Back to Basics with Labor-Power: The Problem of Culture and Social Reproduction Theory

In his 2019 opening statement as editor of Cultural Studies, Ted Striphas notes a widespread feeling that cultural studies is a scholarly formation on the wane.¹ There is a well-established literature on the subject: arguments about its decline are frequent enough to have become their own object of analysis.² Fredric Jameson wrote in the early 1990s that the field’s popularity signaled a “desire” for a new Gramscian “historical bloc,” suggesting that the field’s promise was political as much as it was methodological.³ This is part of the mythos surrounding cultural studies, specifically that iteration of it descending from the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, which piloted the version of interdisciplinary work that took American academics by storm in the 1980s.⁴ Jameson was skeptical of this “desire,” a not uncommon sentiment in the years since. Charges that the field abandoned foundational commitments to Marxism and devolved into neoliberal affirmations of consumption appear throughout its historiography.⁵ Such claims are cliché at this point, but not false: there was a “demarxification.” Stuart Hall said shortly before his passing in 2014 that the field’s turn away from Marxist questions signaled a “real weakness.”⁶ Many consider its left political consciousness a thing of the past, leading to calls for its “renewal” and revitalization.⁷ 

Though Striphas does not mention this particular declension narrative, it is hard not to consider given his response to the field’s ostensible disappointment. He suggests that “re-energizing” the field requires a rethinking of the “basics,” namely the idea of “culture” itself. As he puts it, “the problem of culture has shifted from a core to a peripheral concern, and it is now lacking in sustained reflection.”⁸ This is a methodological provocation with an unstated political premise. The “problem of culture” emerged in relation to debates sparked by postwar capitalism’s development and political crises on the English-speaking left. “Culture” took on new political valences and posed distinct intellectual questions amidst changes in working class composition and everyday life. Figures like Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart rethought the concept in dialogue with prevailing currents in British Marxism shaped by ongoing conflicts in the 1950s: the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, most notably.⁹ Hall and his colleagues at the CCCS did the same in response to the postwar conditions of the British working class and the crisis of Thatcherism.¹⁰ The turn to “culture” as an arena of struggle was a historical imperative and political necessity.¹¹ This suggests that the work of refining culture’s conventional definitions as “regimes of value; artifacts, both material and immaterial; or habits of thought, conduct, expression, and identification” cannot be an arbitrary matter.¹² It must be a project driven by the demands a new conjuncture makes on culture as a concept. To do this work, this essay turns to the current crisis of social reproduction and the Marxist feminist tools developed in response to it.

In the broadest sense, “social reproduction” refers to the socially necessary mental, physical, and emotional work that reproduces and maintains human life on a day-to-day basis, what some have summarized as “care work” or “people-making work.”¹³ Some Marxist feminists adopt a narrower definition, using it to refer to the reproduction of labor-power, Karl Marx’s term for the capacity to labor sold as a commodity in exchange for wages. Early theorists in this tradition adopted an expansive view of the “economic,” taking their cues from Marxists that theorized the creep of capitalist social relations outside “the factory” in light of their real subsumption to capital.¹⁴ They investigated domestic labor’s reproduction of labor-power, developing a non-reductionist account of the relationship between capitalism and gender oppression by showing how the unpaid work performed by women in the household established the conditions of possibility for the production of surplus value outside the home.¹⁵ Broadly influential, their insights have led scholars to consider the socially reproductive functions of a wide array of labors and services, including healthcare, education, and other “care” fields.

Nearly fifty years of neoliberal policy have rendered the work of social reproduction increasingly difficult. The Marxist feminist tradition described above offers the most robust account of this crisis: unlike neoclassical economic or Foucauldian explanations, the Marxist approach identifies its roots in capitalism’s antinomies.¹⁶ This tradition centers labor, unlike other notable theories of social reproduction such as that of Pierre Bourdieu.¹⁷ Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser write, “capitalist society harbors a social-reproductive contradiction: a tendency to commandeer for capital’s benefit as much ‘free’ reproductive labor as possible, without any concern for its replenishment.”¹⁸ In failing to replenish labor-power, it fails to ensure production, prompting systemic crisis.¹⁹ While the state managed these contradictions during the height of Fordism in the global north, neoliberalism’s erosion of the welfare state has contributed to mass precarity.²⁰ In low-income nations of the global south such processes have unfolded equally disastrously, shaped by the pressures of imperialist super-exploitation and the accompanying devastation of working class communities.²¹ The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened the crisis on both fronts.²² Consequently, the terrain of social reproduction has become a heightened terrain of political conflict, with those in frequently feminized care professions—teachers and nurses, for example—engaged in class struggle.²³

This crisis and the response to it has led SRT to become increasingly prominent on the English-speaking Left.²⁴ Leftist scholars working in multiple fields have turned to it to make sense of the current moment.²⁵ Cultural studies can do likewise: SRT provides an opportunity to “re-energize” the field’s intellectual and political commitments by rethinking “culture” in terms adequate to the crisis named above. Contemporary scholars attuned to matters of culture and social reproduction tend to explore the content of cultural works and practices, examining representations of socially reproductive labor, focusing on the persistence of capitalism’s social reproduction system.²⁶ This is valuable, but does not address the ways that culture contributes to the reproduction of labor-power itself.²⁷ Such works remain focused on what Barbara Laslett and Joanna Brenner describe as societal rather than social reproduction.²⁸ This is unsurprising: cultural studies scholars rarely consider labor-power as anything other than a fully formed commodity ready for sale in the market, examining it from the standpoint of its circulation rather than its production. This leaves the question of culture’s relation to labor-power unanswered and that of culture’s sociopolitical function within the current crisis of social reproduction unclear.

