Rethinking the concept of labour

Is labour a useful concept for anthropology today? This essay attempts to respond theoretically to the challenge that the contributions to this special issue empirically pose. The essay rethinks the concept of labour by addressing three questions that deal with the relation of human work effort and capital accumulation: the first refers to alienation; the second to the difference between abstract and concrete labour; and the third to ambiguity. Over the years, these issues have addressed particular aspects of social reproduction, helping define labour as a concept, albeit a heterogeneous one,that is relationally linked to capital. Dislocation, together with the parallel concepts of dispossession, disorganization, disconnection, and differentiation, emerges prominently in the analyses of contemporary labour transformations and spacificities. Finally, the essay engages with seemingly disappearing labour futures and what this means for the concept of labour. What is the value of work for capital and, conversely, the value of labouring for people today?

other hand, we may fail the quest for ethnographic understanding. Understanding the 3 world and its diverse inhabitants in their own terms, their specific connections and 4 disconnections, dissolves distance. Yet modernist epistemology requires a separation 5 between subject and object and the creation of some fictional building blocks (concepts) 6 which are thinking tools: that is, they do not describe reality; they attempt to explain 7 it by producing abstract paths, logics, articulations (cf. I.akoff & Johnson 1980 on the 8 Western building metaphor of scientific arguments). Hence, do we need a concept at all 9 if every cultural understanding of life-sustaining practices is not only different but also 10 part of a way of being in the world and becoming a concrete and unique entity? Can 11 a concept such as labour bridge the gap between the inescapable concreteness of lived 12 experience and the diverse abstractions used to make sense of it? Can it be useful as a 13 tool for explaining what goes on in different parts of the world regarding the forms in 14 which energy is expended, co-ordinated, and organized in order to sustain life and make 15 it worth living? If we think of the world as connected, it makes methodological sense; 16 if we think of the world as an aggregate of multiple worlds, it may make little sense. 17 So there is a preliminary decision that refers to method. Anthropologists have been 18 stressing the connection between the world's inhabitants (human and nonhuman) 19 in the era of colonial expansion and later globalization. Therefore, movements and 20 logics are also historically connected, dependent phenomena rather than independent 21 materializations (manifestations). Moreover, capitalism, or the 'self-expansion of the 22 money form of value' (Elson 1979: 165), has been deployed in most places, although 23 with its particular forms of embeddedness, translation, and interpretation which are 24 tied to historically uneven and combined developments, and sociocultural imperatives 25 (Allinson & Anievas 2009;Rosenberg 2006). As feminist economists, anthropologists, 26 and critical social scientists in general have pointed out frequently, this form of value 27 and the relations it entails do not saturate the social space. What is probably even more 28 significant, they are not separated from other forms of value and relationships, nor do 29 they function in another realm. In fact, it would seem that the way in which these other 30 relations and values appear is central to how capitalist relations develop and enable 31 the 'self-expansion of the money form of value' to take hold. Capitalist relations are 32 always parasitical on ongoing relational connections that guide worthy life sustaining 33 practices. 34 Harvey and Krohn-Hansen in the introduction to this issue define their aim as exploring the tension between the ways that global capitalism might connect the experience oflabour on the assembly lines of the Chinese factory to the experiences of those engaged in the mining of coltan or working in the container shipping industrywhile at the same time not connecting them at all, not simply fragmenting but also necessarily responding to hugely varied histories and fields of expectation (emphasis added) 40 At the same time, the issue attempts to investigate 'dislocation in which places and 41 persons are reconfigured by movements of capital ' (p. ???). It remains to be seen if the 42 connected-disconnected-dislocation triad the authors of this issue are exploring rests 43 on labour as a concept rather than labour as a description of local experiences in a 44 world dominated by global capitalism. The introduction, in a clear support of labour's 45 conceptual strength, points out that 'a focus on labour, in this second decade of the 46 twenty-first century, configures a field of ethnographic concern that conjures both the 47 systemic force of capital, and the historical specificity ofhow these ever-shifting capital 48 relations play out in practice across the world' (p. ???). Theoretically exploring this 49 assertion is the objective of this essay.

