic Subjets

Historical Materialism 24.
2 (2016) 61–86
brill.com/hima
Automatic Subjects
Gendered Labour and Abstract Life
Kevin Floyd
Department of English, Kent State University
kfloyd@kent.edu
Abstract
Critical analysis of the biotechnological reproduction of biological life increasingly

emphasises the role of value-producing labour in biotechnologically reproductive pro-
cesses, while also arguing that Marx’s use of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘value’ is inadequate
to the critical scrutiny of these processes. Focusing especially on the reformulation of
the value-labour relation in recent work in this area by Melinda Cooper and Catherine
Waldby, this paper both critiques this reformulation and questions the explanatory
efficacy of the category ‘labour’ in this context. Emphasising the contemporary global
expansion of capital relative to value-producing labour – specifically, the expansion
of fictitious capital and debt on the one hand, and of global surplus populations on
the other – it argues that this reformulation misrepresents the mediated capacities of
capital as the immediate capacities of labour. This reformulation, moreover, is indic-
ative of broader tendencies in the contemporary theorisation of labour, tendencies
exemplified by autonomist Marxism.
Keywords
labour – value – gender – social reproduction – biotechnology – debt – surplus popu-

lations – autonomist Marxism
I would like to thank the co-editors of this special section of essays, and two anonymous
readers, for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.
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62 Floyd
Feminist scholars, Marxist-Feminists among them, have repeatedly anal-

ysed the contemporary market-mediation of gendered, socially reproductive
labour, its contemporary absorption into value circuits. The reproductive-
labour debates of the seventies and eighties proceeded largely with reference
to a Keynesian welfare-state model of the family wage, in which such tasks
as childbearing, childcare, and housework were unwaged, and indeed were
not recognised as labour at all, though they were essential conditions for the
reproduction of labour-power and therefore the production of surplus value.1
So as the long, slow dismantlement of the welfare state continues, those social-
reproduction functions we tend to associate with it – not only state provision
for education, health care and unemployment benefits, but also the gendered
labour that serves to reproduce labour-power – have become more imme-
diately, directly commodified. This includes, in the global North, an uneven
shift away from unpaid domestic labour, its offloading to precarious forms of
service labour, especially migrant labour, and indeed a voluminous relocation
from South to North of labouring women, including nannies, maids, and sex-
workers. As the socially reproductive demands imposed on family units have
increased, even as the family’s ability to meet those demands has been under-
cut, we have been witnessing a kind of extraction or expropriation of repro-
ductive labour itself from some regions of the globe to others.2
In this context, this essay examines recent critical discussions of a con-
temporary, international expropriation of what these discussions sometimes
call biologically reproductive labour. Here we are speaking of biological repro-
duction as facilitated by biotechnology, one of the most capital-intensive
industries on the planet. Recent anthropological work of the kind I will be
considering describes the way in which ‘female biological material’ is drawn
into international, biotechnological value circuits, and identifies an emergent
‘biomedical mode of reproduction’, a mode that includes gestational surrogacy
performed in the South for affluent consumers in the North, as well as the cir-
culation of reproductive tissues (oocytes, foetal tissue, umbilical-cord blood)
for stem-cell industries – a circulation that, for all its complexity, also tends to
1 See, e.g., Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 2012; Endnotes 2013; Vogel 2013. Fortunati 1995
suggests that reproductive labour, far from being a mere precondition of surplus value’s pro-
duction, is itself productive of value. For an arresting critical reconsideration of Fortunati,
see Gonzalez 2013. For a useful brief sketch of the reproductive-labour debates, see Ferguson
and McNally 2013, pp. xviii–xxiii.
2 See, e.g., Bakker 2003; Chang 2000; Sassen 2000, 2002; Ferguson and McNally 2014; Rosewarne
2012.
Historical Materialism 24.2 (2016) 61–86

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Automatic Subjects 63
move internationally in one general direction, from poorer regions and nations
to wealthier ones.
These forms of circulation are part of a broader set of developments, emerg-
ing over the last few decades, in which biotechnologically isolated, manipu-
lated, and disseminated life is absorbed by capitalist processes. Examples
include the expanding commodification of transplantable organs; the specu-
lative pricing of genetic information; the impact of finance capital on contem-
porary drug development; the pharmaceutical industry’s growing demand for
ever larger numbers of clinical-trial subjects, which involves the international
outsourcing of clinical-trial participation; the burgeoning market for fertility
services for purposes of assisted reproduction; and the marketing of human
tissues for steadily expanding stem-cell industries.3 And just as these heavily
financialised industries and markets have grown right along with the finan-
cial sector itself, growth that intensifies the demand for biological services and
substances, what often motivates the living suppliers of these services and sub-
stances – gestational surrogates, clinical-trial subjects, suppliers of organs and
tissues – is frequently not only financial difficulty or outright poverty but, spe-
cifically, debt, an issue that will figure prominently in the following analysis. In
an important early account of the market for kidneys in India that underscores
the conditioning of this market by debt, Lawrence Cohen remarks that certain
‘urban slums and rural hinterlands’ have become ‘organ supply centers’.4
Public discourse on these developments has typically been framed in the
ethical terms of human rights and their violations,5 and the developments
themselves have tended to be regulated according to the institutional logic of
bioethics.6 The biological subjects from which various forms of reproductive
capacity are expropriated are viewed as donors, for example, notwithstand-
ing the fact that these ‘donors’ are routinely paid, and typically recruited from
those populations most likely to be confined to the informal or contingent
labour sectors. But critical research on these topics has tended more and
more to engage the problem of how to understand such processes in relation
to political-economic categories. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, for example, con-
siders the challenge an expanding global commodification of human organs
3 See, e.g., Cohen 2002; Scheper-Hughes 2002, 2005; Sunder Rajan 2006, 2012; Sunder Rajan
(ed.) 2012; Vora 2008; Anagnost 2011; Cooper and Waldby 2014; Dumit 2012.
4 Cohen 2002, p. 13. On the role of debt as a motivator to sell or rent one’s biological material or
capacity, see Scheper-Hughes 2002; Vora 2015.
5 Vora 2015, pp. 1–2.
6 Cooper and Waldby 2014, p. 7.
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64 Floyd
might pose to traditional understandings of commodification,7 while Amrita