Though SRT has only minimally engaged with cultural matters, its insights are directly relevant to them. I argue that “culture” possesses a socially reproductive function complementary to its societally reproductive function. It is axiomatic within the field that culture is a material force: the ideological terrain only exists in and through concrete practices.²⁹ When read in the context of SRT’s view of the economic, the relationship between these practices and labor-power becomes apparent. Kylie Jarrett, Eric Drott, and Nathan Kalman-Lamb have made similar claims about the “people-making work” of individual cultural forms—social media, music, and sport, respectively—but a more general theorization of such matters is necessary given the peripheral standing of “the problem of culture” and the centrality of culture to capitalism today.³⁰ A systematic account at a high level of abstraction that tackles “culture” in relation to labor-power can clarify its social reproductive function within capitalism as a social totality, revealing tendencies and contradictions that can later be considered historically.³¹ Michael Denning’s “labor theory of culture” provides a generative starting point for this project: he links culture and labor-power in terms consistent with those of SRT. Building on his work, I suggest that culture stands as one of the many determinants of labor-power’s reproduction, as one of the constitutive components of the labor process and of that process’s conditions of possibility. This abstract model reveals the phenomena studied by Jarrett, Drott, and Kalman-Lamb as historical expressions of capitalism’s social reproductive logic, pointing towards the particular relationship neoliberal capitalism posits between labor-power and culture.

My claims about the socially reproductive function of culture are neither transhistorical nor functionalist. It is imminent to capitalism, a consequence of the forms of labor it compels and the needs it produces. I do not offer a general theory of culture relevant to all contexts, only those dominated by the capitalist mode of production. My argument retains another axiom of cultural studies, namely the idea that culture remains a contested terrain. I highlight the often-contradictory connection between social and societal reproduction as a site of political intervention. This essay links cultural struggles to social reproductive struggles, suggesting that the former can function as forms of the latter. Fights over meaning can be thought of in the same terms as fights over sustenance and care.

To make this argument, I first explicate SRT by examining its approach to labor-power and the economic by turning to Maria Dalla Costa and Selma James’s The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1975) and Bhattachrya’s conception of a wage labor circuit in the context of larger debates within Marxism about reproduction. This background frames the following section, which details the ways cultural studies scholars have traditionally focused on labor-power’s circulation rather than its reproduction, centering “societal” rather than “social” reproduction. Next, I put Denning’s labor theory of culture into conversation with contemporary Marxist feminist work in SRT and Marx’s own writings on labor to construct a systematic account of culture’s socially reproductive function within capitalism, detailing at a high level of abstraction the synthesis and simultaneity of social and societal reproduction and the possibilities of political contestation contained therein. Historical accounts complementary to this systematic account appear in the following section.

Reproducing Labor-Power in the Integrated Totality

If Marx aimed to demystify the “hidden abode” of production that bourgeois political economists ignored in their fetishization of the market, early Marxist feminist theorists of social reproduction aimed to peer “behind” that hidden abode to develop Marx’s incomplete account of labor-power.³² He minimally detailed its reproduction, suggesting only that it requires “a certain quantity of the means of subsistence.”³³ Theorists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Lise Vogel, and Leopoldina Fortunati considered how unpaid labor typically performed by women in the “domestic” sphere—cooking, cleaning, and childrearing, for instance—transformed those “means of subsistence” into labor-power, thus making its exchange and the realization of surplus-value possible: without such labors, men could not earn a wage. Their intervention revealed a unity obscured by bourgeois distinctions between the economic workplace and non-economic home.

A view of capitalism as an irreducibly complex totality undergirds this intervention. SRT views the social relations constitutive of the mode of production as extending throughout everyday life: the economic is an expansive category in this theoretical context. Dalla Costa and James described this in 1972: 

The community therefore is not an area of freedom and leisure auxiliary to the factory, where by chance there happen to be women who are degraded as the personal servants of men. The community is the other half of capitalist organization, the other area of hidden capitalist exploitation, the other, hidden, source of surplus labor. It becomes increasingly regimented like a factory, what Mariarosa calls a social factory, where the costs and nature of transport, housing, medical care, education, police, are all points of struggle. And this social factory has as its pivot the women in the home producing labor power as a commodity, and her struggle not to.³⁴

The term “social factory” originated with Mario Tronti, who argued in 1962 that capitalism’s postwar development rendered everyday life a functionary of traditional factory production, presaging later arguments by Antonio Negri regarding the “total subsumption of society” by capital.³⁵ Dalla Costa and James do not position “community” institutions as epiphenomenal to the economic or as reflections of a narrowly defined economic sphere, but as sites of social activity that exist in dialectical relation to processes of exploitation at the site of commodity production. They argued that this meant domestic reproductive labor directly produced surplus value.³⁶ Recent work persuasively challenges such claims, as well as the autonomist roots signaled by the above references to Tronti and Negri, by showing how reproductive labors indirectly relate to the production of value by waged labor, a function of the contingent relation between concrete reproductive activities and the market.³⁷ Claims about the value-productive nature of reproductive labor make political sense as a means of validating feminized (read: historically ignored) activities, but as Maya Gonzalez has argued, reproductive activities provide a necessary precondition for capital accumulation whether or not they produce value.³⁸ 

Dalla Costa and James’s response to Marxism’s silence on labor-power’s reproduction was a significant intervention in Marxist theories of reproduction. Analyzing the specific experiences of women cultivated a stronger portrait of what SRT calls capitalism’s integrated totality.³⁹ Within Marxism, reproduction typically refers to the reproduction of capitalist society. This was Marx’s primary concern in volumes one and two of Capital, which he detailed from the perspectives of capital’s production and circulation, respectively. He discussed labor-power only insofar as it contributed to capital’s valorization, taking the capitalist system’s reproduction as his object of analysis rather than the reproduction of the workers within it, a distinction Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner describe as that between “societal” and “social reproduction.”⁴⁰ Later work on reproduction remained within Marx’s paradigm. Consider, for instance, the Regulation School initiated by Michel Aglietta and adopted by heavily-cited figures like David Harvey.⁴¹ Aglietta aimed to explain capitalist society’s reproduction vis-à-vis the ways legal, political, and cultural institutions harmonized production and consumption.⁴² Labor-power featured prominently in this framework, but primarily as a circulating commodity: the aforementioned institutions mobilized and assured labor-power’s movement, but did not generate it.⁴³ A societal-specific analysis, however, confronts limits: social and societal reproduction are entwined and reinforce each other; absent one, the other breaks down.⁴⁴ This relationship undergirds capitalist society’s aforementioned “social-reproductive contradiction.” 

