In fact, as wives and mothers have “gone on strike,” many of their previously invisible services have become saleable commodities around which entire industries have been built.

the production of workers and of unequal power relations aiming to keep the labor force divided remains the main capitalist enterprise, as it was at the dawn of capitalism.

Bertolt Brecht said that what is produced in boredom can only generate boredom and he was right.

Last, Hearn’s discussion of “self-branding,” in reality TV, directly challenges the assumption that affective labor is a creative activity or a vehicle for self-expression. It shows that while drawing from the emotions and personality of the workers, the selfhood performed is shaped by specific dictates and disciplinary structures, and the selling

What is needed is the reopening of a collective struggle over reproduction, reclaiming control over the material conditions of our reproduction and creating new forms of cooperation around this work outside of the logic of capital and the market.

In the neoliberal workplace, where understaffing makes speedups the order of the day, and where precarity generates high levels of insecurity and anxiety, AL is more conducive to tensions and conflicts than to the discovery of commonalities.

Why hasn’t the women’s movement posed the question of freeing the university, not simply in terms of what subjects should be studied, but also in terms of eliminating the financial cost of studying?

Compared with assembly-line work, “affective labor” may appear more creative, as workers must engage in a constant rearticulation or reinvention of their subjectivity, choose how much of their “selves” to give to the job, and mediate conflicting interests. But they must do so under the pressure of precarious labor conditions, an intense pace of

The wage and the lack of it have allowed capital to obscure the real length of our working day.