Historicizing labour 3
The history of the concept of labour in Western thought shows how its development 4 was tied to productive tasks (in particular agriculture) and drudgery. In late medieval 5 times, an idea of a 'common good' objective in the motivation of work transforms 6 the originally servile substance of the concept into a vocational one which refers to the divinely preordained tasks of one of the three orders of society (oratores, bellatores, laboratores). It describes status adscription rather than a property of the individual 9 (Duby 1980;Le Goff 1980). In its development as a concept, three processes become 10 salient: (1) the shift of productive effort from a derogatory to a positive status in the 11 late Middle Ages; (2) the idea that it expresses the participation in a collective (social) 12 process aiming at the common good; and finally (3), with the coming of modernity, the 13 individualization of the human productive relation to nature ( Castel2013; Locke 1986Locke 14 [1689). These three aspects -productivist, social, and individual-beco me entangled 15 in the concept that political economists inherit and that in turn Marx will develop as 16 the cornerstone of his theoretical construct. As a consequence, the dominant concept 17 of labour rests on an idea of society or a collective good, an idea of individually self-18 contained creative energy, and an idea of the objectification of energy in material 19 production. These elements are present in the labour theory of value and in the triad 20 of aspects that support it, namely the concrete, social, and abstract forms of labour. 21 In addition, as a social science concept, labour is generally paired with capital and 22 referred to historical contexts where work is somehow connected with the process 23 of capital accumulation. Beyond the understanding of labour as a wage relationship 24 with the owners of the means of production that enables workers to make a living, 25 many forms of relations have been explored that connect unwaged work (communal, 26 unpaid, volunteer, affective, unregulated tasks) and even non-work (unemployment, 27 leisure, idleness) with capitalist accumulation processes. This extension of the concept 28 of labour still preserves as its core meaning the multiple forms of its relation to capital. 29 In the last fifty years at least, the concept has suffered extremely pertinent and 30 creative critiques, mostly by feminist scholars who have introduced reproductive work 31 into the conceptual realm of labour, pointing to the centrality of its particularities (e.g. emotional and relational value) for the social reproduction of a labour force (Dalla Costa & James 1972;Hochschild 2003Hochschild [1983Lawson 2007;Nelson 2006). Anthropologists as well have provided important critical perspectives that show the cultural and historical 35 embeddedness of life-sustaining practices and question the universal applicability of the 36 Western concept of labour to make sense of the diversity of human livelihood practices 37 (Escobar 2008;Gudeman & Rivera 1990;Malinowski 1978[1935] Strathern 1988 English-speaking scholars have often been using a distinction between 'work' and 47 'labour', where labour is defined as human effort which pertains to capitalist relations 48 of production, and work describes the rest of human energy expenditure in relation to 49 non-capitalist realms, whether these be reproductive tasks (which eventually became 2 subsumed by the 'care' concept) or socially relevant, non-market-orientated tasks (generally but not solely productive) in the margins and interstices of the capitalist 4 market system or in non-capitalist historical or present-day societies. However, this 5 distinction cannot be drawn in other languages (e.g. Spanish or French) where there 6 is a common word for work and labour, and, conversely, other languages have various 7 significant categories to describe creative effort (Frayssé 2014). While this might be 8 taken as a hindrance to the development of a clear concept of labour, it also points at 9 what anthropologists confront in the field: scientific conceptual distinctions cannot rest 10 on a nominalist basis, although naming the world is a form of engaging with it that has 11 practical consequences and hence must be acknowledged by those seeking to explain it. 12 The main problem with the work/labour conceptual distinction, in my opinion, is 13 that it makes two presuppositions: first, that there is something inherently different 14 between one form of effort expenditure and the other, namely the kind of value that 15 is created; and, second, that they cannot be simultaneously present in the human 16 experience of energy expenditure. This brings up three questions that need to be 17 addressed in order to rethink the concept of labour: the first refers to alienation; 18 the second to the difference between abstract and concrete labour; and the third to 19 ambiguity. 20 21 Alienation: the objectification and exploitation of labour 22 The idea of alienation as defined in Marxist literature describes, on the one hand, the 23 separation of the product of labour from the person who has produced it (this is the 24 process of objectification) and, on the other hand, the appropriation of a person's 25 labour and hence its product by someone not involved in its production (exploitation) 26 (Axelos 1976;Marx 1959Marx [1844 ). Moreover, alienation has also been understood as the 27 separation of labour in capitalism from its concrete conditions of reproduction (what 28 makes a life worth living), a process that Karl Polanyi (1957;[1944) described as the 29 disembedding of social relations and the production of labour as a fictitious commodity. 30 Yet it is because productive activity is understood as the concrete self-realization of the 31 individual worker that its estrangement through the double form of alienation becomes 32 the critical aspect of capitalist relations.