Bhattacharya’s understanding of labor-power’s reproduction as a circuit complementary to that which reproduces capital schematizes the relationship between social and societal reproduction. In Marx’s formulation, industrial capital valorizes through the following circuit: M – C(M_p, L_p) . . P . . . C’ – M’.⁴⁵ Money (M) is exchanged for commodities (C) that are produced via the coming together of the means of production with labor-power. These commodities move through a production process (P) to create commodity-capital (C’) that is used to generate profit (M’).⁴⁶ This process unfolds in the context of the total social capital, the aggregate of individual capitals, moving through what Marx calls “expanded reproduction” in service of capital accumulation, shaping society as a whole.⁴⁷ Capitalists, however, do not produce labor-power—that happens in the “community”—meaning labor-power possesses its own reproductive circuit entwined with Marx’s general circuit.⁴⁸ Bhattacharya conceptualizes it thusly: M – A_c – P – L_p – M.⁴⁹ In this “process of production of self for the worker or a process of self-transformation,” workers exchange money (M) for articles of consumption (A_c), which they consume in a production process (P) that generates labor-power (L_p) later sold to capitalists for money (M) in the form of wages.⁵⁰ Without this circuit, capital cannot valorize: it depends on labor-power. Labor-power’s removal, intentional or otherwise, disrupts production and accumulation.

The relationship between social and societal reproduction thereby marks a site of political intervention as much as it does a crisis animating contradiction. It positions political struggles seemingly disconnected from the processes of production—such as those of race, gender, and sexuality—as forms of class struggle insofar as they compel changes to the social organization of labor-power’s reproduction which drive changes in labor and valorization processes. In comprehending the whole, SRT explores how, in Ferguson and David McNally’s words, the “messy, complex, set of lived relations carried out by differently gendered, sexualized, racialized human beings” function within capitalism.⁵¹ Such modes of oppression, a list to which we could add any number of others, are “integral to and determinant of . . . actual processes of capitalist dispossession and accumulation,” meaning struggles against them are always “potentially anti-capitalist in essence.”⁵² Politics organized around or in response to racial or gender-based oppression, for instance, maintain their specificity without effacing their political economic dimensions.⁵³ 

Hence many topics are now viewed in terms of social reproduction. As Ferguson, Genevieve LeBaron, Angela Dimitrakaki, and Sara R. Farris write, “There is plenty of evidence . . . that the social reproduction of labour involves social relations beyond the gendered and household relations that have been the conventional focus of Marxist Feminism in general and [Social Reproduction Feminism].”⁵⁴ A range of activities in and outside the household facilitate the movement from A_c to P, including healthcare, education, care of the elderly or infirm, the construction of sexuality, pension funds, microcredit schemes, and education.⁵⁵ Such activities occur in a range of sites, including labor camps and dormitories, as Lise Vogel suggests.⁵⁶ Others have expanded SRT’s political focus by considering its relation to decolonial politics.⁵⁷ Culture can be situated alongside labor-power in this framework. 

Labor-Power in Cultural Studies

Laslett and Brenner’s distinction between “societal reproduction” and “social reproduction” clarifies the ways cultural studies scholars have engaged with labor-power. The field has largely engaged with culture and labor-power in terms of the former, keeping it within the domain of Marx’s circuit of industrial capital and reiterating Marxism’s traditional understanding of reproduction. A turn to the collective work and legacy of CCCS via Stuart Hall’s 1983 lectures at the “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, and Boundaries” conference demonstrates the centrality of societal reproduction to the cultural studies project.⁵⁸ Pivotal to the field’s popularization, they centered societal reproduction insofar as the problematic of the base and superstructure was a primary conceptual touchstone. The base/superstructure problematic is, after all, a reproductive schema.

For Hall, the relationship between the economic (base) and ostensibly non-economic (superstructure) “defined and framed the concerns of Cultural Studies.”⁵⁹ This starting point privileges the relations constitutive of a given social formation at a macro-level. His rejection of the “strong determinist position” that saw superstructural forms like culture as mere expressions of the base was an argument for a multi-directional conception of the relationship between base and superstructure—that is, for a more nuanced conception of societal reproduction.⁶⁰ This is evident in Hall’s engagement with Althusser’s conception of ideology and Gramsci’s view of hegemony. Hall saw his turn to the latter as the embrace of a less functionalist framework for understanding the reproduction of social relations. He writes, “[Althusser’s conception of] ideology does not therefore only have the function of ‘reproducing the social relations of production.’ Ideology also sets limits to the degree to which a society can easily, smoothly, and functionally reproduce itself.”⁶¹ His Gramscian turn emphasized the struggle contained within these processes in contexts allegedly epiphenomenal to economic concerns, namely culture and the institutions that generated it, but his focus remains society’s relations of production.⁶² 

Hall’s concern with culture’s mediation of societal reproduction treats labor-power as an already-formed commodity primed to move through the labor process in service of capital’s valorization. The social relations of production remain tied to the traditional site of commodity production. This is a holdover from Althusser. He investigated ideology and labor-power’s reproduction in the same terms, focusing on the former as one of the preconditions of the latter’s movement through the production process. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” he discusses labor-power’s value as Marx does in terms of wages used to purchase biological necessities, as well as acquired skills deployed in the labor process. He argues that dominant ideology as expressed and enacted within various ideological state apparatuses, including culture, subjects this productive force to the rule of the dominant class, which in turn ensures that it produces surplus value.⁶³ Ideology facilitates each relation of exchange and production within Marx’s general circuit of capital. Though Hall troubled the notion that this would happen automatically, he took labor-power’s presence within this circuit for granted. The concept rarely appears in his lectures except in terms of its role within extant systems of signification that are sites of struggle.⁶⁴ While Hall’s Gramscian turn let him argue that “[cultural forms] create the possibility of new subjectivities, but they do not themselves guarantee their progressive or reactionary content,” he still presumes the presence of an individual possessing the capacity to labor that said subjectivity either does or does not put into motion.⁶⁵ 

