We might begin by remembering that the miracle years of the previous golden age (roughly 1950-1973) depended not only on a world war and an enormous uptick in state spending, but also on an historically unprecedented transfer of population from agriculture to industry. Agricultural populations proved to be a potent weapon in the quest for “modernisation”, since they provided a source of cheap labour for a new wave of industrialisation. In 1950, 23 percent of the German workforce was employed in agriculture, in France 31, in Italy 44 and in Japan 49 percent — by 2000, all had agricultural populations of under 5 percent. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, capital dealt with mass unemployment, when it occurred, by expelling urban proletarians back to the land, as well as by exporting them to colonies. By eliminating the peasantry in the traditional core at the same time as it came up against the limits of colonial expansion, capital eliminated its own traditional mechanisms of recovery. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

For Marx, the fundamental crisis tendency of the capitalist mode of production was not limited in its scope to periodic downturns in economic activity. It revealed itself most forcefully in a permanent crisis of working life. The differentia specifica of capitalist “economic” crises — that people starve in spite of good harvests, and means of production lie idle in spite of a need for their products — is merely one moment of this larger crisis — the constant reproduction of a scarcity of jobs in the midst of an abundance of goods. It is the dynamic of this crisis — the crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation — which this article explores. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

Meanwhile, the wave of industrialisation that absorbed those who had been pushed out of agriculture came up against its own limits in the 1970s. Since then, the major capitalist countries have seen an unprecedented decline in their levels of industrial employment. Over the past three decades, manufacturing employment fell 50 percent as a percentage of total employment in these countries. Even newly “industrialising” countries like South Korea and Taiwan saw their relative levels of industrial employment decline in the past two decades. At the same time the numbers of both low-paid service-workers and slum-dwellers working in the informal sector have expanded as the only remaining options for those who have become superfluous to the needs of shrinking industries. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

Despite the complexity of its results, capital has only one essential precondition: people must lack direct access to the goods they deem necessary for life, finding that access instead only through the mediation of the market. Hence the very term “proletariat”, referring originally to landless citizens living in Roman cities. Lacking work, they were pacified first by state provision of bread and circuses, and ultimately by employment as mercenaries. However, the proletarian condition is historically uncommon: the global peasantry have, throughout history, mostly had direct access to land as self-sufficient farmers or herders, even if they were almost always coerced into giving a portion of their product to ruling elites. Thus the need for “primitive accumulation”: separating people from land, their most basic means of reproduction, and generating an all-round dependence on commodity exchange. In Europe, this process was completed in the 50s and 60s. On a global scale it is only now – with the exceptions of sub-Saharan Africa, parts of South Asia, and China – beginning to approach completion. The initial separation of people from the land, once achieved, is never enough. It has to be perpetually repeated in order for capital and “free” labour to meet in the market time after time. On the one hand, capital requires, already present in the labour market, a mass of people lacking direct access to means of production, looking to exchange work for wages. On the other hand, it requires, already present in the commodity market, a mass of people who have already acquired wages, looking to exchange their money for goods. Absent those two conditions, capital is limited in its ability to accumulate: it can neither produce nor sell on a mass scale. Outside of the US and UK before 1950, the scope for mass production was limited precisely because of the limitation of the size of the market, that is, because of the existence of a large, somewhat self-sufficient peasantry not living primarily by the wage. The story of the post-war period is that of the tendential abolition of the remaining global peasantry, first as self-sufficient, and second as peasants at all, owning the land on which they work. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

Marx explains this structural feature of capitalism in his chapter on “simple reproduction” in volume one. We will interpret this concept as the reproduction, in and through cycles of production-consumption, of the relationship between capital and workers: Marx sometimes refers to simple reproduction as an abstract thought experiment – capitalism without growth – but to leave it at that is to miss what the concept tells us about the inner mechanism of the process of accumulation. The chapter on simple reproduction concludes: “Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer” (Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p.573). Simple reproduction is maintained not out of “habit”, nor by the false or inadequate consciousness of workers, but by a material compulsion. This is the exploitation of wage-workers, the fact that all together, they can purchase only a portion of the goods they produce: "[Capital prevents its] self-conscious instruments from leaving it in the lurch, for it removes their product, as fast as it is made, from their pole to the opposite pole of capital. Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for their maintenance and reproduction: on the other hand, it secures by the annihilation of the necessaries of life, the continued re-appearance of the workman in the labour-market.” (Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p.573.) Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

All capital must accumulate, or it will fall behind in its competition with other capitals. Competitive price formation and variable cost structures within sectors lead to divergent intra-sectoral profit rates, which in turn drives efficiency-increasing innovations, for by reducing their costs beneath the sectoral average firms can either reap super profits, or lower prices to gain market share. But falling costs will in any case lead to falling prices, for the mobility of capital between sectors results in an equalisation of inter-sectoral profit rates, as the movement of capital in search of higher profits drives supply (and thus prices) up and down, causing returns on new investment to fluctuate around an inter-sectoral average. This perpetual movement of capital also spreads cost-reducing innovations across sectors — establishing a law of profitability which forces all capitals to maximise profits , irrespective of the political and social configuration in which they find themselves. Conversely, when profitability falls, there is nothing that can be done to re-establish accumulation short of the “slaughtering of capital values” and the “setting free of labour” which re-establish the conditions of profitability. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

All capital must accumulate, or it will fall behind in its competition with other capitals. Competitive price formation and variable cost structures within sectors lead to divergent intra-sectoral profit rates, which in turn drives efficiency-increasing innovations, for by reducing their costs beneath the sectoral average firms can either reap super profits, or lower prices to gain market share. But falling costs will in any case lead to falling prices, for the mobility of capital between sectors results in an equalisation of inter-sectoral profit rates, as the movement of capital in search of higher profits drives supply (and thus prices) up and down, causing returns on new investment to fluctuate around an inter-sectoral average. This perpetual movement of capital also spreads cost-reducing innovations across sectors — establishing a law of profitability which forces all capitals to maximise profits , irrespective of the political and social configuration in which they find themselves. Conversely, when profitability falls, there is nothing that can be done to re-establish accumulation short of the “slaughtering of capital values” and the “setting free of labour” which re-establish the conditions of profitability. Yet this formalistic conception of the valorisation process fails to capture the historical dynamic to which Marx’s analysis is attuned. The law of profitability alone cannot ensure expanded reproduction, for this also requires the emergence of new industries and new markets. Rises and falls in profitability act as signals to the capitalist class that innovations have occurred in specific industries, but what is important is that over time the composition of output — and therefore employment — changes: industries that once accounted for a large portion of output and employment now grow more slowly, while new industries take a rising share of both. Here, we have to look at the determinants of demand, as independent from the determinants of supply. Demand varies with the price of a given product. When the price is high, the product is purchased only by the wealthy. As labour-saving process innovations accumulate, prices fall, transforming the product into a mass-consumption good. At the cusp of this transformation, innovations cause the market for a given product to expand enormously. This expansion stretches beyond the capacity of existing firms, and prices fall more slowly than costs, leading to a period of high profitability. Capital then rushes into the line, pulling labour with it. At a certain point, however, the limits of the market are reached; that is, the market is saturated. Now innovations cause total capacity to rise beyond the size of the market: prices fall more quickly than costs, leading to a period of falling profitability. Capital will leave the line, expelling labour. [10] [10]: This process applies only to consumer-goods industries. Capital-goods industries, tend to expand and contract in accordance with the needs of the particular consumer-goods which ‘lead’ each cycle. But the relationship between the two ‘departments’ is never so simple. As we will show, labour-saving ‘process-innovations’ in dept. 1 may lead to ‘product innovations’ in dept. 2, expanding the market as a whole. This process, which economists have called the “maturation” of industries, has occurred many times. The agricultural revolution, which first broke out in early modern England, eventually hit the limits of the domestic market for its products. Labour-process innovations such as the consolidation of fragmented land holdings, the abolition of the fallow, and the differentiation of land use according to natural advantages meant — under capitalist conditions of reproduction — that both labour and capital were systematically pushed out of the countryside. England rapidly urbanised as a result, and London became the largest city in Europe. It is here that the key dynamic of expanded reproduction comes into play. For the workers thrown out of agriculture were not left to languish indefinitely in the cities. They were eventually taken up in the manufacturing sector of an industrialising Britain, and especially in the growing textile industry, which was transitioning from wool to cotton cloth. But once again, labour-process innovations such as the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and the power loom meant that eventually this industry, too, began to throw off labour and capital. And the decline in the industries of the first Industrial Revolution, as a percentage of total labour employed and capital accumulated, made way for those of the second Industrial Revolution (chemicals, telecommunications, electric and engine-powered commodities). It is this movement of labour and capital into and out of lines, based on differential rates of profit, that ensures the continued possibility of expanded reproduction: [E]xpansion … is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase in the number of workers, which must occur independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free” a part of the working class; by methods which lessen the number of workers employed in proportion to the increase in production. Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed hands. Expanded reproduction is, in this way, the continual reproduction of the conditions of simple reproduction. Capitals that can no longer reinvest in a given line due to falling profitability will tend to find, available to them on the labour market, workers who have been thrown out of other lines. These “free” quantities of capital and labour will then find employment in expanding markets, where rates of profit are higher, or come together in entirely new product lines, manufacturing products for markets that do not yet exist. An increasing number of activities are thus subsumed as capitalist valorisation processes, and commodities spread from luxury into mass markets. The bourgeois economist Joseph Schumpeter described this process in his theory of the business cycle. He noted that the contraction of older lines rarely happens smoothly or peacefully, that it is usually associated with factory closures and bankruptcies as capitals attempt to deflect losses onto one another in competitive price wars. When several lines contract simultaneously (and they usually do, since they are based on linked sets of technological innovations), a recession ensues. Schumpeter calls this shedding of capital and labour “creative destruction”—“creative” not only in the sense that it is stimulated by innovation, but also because destruction creates the conditions for new investment and innovation: in a crisis, capitals find means of production and labour-power available to them on the market at discount prices. Thus, like a forest fire, the recession clears the way for a new bout of growth. Many Marxists have espoused something similar to Schumpeter’s conception of cyclical growth, to which they merely add the resistance of workers (or perhaps the limits of ecology) as an external constraint. Hence the Marxist notion of crisis as a self-regulating mechanism is complemented by a conviction that crises provide opportunities to assert the power of labour (or correct the ecologically destructive tendencies of capitalism). In these moments, “another world is possible”. Yet Marx’s theory of capitalism contains no such distinction between “internal” dynamics and “external” limits. For Marx it is in and through this process of expanded reproduction that the dynamic of capital manifests itself as its own limit, not through cycles of boom and bust but in a secular deterioration of its own conditions of accumulation. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