33
Objectification of concrete labour has often been accepted as a universal 34 phenomenon inasmuch as the framework of individuation and material autonomy 35 of the product are taken for granted. Exploitation, on the other hand, has been strongly 36 circumscribed to particular historical periods and often limited to capitalist relations, 37 where wage-labour and commoditization of social reproduction prevail. This neat 38 conceptual separation is difficult to sustain with the ethnographic record, not only 39 for non-capitalist-dominated realms of social interaction and non-Western cultural 40 environments, but even for commodity chains in contemporary capitalist production. 41 Indeed, the conceptual attachment of creative energy to the human individual as a power 42 producing life and providing rights through its expenditure is itself an ideological 43 creation of particular historical interactions which are not restricted to the liberal 44 enlightenment, as Aron Gurevich (1985) shows for medieval Iceland. Creative energy 45 can be understood as distributed in netwo rks that b ring together human and no n human 46 entities-as Actor Network Theory proposes in present-day Western scholarship-or 47 the individual can be but a volatile form of social interaction (Strathern 1988), and 48 objectification may occur partially, if at all (as with artisan artistic branding of oeuvres: 49 Cant, this volume). The more general critique is that even in a context dominated by capitalist relations, human labour is never fully disembedded. In fact, by following 3 supply commodity chains, we can observe that the alienable aspect of labour, what 4 makes it exploitable in a particular way, always depends on its inalienable ties to the 5 social environment. Hence when we observe the concrete life projects of people as 6 they unfold in different parts of the world, and how they are woven into particular 7 forms of surplus extraction or appropriation, we immediately realize how important 8 relations such as kinship obligations and claims are to the setting of localized forms 9 of capitalism. I would argue, nevertheless, that there is a logic to the way surplus 10 extraction operates at different scales, and it is not merely contingent on emergent and 11 unpredictable forms. Two complementary processes are always at work in capitalist 12 accumulation: rent extraction (through land rent, financial fees, patent rights, etc.) 13 and surplus value extraction (through exchange relations, contractual agreements, or 14 predatory domination). The first rests on privileged rights of access, the second on 15 reduction of the cost of labour by competitive means, crude domination or otherwise. 16 And both rely on the entanglement of values pertaining to different realms of moral 17 obligation (personal, intimate, social, market, contract, etc.) and on the tensions and 18 overlaps between the concrete and abstract value of labour. 19 20

Concrete and abstract labour: a reassessment
Much of the anthropological unease with the Marxian labour theory of value stems from its development of a dual aspect oflabour, namely the distinction between the concrete and abstract labour embodied in the commodity. Concrete labour has been defined as the energy, embodied skills, cultural beliefs, and forms of co-operation expended to create a specific product (or service). Abstract labour has been usually understood as related to the existence of a developed market exchange system that would theoretically 27 pool all socially necessary labour (i.e. the labour needed to reproduce a society) and 28 hence enable the evaluation of the proportional quantity of social labour embodied 29 in a particular item. Following this, concrete labour could become a universally 30 applicable concept, whereas abstract labour was circumscribed to societies (and sectors 31 of production) where capitalism was hegemonic. This questioned the core of the labour 32 theory of value and became one of the major challenges among Marxist feminists 33 when trying to think about the value of domestic labour and its possible exploitation 34 in relation to systemic capital accumulation processes. The same problem assailed 35 anthropologists studying small family production and subsistence work in agriculture 36 all over the world, and sociologists looking at self-provisioning practices (Pahl1985). 37 Those studying societies (or activities) hypothetically isolated from capitalist forms of 38 market exchange had no direct use for the theoretical duality in Marxian value theory. 39 However, Diane Elson (1979: 144, also 148), in a clarification of Marx's 'value theory of 40 labour', proposes that the four aspects (concrete/abstract and private/social) of labour are present in all societies, and, according to Marx, what differs is the social form in which they appear: 'What is specific to a particular kind of society is the relation of these aspects 43 to one another and the way they are represented in the precipitate forms ' (1979: 149). 