These are not criticisms of Hall. He was grappling with a different set of political and intellectual questions. Nonetheless, his work demonstrates a tendency within CCCS to emphasize societal reproduction that the field has reproduced since.⁶⁶ There were notable exceptions.⁶⁷ Hall and his co-authors engaged directly with Dalla Costa and James in Policing the Crisis (1978) to suggest that their framework offered a potentially useful means of understanding the forms class struggle took among the black working class, but this line of thinking is not substantively developed.⁶⁸ The Women’s Studies Group and the Political Economy of Women Group at CCCS engaged with the same figures and produced a variety of works in response to debates about the nature of domestic labor.⁶⁹ Several essays in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain (1982) made similar moves with an eye towards race and the domestic labors of social reproduction.⁷⁰ Later works, however, tended to take the path charted in Hall’s lectures. Marxist studies of leisure such as those by Chris Rojek addressed the relationship between leisure and labor-power, but did not go beyond Marx’s own limited account of its reproduction.⁷¹ Labor-power never appears in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson’s Cultural Studies (1992), an influential volume in the United States that, as Paul Smith put it, “served to lay out the ideology and define the ethos of the then burgeoning field.”⁷² This is unsurprising. Charges that the field devalued, ignored, or abandoned Marxist considerations of the economic recur throughout its history.⁷³ Janice Peck, for instance, has argued that Hall’s significant reevaluations of superstructural phenomena left the base (which includes labor-power) analytically undisturbed.⁷⁴ Toby Miller, Christian Fuchs, and Denning have all suggested that the field neglects labor.⁷⁵ Even works committed to reinvigorating the field’s leftist political commitments vis-à-vis a grounding in political economy do not engage with labor-power’s reproduction.⁷⁶ Such works often reiterate Hall’s focus on the ideological factors facilitating labor-power’s circulation rather than its material reproduction.⁷⁷

Culture and Labor-Power’s Reproduction

Denning’s “labor theory of culture” is a notable exception to the above-described tendency to begin and end with labor-power’s circulation.⁷⁸ His work here has been a frequent point of reference for scholars investigating the labor history of the cultural industries, but it also provides a valuable starting point for a general theory of culture’s socially reproductive functions.⁷⁹ The link it posits between culture and labor-power can be rethought in terms drawn from SRT. My argument here is abstract, concerning categories of the capitalist mode of production in a systematic sense rather than their historical expression, a consideration of which appears in the following section. As Hall put it, “one has to cut into the thick texture of social life and historical experience with clearly formulated concepts and abstractions,” the latter of which precedes the former.⁸⁰ Such an approach clarifies culture’s role in Bhattacharya’s wage labor circuit, showing that it functions logically within capitalism’s integrated totality.

Denning begins with culture’s relation to work in general, providing an initial framework for thinking through the reproductive relationship between culture and labor-power. Building upon Harry Braverman’s insistence on the fundamental unity of mental and manual labor, Denning insists that “work and culture are synonyms”: as transformative activities, both are “purposive, conscious, and directed by conceptual thought.”⁸¹ The production of “regimes of value; artifacts, both material and immaterial; or habits of thought, conduct, expression, and identification,” as Striphas defined “culture,” are concrete activities dependent on the full-range of human faculties.⁸² The same should be said of challenges to said regimes, the repurposing of said artifacts, and the revision of any “habits of thought, conduct, expression, and identification.” While separated spatially insofar as cultural activity often takes place outside the workplace, this is the historical form of appearance of a theoretical and operational unity, a manifestation of the bourgeois mystification of the “economic” and “non-economic” akin to that between home and the workplace. 

The collapse of the distinction between work and culture is a reminder that the labors of culture are not unique. The determinants of labor generally apply here. This means that prevailing regimes of gender, race, and sexuality influence them. These modes of oppression cut across the many spheres in which individuals and groups enact the labors of culture, influencing how and where they occur, who can perform them, and how society appreciates them, monetarily or otherwise. Such labors function differently with respect to production depending on their context: some cultural activity is value-productive and others not. In most cases, the substances of culture are commodities produced according to capital’s industrial logic: workers sell their labor-power within the cultural industries and produce films, books, records, and the like in accordance with the prevailing relations of production; those commodities circulate on the market.⁸³ As Denning notes, a labor theory of culture draws attention to the labor process and the valorization process.⁸⁴ However, the labors of culture occur in different spheres. The spatial and conceptual distinction between labor and culture is a mystification, but one that has material affects; that distinction manifests historically. Informal acts of cultural production—those creative acts of everyday production, transformation, and meaning-making—usually occur outside sites of commodity production: in the household, in public spaces of consumption, and others. While individuals rarely sell their labor-power or produce value in such contexts, they are nonetheless engaged in purposive transformative activity under conditions shaped by capitalist social relations and often with materials produced as commodities. Here, they bear an indirect relation to the market, meaning these labors operate differently: they have different uses and do not necessarily circulate with exchange-value.⁸⁵ Much like feminized domestic labor, this is likely why culture has not been considered work.

Denning suggests that these labors are reproductive. As he notes, commodities themselves are sensuous, even extra-sensuous objects.⁸⁶ In thinking through culture in relation to and as work, he grounds it in bodies and minds, in human sensory experience, capturing culture’s significance beyond its ideological functions, namely the production of physical and mental pleasures through the creative use of cultural forms.⁸⁷ Cultural forms satisfy needs in everyday life, responding to human sensorial desire rooted in the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of individuals.⁸⁸ This is their primary use-value. They are “articles of consumption” put to use within a productive process, above conceptualized as the labors of culture, that generates labor-power.⁸⁹ This is why he can refer to cultural objects as “means of subsistence of mobile and global workers” and claim that “culture is the labor which produces labor power.”⁹⁰ Elaborating, he states, 

Culture is a name for that habitus that forms, subjects, disciplines, entertains, and qualifies labor power. In it lies the very resistance to becoming labor power. It is the contradictory realm of work in the shadow of value, the unpaid and “unproductive”labor of the household and what autonomous Marxists called “the social factory”; but it is also the contradictory realm of the arts of daily life, of what Marx called the “pleasures of the laborer,” the “social needs and social pleasures” that are called forth by the “rapid growth of productive capital.”⁹¹

His invocation of the “social factory” and domestic labor suggests that Denning is using “culture” in the same sense that Dalla Costa and James used “community”: to denote the “other half of capitalist organization” that makes the production of surplus-value possible.⁹² This space is where the creative transformation of cultural forms unfolds.⁹³ Here, the work of culture does not simply mobilize labor-power in particular ways, but also contributes to its reproduction as a commodity via the individual and/or collective engagement with its sensuous qualities that occur alongside and through processes of symbolic creation or ideological negotiation. This occurs prior to labor-power’s circulation. In other words, there is more at stake in the labors of culture than ideology: they help sustain that which is necessary to survive under capitalism. 

