#wage relation

“I contend that the positionality of Black subjectivity is at the heart of those contradictions [between the political demands of radical social movements and the ideological structure that underwrites their political desires] is bound up with the political limitations of several naturalized and uncritically accepted categories that have their genesis mainly in the works of Antonio Gramsci, namely, work or labor, the wage, exploitation, hegemony, and civil society. I wish to theorize the symptoms of rage and resignation I hear in the words of George Jackson, when he boils reform down to a single word, ‘fascism,’ or in Assata’s brief declaration, ‘i hated it,’ as well as in the Manichean delirium of Fanon, Martinot, and Sexton. Today, the failure of radical social movements to embrace symptoms of all three gestures is tantamount to the reproduction of an anti-Black politics that nonetheless represents itself as being in the service of the emancipation of the Black prison slave.”

“Racial disparities have been reproduced as an inherent category of capitalism since its origins not primarily through the wage, but through its absence. The initial moment of contact between a European colonial order and an unwaged, racialised “outside” to capital has been progressively systematised within capitalism itself as a racialised global division of labour and the permanent structural oversupply of such labour, which has produced “one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums”.

Just as Marx argued that the wage serves to hide the surplus labor expended by waged laborers in the production of surplus value, the wage also obscures the contributions of unwaged labor toward the process of valorization and, consequently, the true length of the working day