People usually look for a theory of secular decline in Marx’s notes on the tendential fall in the rate of profit, which Engels edited and compiled as chapters 13 to 15 of volume three of Capital. There, the tendency of the profit rate to equalise across lines — combined with the tendency of productivity to rise in all lines — is held to result in an economy-wide, tendential decline in profitability. Decades of debate have centred on the “rising organic composition of capital”, to which this tendency is attributed, as well as on the complex interplay of the various tendencies and counter-tendencies involved. Yet those engaged in this debate often neglect that the same account of the composition of capital underlies another law, expressing itself in both cyclical and secular crisis tendencies, one that may be read as Marx’s more considered re-formulation of this account — chapter 25 of Capital volume one: “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” If the unemployed tend to be reabsorbed into the circuits of capitalism as an industrial reserve army — still unemployed, but essential to the regulation of the labour market — they then equally tend to outgrow this function, reasserting themselves as absolutely redundant: "The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.” [Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p. 638] In other words, the general law of capital accumulation is that — concomitant with its growth — capital produces a relatively redundant population out of the mass of workers, which then tends to become a consolidated surplus population, absolutely redundant to the needs of capital. [This surplus population need not find itself completely ‘outside’ capitalist social relations. Capital may not need these workers, but they still need to work. They are thus forced to offer themselves up for the most abject forms of wage slavery in the form of petty-production and services.] Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

This is the secret of the “general law”: labour-saving technologies tend to generalise, both within and across lines, leading to a relative decline in the demand for labour. Moreover, these innovations are irreversible: they do not disappear if and when profitability is restored (indeed, as we shall see, the restoration of profitability is often conditioned on further innovations in new or expanding lines). Thus left unchecked this relative decline in labour demand threatens to outstrip capital accumulation, becoming absolute. […] What Marx is here describing is not a “crisis” in the sense usually indicated by Marxist theory, i.e. a periodic crisis of production, consumption or even accumulation. In and through these cyclical crises, a secular crisis emerges, a crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation itself. If expanded reproduction indicates that workers and capital pushed out of contracting industries will try to find places in new or expanding lines, the general law of capital accumulation suggests that, over time, more and more workers and capital will find that they are unable to reinsert themselves into the reproduction process. In this way the proletariat tendentially becomes an externality to the process of its own reproduction, a class of workers who are “free” not only of means of reproduction, but also of work itself. For Marx this crisis expresses the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. On the one hand, people in capitalist social relations are reduced to workers. On the other hand, they cannot be workers since, by working, they undermine the conditions of possibility of their own existence. Wage-labour is inseparable from the accumulation of capital, from the accretion of labour-saving innovations, which, over time, reduce the demand for labour: “The working population ... produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing” [Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p. 638]. It might seem that the abundance of goods, which results from labour-saving innovations, must lead to an abundance of jobs. But in a society based on wage-labour, the reduction of socially-necessary labour-time — which makes goods so abundant — can only express itself in a scarcity of jobs, in a multiplication of forms of precarious employment. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

The “general law of capitalist accumulation”, with its clear implications for the interpretation of Capital, has been overlooked in our own time because under the name of the “immiseration thesis” it was taken up and abandoned many times over in the course of the 20th century. It was held that Marx’s prediction of rising unemployment, and thus the increasing immiseration of the working population, has been contradicted by the history of capitalism: after Marx’s death, the industrial working class both grew in size and saw its living standards rise. Yet quite apart from the fact that these tendencies are often over-generalised, more recently their apparent reversal has made the immiseration thesis seem more plausible. The last 30 years have witnessed a global stagnation in the relative number of industrial workers. A low-wage service sector has made up the difference in the high GDP countries alongside an unparalleled explosion of slum-dwellers and informal workers in the low GDP countries. So is the immiseration thesis correct after all? That is the wrong question. The question is: under what conditions does it apply? Marx wrote about the growth of consolidated surplus populations in 1867. Yet the tendency he described — by which newer industries, because of their higher degree of automation, absorb proportionally less of the capital and labour thrown off by the mechanisation of older industries — did not play out as he had envisaged. As we can see from the graph on the facing page, Marx’s view was correct, in his own time, for the UK: the rising industries of the early second Industrial Revolution — such as chemicals, railways, telegraph etc. — were not able to compensate for declining employment in the industries of the first Industrial Revolution. The result was a steady fall in the rate of growth of manufacturing employment, which looked set to become an absolute decline sometime in the early 20th century. What Marx did not foresee, and what actually occurred in the 1890s, was the emergence of new industries that were simultaneously labour and capital absorbent, and which were able to put off the decline for more than half a century. The growth of these new industries, principally cars and consumer durables, depended on two 20th century developments: the increasing role of the state in economic management, and the transformation of consumer services into consumer goods. The emergent industries of which Marx wrote in the 1860s — gas-works, telegraphy, and railways, (we would add only electrification) — were already in his time beginning to be made available to consumers. Yet the consumer services generated from these technologies — initially reserved for the enjoyment of a wealthy elite — were secondary to the services they provided within the internal, planned economy of industrial firms. Railways emerged as a labour-saving innovation within mining, which was subsequently extended to other industries. It became a service offered to consumers only after extensive national-rail infrastructures had been developed by state-supported cartels. Even as costs fell and mechanised transportation via rail became available to more and more people, as a consumer service it preserved many of the features of its initial employment as a “process innovation” within industry. National railways, carrying passengers in addition to freight, absorbed large amounts of capital and labour in their construction but were subsequently relatively automated processes requiring less capital and labour for their upkeep. The advent of the automobile industry, subsidised by state funding of roads, eventually transformed the consumer service of mechanised transport into a good that could be purchased for individual consumption. This segmentation and replication of the product — the transformation of a labour-saving process innovation into a capital-and-labour absorbing “product innovation”— meant that this industry was able to absorb more capital and labour as its market expanded. A similar story can be told of the shift from telegraphy to telephones, and from electronic manufacture to consumer electronics. In each case, a collectively consumed service — often emerging from an intermediary service within industry — was transformed into a series of individually purchasable commodities, opening up new markets, which in turn became mass markets as costs fell and production increased. This provided the basis for the “mass consumerism” of the 20th century, for these new industries were able to simultaneously absorb large amounts of capital and labour, even as productivity increases reduced relative costs of production, such that more and more peasants became workers, and more and more workers were given stable employment. Yet, as the unprecedented state deficit-spending which supported this process indicates, there is no inherent tendency to capital that allows for the continual generation of product innovations to balance out its labour-saving process innovations. On the contrary, product innovations themselves often serve as process innovations, such that the solution only worsens the initial problem. When the car and consumer durables industries began to throw off capital and labour in the 1960s and 70s, new lines like microelectronics were not able to absorb the excess, even decades later. These innovations, like those of the 2nd industrial revolution described above, emerged from specific process innovations within industry and the military, and have only recently been transformed into a diversity of consumer products. The difficulty in this shift, from the perspective of generating new employment, is not merely the difficulty of policing a market in software — it is that new goods generated by microelectronics industries have absorbed tendentially diminished quantities of capital and labour. Indeed computers not only have rapidly decreasing labour requirements themselves (the microchips industry, restricted to only a few factories world-wide, is incredibly mechanised), they also tend to reduce labour requirements across all lines by rapidly increasing the level of automation. Thus rather than reviving a stagnant industrial sector and restoring expanded reproduction — in line with Schumpeter’s predictions — the rise of the computer industry has contributed to deindustrialisation and a diminished scale of accumulation — in line with Marx’s. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