44 In particular, abstract labour is not limited to societies where market exchange prevails 45 in social reproduction. The abstraction refers to a quantitative proportion of the human 46 energy and time necessary to reproduce the social totality as a meaningful whole, and 47 this whole encompasses any collective effort in whatever form it is co-ordinated (i.e. 48 not necessarily through market co-ordination). Elson adds that 'the objectification 49 of the concrete aspect of labour is universal [in the concrete object or service], but the objectification of the abstract aspect of labour [in money] is not: it is specific to 3 capitalist social relations ' (1979: 150). What is elusive in non-capitalist societies is the 4 representation of this abstraction in a particular physical form (i.e. a unique universal 5 equivalent, money) (1979: 164-5). That is, in the labour concept, the aspect of abstract 6 labour exists in all historical societies but its objectification, its materialization in an 7 object, does not. This, then, would be the main specificity of societies where capitalism 8 is dominant: the fact that in the value of commodities the objectified abstract aspect of 9 labour (money) reflects value which 'produces the illusory appearance that value in its 10 money form is an independent entity' (1979: 165, original emphasis). Abstract labour 11 in its objectified form, then, subsumes (but does not obliterate) the other aspects of 12 labour and becomes the hegemonic driver of production. Making money instead of 13 making useful objects. 14 This reading of Marx's theory renders his multidimensional concept of labour more 15 useful to anthropologists because, on the one hand, it opens the field of possible forms 16 of objectification of the abstract value of labour to whatever is the dominant universal 17 value equivalent present in a particular society (e.g. kinship, prestige, etc.). The concept 18 can also be extended to include the entanglement of dominant and non-dominant value 19 realms of society, and of activities that are sustained by ambiguous claims to labour, as 20 when unwaged kin working in a family farm produce food within a global commodity 21 chain (Martin, this volume; Melhuus, this volume; Narotzky 2016). On the other hand, 22 it refocuses the Marxist question on labour instead of value. Indeed, the 'value theory 23 of labour' is not the 'labour theory of value'. Labour-that is, human life expenditure in 24 order to reproduce life-is at the centre of Marx's theory, a preoccupation that began as 25 an inquiry placing 'real life' and 'practice' as the starting-point (Marx 1969(Marx [1845). From 26 this perspective, labour and life are two sides of the same coin and their entanglement 27 is universal ( see Collins 2016 for a reassessment of the labour theory of value taking 28 these issues into account). Of course, some conceptual problems remain, in particular 29 the individualization of human energy and its creative power, although it is always 30 presented as attached to the collective and relational objective of social reproduction, 31 which constitutes, in fact, the argument for the existence of abstract labour. 32 Hence, the concrete and abstract aspects of labour cannot be separated. aspect of labour gives form to the manner in which abstract labour is configured, the 5 reverse also holds: there is a concrete aspect of capital, of the way in which concrete 6 agents create capital as a particular relation with labour in one or multiple locations 7 (Bourdieu's social, symbolic, and cultural capitals, attempt to capture this diversity for 8 the French context). Perhaps Sylvia Yanagisako's essay in this volume is an extremely 9 clear example of this, but it is present in all the pieces, because labour and capital, as 10 concepts, exist only as a relationship, which is concrete and place-bound (i.e. different) 11 while it simultaneously is abstract and hence distributed across the globe in its objective 12 of expanding the money form of value (i.e. equivalent). As a result, the relational forms 13 of these historical precipitates of concrete and abstract aspects are dynamic, even if, 14 conceptually, what defines that relationship is the self-expansion of the money form of 15 value and the subsumption of other forms of value to this objective. 