Pande insists on viewing gestational surrogacy as labour, in direct response
to indignant discussions of gestational surrogacy which insist that women’s
reproductive labour has a natural, biological basis rather than a productive or
commercial one.8
But a significant, arresting complication raised by biotechnology’s interven-
tion in the terrain of biological reproduction is the question of how, exactly,
we are to understand the relation between living labour and biological life, or
what we might call labour’s ‘living’ dimension. Kalindi Vora frames her analy-
sis of gestational surrogacy in India in terms of ‘the exhaustion of biological
bodies and labours in India to extend life in the Global North’,9 and indeed
biotechnology’s impact on a broader social reproduction of life involves a
wider international expropriation of generative life as such, of ‘bodies’ as well
as ‘labours’. And this apparent disinterring of ‘life’ from ‘labour’, the differentia-
tion of the two such arguments tend either to imply or to explicitly address,
sometimes also raises questions about a third crucial category from which
labour is inseparable: value.
When capital circulation involves the circulation of biological substances
and biologically reproductive services, how are we to understand these
dynamics in relation to categories like value? In an explicit analogy with
surplus value, Kaushik Sunder Rajan proposes that biotechnology facilitates
entirely new ways of extracting ‘surplus life’ from South to North.10 In a simi-
lar vein, Ann Anagnost contends that surplus value now ‘takes on the form of
surplus life’, referring to the uneven ‘redistribution of life chances, in which
the life potential of one population is extracted and grafted onto another’.11 As
these claims suggest, this work not only draws frequently on Marx; it just as
frequently insists that an emergent, biomedical conjuncture requires a funda-
mental rethinking of the categories most basic to his analysis of capital. In a
study called Life as Surplus, Melinda Cooper remarks that ‘It is becoming dif-
ficult to think about the life sciences without invoking the traditional concepts
of political economy. . . . At the same time, however, the expansion of com-
mercial processes into “life itself” has a troubling effect on the self-evidence of
7 Scheper-Hughes 2002.
8 Pande 2014, p. 7.
9 Vora 2015, p. 13.
10 Sunder Rajan 2012.
11 Anagnost 2011, p. 214.

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traditional economic categories, compelling us to rethink their scope in dia-

logue with the life sciences.’12
Such arguments sometimes imply, and sometimes explicitly state, that we
need to rethink the very relation between life, labour and value – and that the
way the latter two categories, in particular, operate in Marx’s work is inadequate
to the critical scrutiny the biotechnological reproduction of life demands. The
present essay poses certain questions about the intermediations of these three
categories, and about whether this conjuncture really does require a funda-
mental rethinking of labour and value. How are we to understand biologically
reproductive labour, as it is being reshaped by biotechnological capital, as a
practice of labour? And how are we to understand the mediation of emer-
gent, biotechnological forms of biological reproduction by value? My consid-
eration of these questions will focus especially on ‘From Reproductive Work
to Regenerative Labour’, a three-chapter section in an enormously informa-
tive recent study, Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby’s Clinical Labor.13
This focus is not only because of space limitations. Though I will draw on
additional examples of research in this area, especially recent work by Vora,
this one study, I maintain, has much broader implications for current under-
standings of the value-labour relation. Sunder Rajan and Anagnost posit an
analogy between surplus value and surplus life: these arguments situate them-
selves in relation to Marx largely by establishing analogies with his categories.14
Cooper and Waldby go further than this. Not only do they critically reformu-
late the category of labour by placing particular emphasis on its ‘living’ part;
they also recognise that rethinking Marx’s account of labour will necessarily
require a simultaneous rethinking of his account of value, and they pursue
both in tandem.
And this is where the limits of this rethinking of Marx’s categories begin to
reveal themselves. In what follows, I will question the explanatory efficacy of
the category of labour in grasping contemporary practices of biotechnological
reproduction. I will suggest that this category occludes more than it illumi-
nates, that it actually understates the violence of contemporary capital accu-
mulation. I will maintain, specifically, that Cooper and Waldby’s reformulation
of the labour-value relation depicts the mediated capacities of biotechno-
logical capital as the immediate capacities of biotechnologically reproductive
labour. This reformulation projects a contemporary expansion of new forms of
value-producing labour, insisting for example that ‘forms of in vitro labour are
12 Cooper 2008, p. 3.

13 Cooper and Waldby 2014.
14 Sunder Rajan addresses this logic of analogy explicitly: see Sunder Rajan 2012, pp. 340–2.

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66 Floyd
increasingly central to the valorisation process of the post-Fordist economy’,15

precisely when, in an age of stagnant accumulation, value production more
generally, I argue, is contracting – when what is expanding is not value-pro-
ducing labour, but capital relative to value-producing labour, and when the
global reserve of surplus labour – a ‘form of life’ radically dissociated from the
valorisation process, and of which biotechnological capital increasingly makes
use – is expanding right along with it.
And what I will identify as a collapsing of the very distinction between labour
and capital in Cooper and Waldby’s analysis is, crucially, anything but atypical.
It is in fact indicative of broader tendencies in the contemporary theorisation
of labour, and of the limits of those tendencies. I will place particular emphasis
on the theoretical problematic this analysis shares with autonomist Marxism –
a tradition that also tends to collapse the distinction between capital and
labour, and that posits, with Cooper and Waldby, what I will call an abstraction
of life. ‘Life’, a category that has had a prominent place in theoretical conversa-
tions for some time now, is also a category I imagine Marx (furiously) calling
a ‘chaotic conception of the whole’. When Marx explains the nature of such
‘chaotic’ conceptions, the term ‘population’, a term very closely related to cer-
tain theoretical invocations of ‘life’, and a term which will be unavoidable in
the discussion that follows, is exhibit A.16 But for Marxism the question of life
may also be unavoidable, as Stuart Martin has recently suggested.17 In the pres-
ent, at least, and for reasons I will specify, this is undoubtedly the case – and
not only because an analytic abstraction of life has played such a large part in
contemporary critical accounts of labour.
The Analytic Subsumption of Capital by Labour
Affluent consumers in the North can now purchase reproductive biological

capacity, at relatively low rates, from unemployed or underemployed women
in places like China, India, and Eastern Europe. During, and very much charac-
teristic of, an earlier, welfare-state era, ‘tissue gift economies’ were established
in the North, an effort to pre-empt any subsumption of tissue circulation by
market exchange.18 But multiple forms of biotechnical reproduction are now

16 Marx 1973, p. 100. The term population is most closely associated with the Foucauldian
account of biopolitics.
17 Martin 2011.
18 Waldby and Mitchell 2006.