Deindustrialisation began in the US, where the share of manufacturing employment started falling in the 1960s before dropping absolutely in the 80s, but this trend was soon generalized to most other high-GDP countries, and even to countries and regions that are seen as “industrializing”. [In no country (with the exception of the UK) did deindustrialisation involve a decline in real industrial output. In 1999, manufacturing still accounted for 46 percent of total US profits, but only 14 percent of the labour force.] The explosive growth of a low-wage service-sector partially offset the decline in manufacturing employment. However, services have proven incapable of replacing manufacturing as the basis of a new round of expanded reproduction. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

Services are, almost by definition, those activities for which productivity increases are difficult to achieve otherwise than on the margin. The only known way to drastically improve the efficiency of services is to turn them into goods and then to produce those goods with industrial processes that become more efficient over time. Many manufactured goods are in fact former services — dishes were formerly washed by servants in the homes of the affluent; today, dishwashers perform that service more efficiently and are themselves produced with less and less labour. Those activities that remain services tend to be precisely the ones for which it has so far proven impossible to find a replacement in the world of goods. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

In the early post-war period, many countries turned to “Fordism” — that is to say, the import of methods of mass production, made possible by government-sponsored “technology transfers” from high-GDP countries. Fordism is often taken to be a national economic-development policy, based on an “agreement” between capital and workers to share the gains of productivity increases. But Fordism was, almost from the beginning, predicated on an internationalisation of trade in manufactures. Europe and Japan benefited the most from the resurgence of international trade in the 1950s and 60s: capitals in these countries were able to achieve massive economies of scale by producing for international trade, thereby overcoming the limits of their own domestic markets. By the mid-60s, capitals in low-GDP countries like Brazil and South Korea were doing the same thing: even if they could capture only a small portion of the rapidly expanding international export market, they would still grow far beyond what was possible in their home markets. Thus, in the period before 1973, the internationalisation of trade was associated with high rates of growth in all industrialising countries. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

After 1973, the situation changed. Markets for manufactures were becoming saturated, and it was increasingly the case that a few countries could provide the manufactures for all of the world (one chinese firm currently supplies over half the world's microwaves). Thus the resulting crisis of the capital-labour relation, which is to say, a combined crisis of over-production and under-consumption, signalled by a global fall in the rate of profit and issuing in a multiplication of forms of unemployment and precarious employment. As the capital-labour accord snapped, having always been based on healthy rates of growth worldwide, wages stagnated. Capital in all countries became even more dependent on international trade, but from now on, capitals in some countries would expand only at the expense of those in others. Though they had not yet caught up to the high-GDP countries, the low-GDP countries took part in the same international crisis. Structural Adjustment Programs only accelerated their transition to a new, unstable international framework. Deindustrialisation, or at least the stagnation of industrial employment, set in almost universally among industrialising countries in the 1980s and 90s. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

It should thus be clear that de-industrialization is not caused by the industrialization of the “third world”. Most of the world’s industrial working-class now lives outside the “first world”, but so does most of the world’s population. The low-GDP countries have absolutely more workers in industry, but not relative to their populations. Relative industrial employment is falling even as agricultural employment collapses. Just as de-industrialisation in the high-GDP countries entails both the exit from manufacturing and the failure of services to take its place, so also the explosive growth of slums in the low-GDP countries entails both the exit from the countryside and the failure of industry to absorb the rural surplus. Whereas the World Bank used to suggest that the growing surplus populations throughout the world were a mere transitional element, they are now forced to admit the permanence of this condition. More than a billion people today eke out a terrible existence via an endless migration between urban and rural slums, searching for temporary and casual work wherever they can find it. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

The US emerged unscathed from World War II as the most advanced capitalist country, with the largest domestic market, the smallest agricultural population (as a percentage of employment), and the most advanced industrial technologies. By some estimates it was responsible for more than half of the world’s output.36 It also emerged from the war as the global creditor par excellence, owning two thirds of global gold reserves and with most allied powers owing it tremendous sums of money. Under these conditions, the US was able to reconstruct the international monetary order, in a shambles since the Great Depression, on its own terms. At Bretton Woods, the dollar was established as the international reserve currency, the only one to be directly backed by gold, and all other currencies were pegged to the dollar (creating a fixed exchange rate system, which nevertheless allowed for periodic adjustments). On the one hand, by fixing their own currencies to the dollar, European powers were given temporary relief from balancing their budgets during reconstruction. On the other hand, the US, by facilitating reconstruction, was assured of markets for its capital exports, which in turn facilitated the European purchase of American goods. In this way European budget deficits were funded by US capital exports, and a persistent trans-Atlantic trade imbalance was effectively written into the Bretton Woods agreements. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

While during the post-war boom the export of dollars via foreign direct investment had enabled rapid growth in deficit countries, this phase change meant that US capital exports became increasingly inflationary. [37] The spiralling US budget deficits of the Vietnam war only intensified this problem of inflation, as the seemingly inevitable devaluation of the dollar threatened to undermine the reserves, and hence the balance of payments, of all nations, straining the fixed exchange rate system to its limits. The result was that on the one hand many central banks began to cash in their dollars for gold (forcing the US to effectively end convertibility in 1968), while on the other hand surplus dollars accumulated in Eurodollar markets began to put speculative pressure on the currencies of export-based economies who were most at risk from the effects of dollar devaluation. These included both those developing countries which had pegged their currencies to the dollar, and thus risked seeing their primary commodity exports fall in value relative to the manufactured imports on which their development depended, as well as developed nations whose export markets risked being undermined by the revaluation of their currencies relative to the dollar. In its subsequent abandonment of Bretton Woods and its policy of “benign neglect” of the deficit, the US used this threat of dollar devaluation to impose a new flexible dollar reserve currency standard on the rest of the world, effectively delegating the job of stabilizing the dollar to foreign central banks who would be compelled to spend their surplus dollars on US securities in order to maintain the dollar value of their own currencies. This to all intents and purposes removed budgetary constraints from the US, allowing it to run up deficits and issue dollars at will, knowing that foreign nations would have no choice but to recycle them back to US financial markets, particularly into US government debt which quickly replaced gold as the global reserve currency. [37]: Most Marxists attribute inflation in this period either to the exploding US budget deficit (due in large part to the Vietnam war) or to the rising strength of labour. Yet Anwar Shaikh convincingly argues that the restricted supply in relation to which inflation is the index of excess demand is not full employment or labour recalcitrance, but rather the maximum level of accumulation, or the maximum capacity profit rate – whose decline during this period is the leading factor behind stagflation. Anwar Shaikh, ‘Explaining Inflation and Unemployment’ in Andriana Vachlou, ed., Contemporary Economic Theory (Macmillan 1999). Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

