Wageless Life

by Michael Denning, New Left Review, December 2010 (Click here to download this article in pdf)

Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited. Since the beginnings of the wage-labour economy, wageless life has been a calamity for those dispossessed of land, tools and means of subsistence. Expelled from work, the wageless also became invisible to science: political economy, as Marx noted in the earliest formulations of his critique of the discipline, ‘does not recognize the unemployed worker’: ‘The rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal workingman—these are figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the gravedigger, and bum-bailiff, etc; such figures are spectres outside its domain.’ [1]