A turn to Marx’s writings on labor-power, value, and living labor clarifies the socially reproductive function of cultural activity. Though he does not adequately theorize labor-power’s reproduction, Marx does explore its value in a manner consistent with the dynamics sketched above. He defines labor-power as “The aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind,” with its value determined by that of “the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.”⁹⁴ These “means of subsistence” must sustain the worker in their “normal state as a working individual.”⁹⁵ This includes food, shelter, and housing, as well as a “historical and moral element.”⁹⁶ Marx writes,

the number and extent of [a worker’s] so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history, and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country; in particular they depend on the conditions in which and consequently on the habits and expectations with which, the class of free workers has been formed.⁹⁷

Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho argue that these “historical and moral elements” refer to those varied and differentiated phenomena constitutive of social relations and norms.⁹⁸ Marx affirms this in Capital’s second volume. In his discussion of the working class’s “necessary means of consumption” in the context of simple reproduction, he writes, “it is immaterial whether a product such as tobacco, for example, is from the physiological point of view a necessary and means of consumption or not; it suffices that it is such a means of consumption by custom.”⁹⁹ Cultural forms must be included in this framework given their saturation of everyday life.¹⁰⁰ One cannot consider the “living personality” and “normal state” of individuals within the capitalist system absent the forms of meaning-making expressed in, by, and through cultural objects that are sensuously consumed, realizing their use-value insofar as they satisfy particular physical, mental, and emotional needs, even if only by “custom.”¹⁰¹ This explains why Marx included cultural forms like “journals” and “books” alongside housing, foodstuffs, and educational expenses as “necessaries” in the 1880 questionnaire he developed to understand the lives and habits of the French working class: they were necessary for labor-power’s reproduction.¹⁰² 

Marx’s conception of the toll of the labor process drives this point home. Labor-power describes capacity to labor, not labor itself.¹⁰³ Marx calls this activity “living labor,” which he conceptualizes in terms consistent with his discussion of labor-power’s value. He defines it as the expenditure of “a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, etc.” which “have to be replaced.”¹⁰⁴ This expenditure depletes one’s “vital forces,” a term Marx uses in both the Grundrisse and Capital to name the reservoir of physical and mental energies the concrete exercise of labor-power depletes.¹⁰⁵ “Vital forces” are what, in Marx’s famous metaphor, the vampire of capital sucks, transforming living labor into the dead labor that is capital.¹⁰⁶ As he puts it in his writings on the working day:

Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man can only expend a certain quantity of his vital force. Similarly, a horse can work regularly for only 8 hours a day. During part of the day the vital force must rest, sleep; during another part the man has to satisfy other physical needs, to feed, wash and clothe himself. Besides these purely physical limitations, the extension of the working day encounters moral obstacles. The worker needs time in which to satisfy his intellectual and social requirements, and the extent and the number of these requirements is conditioned by the general level of civilization.¹⁰⁷

Once again, Marx identifies “moral” elements in relation to labor, clarifying them as “intellectual and social requirements” and as “needs” shaped by “civilization,” descriptions that, as suggested above, can be understood in cultural terms.¹⁰⁸ Marx invokes them as limiting factors on the physical and temporal amount of concrete labor a worker can perform with their body and mind: they determine how much their “muscle, nerve, brain, etc.” can take within the labor process.¹⁰⁹ If “journals” and “books” are “necessaries” in relation to labor-power’s value, here they are constituted as such in relation to the living labor that generates that surplus-value at the point of production. 

Including cultural forms within the “historical” and “moral” determinants of labor-power as “articles of consumption” points to the historical specificity of culture’s socially reproductive function. In the passage quoted above, Marx notes that a worker’s “intellectual and social requirements” are dependent upon “the general level of civilization.”¹¹⁰ They are expressions of “habits” and “expectations.”¹¹¹ As such, they are constructions. Denning alludes to this via his invocation of Marx’s Wage-Labor and Capital: “Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures.”¹¹² “Needs” are not static, but evolve and proliferate alongside the productive forces of society.¹¹³ While the fact that meaning is made, objects creatively transformed, and sociality engendered may be transhistorical, their relationship to labor-power is specific to social relations dominated by the regime of wage labor. Culture’s socially reproductive function is not imminent to a given cultural form, but dependent upon social relations that generate “social needs” “culture” responds to. Marx could suggest that “journals” and “books” reconstituted workers’ “vital forces” because the nineteenth century saw their production as “culture,” a concept held as external and antithetical to the alienating drudgery of labor and violence of the market.¹¹⁴ Denning sutures this distinction, but it remains a real abstraction. That is, an abstraction that “exists in the world as an object with social objectivity to which all must bow.”¹¹⁵

The connection Marx draws between the needs of individual workers and the state of society suggests a connection between culture’s role in social and societal reproduction. As noted earlier, culture’s role in the production of the capitalist system is well-established. These modes of societal reproduction have social reproductive counterparts. First, if cultural forms are commodities, then their consumption in that capacity reproduces capitalist society, at least on some level, regardless of how they are interpreted, insofar as it continues the circulation of value.¹¹⁶ In satisfying “social needs and social pleasures,” cultural activity contributes to labor-power’s reproduction and thus workers’ ability to move through Bhattacharya’s wage labor circuit, which itself contributes to society’s reproduction: consuming cultural commodities reproduces capitalism and the use of those commodities helps generate the labor-power on which capitalism depends. Second, culture also functions ideologically, legitimating and/or limiting the reproduction of the relations of production undergirding capitalist society. This ideological component contributes to labor-power’s reproduction insofar as ideology has emotional, psychological, and physical components that shape what Marx calls a worker’s “normal state.”¹¹⁷ The production of one’s capacities as labor-power is itself a material and ideological project shaped by the way capitalist society makes wage labor a necessary precondition for survival. Hence Denning’s claim that, “Culture is a name for that habitus that forms, subjects, disciplines, entertains, and qualifies labor power.”¹¹⁸ 