A common objection to the account we have so far provided would be to point to China as an obvious exception to this picture of global stagnation, particularly in so far as it relates to otherwise global trends of deindustrialisation and under-employment. Of course, over these years China became a global industrial powerhouse, but it did so not through opening new markets or innovating new productive techniques, but rather by massively building out its manufacturing capacity at the expense of other countries. [41] Everyone assumes that this expansion must have brought about a historic increase in the size of the Chinese industrial working class, but that is flatly false. The latest statistics show that, on balance, China did not create any new jobs in manufacturing between 1993 and 2006, with the total number of such workers hovering around 110 million people. [41]: In the 1990s Japan devolved its more labour-intensive industries onto developing countries in Asia – first to the East Asian Tigers, then to the ASEAN countries and then to China. But the absorption of industries by China has undermined the hierarchy of production within the region. […] China has not only grown on the basis of labour-intensive manufacturing. Its low wages have helped it to compete across a spectrum of industries, from textiles and toys to cars and computers. The incorporation of existing labour-saving innovations into the firms of developing countries, including China, has meant that, even with growing geographic expansion, each set of industrialising countries has achieved lower heights of industrial employment (relative to total labour force). That is to say, not only has China lost manufacturing jobs in its older industries; the new industries have absorbed tendentially less labour relative to the growth of output. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

In the 19th century when England was the workshop of the world, 95 percent of that world were peasants. Today, when the vast majority of the world’s population depends on global markets for their survival, the ability of one country to produce for all the others spells ruin, both for those who must be kept impoverished in order to maintain export prices, and for the vast multitudes whose labour is no longer necessary, but who, equally, can no longer rely on their own resources to survive. In this context the remainder of the world’s peasantry can no longer act as a weapon of modernisation, i.e. as a pool of both labour and consumer demand that can be drawn on in order to accelerate the pace of industrialisation. It becomes a pure surplus. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

Yet if the “general law” [Marx’s “general law of capital accumulation” leading to increased surplus population] was suspended for much of the 20th century for the reasons we have outlined above, the current growing global masses of under-employed cannot be attributed to its reassertion, at least in any simple sense. For the trajectory of surplus capital distorts the trajectory of surplus labour described by Marx, and not only in the ways that we have already described. Most importantly, surplus capital built up in international money markets over the last 30 years has masked some of the tendencies to absolute immiseration, through the growing debt of working class households. This tendency, which has kept the bottom from falling out of global aggregate demand, has equally prevented any possibility of recovery, which would be achieved only through the “slaughtering of capital values” and “setting free of labour”. For while asset-price deflation may raise the possibility of a new investment boom, the devalorisation of labour-power will, in this context, only lead to increasing levels of consumer default and further financial breakdowns. Thus it is not only its capacity to generate employment, but the sustainability of the recovery itself which remains in question today. The coming decades may see a series of blowouts, if states fail to manage global deflationary pressures, or they may see a long and slow decline. While we are not catastrophists by inclination, we would warn against those who might forget that history sometimes rushes forward unpredictably. Regardless, the catastrophe for which we wait is not something of the future, but is merely the continuation of the present along its execrable trend. We have already seen decades of rising poverty and unemployment. Those who say of the still-industrialized countries that it is not so bad, that people will soldier on — in a phrase, that the proletariat has become indifferent to its misery — will have their hypothesis tested in the years to come, as levels of debt subside and household incomes continue their downward trend. In any case, for a huge chunk of the world’s population it has become impossible to deny the abundant evidence of the catastrophe. Any question of the absorption of this surplus humanity has been put to rest. It exists now only to be managed: segregated into prisons, marginalised in ghettos and camps, disciplined by the police, and annihilated by war. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

It is clear that the theory of value and class-analysis cannot ultimately be separated. The categories of value and class are mutually implicated. By understanding capital as operating in terms of a “systematic dialectic” one can see that their relation is an internal one, both that “the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour — is the ultimate development of the value-relation”68 and that value relations are a product of the separation of living labour from objectified labour, that is of class. But although it must therefore be ultimately futile to look for the abolition of value anywhere else than in the class that is forced to produce it, and which is increasingly made redundant by it, the doubts about the revolutionary potential of the working class that are harboured by many of the value-critics have to be confronted. It seems to us that Théorie Communiste do this. At the heart of TC’s theory is the recognition of the reciprocal implication or mutual involvement of proletariat and capital. The fundamental question that this poses is that of how the struggle of a class that is a class of capitalist society can abolish that society. Part of the importance of the contribution of TC is to have resisted answering this by attributing a revolutionary human essence to the proletariat, beneath its merely class and capitalist nature, while at the same time not losing the centrality of the class contradiction. Their answer is rather to grasp the class relation as developing historically through cycles of struggle, while always involving a systematic implication. Crucially for TC “communisation” is not what communism and the revolution “always really was or as it always should have been.” Rather, the concept of communisation emerges historically with the end of a cycle of struggle in which communism and revolution appeared as something else. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

For TC, the classical workers’ movement from Marx through the 2nd and 3rd Internationals was part of a cycle of struggle which they term programmatism.70 In this period workers’ struggles and the vision of the overcoming of capitalism that emerged from them was based on an autonomy and positivity that workers were able to maintain within the capital-labour relation. The revolution of this period could be described as the impossible attempt to abolish a relation by affirming one of its poles. The tragedies of social democracy and Stalinism, and anarchism’s experience in Spain, were the product of the contradictions of the goal and methods set by the movement in its high period, which in turn were a product of the configuration of the class relation at that time — i.e. of the way that capital and class confronted each other. […] The determinate failure of this programmatic revolution bequeathed a post-WW2 capitalism where the workers’ movement had a certain power within capitalist society but no longer carried its earlier aspect of autonomous revolutionary affirmation. It was this situation that the development of a revolutionary theory had to confront. The struggles which then gave rise to new theoretical production in the 60s and 70s were — whatever the hopes of groups like the SI — not beyond programmatism. Rather, they took on a contradictory character: counter-cultural utopianism and “resistance to work,” issues of everyday life, coinciding with — and in many ways depending upon — the strength of a more programmatic movement. It was in this contradiction and these struggles that the theory of communisation and the new critical Marxism could arise. The resolution of these struggles in capital’s favour marked the end of that cycle in a restructuring in which the class’s possibilities of a positive autonomy and affirmation within capitalism would be suppressed. It is for TC exactly this defeat that creates a new configuration of the class relation in which the existence of the class is no longer experienced as a positivity to affirm but as an external constraint in the form of capital. And it is this configuration which necessitates both a new understanding of communism and a new reading of Marx. The critical reading of Marx grasps the radicality of what the revolutionary negation of value involves: we are speaking as much of the overcoming of our own selves as of something “out there.” The contribution of TC is to grasp how and why the configuration of the contradiction between capital and labour in an earlier period did not pose such an overcoming. In Marx’s day, and during the historical workers’ movement, the relation of capital and proletariat posed revolution in terms of the affirmation rather than the negation of labour, value and class. The work of TC suggests that the radical “way out” implied by value-form theory may be determined by the historical evolution of the capital-labour relation itself, rather than being the product of an ahistorically correct consciousness, free-floating scientific point of view or perspective of critique. The historical perspective on the class relation complements value-form theory. And the sophisticated analysis of capitalist social relations in systematic dialectic and value-form theory can inform the perspective of communisation by offering an elaboration of what exactly this class relation is, and how the particular social relations of capitalist society are form-determined as such. Systematic dialectic and value-form theory can help us to understand the character of the capitalist class relation, i.e. what it is exactly that can have a history in which revolution previously presented itself in the form of programmatism, and whose adequate horizon of supersession is now communisation. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

I disagree with this part of the analysis. I don’t think we needed the workers movement to fail its goals to be able to form a communization thesis. Kropotkin and the anarchist communists had formed it long before (at the end of the 19th century).