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internationalised and more explicitly, transparently commodified, especially

given the availability of female populations, often though not always in the
South, with a relative dearth of income options. The gestational surrogacy
market in India, for example, a market Pande describes as ‘flourishing’,19 serves
Indian elites, but is also expanding its service to consumers abroad, an expan-
sion consistent with India’s more general move in recent decades toward
offshore service provision (India alone accounting, according to some esti-
mates, for eighty per cent of offshore service provision in so-called ‘developing
countries’).20 Vora underscores the way in which this development recapitu-
lates an older colonial logic, the Northern presumption that it can and should
draw on ‘surplus’ reproductive capacity in the South for its own r eproduction.21
Pointing out that the industrial labourer who was Marx’s model for the
labourer ‘as such’ ‘relies on a host of forms of vital energy’ not recognised as
labour, including not only gendered reproductive labour, but also colonial and
slave labour, she adds that processes of racialisation have historically tended to
represent some bodies as ‘more economically useful as biological entities than
as the subjects of labour power’.22 And explicitly framing her analysis in rela-
tion to Marxian definitions of reproductive labour, she raises the question of
whether definitions of gendered, value-producing labour should be expanded,
so that surrogacy will be recognised as value-producing labour. The discourse
of surrogacy in these contexts, as Vora puts it, ‘represent[s] the parents who
produce the embryo as the owners of the child, and the scientists, doctors,
and technicians as performing the high value technical work’; ‘the surrogate’,
meanwhile, is represented ‘as a mere passive vessel’. This discourse, she pro-
poses, thereby manages to do nothing less than erase bodies from biological
reproduction.23
Via stem-cell industries, as well, global biotech diverts living material that
could conceivably be used in efforts to sustain local populations towards the
regeneration of populations in more affluent regions and nations. Considering
the expropriation of such material from Eastern Europe, Cooper and Waldby
point out that selling eggs has provided income for women ‘living on the eco-
nomic margins . . ., many of whom are otherwise engaged in the standard
forms of female service labour such as domestic work and prostitution.’24
19 Pande 2014, p. 1.

21 Vora 2015, p. 9.
22 Vora 2012, pp. 694–5.
23 Vora 2012, p. 695. See also Dickenson 2007, pp. 58–9.
24 Cooper and Waldby 2010, pp. 5, 13.

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68 Floyd
Indeed fertility itself, in the specific form of oocyte markets, is now something
that circulates across the European Union. These markets function as ‘fertility
chains’ that not only ‘transact fertility between individual purchasers and ven-
dors, but [that] also displace fertility from one class and location to another,
and create new maps of reproductive surplus and deficit’.25 For example,
‘Like most of Eastern Europe, actual reproduction rates in the Czech Republic
are well below replacement level, and considerably below rates in northern
Europe. Nevertheless, both infertile Czech couples and young Czech women
are excluded from the pursuit of their own reproduction by the private clinic
business model, whose focus is on the transfer of fertility to wealthier clients
to facilitate family formation elsewhere.’26 The fees paid for ‘donations’ of bio-
logical material, meanwhile, ‘are in principle . . . sufficiently high that they are
not exploitative but sufficiently low that they do not transform participation
into a transaction.’ But in the EU oocyte market, where prohibitions on the
sale of tissue have traditionally been designed to protect the donor, regula-
tion in the area of assisted reproductive technology has begun to shift toward
the protection of fertility patients. ‘Consequently, the existence of an intra-
European market is steadily eroding the ability of bioethics councils to keep
compensation rates below an incentive level, as pressure mounts to improve
intranational oocyte supply.’27
How are we to understand the relation between labour and value in such
contexts? Vora, Cooper, and Waldby put a high priority, first of all, on the recog-
nition of emergent forms of biotechnologically reproductive labour. Women’s
labour involved in ‘collaborations’ with the clinics that purchase biological
capacity or material goes unrecognised precisely because it is naturalised, they
argue, in a way not unlike the lack of recognition of domestic household labour
that Marxist-Feminists have been highlighting for decades now. One implica-
tion, then, is that failing to recognise these emergent labour practices recapitu-
lates the blind spots of classical Marxism that gave rise to Marxist-Feminist
critiques in the first place. But they also view both Marxist and Marxist-
Feminist analysis as inadequate to these practices. Vora argues that Marxist-
Feminist analyses ‘fall short of identifying how the exploitation of gendered
labour is also part of a system that governs through a reduction and extension’
of the biological as such.28 And the terms in which Marx theorises labour and
value, Cooper and Waldby maintain – ‘alienated labour, expended over metric

26 Waldby 2012, pp. 284–5.
28 Vora 2012, p. 683.

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time, which produces commodities for market exchange’ – cannot account

for the biotechnological production of value, just as Marxist-Feminism fails
to account for the transformation of ‘post-1970s reproductive labour . . . into
feminised precarious care and service work.’29 Indeed, while Vora’s arguments
for recognition tend repeatedly to assert that value is extracted both from ‘life
itself’ and from emergent, unrecognised forms of biological labour, Cooper
and Waldby’s case for recognition is based on a sustained argument about how
these emergent forms actually produce value.
And this case involves a revealing inversion of Marx’s figure of the automatic
subject. In the first volume of Capital, Marx employs this figure to represent
capital as self-valorising, and then only a few chapters later – having entered
the hidden abode of production – provides an auto-critique of this same rep-
resentation, identifying labour as the coerced catalyst of self-valorising value.
He thereby critiques the fetish whereby the capacities of value-producing
social labour appear as the exclusive capacities of capital. Cooper and Waldby,
in their insistence on recognising the value-producing capacities of the ‘clini-
cal labourer’, produce something like the opposite problem: what they identify
as the immediate capacities of biologically reproductive labour bears a telling
resemblance to the mediated capacities of capital.
For example, they define these contemporary forms of gendered labour in
terms of the experience of risk, for good reason including the risks ‘inherent in
the experience of biological contingency’.30 But the unpredictability of supply
and demand is also central here: risk, rather than being socialised and insured
against by a welfare state, for instance, now devolves onto the outsourced, unin-
surable, corporeal risks endured by the clinical labourer, whom they identify
as the private contractor of their own labour-power.31 This labourer, for them,
is a product of the long historical shift from normalised labour protections for
white male workers characteristic of Fordist-Keynesianism in the North, to
the contemporary tendency toward outsourcing that represents the labourer
as independent and entrepreneurial. They suggest that these new contrac-
tual relations, and the various forms of legal recognition and regulation that
condition them – regulatory statutes, commercial and labour law – are a
key condition of post-Fordist value production. Clinical Labor’s concluding
proposition – ‘it is these terms of exchange that must be redressed if clini-
cal labour is to be undertaken in more equitable ways’ – follows with impec-
cable logic from its heavily contractual framing of the biotechnological forms