The relationships posited above might appear functionalist.¹¹⁹ For instance, they suggest that culture reproduces labor-power regardless of its ideological content: societally affirming and challenging cultural activities perform the same emotional, psychological, and physical function in relation to labor-power. This may be the case at times, but the links above are by no means fixed: they denote sites of possible contradiction that serve as “points of struggle,” as Dalla Costa and James would have it. If culture mediates the social relations and norms constitutive of the “historical” and “moral” determinants of labor-power, that includes the conflicts endemic to the concept. Culture does not cease being a contested terrain when viewed in social reproductive terms. Alternative interpretations of Marx’s conception of “historical and moral elements” are instructive here. Contra Fine and Saad-Filho’s read of this phrase, some argue it refers to class struggle.¹²⁰ There is no reason to separate these interpretations. As the cultural studies tradition exemplified by Hall demonstrates, social norms are sites of conflict between dominant and subordinate classes crucial to the construction and contestation of a hegemonic bloc, part-and-parcel of a Gramscian “war of position.”¹²¹ The meanings and affects embedded in culture that contribute to labor-power’s reproduction may reinscribe the relations of production in all the senses noted in the previous paragraph, but those meanings, affects, and the benefits thereof might also challenge the regime that necessitates wage labor in the first place. The wage labor circuit can incubate disruptions in the circuit of capital’s reproduction. The need to socially reproduce oneself can undermine capitalist society’s need to reproduce itself, effectively inverting the social reproductive contradiction endemic to capitalist society.

Reassessing conventional understandings of cultural politics in light of culture’s socially reproductive function illustrates these contradictory dynamics. Consider demands for cultural representation. Demands by marginalized people for affirmative acknowledgment as human beings within the culture industries and society writ large, what Fraser has characterized as the politics of recognition, could be understood as demands for the materials they need to reproduce themselves and live within a violently racist and patriarchal social order that excludes and exploits them.¹²² Such demands are more akin to those for adequate healthcare or housing rather than the articulation of a political program. They reinscribe the societal order as demands made within capitalist relationships, but the same could be said of demands for access to healthier options in food deserts. Like those “necessaries,” they provide the resources to go to work, but also the resources to contest the order that compels them to do so: politics demands mental, emotional, and physical energy the same way wage labor does. The materiality of cultural struggle extends beyond the fact of its existence as a concrete practice: it is material in the sense that it is a struggle over sustenance. In this way, a cultural demand oriented towards the reproduction of labor-power helps create the conditions necessary for challenging society writ large.

The same dynamics unfold when we consider demands for access to cultural forms, specifically in terms of the time and ability to consume and produce culture. Consider struggles to shorten the workday, which challenge the production of absolute surplus value by decreasing the duration of exploitive work.¹²³ For Marx, the extended working day robbed workers of “time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfillment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and mind, [and] even the rest time of Sunday.”¹²⁴ In short, it robs workers of the time and opportunity for cultural activity. In this light, the third clause in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American labor movement demand of “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” is a demand for culture that implicitly recognizes its necessity to labor-power.¹²⁵ To demand time “for what we will” is to demand time for self-transformation in everyday life in terms not directly dictated by capital: time “for the free play of the vital forces of his body and mind.”¹²⁶ Contemporary workers in China have made the same connection, including “leisure time” alongside other material necessities in agitational literature, positing it as essential to labor-power’s reproduction.¹²⁷ The desire for such time requires changes elsewhere: a shorter working day will, from capital’s point of view, require a restructured production process. 

In the examples above, cultural struggle is an expression of social reproductive struggle, meaning we can consider it a form of class struggle. It is not an adjunct to it, an autonomous fight parallel to that over political economy. That is not to say that cultural struggle is equivalent to other forms or expressions of class struggle, only that it functions as such within capitalism’s integrated totality and bears anti-capitalist potential. This underpins Denning’s claim that “in [culture] lies the very resistance to becoming labor power.”¹²⁸ He echoes Marx here, who suggests that it is in “ideological forms” that workers “become conscious” of contradictions and transformations in political-economy and “fight it out.”¹²⁹ Denning’s injunction deepens Marx’s position. It suggests that it is in “ideological forms” that workers can affect contradictions and transformations in political-economy insofar as fights for, in, and around them disrupt the circuit of wage labor’s reproduction (M – A_c – P – L_p – M) which in turn disrupts that of industrial capital (M – C(M_p, L_p) . . . P . . . C’ – M’). This hinges on the centrality of labor-power to the smooth operation of the system. Capital depends upon it. Capitalists view workers only in terms of it. Marx notes that the drive to extend the working day reveals this truth: for the capitalist, “the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that there all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.”¹³⁰ The labors of culture can undermine this perspective. In the examples considered in the previous two paragraphs, the raw materials for the production of oneself are at stake. Fights over sustenance and time can refigure conditions that demand the production of the need for labor-power, creating the conditions for the production of oneself otherwise.

Culture and Neoliberal Crises of Care

The picture painted in the previous section is incomplete. I have largely spoken of culture, cultural forms, and cultural works in the abstract, avoiding more concrete examples like working class culture, television, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as much as possible. As the Endnotes Collective has argued, both systematic and historical approaches are necessary: the former helps articulate the dynamics of capital’s social totality while the latter “pour into and disrupt the identity” of that totality.¹³¹ However, taken alone they only offer partial portraits. Much changes in the move from the idea of culture to cultural form and to a specific text. Arguably, the tradition of cultural studies inaugurated by the CCCS emerged via the upward movement from the abstract to the concrete via the investigation of empirical phenomena in relation to the wide array of determinations that movement revealed. Such a movement is necessary to clarify the distinctiveness of culture’s socially reproductive functions. I have no intention of conflating domestic labor or healthcare work with the labors of culture. Social reproduction is a variegated phenomenon: one can only draw equivalencies between different forms and their attendant struggles at the highest levels of abstraction. Such abstractions are nonetheless historically suggestive. Here, I will briefly consider how the systematic analysis presented above can be brought to bear on the current crisis of social reproduction. This is the context a “re-energized” sense of culture can speak to. My goals here are modest: I aim to be suggestive rather than definitive, demonstrating the empirical utility of SRT to cultural studies, as well as vice versa. 