Against the neo-classical revolution in bourgeois economics, which repudiated the labour theory of value, Marxists tended to assert the classical position that labour is the substance of value and that value is the labour embodied in the product. Like the classical political economists, Marxists failed to address the peculiarity of the social process of reduction that is necessary for such quantitative magnitudes to be compared. That is to say, they too did not ask the question of why labour appears in the value-form of its product, and what kind of labour can so appear. Yet as Marx indicates, it is only by understanding the intricacy of the value-form that one can understand the subsequent forms of money and capital, or how human activity takes the form of the accumulation of capital. […] Understanding value as merely a form […] went together with a vision of socialism as a state-directed version of essentially the same industrial division of labour that is organised by the market in capitalism. On this view labour, which was restricted by market forms under capitalism, would become the conscious organising principle of society in socialism. […] labour is something that exists quasi-naturalistically in the product, and exploitation is seen as an issue of the distribution of that product — thus the “solution” to capitalism is seen as workers, via the state or other means, shifting that distribution in their favour. If exploitation is a matter of the deduction of a portion of the social product by a parasitic ruling class then socialism does not have to substantially alter the form of commodity production; but may simply take it over, eliminate the parasitic class, and distribute the product equitably. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

In the traditional view, the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production need not involve the abolition of abstract labour: abstract labour, according to this view, is a generic abstraction, a general transhistorical truth underlying the appearance of market forms within the capitalist mode of production. This truth would shine forth in socialism, with the parasitic role of the capitalist eliminated, and the anarchic market organisation of social labour replaced by (state) planning. From a critical perspective, traditional Marxism had turned capitalist forms and laws into general laws of history: in the relatively backward areas such as Russia, where Marxism became the ideology of state-led industrial development, Capital became a “how-to manual.” By contrast, for the value-form theorists Marx’s theory of value, as a monetary theory of value, is “not a theory about the distribution of social wealth, but rather a theory of the constitution of the social totality under the conditions of capitalist commodity production.” The issue was thus shifted from one of distribution to an overcoming of the form of labour, of wealth and the mode of production itself. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

Value is a relation or process that unfolds itself and maintains itself through different forms — in one moment money, the next the commodities that compose the labour process (including the commodity labour-power), the next the commodity product, and then again money — whilst always maintaining a relation in its money form to its commodity form and vice versa. For Marx then, value is not the embodiment of labour in the commodity, nor an unmoving substance. It is rather a relation or process which dominates those who bear it: a substance that is at the same time subject. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

The earlier [Marx’s politico-economic] drafts also pointed towards a more radical concept of revolution at a more fundamental ontological level. The drafts reveal that for Marx the critique of political economy calls into question the division of subjectivity and objectivity, the givenness of what it is to be an individual, and what is, and is not, our very being. For Marx these ontological questions are essentially social. He considered that the political economists had more or less succeeded in clarifying the categories which grasped the social forms of life under capitalism. While the bourgeoisie, however, tended to present these as ahistorical necessities, Marx recognised them as historically specific forms of the relationship between humans, and between humans and nature. The fact that human activity is mediated by social relations between things generates an atomised, object-less character to human subjectivity. The individual experience in capitalism is one of pure subjectivity, with all objectivity existing against it in the form of capital: “Separation of property from labour appears as the necessary law of this exchange between capital and labour. Labour posited as not-capital as such is: (1) not-objectified labour, conceived negatively [...] separated from all means and objects of labour, from its entire objectivity. This living labour, existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (also, not-value); this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labour, stripped of all objectivity. Labour as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth. [...] (2) Not-objectified labour, not-value, conceived positively, or as a negativity in relation to itself [...]. Labour not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value. [T]he in-every-way mutually contradictory statements that labour is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity, are reciprocally determined and follow from the essence of labour, such as it is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its contradictory being, and such as it, in turn, presupposes capital.” [Marx, Grundrisse (MECW 28), pp. 221-2] Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

Drawing on the pioneering work of Pashukanis, participants in the state-derivation debate grasped the separation of “the economic” and “the political” as something specific to capitalist domination. The implication was that — far from establishing a socialist economy and a workers’ state, as in traditional Marxism — the revolution should be grasped as the destruction of both “the economy” and “the state”. Despite the abstract — and at times scholastic — appearance of these debates, we thus begin to see how the critical return to Marx on the basis of the struggles of the late sixties in Germany had specific — and particularly radical — implications for how we conceive of the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

For TC [Theorie Communiste] the communist revolution understood as communisation does not establish a “republic of labour” or any new form of management of the means of production. Rather, it is the overcoming of the alienated social relation of production which constitutes the separation of subjectivity and objectivity experienced in capitalism. In the overcoming of the separation of individuals from each other and from the means of production, communisation overcomes the separation of human subjectivity from “objectified labour,” i.e. the subject/object split that forms the basis of social reality under capitalism. TC envisage this as an overcoming of each dimension which Marx describes in the Grundrisse: labour ceases to exist as a separate activity; production no longer distinguishes itself from and dominates reproduction; needs are no longer separate from capacities; and individuals no longer confront their sociality through the mediation of the exchange of their products or in the form of the state — they become directly social. The revolution as communisation dissolves both the social form of things, i.e. their existence as carriers of ‘objectified labour’, of value (they become things again), and the atomised, empty and separated out subject-form of the individual. Thus for TC, as for Marx in the Grundrisse, the formerly “objective” moment of production no longer dominates the subjective, but rather becomes “the organic social body in which the individuals reproduce themselves as individuals, but as social individuals.” Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

Those who developed the theory of communisation rejected this posing of revolution in terms of forms of organisation, and instead aimed to grasp the revolution in terms of its content. Communisation implied a rejection of the view of revolution as an event where workers take power followed by a period of transition: instead it was to be seen as a movement characterised by immediate communist measures (such as the free distribution of goods) both for their own merit, and as a way of destroying the material basis of the counter-revolution. If, after a revolution, the bourgeoisie is expropriated but workers remain workers, producing in separate enterprises, dependent on their relation to that workplace for their subsistence, and exchanging with other enterprises, then whether that exchange is self-organised by the workers or given central direction by a “workers’ state” means very little: the capitalist content remains, and sooner or later the distinct role or function of the capitalist will reassert itself. By contrast, the revolution as a communising movement would destroy — by ceasing to constitute and reproduce them — all capitalist categories: exchange, money, commodities, the existence of separate enterprises, the state and — most fundamentally — wage labour and the working class itself. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

Both value-form theory and communisation express dissatisfaction with received interpretations of Marx, and thus a rejection of “orthodox” or “traditional” Marxism. For us, there is an implicit commonality between value-form theory and the theory of communisation such that each may productively inform the other. We will here examine the historical parallels, and points of convergence, between these two tendencies. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

This is why value-form theory points, in terms of the notion of revolution that follows from it, in the same direction as communisation. The overcoming of capitalist social relations cannot involve a simple “liberation of labour”; rather, the only “way out” is the suppression of value itself — of the value-form which posits abstract labour as the measure of wealth. Communisation is the destruction of the commodity-form and the simultaneous establishment of immediate social relations between individuals. Value, understood as a total form of social mediation, cannot be got rid of by halves. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

I disagree with this part of the argument. I don’t think we need the value-form theory to arrive at the communization thesis. Marx’s sociological analysis of the commodity (and his observation that value is a social relation) can lead us to the understanding that we must abolish it and its logic of relating to each other by strictly quantifying our contributions to the social product. I believe that Kropotkin and the anarchist communists arrive at the communization thesis already at the end of the 19th century. The fact that Marx himself believed that we need an intermediate stage or that the socialist/pro-state strategy was the dominant one until recently doesn’t mean that the argument wasn’t there long before. It was just seen as utopian.

