The appearance of seemingly automated abundance Jefferson so doggedly cultivated required substantial additional labor—the labor of making labor seem to disappear.

As socialist feminism usefully highlights, capitalism is dedicated to ensuring that as much vital labor as possible goes uncompensated. Fauxtomation must be seen as part of that tendency.

The joint creation of social life is the very basis of all economic activity. There would be no gross domestic product to contribute to without it, no assets to leverage or profits to hoard.

Her point is not that women have, historically, performed reproductive labor outside the sphere of waged work, that their efforts are supplemental to the real action. Rather, she insists that reproductive labor is utterly central: in its absence, the entire system would collapse.

The socialist feminist tradition is a powerful resource because it’s centrally concerned with what work is—and in particular how capitalism lives and grows by concealing certain kinds of work, refusing to pay for it, and pretending it’s not, in fact, work at all.

For years, wannabe prophets predicted that robots were “coming for our jobs.” That particular forecast, it turns out, has not come to pass. Instead, more and more people effectively have robots for bosses.

Denied the basic resources we need to live, we are forced to seek security through market means—investing in ourselves as “brands,” paying our insurance premiums, and praying that our retirement funds appreciate—while lining the pockets of those most responsible for making us insecure in the first place.

Before the wage earner could emerge as our society’s paradigmatic subject, the persona that we must all embody to survive, the condition of what historian Michael Denning calls “wagelessness” had to be imposed via the process of enclosure, after which peasants could no longer provide for themselves. “Capitalism begins not with the offer of work, bu

Work, we are often told, is becoming insecure. In reality, insecurity precedes work, or at least its waged variety. While some claim that insecurity is the inevitable consequence of innovation—the result of the fact that, as labor productivity rises, you need fewer workers to produce the same output— the fact is that people had to be made insecure,