Responses to \"Bringing in the Work of Nature: From Natural Capital to Hybrid Labor\" Alyssa Battistoni<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In her abstract, Battistoni describes moving away from what is known as natural capital<\/em> (ecosystem services) to a feminist approach to what she calls \"hybrid labor\", through which she articulates<\/p>\n\n\n\n ...an expanded idea of hybrid labor that understands the \u201cwork of nature\u201d as a collective, distributed undertaking of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Natural resources: <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Natural Capital, argued along the same lines as all capital, by turning complex biological, atmospheric, and earth systems into services <\/em>(rather than things to be extracted at least). It is familiar<\/em> (yes, neoliberal valuation has seeped into the family, the self, and all else) to describe the importance of ecosystemic contributions to the health of the planet as something<\/em> that can be abstracted, i.e. assigned a monetary value. Battistoni wants us to move away from the notion of capital as the definition of labor, leveraging \"the insights of feminist theorists regarding undervalued forms of production\" to examine how acts of working together are \"a collective, distributed undertaking of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world.\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her term for this new undervalued collaborative form of production is \"Hybrid Labor.\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking cues from Bennett and Latour, she asks how to bring their ideas of actor networks and vibrant matter, lively agents of all stripes and forms, into the political realm (\"Bennett\u2019s analysis falters when it comes to suggest-ing how the power of these multitudinous agents might be recognized and mobilized for political action.\" and \"what exactly does it mean to \u201cbring in\u201d species, rivers, earthworms, as we go about, in Latour\u2019s words, \u201ccomposing a common world\u201d?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Natural capital purports to \u201cbring nature in\u201d to economics for the purposes of transforming it, but without any intent to effect political transformation<\/span>. To suggest that labor is not exclusively human is not to efface the difference between human labor and other forms, or between humans and other laborers. The fact that humans have capacities that are not utilized by certain forms of labor does not mean that labor must be an exclusively human category\u2014only that \u201cwhat makes us human\u201d is located elsewhere. Labor can still be a useful and important category of political activity even\u2014and perhaps especially\u2014if it is not also the determining characteristic of humanity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Discuss:<\/p>\n\n\n\n As wages-for-housework proposed that household tasks be seen as work rather than a set of exchangeable commodities \u00e0 la Becker, I propose conceiving of the reproduction of the conditions of life on Earth\u2014the continuous rebuilding of our common, livable home\u2014as a form of collective, hybrid labor rather than a set of services to be traded. Scholars are beginning to highlight the human labor and care that go into maintaining ecosystems, granting these often invisible forms of work critical recognition.73 But we must also recognize the generative, productive forces of \u201cnature itself\u201d as part of this labor. The daily remaking of the world requires more-than-human activity: thus the importance not only of replacing \u201ccapital\u201d with \u201clabor,\u201d but \u201cnatural\u201d with \u201chybrid.\u201d Labor vs Capital: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Battistoni's apologia:<\/p>\n\n\n\n to argue for political subjectivity based on labor may seem to re-center labor as the primary activity of life or accept too readily the subsump-tion of other activities to the category of labor.86 Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, for example, that to declare various forms of human activity labor is to already accept capitalist categories and figurations of politics;87 Helmreich rightly cautions against seeing \u201corganisms as natural factories or assembly lines, when in fact they only become so in certain relations.\u201d88 Indeed, I don\u2019t seek to reify social relations as natural, suggest that only activities designated as labor can be recognized as valuable, insist that labor is the only basis for political relationships, or propose it as an all-encompassing descriptor of human\u2013nonhuman relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By way of comparison, recognition of another human\u2019s status as a co-laborer does not preclude other relationships; if anything, it is likely to foster additional forms of sociality. Likewise, considering nonhumans in terms of labor does not mean they should be seen entirely or exclusively in those terms. Nor must labor be the exclusive political relationship. As humans who participate in politics organized around their labor also act politically in other dimensions, so too with more-than-human politics: taking up the idea of hybrid labor does not, for example, preclude a politics that aims to minimize nonhuman suffering, as in campaigns against cruelty to animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","type":"rich"}
Yet even the valuation of ecosystems as natural capital have (had? this article was written in 2017) largely been ignored by political theorists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To get at a political transformation<\/span>, we first must dissect labor and what constitutes the human. We can take off from a Marxist runway, and expand through marxist feminists. A starting point is the ways in which labor is under-recognized across the human species (unpaid, reproductive, emotional, affective labor, etc). But to contain labor as exclusively within the domain of humans is also an oversight. Marx's \"influential view that labor is exclusively and distinctively human leads him to undervalue the constitutive powers of reproduction and generation in the production of nature itself. The earth, beyond the human, does plenty of unpaid work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
...The similarities of interest to me are structural and historical rather than ontological or essential: both \u201cwomen\u2019s work\u201d and the \u201cwork of nature\u201d\u2014the kinds of bodily, ephemeral, daily activities necessary for simply sustaining life\u2014have tended in capitalist societies to be unrecognized and undervalued, to act as background conditions to market relations and lasting works.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n