The account that follows is strongly influenced by systematic dialectics, a method that tries to understand social forms as interconnected moments of a totality.2 We therefore move from the most abstract categories to the most concrete, tracing the unfolding of gender as a “real abstraction”. We are only concerned with the form of gender specific to capitalism, and we assume from the outset that one can talk about gender without any reference to biology or prehistory. We begin by defining gender as a separation between spheres. Then, having done so, we specify the individuals assigned to those spheres. Importantly, we do not define spheres in spatial terms, but rather in the same way Marx spoke of the two separated spheres of production and circulation, as concepts that take on a materiality. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

We argue that these binaries depend on category errors whose faults become clear once we attempt to illuminate the transformations within capitalist society since the 70s. Forms of domestic and so-called “reproductive” activities have become increasingly marketised, and while these activities may occupy the “sphere” of the home, just as they did before, they no longer occupy the same structural positions within the capitalist totality, despite exhibiting the same concrete features. For this reason, we found ourselves forced to clarify, transform, and redefine the categories we received from marxist feminism, not for the sake of theory, but to understand why humanity is still powerfully inscribed with one or the other gender. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Within marxist feminism we encounter several sets of binary terms to analyse gendered forms of domination under capitalism. [In the broadest strokes, marxist feminism is a perspective which situates gender oppression in terms of social reproduction, and specifically the reproduction of labour-power. Often it considers the treatment of such topics in Marx and in subsequent marxist accounts of capitalism deficient, and in light of the ‘unhappy marriage’ and ‘dual systems’ debates, it generally supports a ‘single system’ thesis. It is also worth noting that this article is meant to continue a conversation from the 1970s, the ‘domestic labour debate,’ which turns on the relationship between value and reproduction, and which deploys Marxist categories in order to consider whether ‘domestic’ and ‘reproductive’ labour are productive.] These include: productive and reproductive, paid and unpaid, public and private, sex and gender. When considering the gender question, we found these categories imprecise, theoretically deficient and sometimes even misleading. This article is an attempt to propose categories which will give us a better grasp of the transformation of the gender relation since the 70s and, more importantly, since the recent crisis. […] The binaries listed above appear to limit one’s grasp of the ways in which these spheres function at present, as they lack historical specificity and promote a transhistorical understanding of gendered “domination”, which takes patriarchy as a feature of capitalism without making it historically specific to capitalism. We hope to delineate categories that are as specific to capitalism as “capital” itself. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

When raising the problem of the value of labour-power, Marx concludes that it is equal to the labour-time necessary for its production, as is the case for any other commodity. However, in this case, it is mysteriously reduced to the labour-time necessary for the production of the worker’s means of subsistence. But a cart full of “means of subsistence” does not produce labour-power as a ready-made commodity. If we were to compare the production of labour-power with the production of any other commodity, we would see that the “raw materials” used for this production process, i.e. the means of subsistence, transmit their value to the end product, while the new labour needed to turn these commodities into a functioning labour-power adds no value to this commodity. If we were to push this analogy further, we could say that — in terms of value — labour-power consists only of dead labour. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Marx reduces the necessary labour required to produce labour-power to the “raw materials” purchased in order to accomplish its (re)production. Any labour necessary to turn this raw material, this basket of goods, into the commodity labour-power, is therefore not considered living labour by Marx, and indeed,in the capitalist mode of production it is not deemed necessary labour at all. This means that however necessary these activities are for the production and reproduction of labour-power, they are structurally made non-labour. This necessary labour is not considered as such by Marx because the activity of turning the raw materials equivalent to the wage into labour-power takes place in a separate sphere from the production and circulation of values. These necessary non-labour activities do not produce value, not because of their concrete characteristics, but rather, because they take place in a sphere of the capitalist mode of production which is not directly mediated by the form of value. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

While the autonomist feminists would conclude that every activity which reproduces labour-power produces value, we would say that, for labour-power to have a value, some of these activities have to be cut off or dissociated from the sphere of value production. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

In this section, the Endnotes disagree with the autonomist feminists (like Fortunati) who argue that the work that reproduces labour-power is productive work itself (produces value). They argue that these activities happen in a sphere that is external/separate from value production. Moreover, that they are structurally made non-labour in the capitalist system (as belonging to this external/separate sphere) and this is why Marx doesn’t account for these activities as value-producing labour when analyzing reproduction.

Terms like the “reproductive sphere” are insufficient for identifying this sphere, because what we are trying to name cannot be defined as a specific set of activities according to their use-value or concrete character. Indeed, the same concrete activity, like cleaning or cooking, can take place in either sphere: it can be value-producing labour in one specific social context and non-labour in another. Reproductive tasks such as cleaning can be purchased as services, and prefab meals can be bought in place of time spent preparing meals. However, to fully appreciate how — beyond labour-power — gender is reproduced, it will be necessary to differentiate reproduction that is commodified, monetised, or mass produced from that which is not. Because the existing concepts of production and reproduction are themselves limited, we need to find more precise terms to designate these two spheres. From now on we will use two very descriptive (and therefore rather clunky) terms to name them: (a) the directly market-mediated sphere (DMM); and (b) the indirectly market-mediated sphere (IMM). Rather than coming up with jargonistic neologisms, our aim is to use these as placeholders and to concentrate on the structural characteristics of these two spheres. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

The production and reproduction of labour-power necessitates a whole set of activities; some of them are performed in the directly market-mediated or DMM sphere (those that are bought as commodities, either as product or service), while others take place in that sphere which is not directly mediated by the market — the IMM sphere. The difference between these activities does not lie in their concrete characteristics. Each of these concrete activities — cooking, looking after children, washing/mending clothes — can sometimes produce value and sometimes not, depending upon the “sphere”, rather than the actual place, in which it occurs. The sphere, therefore, is not necessarily the home. Nor is this sphere defined by whether or not the activities taking place within it consist of those that reproduce labour-power. It is defined by the relationship of these reproductive tasks to exchange, the market and the accumulation of capital. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Within the directly market-mediated sphere, reproductive tasks are performed under directly capitalist conditions, that is, with all the requirements of the market, whether they are performed within the manufacturing or the service sector. Under the constraints and command of capital and the market, the production of goods and services, regardless of their content, must be performed at competitive levels in terms of productivity, efficiency and product uniformity. The index of productivity is temporal, while that of efficiency pertains to the ways in which inputs are economically utilised. Furthermore, the uniformity of the product of labour requires the uniformity of the labouring process, and of the relationship of those who produce to what they produce. One can immediately see the difference between tasks performed in this sphere, and that outside of it. In the DMM sphere, the rate of return on a capitalist investment is paramount and therefore all activities performed — even if they are “reproductive” in their use-value character — must meet or exceed the going rate of exploitation and/or profit. SNLT applies to the process of abstraction occurring through the mediation of the market, which averages out the amount of time required within the labour process to competitively sell a product or service. Bankruptcy and the loss of profit are factors weighing on this process; likewise the innovative use of machinery in order to decrease the time required to produce goods. Thus, the increase of profit or market share dominates the DMM sphere. […] In addition, different forms of domination characterise these spheres respectively. Market dependency, or impersonal abstract domination, organises DMM relations of production and reproduction, through the mechanism of value-comparison in terms of socially necessary labour time. The kind of “direct market-mediation” within this sphere is abstract domination, and as such, it is a form of indirect compulsion determined on the market (“behind the backs of the producers”). Hence, there is no structural necessity toward direct violence, or planning, in order to allocate labour per se. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

The indirectly market-mediated sphere has a different temporal character. The 24-hour day and 7-day week8 still organise the activities within this sphere, but “socially necessary labour time” (SNLT) is never directly a factor in that organisation. […] Of course, mechanisation is also possible in the IMM sphere, and there have been many innovations of that sort. In this case, however, the aim is not to allow the production of more use-values in a given amount of time, but to reduce the time spent on a given activity, usually so that more time can be dedicated to another IMM activity. When it comes to the care of children, for example, even if some activities can be performed more quickly, they have to be looked after the whole day, and this amount of time is not flexible. In addition, different forms of domination characterise these spheres respectively. […] In contrast [to the DMM sphere], there is no such mechanism comparing the various performances of the concrete activities occurring in the IMM sphere — which is to say, as being socially determined. They cannot be dictated by abstract market domination and the objective constraints of SNLT, except in an indirect way such that the requirements of production transform the requirements of labour-power’s maintenance outside of the DMM sphere. Instead, other mechanisms and factors are involved in the division of IMM activities, from direct domination and violence to hierarchical forms of cooperation, or planned allocation at best.9 There is no impersonal mechanism or way to objectively quantify, enforce or equalise “rationally” the time and energy spent in these activities or to whom they are allocated. When an “equal and just” sharing of these activities is attempted, it must be constantly negotiated, since there is no way to quantify and equalise “rationally” the time or energy spent. What does it mean to clean the kitchen, what does it mean to look after a child for one hour: is your hour of childcare the same as my hour of childcare? This allocation cannot but remain a conflictual question. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

The Endnotes propose two different categories to analyze tasks related to labour-power reproduction: Directly Market-Mediated Sphere (DMM) and Indirectly Market-Mediated Sphere (IMM). The predicate of belonging to one sphere or the other is whether the activity is subsumed by the market (is commoditized) or not. They argue that belonging to one sphere or the other has consequences both on the material conditions (e.g. whether quantitative comparisons related to socially-necessary labour-time take place) but also on domination (e.g. in DMM domination is impersonal, the characteristic of the market indirect compulsion. On the contrary, in IMM domination is personal (e.g. from the husband to the wife). It seems to me that this argument is related to the productive/unproductive work in Marx’s theory (what is socially considered productive work under a specific mode of production).