16 As anthropologists, we are driven to the concrete expressions of the labour/capital 17 relation out of necessity, as this is the experience that the ethnographic method provides 18 us with and becomes the basis on which theory is developed. Indeed, when we observe 19 labour forms, we tend to set off from their embedded character: the way that kinship, 20 cultural understandings, and historical factors are central to the way people engage 21 productively with local and global forms of capital. Keir Martin, in this volume, 22 illustrates this embeddedness in an apparently paradoxical manner when he points 23 at how the local use of the labour category (here defined as wage-labour) defines a 24 particular relationship to land and labour that is not tied to 'custom' ('kastom'). Instead 25 it attempts to assert private property over land, turning it into a small commodity 26 production factor in the wider context of agricultural contract farming (see also  ,  4 nonhuman, environmental, and symbolic aspects of it) has appeared as dislocated 5 by the forceful expansion of the money form of value in the case of capitalism, in a 6 process of commodification akin to that described by Polanyi (1971Polanyi ( [1944) for 'fictitious 7 commodities' (see also Burawoy 2010). Indeed, this aspect should be included in the 8 concept of labour for it is a core defining dimension of the experience of the emergent 9 relation between capital and labour. Dislocation, however, complements two other key 10 aspects of the process of uneven development of capitalism as it affects labour, namely 11 dispossession ( are as much a part of the geography of capitalism as the booming zones of enterprise and prosperity ... They refer to processes through which global capitalism constitutes its categories of social and geographical membership and privilege by constructing and maintaining a category of absolute non-membership (2009:317).
Indeed, geographical membership and the privileges attached to it seem to be emerging 3 as crucial sites of conflict among labour as they express the reorganization of spaces of capital and its spatial fixes and the dislocation of the livelihood systems attached to them. 5 Place is formed and transformed by the articulated forces of capital, labour, and the 6 state in the longue durée, as Huw Beynon, RayHudson, and David Sadler (1994) pointed 7 out over twenty years ago, but also by the forces of local responsibilities, meanings, 8 and expectations that are part of the historical entanglements of the place ( see Escobar  9 2008; Harvey, this volume). Place is the domain of concrete existing people while space 10 often appears as an abstraction. But space, in an analogy with the abstract aspect of 11 labour, stresses the relational value of places for social reproduction, and appears as an 12 inseparable aspect of the concrete place. Space, on the one hand, engages with capital 13 as an emergent abstraction of relationally located, connected, and disconnected social 14 relations, while capital can only be realized in places, through places and their concrete 15 social differentiations. Space expresses the power of the state (and capital) as an abstract 16 relation of domination, although this power can only be realized in places through the 17 concrete production and ( often violent) enforcement of difference or, on the contrary, 18 through the enforcement of homogenizing norms. Place, on the other hand, grows 19 from the meaningful relationships that people build with each other in the long 20 term and from their engagement and creative production of institutions in particular 21 locations. Place is multidimensional and the primary referent of people's lives, of the 22 everyday practice of located sociability. Often described as a local affair, however, 23 place is also multiscalar, as social, economic, and power relationships that produce 24 place occur at various scales (local, regional, national, global) and simultaneously 25 transform the operational scale of political-economic processes in space (Peck 2002;26 see in particular the essays by Cant, Campbell, Hoem, and Schober in this volume). 27 Concrete agents' understandings inform practices occurring at multiple scales that 28 take into consideration the values (or value) most dear to each actor and use them 29 to make differences. Hence differences are created as a resource to take advantage 30 of, resist, exploit, or capitalize. Some people (within households, regions, firms, or 31 institutions) will have a great capacity to define, impose, and benefit from particular 32 differences between and within places (and people) while others will have a limited 33 one. Geometries of power result from the capacity of some agents to define, enforce, 34 and take advantage of difference both within and between places (and people) in their 35 interest. Making difference between places is also often making difference between the 36 past of these places and an alleged better (or worse) present or future there or elsewhere. 37 Much in both the concrete and abstract aspects of labour depends on the historical 38 processes of making differences and on how they combine with each other globally 39 at particular junctures. Spatial differentiation, then, produces topographies of value 40 where life and work are not worth the same; it materializes and induces a process of 41 dislocation through movement that complements other dislocations linked to the life 42 rhythms and time/effort ratios for earning a livelihood. 43

