Hybrid alienation: reproductive labour and emancipation in the anthropocene
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Springer Nature
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-026-00793-0
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-026-00793-0
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Acknowledgements: I presented versions of this article at the 9th Political Theory Graduate Conference (Sciences Po), organised by Marius Bickhardt, Gauthier Delozière, Maxime Gaborit, Léo Grillet, Claire Lejeune, and Léna Silberzahn, as well as at the 2023 Annual Conference of the British and Ireland Association for Political Thought, organised by Udit Bhatia, Maxime Lepoutre, and Ashwini Vasanthakumar. I would like to thank the organisers and conference participants for their invaluable input, as well as the Cambridge Trust and St Edmund's College for their financial support enabling me to participate in these conferences. In addition, I would also like to thank Duncan Kelly, Alyssa Battistoni, Sam Harrison, Nanna Sætan, Baptiste Albertone, Benjamin Tan, Alina Utrata, and the members of the Cambridge Political Theory/History of Political Thought Writing Workshop for discussions and criticisms of earlier drafts, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
This article develops an account of alienation that centres the way in which reproductive labour determines the constitution and shape of this world. The first part proposes a functionalist reading of the idea of the regeneration and reproduction of a liveable world as joint human and non-human labour. It draws on the Wages for Housework movement to argue that understanding reproduction as labour illuminates the ways in which the ‘naturalness’ of reproduction emerges as a function of a deeper political decision to valorise production. The second part provides a hybrid reconstruction of alienation as a means to critique such an arrangement of labour, without inadvertently falling back on a reified notion of ‘nature’. I argue that this helps us keep track of the political construction of ‘nature’ which underlies the concepts of political theory we rely on. The third part ties both of these strands together: a political organisation of labour that relies on the ‘naturalisation’ of reproduction alienates us by rendering it impossible to make our own fundamental decisions about the constitution of the collective. Thereby, it offers a way of holding onto the goal of emancipation in the Anthropocene.
This article develops an account of alienation that centres the way in which reproductive labour determines the constitution and shape of this world. The first part proposes a functionalist reading of the idea of the regeneration and reproduction of a liveable world as joint human and non-human labour. It draws on the Wages for Housework movement to argue that understanding reproduction as labour illuminates the ways in which the ‘naturalness’ of reproduction emerges as a function of a deeper political decision to valorise production. The second part provides a hybrid reconstruction of alienation as a means to critique such an arrangement of labour, without inadvertently falling back on a reified notion of ‘nature’. I argue that this helps us keep track of the political construction of ‘nature’ which underlies the concepts of political theory we rely on. The third part ties both of these strands together: a political organisation of labour that relies on the ‘naturalisation’ of reproduction alienates us by rendering it impossible to make our own fundamental decisions about the constitution of the collective. Thereby, it offers a way of holding onto the goal of emancipation in the Anthropocene.