As we further explicate the spheres of DMM and IMM in relation to that which is waged or unwaged, we elucidate the overlapping of these spheres through the principle of *social validation*. En route we will explore the ways in which the activities in question can be called labour or not; that is, if they qualify as labour or not in this mode of production. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

those [activities related to the reproduction of labour power] which are unwaged are the non-social of the social: they are not socially validated but are nonetheless part of the capitalist mode of production. Importantly, however, these do not map directly onto the spheres of IMM and DMM. […] They are cut off from social production; they must not only appear as, but also be non-labour, that is, they are naturalised. They constitute a sphere whose dissociation is necessary to make the production of value possible: the gendered sphere. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

We see that within the interplay of these four terms there are some waged activities which overlap with those of the IMM sphere: those organised by the state (the state sector). Within this imbricated set of categories, the sphere of IMM activities intersects with the sphere of waged labour. These waged and IMM activities are forms of state-organised reproduction that are not directly market-mediated. These activities reproduce the use-value of labour-power but are waged and thus socially validated. Nevertheless, these activities are not productive of value, nor are they subject to the same criteria of direct market-mediation. They are social because they are remunerated through the social form of value. Because they are not productive of value, they are the forms of reproduction which are a collective cost to capital: they are paid indirectly through deductions from collective wages and surplus-value in the form of taxes. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

For us, labour will be defined, in its opposition to non-labour, as an activity that is socially validated as such, because of its specific function, its specific social character in a given mode of production. Other bases for definitions of labour are also possible, to cite a few: exchange between man and nature, expense of energy, distinction between pleasant/unpleasant activities. However, we think that none of these definitions can help us understand anything about the character of unwaged IMM activities. These definitions only take into account their concrete characteristics, and in the case of unwaged IMM activities, this leads to banal or absurd descriptions. Is comforting a child an exchange with nature? Is sleeping a labour that reproduces labour-power? Is brushing one’s teeth labour? Brushing somebody else’s teeth? We think that our definition of labour, while it may seem banal at first glance, is the only one capable of passing over these meaningless questions, and that it constitutes the right starting-point for research into the specific character of these activities. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

the wage validates the fact that labour-power has been employed adequately, whilst universally recognising it as social labour, whatever the concrete activity itself might have been, or whether it was “productively” consumed. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

We find it necessary to hold fast to the traditional dichotomy of private/public as that which separates the economic and the political, civil society and the state, bourgeois individual and citizen. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Prior to capitalism the term “private” referred to the household, or oikos, and it was considered the sphere of the economic. With the advent of the capitalist era the private sphere moved outward beyond the household itself. Here we begin to see the inadequacy of the concept of “the private sphere” as a place outside of “the public sphere” that includes the economy, as for example in feminist theory. For the private is not merely that which is located in the domestic sphere, and associated with domestic activities. Rather, it is the totality of activities inside and outside of the home. As a result of the structural separation between the economic and the political (political economy) — corresponding to the spread of capitalist social (production) relations — the private sphere becomes increasingly diffuse, rendering the home only one amongst many moments of “the economic” or “the private”. Therefore, contrary to most feminist accounts, it was only within the context of pre-modern relations — prior to the separation of the political and the economic under capitalism — that the private sphere constituted the household. In contrast, in the modern capitalist era,the scope of private exploitation spans the entire social landscape. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Where then is “the public” if the private is the totality of productive and reproductive activities? Marx claims that the public is an abstraction from society in the form of the state. This sphere of the political and the juridical is the real abstraction of Right separated from the actual divisions and differences constituting civil society. For Marx, this abstraction or separation must exist in order to attain and preserve the formal equality (accompanied, of course, by class inequality) necessary for self-interested private owners to accumulate capital in a manner uninhibited rather than controlled or dictated by the state. This is what distinguishes the modern state, which is adequate to capitalist property relations, from other state systems corresponding to other modes of production, whether monarchical or ancient democratic. This means that the modern capitalist state and its “public sphere” is not an actually existing place, but an abstract “community” of “equal citizens”. Hence, the differentiation between the sphere of economic relations and that of the political — including relations between unequals mediated by relations between “abstract equal citizens”— renders “citizens” only formally equal according to the state and civil rights. As a result, these “individuals” appear as equals on the market — even though in “real life” (the private sphere of civil society) they are anything but. This abstraction, “the public”, must exist precisely because the directly market-mediated sphere is mediated by the market, a space of mediation between private labours, produced independently from one another in private firms owned and operated by private (self-interested) individuals. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

What then is the relationship between on the one hand, the spheres of public/private, political/economic, state/civil society, and on the other hand, the spheres of direct and indirect market-mediation? The meeting-point of these spheres marks the moment of their constitutive separation, and defines those anchored to one as distinct from the other, as different. This difference is determined by whether those individuals defined by the state directly exchange the labour-power commodity they bear within their person as their own property, or — if that exchange is mediated indirectly — through those with formal equality. Now we are ready to look at the individuals who have been assigned to each sphere. What we see at first, when we look at the dawn of this mode of production, is individuals who have different rights, which are defined by the law as two different juridical beings: men and women. […] the dichotomy between public and private does the initial work of anchoring individuals as men and women to the different spheres reproducing the capitalist totality through their differential right not merely to private property, but to that property which individuals own in their persons. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

In order to found the bourgeois mode of production, it was not necessary for all workers to be given equality under the sign of “the citizen”. Historically, “citizen” only names a specific category to which both property owners and certain proletarians are able to belong. As capitalist juridical relations disavow class through the reconstitution of the difference between citizen and other, the historical conditions under which the bourgeois mode of production was itself constituted were various forms of unfreedom. For this reason we have citizen and other as mapping onto: male (white)/ non-(white) male. For instance, under the conditions of slavery in North America, the classification of white was necessary to maintain the property of masters over slaves. Women were also classified as other, but for different reasons, as we shall see. […] Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

However, what constitutes the citizen/other binary in this mode of production is not based upon a negative definition of slavery but rather upon “free” labour, consisting of those with, as opposed to without, the same formal freedom. “Free labour” as Marx identified it — that is, the technical definition of freedom for the wage labourer — requires what we might call “double freedom”: "For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power.” [Marx, Capital, vol.1, (MECW 35), 179.] Nevertheless, haven’t women always been wage-labourers? Of course, since the origin of capitalism, women have been bearers of labour-power, and their capacity to labour has been utilised by capital; but they have only quite recently become the owners of their labour-power, with “double freedom”. Prior to the last quarter century, women were indeed free from the means of production, but they were not free to sell their labour-power as their own. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

The freedom of ownership, which includes mobility between lines of work, was historically only for some at the expense of others. Those struggling for political and “public” freedom, or double freedom, were caught in a double-bind. They were forced to make arguments on behalf of their (“but-different”) equality, while at the same time having interests in contradiction with those of others who identified with the same fight for equality on different terms. This is especially true in the case of women, who were caught between demanding freedom as the ideal, equal human, and freedom as different. This is because their “real difference” under capitalism is not ideal or ideological but embodied, and structurally reproduced through the practices which define women as different. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

