4. Labour in the Valorisation Process

Approaching labour as an object of inquiry in light of the New Reading of Marx’s theory of the value-form, this chapter analyses how what goes on in the workplace relates to what goes on in the market. Value assumes a succession of what Richard Gunn calls ‘modes of existence’ in the valorisation process, of which the labour process is just a carrier. This procession of forms is hard to capture in applied social research focused on labour alone. The chapter evaluates how two methods for studying labour and economic life capture value’s ‘non-empirical reality’ – the Italian workers inquiry tradition, and the feminist ‘life trajectory of the commodity’ approach. Encapsulating production and circulation, Chris Arthur’s conceptualisation of ‘practical abstraction’ is proposed as an alternative.