Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2004 15:42:52 -0600
From: Nate Holdren <nateholdren-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: AUT: more on the multitude - reproductive labor, social factory, etc


hey y'all-
more on this same subject, I'm trying to make sense of some stuff -

In Hardt and Negri and others' talk about the multitude, real
subsumption, etc, and in earlier talk about the social(ized) worker,
the social factory, there's stuff about the productivity for capital
of domestic and reproductive labor, traditionally feminine labor.

My question is this: is the theoretical move here an epistemological
or ontological one? That is, is the argument that political ideas have
changed, or that the rest of the world has changed? More clearly: is
the point that lefty theory/politics discovered that
domestic/reproductive labor and so on was productive (and so the
concept of labor had been too narrow to account for laboring
activity)? Or is is that domestic/reproductive labor became productive
(and so the newly expanded labor activity requires an expansion of the
concept of labor)?

And does anyone have any views either way on this? I'm more keen on
the point being one of epistemology, of theory, that the concept of
labor had been too narrowly defined. This touches on the meaning of
multitude as well, since this view also means that the condition of
reproductive-labor being productive-labor is not a new facet of class
composition today, though reproductive labor being waged labor -
nursing, caring work, etc - may be. (I don't know the history well
enough to say).

best,
Nate


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