The current social reproduction crisis began with the dismantling of the industrially oriented state-managed capitalism of the Fordist period in the global north. The postwar state aimed to contain capital’s undermining of labor-power by investing in social reproductive institutions like healthcare and higher working-class wages paid to white male breadwinners, otherwise known as the “family wage.” The reproduction of white working class labor-power depended on patriarchal gender and sexual relations, white supremacist exclusions, and imperialist expropriation of the global south.¹³² The neoliberal turn prompted by the economic crises of the 1960s and 1970s brought state divestment from these socially reproductive institutions and the end of the Fordist family wage.”¹³³ Reprivatized public services replaced the former, the “dual income family” replaced the latter: patriarchal gender and sexual relations, white supremacist exclusions, and imperialist exploitation continued, though in different forms. As one group of feminist economists puts it, “Care needs and the soaring costs of access to privatized health, education, and utilities have been thoroughly placed in the hands of households and have come to be privately shouldered by families.”¹³⁴ The result is a “dualized organization of social reproduction, commodified for those who can pay for it and privatized for those who cannot, as some in the second category provide care work in return for (low) wages for those in the first.”¹³⁵ This is what Fraser and others have called a “crisis of care” that has continued the immiseration of social labor-power. 

These crises of care unfold differently in low-income nations of the global south, but no less disastrously, shaped by the same drive towards accumulation undermining the labor force of the global north but exacerbated by that hemisphere’s exploitive relationship towards the south.¹³⁶ In such regions, state investment in social reproductive institutions followed a very different trajectory, with some states never having any and others developing and implementing subsidies for socially reproductive purposes.¹³⁷ This means the process of reprivatization described above is not directly applicable. Furthermore, such regions feature economies dependent upon agricultural production, informal labor forces, and unfree labor, meaning the dynamics unfold differently than those dictated by the labor and valorization process dictated by industrial capital.¹³⁸ As Smriti Rao puts it, outside the global north, the crisis expresses itself in “the inability to perform forms of indirect care—in particular to secure the inputs necessary to generate food, drink, and a safe and clean-living space.”¹³⁹ 

If culture performs a socially reproductive function within the systematic logic of capital, then changes in formal and informal cultural production must be understood in these terms. Consider my periodization of the global north’s most recent social reproductive crisis. In the United States, the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatization of swathes of social services accompanied the dismantling and privatization, in whole or in part, of public cultural institutions. This took a variety of forms, such as attempts to defund institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts and the replacing of government grants for the arts with loans, ensuring cultural workers went into debt.¹⁴⁰ Beyond the direct control of the state, formerly paid cultural labors are increasingly becoming unremunerated via institutional dependencies on internships and volunteering, what Leigh Claire La Berge calls “decommodified labor.”¹⁴¹ These can be read as assaults on social reproduction insofar as they undermine material support for labor-power sustaining cultural activity, part of neoliberalism’s assault on social reproduction in general.

Such attacks accompanied the deregulation and expansion of the cultural industries: private media firms grew and commodified new spheres of cultural activity as socially reproductive institutions languished.¹⁴² As the already paltry US welfare state disintegrated, culture became a growing sector of the economy and site of consumer spending, the much vaunted “creative economy.”¹⁴³ For instance, the average amount of television individuals living in the United States watched increased from 1,226 hours per person per year in 1970 to 1,575 in 1995.¹⁴⁴ Across the same time span, the amount of money the average person living in the United States spent on recreational activities increased from $93.8 per person per year to $395.5 (in 1992 dollars, adjusted for inflation).¹⁴⁵ These figures cannot speak directly to any causal relationship, but the decline of social reproduction institutions alongside cultural industrial growth in the context of neoliberalism raises the possibility that commodified cultural activity has been taking the place of other socially reproductive activities. 

This hypothesis is consistent with the few recent works that attend to the socially reproductive qualities of culture. Take the work of Jarrett and Drott, for instance.¹⁴⁶ They explore the socially reproductive functions of digital media forms, investigating the particular “social pleasures” of sharing memes on social media (specifically Facebook) and listening to algorithmically selected playlists on music streaming services (like Spotify), respectively. These practices happen within the circuit of labor-power’s reproduction, within a world structured by deadening work that depletes bodies and minds. “Posting” or “vibing” offers recompense that serves as a deposit in one’s “vital forces,” enabling that deadening work to continue. They jointly suggest that neoliberalism depends, in part, upon the reproduction of labor-power vis-à-vis culture’s affective and psychological impacts. Culture in this context serves as another individually shouldered means of reconstituting one’s capacities as a worker. As Drott notes, capitalists and the state are well aware that music can serve a therapeutic function, a cheap alternative to pharmacological and medical interventions likely necessary due to poor working conditions in the first place.¹⁴⁷ 

The current crisis of social reproduction appears to have heightened culture’s reproductive function, at least in the geographic and political context described above. It seems to be picking up the reproductive slack as the neoliberal state cedes control of previously relied upon institutions to the logic and forces of capital, another example of the ways individuals come to bear the burden of reproducing themselves such that they can survive amidst the regime of wage labor. This comes into view in light of the systematic relationship I sketch above between culture and labor-power, one complementary to and entwined with that between culture and capitalism generally that scholars have long focused on. As noted above, social reproduction is historically variegated. These preliminary conclusions are limited, but illustrate how culture might be thought in socially reproductive terms in other contexts like the global south, as well as at other scales of inquiry.

If the changing political economic terrain of the postwar world prompted the reexamination of culture as a terrain of politics and object of inquiry, then the current conjuncture demands likewise. Otherwise, the field cannot speak fully to the political tasks of the moment. As Hall reminds us, “When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no ‘going back.’ History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment. You have to attend, ‘violently,’ with all the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ at your command, to the ‘discipline of the conjuncture.’”¹⁴⁸ Attending to the reproductive relationship between culture and labor-power is part of that process, meaning there is a historical and political imperative to go “back to basics.” Reenergizing the field’s intellectual and political commitments must be a matter of thinking through the reproductive roles culture plays in this context beyond their representation within it. The failure to do so is to think through the societal at the expense of the social, generating a fragmented portrait of capitalism’s integrated totality. 

Considering culture in these terms is all the more important given the absence of any sustained consideration of it within recent discussions of Marxist SRT. I wrote this essay with a cultural studies audience in mind, but I could have easily written it for those immersed in SRT, urging them to substantively consider the theoretical traditions of cultural studies. Bhattachararya’s oft-cited edited collection Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (2017), for example, does not feature any essays speaking directly to cultural matters.¹⁴⁹ This strikes me as a missed opportunity. If SRT aims to expand the range of practices associated with class struggle, the inattention to culture means there is much work to do on that front. The history of cultural contestation documented by scholars like Hall attests to this. The cultural studies “boom” of the 1980s and 1990s occurred amidst the crisis described above. We might reread the endless cataloging of cultural “resistance” that many argued amounted to populist celebrations of the commodity-form as an index of creative attempts to sustain labor-power amidst austerity, different than struggles for healthcare, housing, and childcare in degree rather than kind. Etymologically, “culture” has agricultural roots, denoting cultivation and growth: it can be understood as a form of “care.” Striphas asks what it might mean to imagine cultural studies as a “care discipline.”¹⁵⁰ Though he aims to prompt considerations of how the field can nurture itself, the shift of perspective I suggest means we can also consider “care” to be its object of analysis, meaning the history of cultural studies and that of contemporary Marxist SRT may already be implicitly aligned.