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70 Floyd
of exploitation it identifies.32 The risks of living biological contingency con-

verge, here, with the risks of economic exchange. The distance this study takes
from the Marxian account of value production entails, in effect, an interpretive
shift away from the logic of value production altogether, toward the logic of
value circulation.
And this implies a shift from labour to capital. They offer their own arrest-
ing analysis of transnational gestational surrogacy in India, an analysis in
which an identification of labour with circulating capital, a collapsing of one
into the other, becomes explicit. With surrogacy, they contend, the womb is
‘rendered . . . exchangeable’. As for the forms of labour and value involved, ‘by
becoming a surrogate, the woman takes on an entrepreneurial economic role,
but in this case, her collateral is her own body. In order to realise its value,
she enters into the surrogacy contract as the proprietor of her own reproduc-
tive capacity. In effect, she consents to the constitution of her uterus as an asset
class, able to generate monopoly rent.’33 The surrogate becomes the proprietor
of the womb, the independent contractor who assumes certain financial and
biological risks. And the womb itself – which ‘has little monopoly value at
home in the village’ – becomes a financial asset generating a revenue stream.
‘Surrogacy creates rentier value from the lived biology of particular women.’34 I
will return to this implicit, disconcerting analogy between capital’s disaggrega-
tion of the female body and Marx’s key example of use-value from which rent
can be generated: land. But for the moment I want to underscore a different
point. While there is obviously no question that gestational surrogacy has to
be understood as a corporeal experience of labour – indeed, before pregnancy
even begins, ‘the surrogate undertakes a course of hormonal intervention to
both retime her ovulation cycle and prepare her body for pregnancy’35 – this
analysis conflates labour not merely with circulating capital, but with fictitious
capital, identifying the womb as an asset that secures a claim on the future
revenue of the firm that manages the contract and profits from the surrogacy
itself. ‘Labour’ becomes, here, the form of a content we cannot avoid calling
capital, and indeed to approach the purest form of circulating capital: money.
Cooper and Waldby certainly acknowledge the highly financialised charac-
ter of biotechnological profit, dominated as this industry is by a shareholder
logic and the prospects of future medical innovations, and therefore predict-
ably subject to the way stock prices in the present are dictated by expected

33 Cooper and Waldby 2014, pp. 85, 84; emphasis in original.

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future returns.36 Such profit depends heavily on the revenue streams secured
through patent claims, through rents rather than actual products. And though
‘the commercial drive for bioeconomic innovation places more and more
demand pressures on tissue procurement’,37 finance capital’s drive to realise
profits in the short term, as Christian Zeller puts it, ‘contradicts the long-term
innovation cycles of knowledge-based industries’, notably the life sciences.38
But Cooper and Waldby also identify ‘bioeconomic value’ as a form of ‘promis-
sory value’ defined by ‘the capturing of value potentials’, displacing the notion
of reproductive labour with ‘regenerative labour’ – labour that is regenerative
not only of value, but of ‘life itself’. They consider, for example, ‘the form of
value produced by regenerative labour for the stem cell industries, and the
kind of action it implies’.39 The kind of action it implies takes place, it turns
out, at a suborganismic level. Depicting the operation of stem cells extracted
from women’s bodies, they point out that the ‘future possibilities of differentia-
tion’ of such cells ‘always exceed the finite possibilities available to the devel-
oped organism’. Such extraction ‘both immortalises the tissue and facilitates its
self-perpetuating potential in vitro’. The temporality of extracted, isolated bio-
logical life – and not only of the technology required to extract it – is thereby
‘reorganised around an economy of promise, potentiality, and expectation’.40
Shifting the temporality of value from ‘retroactive value’ – the past labour con-
gealed in the commodity and realised in exchange – to a mode of speculative
or potential value, they attribute value-producing agency to sheer biological
substance: a form of agency they call the ‘open-ended performativity of the
biological itself’.41 Cooper and Waldby argue, in effect, that stem cells perform
value-producing labour. Biotechnological capacity – the capacity of a form of
fixed capital – is attributed here to we might call the labour of female biol-
ogy’s potenza. And just as risk-bearing labour operates according to a logic
of circulating capital, suborganismic life, they suggest, operates according to
a distinct, recognisable temporality: the promissory temporality of fictitious
capital. Biological materiality assumes, in this analysis, a capacity for autono-
mous value production. It is both explicitly identified as a form of gendered
36 Cooper and Waldby 2014, p. 111. Sunder Rajan 2006 provides a detailed elaboration of con-
temporary biotechnology’s thorough conditioning by finance capital.
38 Zeller 2008, p. 93.

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72 Floyd
labour, and unmistakably modelled on the purportedly independent capaci-

ties of money to turn itself into more money.
Arguments like these, idiosyncratic as they may initially appear, align
with broader trends in the contemporary theorisation of labour. Cooper and
Waldby are hardly the only ones to attribute the capacities of labour to the
living substances isolated and fabricated by biotech, for example. In more
gender-neutral terms, Eugene Thacker maintains that ‘despite Marx’s rather
dichotomous characterisation of living versus dead labour, the identification
of living labour looks forward to the biotech industry, in which genetically
engineered mammals, microbes, and cells are literally put to work as biotech-
nologies’. Apparently taking quite literally Marx’s characterisation of high-tech
production as a ‘mighty organism’, Thacker argues that biotechnology presents
us with ‘a strange, uncanny, nonsubjective labour that is . . . at once fully tech-
nical and yet fully biological, both living and dead, a process-driven and yet
fixed form of capital.’ Erasing the distinction between what some of us still
prefer to call constant and variable capital, Thacker identifies as the labouring
agency of biotechnologically isolated and quantified life what seems, again,
more like the mediated agency of biotechnological capital: ‘the uncanny bio-
material labour of immortalised cell lines, cultured stem cells, DNA synthesiz-
ers, and even transgenic organisms’.42
The work of Antonio Negri is a key touchstone for Thacker’s argument; and
as my use of the term potenza above is intended to suggest, these recalibrated
relations between ‘living labour’ and ‘life itself’ converge with the depiction of
labour in autonomist Marxism in ways that are sometimes implicit, sometimes
explicit, but always revealing.43 Leopoldina Fortunati’s autonomist account
of reproductive labour – specifically its attribution of immediate value pro-
duction to reproductive labour – is approvingly cited by Vora,44 and though
not cited by, certainly consonant with Cooper and Waldby’s account of the
immediate value production of ‘regenerative labour’. Their elaboration of
‘promissory’ temporalities also draws heavily on the work of Lisa Adkins, who
herself relies on autonomist accounts of the supposed supersession of indus-
trial clock-time in her arguments that in the contemporary, ‘post-industrial’
economy, there is no necessary relation between abstract labour time and
value creation.45 And early on, Clinical Labor explicitly cites autonomist
42 Thacker 2005, pp. 104, 127.

