ABSTRACT
Peering behind the ‘hidden abode’ of production to uncover the historical and material conditions that underpin it, this chapter introduces four new directions in the application of Marx’s critique of political economy. First, the chapter surveys open Marxism’s analysis of the social constitution of capitalist society in antagonistic social relations centred on the dispossession of one class from the means of subsistence, mediated by the state. Second, it evaluates how Marxist-Feminist social reproduction theory understands the relationship between gender divisions of labour and the reproduction of labour power, drawing on an empirical case study of the platform economy. Third, it considers Black Marxism’s contribution to the understanding of capitalism’s constitution in processes of primitive accumulation and racial domination, illustrated with the example of how industrial change and incarceration intertwine for racialised ‘surplus populations’ in the US. The chapter relates this analysis of antiblackness to the critical Marxist account of antisemitism as a truncated critique of capitalist social relations. Fourth, the chapter uses ecological Marxism to situate the environmental crisis in labour’s ‘social metabolism’ with nature, drawing upon a case study of labour in the so-called ‘circular economy’.