Coda: Culture and COVID-19

If capitalism’s crises of care “exhaust women, ravage families, and stretch social energies to the breaking point,” those women are exhausted, those families ravaged, and those social energies broken.¹⁵¹ The COVID-19 pandemic makes this clear. Members of the Ridgewood Queens-based commune Woodbine wrote in the pandemic’s earliest moments that it signaled “a general crisis of social reproduction with no end in sight . . . with the shutdown of businesses, schools, and countless other institutions, millions are facing loss of income, housing, and access to basic survival resources, exacerbating long-standing inequalities and pushing ever more people into precarity.”¹⁵² This proved true. The pandemic has accelerated neoliberalism’s crisis of care, rendering it a catastrophe: capital’s circulation ground to a halt and labor markets either contracted or collapsed, heightening everyday uncertainty for all except the wealthy. In the regions hardest hit—such as the United States, Brazil and India—governments responded with half-measures of temporary Keynesian-style support that ultimately put low-wage workers, women, and racial and ethnic minorities at physical and financial risk.¹⁵³ Saad-Filho wrote in May of 2020, 

the uber-rich moved into their yachts, the merely rich fled to their second homes, the middle class struggled to work from home in the company of overexcited children and the poor, already having worse health, on average, than the privileged, either lost their earnings entirely or had to risk their lives daily to perform much-praised but . . . low-paid “essential work” as nurses, care workers, porters, bus drivers, shopkeepers, builders, sanitation officers, delivery workers and so on; meanwhile their families remained locked up in cramped accommodation.¹⁵⁴

The household, the locus classicus of SRT, figures prominently in Saad-Filho’s characterization. It assumed a new centrality in social life: some worked from home, others stayed there due to unemployment; typically separated sites of domestic and wage labor became one.¹⁵⁵ At the same time, the economic fallout meant housing was increasingly unstable: working class renters increasingly face eviction, a situation only avoided via rental-assistance programs and tenuous state-mandated moratoria.¹⁵⁶ COVID capitalism reconfigured the relations of reproductive labor. Their permanence and impact remain to be seen.

Attending to culture’s socially reproductive function will be a part of understanding this impact. The cultural terrain shifted drastically. Cultural industries contracted, leaving cultural workers unemployed and unevenly supported by state systems.¹⁵⁷ The experience of lockdown and quarantine changed how individuals engaged in cultural activity. Just consider the frequency and intensity with which those rendered homebound consumed media, often on the same machines and in the same spaces they used to work remotely, attend school, and reproduce themselves and others, collapsing the spatial distinctions between the labors of culture, wage labor, and reproductive labors.¹⁵⁸ 

Woodbine is notable in this context: as an organization, it illustrates the political possibilities that emerge when we think through the socially reproductive aspects of culture. Founded in December 2013, Woodbine is a “experimental hub in New York City for developing the practice, skills, and tools needed to build autonomy.”¹⁵⁹ Initially, it served as a venue for anti-capitalist culture and politics, hosting film screenings, a community garden, a farm share, and weekly dinners open to all. With the pandemic’s onset, Woodbine’s organizers rapidly transitioned to the work of mutual aid, partnering with “community crisis task force” Hungry Monk to run a twice-weekly food pantry for their neighborhood’s working class, part of a large network of mutual aid groups that sprang up in the United States for the same reasons.¹⁶⁰ As they put it, “The failure of the government to provide a bailout adequate to the crisis must necessarily be met with self-organization, community resilience, and care.”¹⁶¹ The food pantry continues alongside their cultural and political activities.¹⁶² The relative ease with which Woodbine transitioned from focusing on cultural activities to distributing food speaks to a recognition of their shared social reproductive function: they are both forms of care.¹⁶³ We might think of Woodbine as a holistic social reproductive institution, a site where it is possible for workers to reproduce labor-power outside the state and the ordinary circuits of capital. As such, it troubles the link between social and societal reproduction. Woodbine does not exist as a legal, corporate, or nonprofit entity, but as a volunteer-run “free association of people.”¹⁶⁴ It is a collective that began as a self-identified cultural space built within the contemporary social factory. The labors of culture created an infrastructure capable of sustaining a diverse array of other socially reproductive labors. On the local level, it is managing capitalism’s inherent social reproductive contradictions while also creating conditions that enable the resistance to labor-power in itself. 

I do not intend to overstate the political possibilities of culture’s socially reproductive functions, only to identify them as a site of struggle over material necessities and as such one of the many places in which an oppositional politics animated by a desire for a new “historical bloc” might take hold. If an air of melancholy surrounds cultural studies, a sense that its own political desires went unrealized, then it might heed experiments such as Woodbine that trouble the link between social and societal reproduction. The link itself is a fruitful area of intellectual inquiry, but attending to their rupture or the possibility thereof spotlights points of struggle worth supporting, building upon, or emulating. They come into view when we look through and test the systematic model developed throughout this essay against the historical unfolding of the latest capitalist crisis. Writing in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Hall claimed that cultural studies needed to think through culture as a “site of life and death.”¹⁶⁵ He was speaking of the value of attending to representations, but it is just as applicable to the objects of analysis introduced in this work. His point stands: such intellectual work remains a “deadly serious matter.”¹⁶⁶ Again, the COVID-19 pandemic makes this clear: 4,400,048 deaths globally at the time of writing; that number will have increased by the time this article appears.¹⁶⁷

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the editors at Lateral, my anonymous reviewer, and Leigh Claire Le Berge. Their feedback strengthened this work immensely. I would also like to thank Caitlin Weber and Brian Pietras for their insightful comments throughout the writing process, as well as the many undergraduate students in my writing seminars that caught glimpses of this work over the years.