Labor landscapes of post-Fordism are commonly characterized by fragmentation, fracture, and atomization, with platformization as the latest abstraction of a workplace that is everywhere and nowhere. The period following the 2008 financial crash has been posed as an interregnum where the exposed contradictions of neoliberalism have not yet ousted this order, while multiple actors jostle to grasp the reins. In this paper, I propose a focus on the cultural practices of place-making in theorizing contemporary class struggle with reference to two groups of digital laborers: tech workers and online sex workers. Taking the incubator—a place of pooled resources for companies in-the-making—as a jumping off point, I consider the interrelations, differentials, and potentials for class (re)composition when the distinction of work from life is as blurred as it is distinguishing. From an autonomist perspective and looking to collectives such as the Tech Workers Coalition and Hacking//Hustling, I unpick the “common sense” of a placeless platformed capital to explore the multiplicity of the “workplace,” what counts as “work,” and which places enable the imagination of otherwise. As visions of the “future of work” abound I ask, how can research under the umbrella of cultural studies support and co-create points of intervention—places of aggregation—in the interregnum?
Keyword: class
Review of Transgender Marxism edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke (Pluto Press)
Transgender Marxism is a provocative and groundbreaking union of trans studies and Marxist theory. Exploring trans lives and movements, the authors delve into the experience of trans survival and movement solidarity under capitalism. They explore the pressures, oppression, and state persecution faced by trans people living in capitalist societies, and their tenuous positions in the workplace and the home. The authors give a powerful response to right-wing scaremongering against “gender ideology.” Reflecting on the relations between gender and labor, these essays reveal the structure of antagonisms faced by gender non-conforming people within society. Looking at the history of trans movements, Marxist interventions into developmental theory, psychoanalysis, and workplace ethnography, the authors conclude that in order to achieve trans liberation, capitalism must be abolished.
Editors’ Introduction: Materializing Immaterial Labor in Cultural Studies
This introduction frames the six original articles in this issue and the forum on “Corona A(e)ffects: Radical Affectivities of Dissent and Hope” around the concept of immaterial labor. Two full years into a pandemic that has uprooted place-based work for many, and forced even more indoors, away from public spaces, and onto screens, we reflect on the very material effects of present-day immaterial and emotional labor.