43 For a differently focused analysis of the convergence between contemporary accounts of
biocapital and autonomist accounts of biopolitics, see Toscano 2008.
44 Vora 2015, p. 31.
45 Adkins 2008, 2009.

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Marxism as a key source of its own rethinking of the ‘bioeconomic’, approvingly

citing Maurizio Lazzarato’s account of an ostensible contemporary transition
from ‘capital-labour’ to ‘capital-life’, as well as Andrea Fumagalli’s contention
that ‘any “theory of the value of work” must become “a theory of the value
of life” ’.46 The book’s use of this discourse is by no means uncritical, but the
distance it takes has primarily to do with the discourse’s generality. It repre-
sents itself as an effort to specify, in biotechnological terms, the contemporary
salience of the more general autonomist analysis of contemporary capitalist
transition. I want to specify the autonomist problematic in which Cooper and
Waldby participate, in order to underscore the ways in which their represen-
tation of emergent, biologically-reproductive labour practices converges with
more general tendencies in current critical accounts of labour.
Arguments like these vitalise labour that is already dead: they depict as liv-
ing labour the capacities of capital – of circulating capital, fictitious capital,
and that form of fixed capital called biotechnology. And this vitalisation oper-
ates within the autonomist problematic that characterises labour as inherently
self-valorising. I referred above to Marx’s figure of the automatic subject, and
his subsequent auto-critique of this figure a few chapters later, his critique
of the fetishising misrepresentation of the capacities of social labour as the
capacities of capital. By contrast, the autonomist account of the self-valorising
proletarian subject – of that subject’s ‘auto-determination’47 – inverts this
figure while also positing capital as absolutely external to labour, consigning
capital to the reactive ‘capture’ of the wealth it plays no role in producing –
wealth that is indistinct, in this account, from value – and that springs fully
from labour’s immanent capacities. This insistence on undialectical self-
valorisation thereby fetishises labour by isolating it from its mediation by and
dependence upon capital, its functioning within that broader web of relations
only the term capital can adequately identify.
Paradoxically, and as this figural inversion already begins to suggest, this
autonomisation of labour, this insistence on its incommensurability with capi-
tal, operates precisely by way of an analytic subsumption of capital by labour.
And it is at this point that the problematic autonomist Marxism shares with
notions like ‘regenerative labour’ begins to emerge into view. Paolo Virno, for
example, takes Marx to task for ‘completely’ identifying ‘the general intel-
lect (or, knowledge as the principal productive force) with fixed capital, thus
neglecting’ what Virno does not dialectically extrapolate from Marx but pos-
its, rather, as sheer truism, ‘the instance when that same general intellect
46 Cooper and Waldby 2014, p. 6. See Lazzarato 2004; Fumagalli 2011.
47 Negri 1991, pp. 162–3.

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manifests itself on the contrary as living labour’.48 Autonomists are sometimes

far from clear about whether the living mass-intellectuality on which they
insist is merely presupposed by external, techno-scientific processes; or if living
labour is, on a broad scale, ‘suffused in every pore’, as Nick Witheford puts it,
with technoscience, with those capacities and qualities classically attributed
to fixed capital.49 But in other instances the ambiguity vanishes, as when Hardt
and Negri leave no doubt as to the nature of this ‘suffusion’: under Empire,
they contend, ‘constant capital tends to be constituted and represented within
variable capital, in the brains, bodies, and cooperation of productive subjects’.50
Labour’s utter independence of capital is here also its immediate absorption
of capital – as opposed to, say, its mediated absorption of dead labour in the
form of commodified means of subsistence. In a striking catachresis, labour
subsumes capital. Labour becomes, somehow, ‘capital personified’.
To ontologise labour, Moishe Postone argues, is already to fetishise it; and
this representation of labour as the immanent, autonomous source of wealth
would appear to qualify as an appropriate (if peculiarly vitalist) target of his
critique of Marxism’s tendency to render labour transhistorical. For Postone,
it is labour’s abstraction, its mediation by value, that grounds ‘the abstract
domination and the exploitation of labour characteristic of capitalism’.51 The
objective of labour is not to produce wealth or value, but to gain access to
commodified means of subsistence, in order to go on labouring. This ontol-
ogisation is, moreover, symptomatic of the very way in which value renders
labour abstract. Value’s abstraction of labour is already implicit in the inde-
pendent, creative potentiality of ‘regenerative labour’, a potentiality not unlike
the potentiality autonomists attribute to labour in its fully abstracted state.
Jason Read, in a defence of autonomist Marxism that refuses to shy away from
trenchant critique of it, has usefully suggested that labour’s immanent vital-
ity and its abstraction by capital are inseparable – maintaining, with dialecti-
cal elegance, that the respective accounts of labour we find in Postone and in
autonomist Marxism do not have to be opposed, and indeed cannot be. They
identify two inseparable dimensions of labour, a form of action at once living
and abstract.52 But at this point the screw turns yet further: living labour as
self-valorisation, as auto-determination, is ultimately ‘unruly’, an ‘indetermi-
nate’ creative potentiality that is abstract precisely in its ‘indifferent capacity
48 Virno 1996, p. 270.

49 Witheford 1994, p. 95.
50 Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 385.
51 Postone 1993, p. 161.
52 Read 2003, pp. 76–7.

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for any labour whatsoever’, an indifference that is the ‘ground’ from which ‘the
worker asserts his or her particular desires, a particular form of life’.53
In autonomist Marxism, I am proposing, the analytic subsumption of capi-
tal by labour leads ineluctably to an abstraction of life. Under the force of val-
ue’s abstracting power, pure, vital potenza seems to explode the very limits of
labour as such, living labour morphing into a ‘unruly’, ‘indeterminate’, infinite
vitality – as when Negri, posing a rhetorical question, turns Foucault’s account
of biopower on its head: ‘to the extent that saying that power has invested life
also signifies that life is a power, can we locate in life itself – that is to say, in
labour and in language, but also in bodies, in desire, and in sexuality – the
site of emergence of a counterpower, the site of a production of subjectiv-
ity that would present itself as a moment of desubjection?’54 Life takes the
form, here, of an ‘open-ended performativity’: ‘regenerative labour’, too – like
M-C-M′, entirely unlike C-M-C – is self-valorising, independently infinite, an
automatic subject. The living, productive potentiality we encounter in auton-
omist Marxism aligns quite comfortably with the abstraction of life we also
encounter in Cooper and Waldby’s analysis of ‘labouring’ forms of life, forms
already saturated and reified by biotechnological capital.
Capital, Gender, and Abstract Life
What are the implications of this construal of capital as labour? How to cri-
tique this inversion of the automatic subject? What this inversion mystifies
is less capital per se than the capital-labour relation. Just as the capacities of
capital are here inverted into the capacities of labour, these depictions of an
expanding horizon of new forms of labour, and their capacity for new forms of
value production, take place just at the moment when value production is, to
the contrary, contracting. What is expanding in the present is not labour, but
capital relative to labour. As numerous analyses have argued, however diver-
gent they may be in emphasis or in levels of abstraction, new value produc-
tion is currently hamstrung by persistent overcapacity, and specifically by an
unsustainably high global organic composition of capital, unprecedentedly
high productivity worldwide and the attendant difficulty of absorbing sig-
nificant additional surplus labour.55 The multiform manifestations of these
53 Read 2003, pp. 80, 136, 81.