44
A labour concept for 'no labour' futures? 45 Recently, anthropologists ( Ferguson 2013;Li 2009;Smith 2011) have been pointing to 46 a reality that was already debated in the 196os and 1970s by Latin American scholars 47 (Nun 1969;Quijano Obregón 1974 and the surplus population debate). The capitalist 48 system seems to have no use for an increasing number of people, either as labour, 49 consumers, or rent providers. This has been publicly acknowledged by policy makers, mainstream economists, and the media admitting that 'full employment' is impossible 3 and that structural unemployment rates will grow as a consequence of technological 4 innovation, robotization, and globalization. 5 Does this mark the end of a concept of labour? A look into the former debate 6 surrounding development policies and the place of the so-called 'informal sector' in 7 them brings some useful insights. In the 1970s and 198os, the distinction between 8 stable, contractual, protected, waged labour relations and insecure, precarious, 9 often personalized work relations or self-employment ventures became the basis 10 for describing the economy as a dichotomous structure of mutually excluding and 11 hierarchically ordered arenas of production: the formal and the informal sectors (a 12 distinction that development agencies such as the International Labor Organization 13 supported and extended, see Peattie 1987). Additional observation of the endless 14 variations of possible relations of production/reproduction that exist in global 15 capitalism, including at its margins and in its interstices, led to an early critique of 16 this dichotomous opposition, while the connection between formal and informal 'ways 17 of doing' and making a living was stressed (Mingione 1991;Peattie 1980;1987;Portes & 18 Sassen-Koob 1987). John Weeks (1971) pointed out that 'unemployment' rarely describes 19 a permanent out-of-work situation and is often premised on a particular administrative 20 definition of employment as contractual wage-work in the formal sector. Jan Breman's 21 classical critique of the formal/informal sector duality in the 'third world ' (1976a; 1976 b; 22 1976c) observed that the dichotomy lost 'sight of the unity and totality of the productive 23 system' and he emphasized instead 'the fragmented nature of the entire labour market' 24 ( 1976a: 1871). In this view, the labour market is fragmented but continuous, and the 25 social relations that constitute it in everyday practice are multiple, entangled, and result 26 from their historical interaction. 27 Anthropologists, in particular, paid attention to household resources, micro-power 28 relations, mobilities, and temporalities that structured differential access and reciprocal 29 relations within and between households (Melhus, this volume). This perspective 30 highlighted the diversity of jobs that household members undertook and the fluidity 31 between stable, protected, waged work (formal), self-employment, peasant farming 32 or small workshop ownership (partially regulated), casual jobs and unregulated self-33 employment (informal), and unemployment. The ingenuity of poor households to 34 pool and distribute all kinds of resources to 'make ends meet' was acknowledged by 35 the 'livelihood means' and the 'resources of poverty' development literature, where 36 this diversity was rebranded as an asset for household reproduction (Scoones 1998). 37 Mercedes González de la Rocha (2001), however, has pointed out that, following 38 structural adjustment policies in Mexico that eroded labour market opportunities, 39 households were at pains to survive because waged and non-waged income resources 40 were complementary rather than a substitute for each other. 'A new type of labor market 41 segmentation seems to be emerging, not along formal/informal lines but between a very 42 privileged group of workers and the vast majority who struggle to survive with very 43 limited resources' (González de la Rocha 2001: 90). 