Simultaneous disruptions: forms of livelihood, fragmentation of classes, and social labor in the twenty‑first century by Sharryn Kasmir, Susana Narotzky published by Dialectical Anthropology (2025).
“Anthropologists have long argued that wage labor is not to be understood as the emblematic social relation of capitalism. We have repeatedly shown that capital accumulation counts upon and continuously produces modes of exploitation and extraction beyond the wage, including the commodification of non-human nature. The articles in this special issue definitively decenter the wage and free labor, and each details non-waged activities at the center of capitalist production. These labor practices take place in times, places, or sectors that “should” be “modern”—western Europe; the United States; “green industries”—and their existence in these spaces gives lie to the developmentalist fantasy of a forward march to capitalist modernity. Capitalist social relations have always, everywhere been heterogenous, even as con temporary globalization accelerates that tendency…”