54 Negri 2008, p. 13.
55 See, e.g., Kliman 2012; Endnotes 2010; Dyer-Witheford 2015; Kurz 2014 (and indeed the
indispensable recent collection in which Kurz 2014 appears). Kliman’s analysis of rising

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76 Floyd
difficulties are familiar enough, but in the context of this consideration of

an emergent ‘biomedical mode of reproduction’, we should emphasise espe-
cially, as this section will show, the expansion of debt on the one hand, and of
surplus populations on the other. These manifestations include, for example,
the tendential displacement of the production of new value by profitmaking
through the increasingly rapid circulation of capital, especially fictitious capi-
tal. Just as money as medium of circulation is expanding exponentially – as
capital continues to rush into real estate, insurance, the latest barely think-
able ‘financial instrument’ (and into what many have already called the bio-
tech bubble) – that same expansion expresses money’s precarious status as
bearer of value, its precarious capacity to realise value. And as surplus money
expands, so does surplus labour. Over the last half-century, proletarianisation
of the vast majority of the remaining global peasantry56 has accompanied a
global expansion of mostly service-sector jobs, which accounted for more than
half of global employment growth in 2013.57 The predominance of absolute
rather than relative surplus-value extraction in the service sector, meanwhile,
places powerful limits on its capacity to absorb surplus labour. The gargan-
tuan, sponge-like informal sector, on the other hand, tends to range between
fifty and ninety per cent of total employment in the global South.58 And as
labour-saving technological innovations have tended over time to become
generalised across the division of labour, the demand for labour has tended
to decline: even where industrialisation has become concentrated, in the
so-called BRICS nations, ‘successful industrialisation . . . is expected to cre-
ate fewer jobs in industry at any given level of income’, since ‘for late start-
ers, the industrialisation process tends to be more capital intensive’.59 Even
China’s storied increases in manufacturing value added have been largely at
the expense of competing BRICS nations.60 The revealing 2011 analysis of the
global proletariat in Monthly Review put the ‘vulnerably employed’ (informal
composition and falling profitability since World War II focuses on the United States,
though it also underscores certain international dimensions of this rise, the case of US
foreign direct investment, for example. See Kliman 2012, pp. 78–80, 128–38.
56 Endnotes 2010, p. 23.
57 ILO 2014, p. 23.
58 ILO 2014, pp. 12–13.
59 UNCTAD 2003, pp. 93–4.
60 UNIDO 2013, p. 9. See also Prabhat Patnaik’s case that increased labour productivity in
China and India has recently worked as a barrier to the absorption of those countries’
massive surplus labour populations: Patnaik 2009, p. 4. For a useful recent sketch of
the globally rising organic composition of capital, with specific reference to the BRICS
nations, see Clover and Benavav 2014, pp. 752–7.

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and subsistence workers and unpaid family workers) at 1.7 billion, compared
to about 1.4 billion global wage workers (which includes part-time and/or pre-
carious workers), and the total global surplus population as high as 2.4 billion –
an estimate that includes the ‘vulnerably employed’, the officially unemployed,
and the additional ‘globally inactive’ population aged 25 to 54 (which includes
the imprisoned and the ‘unemployable’).61 2.4 billion is roughly one-third of
the planet’s current population. The hundreds of millions of superexploited
wage workers around the world, many of them migrants, would then appear to
be significantly outnumbered by the global population of surplus labour that
serves to keep wages low and thereby to enable that same superexploitation.
Labour in this way becomes, as Endnotes puts it, ‘an “externality” to the pro-
cess of its own reproduction’.62 Capital once again reveals itself to be its own
limit, as it ‘presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour
time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth’.63
Only by occluding the systemic stagnation of accumulation in the present –
only by assuming that value has been reduced to pure political command or
by insisting, contradictorily, that there is no longer any meaningful distinction
between value and wealth – can contemporary autonomist Marxism sustain
its religiously optimistic narrative of labour’s vitality in the present. Cooper
and Waldby, meanwhile, taking their distance from a Marxian account of value
production they view as stuck hopelessly in the era of welfare-state industriali-
sation, also presuppose the persistence of relatively vigorous value-production
characteristic of that era – contending, again, that ‘forms of in vitro labour are
increasingly central to the valorisation process of the post-Fordist economy’,
and thereby occluding biotechnological capital’s high organic composition.
To confront this analytic subsumption of capital by labour with the real sub-
sumption of labour by capital is also to remind ourselves that this tendency,
defined as it is by relative surplus-value extraction, reveals labour to be no
more saliently the source of surplus value than (ultimately, tendentially) a bar-
rier to be expelled from valorisation altogether. While subsumption tends to
suggest the internalisation of what was previously external, it is also the case
that proletarianised surplus labour is at once inside and outside, at once sub-
sumed and externalised, at once subject to the law of value and dissociated
from the valorisation process.
The contemporary expansion of debt and surplus populations provides a
very different way to frame the absorption of biotechnologically abstracted life
61 Foster, McChesney and Jonna 2011, pp. 20–1.