The right to “be equal” and thus equally free, does not itself reorganise the distribution of property, nor as we shall see, the conditions of possibility for capital accumulation. These spheres work in concert. If this were not the case, it would be possible to abolish the actually existing forms of historically-specific “difference” through legal and “political” actions, within the state. This would amount to the abolition of the private through the public sphere — a revolution through reform which is structurally impossible. “Equality” as double-freedom is the freedom to be structurally dispossessed. This is not to say that it is not worthwhile. The question is, can it also become “worthwhile” to capital, the state and its attendant apparatuses of domination? As most of us will have experienced first-hand, the gender distinction has persisted long after differential freedom was abolished for the majority of women. If this differential freedom was in fact what anchored women to the indirectly market-mediated sphere, why did its abolition not “free” women from the category “woman” and the gendered sphere of reproduction? Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Ironically, the reproduction of dual spheres of gender and the anchoring of women to one and not the other is perpetuated and constantly re-established by the very mechanism of the “sex-blind” labour-market, which obtains not for the man/woman distinction directly but rather for the price distinction, or the exchange-value of their labour-power. Indeed, labour markets, if they are to remain markets, must be “sex-blind”. Markets, as the locus of exchanges of equivalents, are supposed to blur concrete differences in a pure comparison of abstract values. How then can this “sex-blind” market reproduce the gender difference? Once a group of individuals, women, are defined as “those who have children” and once this social activity, “having children”, is structurally formed as constituting a handicap, women are defined as those who come to the labour-market with a potential disadvantage. This systematic differentiation — through the market-determined risk identified as childbearing “potential” — keeps those who embody the signifier “woman” anchored to the IMM sphere. Therefore, because capital is a “sex-blind” abstraction, it concretely punishes women for having a sex, even though that “sexual difference” is produced by capitalist social relations, and absolutely necessary to the reproduction of capitalism itself. […]. As an apparent contradiction, once sexual difference becomes structurally defined and reproduced, woman as a bearer of labour-power with a higher social cost becomes its opposite: the commodity labour-power with a cheaper price. […] capitalists […] will […] privilege the labour-power that is likely to be the most reliable over a long period. If the worker is potentially going to leave, then she will not be as good an investment, and will get a lower price. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

What then is gender? For us, it is the anchoring of a certain group of individuals in a specific sphere of social activities. The result of this anchoring process is at the same time the continuous reproduction of two separate genders. These genders concretise themselves as an ensemble of ideal characteristics, defining either the “masculine” or the “feminine”. However, these characteristics themselves, as a list of behavioural and psychological qualities, are subject to transformation over the course of the history of capitalism; they pertain to specific periods; they correspond to certain parts of the world; and even within what we might call the “West” they are not necessarily ascribed in the same way to all people. As a binary however, they exist in relation to one another, regardless of time and space, even if their mode of appearance is itself always in flux. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Sex is the flip side of gender. Following Judith Butler, we criticise the gender/sex binary as found in feminist literature before the 1990s. Butler demonstrates, correctly, that both sex and gender are socially constituted and furthermore, that it is the “socializing” or pairing of “gender” with culture, that has relegated sex to the “natural” pole of the binary nature/culture. We argue similarly that they are binary social categories which simultaneously de-naturalise gender while naturalising sex. For us, sex is the naturalisation of gender’s dual projection upon bodies, aggregating biological differences into discrete naturalised semblances. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

The gender fetish is a social relation which acts upon these bodies so that it appears as a natural characteristic of the bodies themselves. While gender is the abstraction of sexual difference from all of its concrete characteristics, that abstraction transforms and determines the body to which it is attached — just as the real abstraction of value transforms the material body of the commodity. Gender and sex combined give those inscribed within them a natural semblance (“with a phantomlike objectivity”), as if the social content of gender was “written upon the skin” of the concrete individuals. The transhistoricisation of sex is homologous to a foreshortened critique of capital, which contends that use-value is transhistorical rather than historically specific to capitalism. Here, use-value is thought to be that which positively remains after revolution, which is seen as freeing use-value from the integument of exchange-value. In terms of our analogy with sex and gender, we would go one step further and say that both gender and sex are historically determined. Both are entirely social and can only be abolished together — just as exchange-value and use-value will both have to be abolished in the process of communisation. In this light, our feminist value-theoretical analysis mirrors Butler’s critique in so far as we both view the sex/gender binary as being socially-determined and produced through social conditions specific to modernity. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

The Endnotes theorize gender as a concept in the social realm - the anchoring of a certain group of individuals in a specific sphere of social activities. Much like the value of commodities, they view this relation as fetishized and naturalized in the concept of (biological) sex. They believe that, much like value, gender and its naturalized pole of sex must be abolished in the process of communization.

What the female gender signifies — that which is socially inscribed upon “naturalised”, “sexuated” bodies — is not only an array of “feminine” or gendered characteristics, but essentially a price tag. Biological reproduction has a social cost which is exceptional to average (male) labour-power; it becomes the burden of those whose cost it is assigned to — regardless of whether they can or will have children. It is in this sense that an abstraction, a gendered average, is reflected back upon the organisation of bodies in the same way exchange-value, a blind market average, is projected back upon production, molding and transforming the organisation of the character of social production and the division of labour. In this sense, the transformation of the condition of gender relations goes on behind the backs of those whom it defines. And in this sense, gender is constantly reimposed and re-naturalised. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

[…] we opt for a periodisation of the family, since it is the economic unit that brings together the indirectly market-mediated (IMM) and the directly market-mediated (DMM) spheres which delimit the aspects of proletarian reproduction. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

With the current [2010s] crisis, all signs indicate that the state will be increasingly unwilling to organise IMM activities, since they are a mere cost. Expenses in childcare, elderly-care and healthcare are the first to be cut, not to mention education and after-school programs. These will become DMM for those who can afford it (privatisation), or lapse into the sphere of unwaged indirect market-mediation — therefore increasing the abject. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Even if we might, in the crisis, have no choice but to self-organise these reproductive activities — and even though, most likely, abject reproduction will in the end mainly be foisted upon women — we must fight against this process which reinforces gender. We must treat it as it is: a self-organisation of the abject, of what no one else is willing to do. It is important here to state that, even if unwaged IMM activities and the abject might refer to the same concrete activities, these two concepts must be differentiated. Indeed, the category of the abject refers specifically to activities that became waged at some point but are in the process of returning into the unwaged IMM sphere because they’ve become too costly for the state or capital. While IMM is a purely structural category, independent of any dynamic, the concept of the abject grasps the specificities of these activities and the process of their assignment in our current period. Indeed, we can say that, if many of our mothers and grandmothers were caught in the sphere of IMM activities, the problem we face today is different. It is not that we will have to “go back to the kitchen”, if only because we cannot afford it. Our fate, rather, is having to deal with the abject. Contrary to the IMM activities of the past, this abject has already been to a large extent denaturalised. It does not appear to those performing it as some unfortunate natural fate, but more like an extra burden that one must deal with alongside wage-labour. Being left to deal with it is the ugly face of gender today, and this helps us to see gender as it is: a powerful constraint. [Obviously there are nowadays some men, even if few, who do a considerable part of the abject. And they get to know what many women experience: that the abject sticks to one’s skin. Many of these men, especially when they end up having to do most of the childcare, seem somehow to be undergoing a process of social castration.] Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

The Endnotes argue that, as the state is increasingly unwilling to organize IMM carework activities, those who cannot afford the cost of privatization will have no choice but to self-organize these reproductive activities. They see there the rise of the category of the abject, activities deemed not worth an investment by the capital and therefore thrown back to women (and a few men) to deal with. The difference with past generations is that for them these activities were seen as some unfortunate natural fate, while for contemporary women this is more an external constraint, an extra burden they must do, often alongside waged labour.

A last thought, to conclude: if it happens to be true that the present moment allows us to see both our class-belonging and our gender-belonging as external constraints, this cannot be purely accidental. Or can it? This question is critical for an understanding of the struggle which leads to the abolition of gender, that is, to the reproduction by non-gendered individuals of a life in which all separate spheres of activity have been abolished. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender