Affective Labor - History

History

The phrase Affective Labor, seen broadly, has its roots in the Autonomist critiques of the 1970s, in particular those that theorize a dynamic form of capitalism that is able to move away from purely industrial labor. In particular, the Fragment on Machines, from Marx's Grundrisse, and conceptions of decentered the focus of labor theory and sparked debate over what constituted real labor:

No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing (Naturgegenstand) as middle link between the object (Objekt) and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.

Meanwhile, movements such as Selma James and Marirosa Dalla Costa's Wages for Housework campaign attempted to activate the most exploited and invisible sectors of the economy and challenge the typical, male and industrial focus of labor studies.