62 Endnotes 2010, p. 32.
63 Marx 1973, p. 706.

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78 Floyd
into value circuits. Though they model new forms of ‘promissory value’ on the
logic of finance, and though they recognise contemporary tendencies toward
finance-driven deindustrialisation, what Cooper and Waldby do not theorise
in any sustained way, for example, is the sheer determinate weight of debt on
regions of the globe characterised both by massive proletarianisation and by
a dearth of opportunities to perform wage labour. International trafficking in
sex slavery is often tacitly endorsed by debt-ridden governments, for example,
which have grown more and more dependent on tourism for national income.64
Grace Chang adds that ‘austerity programs . . . effectively create systems of debt
bondage such that indebted nations must surrender their citizens, especially
women, as migrant labourers to first world nations in the desperate effort to
keep up with debt payments . . . through . . . remittances.’65 Remittances to the
Philippines from overseas workers, for instance, most of them women, provide
annual national income in the billions, currency that can potentially be used
to pay down government debt. This governmental ‘surrendering’ of citizens
is sometimes voluntary, enshrined in government policy. While posing pow-
erful questions about the effectiveness of such policies in actually mitigating
government debt, Stuart Rosewarne argues that labour-export policies in the
Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka ‘have been premised on the principle
that the promotion of offshore employment for women workers is little differ-
ent from other export programmes’.66 Or, to paraphrase Chang, debt-ridden
countries that cannot export goods sometimes export people instead.67 The
gendered labour of social reproduction is in this sense financially extracted
from poorer countries to wealthier ones, in a kind of inverse reflection of the
way in which households in the North are steeped in debt. Fictitious capital
saturates gendered social reproduction in a double sense: the debt of relatively
affluent households on the one hand, and global debt’s separation of countless
women from their own households, so that they can perform domestic-service
labour elsewhere, on the other.
And just as gestational surrogacy in India, as noted above, needs to be under-
stood in the context of India’s more general commitment to labour outsourc-
ing, this debt-driven export of social reproduction would appear to present
us with a social logic that is extended, and even deepened, in the northward
extraction of biological life. In what may appear an obscene literalisation of
the longstanding metaphorics that associate women’s bodies with ‘nature’ –
64 Sassen 2000, pp. 518–19.

65 Chang 2000, p. 4.
66 Rosewarne 2012, p. 96.
67 Chang 2000, pp. 130–1; see also Sassen 2000, pp. 519–23.

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in the discourse of ova ‘harvesting’, for example68 – those bodies are reduced
to the status not of living labour but of living raw material. Indeed, Vora’s insis-
tence on understanding gestational surrogacy as value-producing labour is in
this sense ambiguous, as she also underscores the way in which ‘human bod-
ies and subjects are thus playing a role structurally similar to that of land and
natural resources as they were dispossessed in the period of capitalist growth
during European territorial colonialism’.69 If destitute women cannot them-
selves be exported – and the percentage of labourers migrating from poorer
to wealthier countries has for decades been miniscule in comparison with
adults in poorer countries who, voluntarily or involuntarily, do not migrate70 –
the contemporary convergence of biotechnology with expanding surplus
populations and expanding debt has created circumstances in which biologi-
cal substances and capacities expropriated from women’s bodies apparently
can be exported.
And if, in the North, social and biological reproduction performed by women
increasingly takes place within the value circuit, this implies not a contract-
ing but an expanding global surplus population, an expanding field of labour
both subject to the value-form and dissociated from the valorisation process.
The ‘feminisation of labour’ thesis proposes not merely that more women have
entered the labour force, but the tendency toward more informal, inexpensive
forms of labour, which are ‘presumed’ to be associated with women workers:
‘irregular labour force participation, willingness to work for low wages, static
jobs requiring no accumulation of technical skills and status, etc.’71 In an era
in which cutting labour costs is of paramount concern, the tendency toward
labour’s disposability is thereby naturalised, to the extent that one believes,
for example, that women are simply biologically better-equipped for the kinds
of jobs on offer. This naturalisation has, as at least one of its preconditions,
an established, historically sedimented dissociation of reproductive labour
from the value circuit. As Endnotes has recently pointed out – and against an
account of domestic labour like Fortunati’s – the determination of the value
of labour-power by the value of the means of subsistence it requires implies
that the domestic household labour needed to transform those means of
subsistence into labour-power adds no new value to that commodity. Within
capital, these domestic activities are ‘structurally made non-labour’: in
order for labour-power to have a value, the domestic labour that reproduces
68 See Dickenson 2007, p. 60.

69 Vora 2015, p. 3.
70 Foster, McChesney and Jonna 2011, pp. 25–6.
71 Standing 1999, p. 585.

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80 Floyd
labour-power has to be dissociated from the circuit of value.72 Whereas it was

once the case that women workers were considered more expensive precisely
insofar as they were represented as bearers of children, in the present ‘woman
as bearer of labour power with a higher social cost becomes its opposite: the
commodity labour power with a cheaper price’.73 But the fact that expand-
ing populations of men around the world find it increasingly difficult to avoid
these disposable jobs, if they are to access wages at all, also tends to undercut
this naturalisation of gender difference. (Guy Standing suggests that ‘there has
been a convergence of male and female patterns of labour force participation.
While there has been an overall trend toward more flexible, informal forms of
labour, women’s situation has probably become less informal, while men’s has
become more so.’)74 So against an account of gendered labour that naturalises
it – that depicts a production of value that operates according to the promis-
sory temporality of an explicitly feminised stem cell’s ‘regenerative labour’, for
example – ‘feminisation’ in this sense refers not to any ontological or biologi-
cal condition, nor to an expansion of value production, but to the contempo-
rary tendency to devalue labour-power. The dissociation of feminised labour
from the circuit of value is hardly reversed in the present, in other words, via
some expansion of labour that is both ‘feminised’ and value-producing. To the
contrary, that dissociation is extended into the present by a growing devalu-
ation of social labour generally, in a sort of outward movement, as it were,
from the ‘private’ to the ‘public’. If value production requires an outside that is
‘structurally made non-labour’, that outside appears to be expanding rather
than contracting.
But if, as I have proposed, the autonomist projection of an expansive horizon
of value-producing labour represents capital as value-producing labour, and if
Cooper and Waldby recapitulate this representation, might we then interpret
these representations as allegories of the real expansion of capital relative to
labour? And does the autonomist abstraction of life, like the abstraction of life
in Cooper and Waldby’s account of ‘regenerative labour’, in this respect capture
something salient about the present, though here again in inverted form? To
the extent that surplus populations appear today to become absolutely rather
than relatively surplus, proletarianisation signifies capital’s abstraction of life,
its tendential reduction of living labour to living inertia, to life at once sub-
sumed by capital and externalised from it. Just as fictitious capital presumes to
free itself from the social-labour process, value-producing labour is similarly
72 Endnotes 2013, pp. 61–2. See also Vogel 2013; Scholz 2014.
73 Endnotes 2013, p. 76.
74 Standing 1999, p. 600.