44 One of the findings of this initial assessment of the complexities of labour relations in 45 'third world' regions may prove particularly useful to present-day analysis of precarity in 46 'post-industrial' economies. This is the observation that scarcity of income-generating 47 opportunities often results in 'the necessity to fence off one's own domain', looking 48 for 'protection along vertical lines, the contracting of obligations in patronage and 49 brokerage relationships with privileged kin or social superiors' (Breman 1976c(Breman : 1942also 1976b: 1908. However, when (and if) the situation of generalized precariousness 3 becomes extreme, even vertical loyalties and particularistic obligations disintegrate 4 and personalized claims are interpreted as predatory (Breman 1976c(Breman : 1942. Thus, 5 extreme labour market fragmentation is also a process of dispossession that generates 6 particularistic forms of protection, even as it disorganizes collective ones (see also 7  become relevant are the situated processes of (re-/de-)commodification of labour in 49 its articulation with these other fictitious commodities. A move from emphasizing 2 labour/capital relations in production to stressing the commodity aspect would enable 3 people to forge linkages beyond labour but within capitalist relations. Burawoy's 4 model 'centers on the commodification of labor, money and nature and their inter-5 relations. The argument is premised on commodification being the key experience in 6 our world today, and that exploitation, while essential to any analysís of capitalism, is 7 not experienced as such' (2010: 307, original emphasis). Commodification, then, would 8 bring together the myriad experiences of dispossession and could eventually produce 9 commonality. 10 11 Conclusion 12 For most people in the world, what we witness is the entanglement of many forms 13 of work, multiple kinds of social relations, institutional involvement in regulation and 14 deregulation, the mobilization of vertical and horizontal solidarities to access resources, 15 and the encroachment of commodification in everyday life. There is nothing inevitable 16 about these circumstances, which are the result of political economic decisions. Indeed, 17 after a period of extreme free-trade policy models (with their obvious caveats of 18 monopoly protection in practice), we may be witnessing the dawn of a protectionist 19 trend that will transform global markets. The predatory nature of unbridled neoliberal 20 capitalism has also generated a return to forms of stewardship of or integration with 21 nature that are curtailing extractive capitalism and supporting alternative subsistence 22 practices (Edelman 2005;Escobar 2008 to the anxieties and strategies that this unforeseen reality produces. In a world with 28 a shrinking labour market, work takes on a meaning increasingly removed from a 29 material productivist aspect and linked instead to the self-realization and recognition 30 value aspects (Fraser 2001). For many people living in a state of permanent or cyclical 31 unemployment, the value of work is very centrally its social aspect: being someone is 32 tied to doing something that is recognized in some way as part of what society values 33 (Joshi 2009;Narotzky & Besnier 2014 capital and the state. Depending on the remaining connections between these practices and the process of self-expansion of the money form of value, I would argue, some of 3 these activities may still provide for the reproduction of labour and hence be related to 4 capital, even when fully embedded in anti-or non-capitalist value domains. 5 Is a concept of labour useful or even possible as an analytical tool for anthropologists? 6 While capitalism remains hegemonic, I suggest that we do not abandon the concept of 7 labour, as it addresses the connection of people and places in a process that overpowers 8 their will to make a life worth living and abducts them into the aim of the expansion of 9 money value. Even when unpaid and hidden forms of labour may be on the rise, such as 10 neo-bondage, contract farming, or self-employment, these unwaged workers are crucial 11 to capitalist social reproduction. Moreover, the ways in which they become valuable for 12 capital accumulation include their configuration as consumers of commodities, rent, 13 and interest providers. 14 What minimal content, then, should an anthropologically useful concept of labour 15 propose? First, I suggest that labour as a concept should be restricted to work effort 16 (human energy expenditure) in its relation to capital, taking into account, however, that 17 this relation has many forms, including many non-commodified and unwaged forms 18 which can be dominant in certain historical conjunctures (Narotzky 2016). Second, 19 the concrete/abstract distinction should be maintained as the key to understanding 20 what makes difference valuable as an asset for the valorization of life and of capital. 21 Third, within the concrete aspect of labour (and capital), ambiguity needs to be present. 22 And finally, dislocation, the process of permanently disrupting and reorganizing the 23 spatial-temporal dimensions of everyday life, is a crucial element in the determination 24 of power geometries between labour and capital. to the anonymous reviewer, whose comments, which helped me clarify sorne points.