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‘freed’ from that process in its reduction by capital to a form of proletarianised,

value-dissociated surplus vitality. What is life, Marx asks, if not activity?75
In an era of stagnant accumulation, the ‘labour’ in ‘living labour’ tends toward
displacement: labour is disinterred from life, increasingly hollowed out, leav-
ing behind what is, from the standpoint of capital, a vital remainder.
This vital remainder is no automatic subject of value production, nor is it
only biotech’s product, nor even its immediate raw material. It is one of the
determinate contemporary conditions of the ‘biomedical mode of repro-
duction’ itself, of the international expropriation of ‘life itself’. To return to
examples I mentioned briefly in the introductory paragraphs above, this vital,
abstract remainder is evident in the on-going subjection of surplus popula-
tions to participation in clinical trials, trials pharmaceutical companies now
regularly outsource to the South; the destitution that excludes these popu-
lations from circuits of drug consumption also produces strong economic
motivations to risk their very corporeality as clinical-trial subjects.76 Or, if one
still wants to insist on identifying clinical-trial subjects with value-producing
labour rather than with experimental raw material, consider the way in which
we are now also faced with a situation in which an earlier ‘chronic scarcity of
cadaver organs’ has been alleviated, evolving into what Scheper-Hughes calls
‘a trade in “surplus” body parts from living “suppliers” ’: destitute peasants, refu-
gees, migrant labourers, prisoners, the homeless, the undocumented. Organ
scarcity having once been a serious problem, there is now ‘no shortage of des-
perate individuals willing to sell a kidney, a portion of their liver, a lung, an eye,
or even a testicle for a pittance’. Of the global circulation of kidneys, she writes
that, generally, this ‘circulation follows the established routes of capital from
South to North, from poorer to more affluent bodies, from black and brown
bodies to white ones’, adding that ‘we can even speak of organ donor versus
organ recipient nations’.77 And Ann Anagnost describes the way in which, in
the 1990s, blood purchased from proletarianised peasants in Henan province,
one of the most heavily-populated provinces in rural China, became the raw
material for a provincial initiative to build a biotech industry. The peasants
whose blood was priced thereby secured money not to purchase consumer
goods, but to repay debt – making Henan province ‘an agricultural economy
reduced to the point where the balance sheets of farming households are
driven into deficits that can only be repaid with blood, as if blood were yet
75 Marx 1975, p. 327.

76 Sunder Rajan 2006; Cooper and Waldby 2014, pp. 159–94. For an enlightening journalistic
account, see Shah 2006.
77 Scheper-Hughes 2005, pp. 145, 150. See also Cohen 2002; Scheper-Hughes 2002.

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82 Floyd
another form of agricultural produce.’78 Arguments like these often refer to

surplus populations as ‘bioavailable’ populations, and suggest that we are wit-
nessing an overproduction of bioavailability. Price, meanwhile, would appear
to be something like the opposite of a reliable expression of value in these
examples, inasmuch as this pricing of biological substances presupposes the
radical separation from the value circuit of the would-be labourers from whom
these substances are expropriated. The ‘reserve army of surplus labour’ begins,
around the edges as it were, to take the form of what Anagnost suggests calling
a ‘standing reserve’ of abstract life,79 an uneven but expanding field of calcu-
lable vitality. The dismantling of factories is now echoed in a dismantling of
persons: this is a field defined by a vanishing distinction between the life of a
population and sub-individual life, between aggregates of people and aggre-
gates of biological material as ready-made as minerals, apparently, for extrac-
tion and manipulation.
I argued above that the recognition of emergent forms of gendered labour
was one impulse driving these analyses of the ‘biomedical mode of reproduc-
tion’. Crucial as it is to recognise the gendered dimensions of labour, it is just
as crucial to recognise the gendered dimensions of the current dysfunctions
of value production, which are also, inseparably, dysfunctions in what Marx
calls expanded reproduction, in the social reproduction of the capital/labour
relation itself. The ‘biomedical mode of reproduction’ facilitated by the con-
juncture of finance and biotechnology is more cogently understood as an
emergent variation on a very old story of financial plunder, capital’s contem-
porary reduction of living labour to a condition of value-dissociated abstract
life. To identify these processes as expansive new practices of value-producing
labour is to insist on the recognition of a form of gendered agency, an effort
that has long been one of the defining principles of a certain kind of feminist
critique. That effort is reinforced here by another emphasis on agency, auton-
omist Marxism’s understandable insistence on the agency of labour. But the
imperative of recognition is a fundamentally ethical one, the kind of impera-
tive that can occlude as much as it explains. In the present case, this impera-
tive operates by way of an inversion of Marx’s figure of the automatic subject,
and the incoherent account of value that inversion requires. It forestalls any
properly political-economic recognition of the on-going displacement of vari-
able capital by constant capital, the on-going cleavage of capital into a standoff
between surplus populations and debt, and the concrete forms of structural
violence that standoff entails.
78 Anagnost 2011, p. 225.

79 Anagnost 2011, p. 226.

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Historical Materialism 24.

Critical analysis of the biotechnological reproduction of biological life increasingly

labour – value – gender – social reproduction – biotechnology – debt – surplus popu-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341470

Feminist scholars, Marxist-Feminists among them, have repeatedly anal-

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might pose to traditional understandings of commodification,7 while Amrita

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traditional economic categories, compelling us to rethink their scope in dia-

12 Cooper 2008, p. 3.

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increasingly central to the valorisation process of the post-Fordist economy’,15

The Analytic Subsumption of Capital by Labour

Affluent consumers in the North can now purchase reproductive biological

15 Cooper and Waldby 2014, p. 7.

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internationalised and more explicitly, transparently commodified, especially

19 Pande 2014, p. 1.

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25 Cooper and Waldby 2014, pp. 63, 72.

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time, which produces commodities for market exchange’ – cannot account

29 Cooper and Waldby 2014, p. 105.

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of exploitation it identifies.32 The risks of living biological contingency con-

32 Cooper and Waldby 2014, p. 228.

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labour, and unmistakably modelled on the purportedly independent capaci-

42 Thacker 2005, pp. 104, 127.

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Marxism as a key source of its own rethinking of the ‘bioeconomic’, approvingly

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manifests itself on the contrary as living labour’.48 Autonomists are sometimes

48 Virno 1996, p. 270.

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Capital, Gender, and Abstract Life

53 Read 2003, pp. 80, 136, 81.

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difficulties are familiar enough, but in the context of this consideration of

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61 Foster, McChesney and Jonna 2011, pp. 20–1.

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64 Sassen 2000, pp. 518–19.

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68 See Dickenson 2007, p. 60.

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labour-power has to be dissociated from the circuit of value.72 Whereas it was

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‘freed’ from that process in its reduction by capital to a form of proletarianised,

75 Marx 1975, p. 327.

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another form of agricultural produce.’78 Arguments like these often refer to

78 Anagnost 2011, p. 225.

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Historical Materialism 24.2 (2016) 61–86

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341470