Wage labour is often seen as a fundamental, even the fundamental, relationship in capitalism. Some twenty years before he completed his multi-volume Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx delivered a short set of lectures entitled Wage Labour and Capital; the lectures were published two years later as a series of five articles in the newspaper that Marx edited.
Marx wrote that “Capital … presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence.”1
In her 2025 book Free Gifts: Capitalism and The Politics of Nature, Alyssa Battistoni described this important social and political relationship this way: “Capital … is the power to purchase another’s time and decide how it will be used; the ability of one group of people to command the activity of another…” (Free Gifts, p. 58). (This is the fourth installment in a series on Free Gifts; the others are here, here, and here.)
Purchasing others’ time, whether by the hour, the day, or the week, can be an important tactic for extracting wealth – especially when asserting control over that time allows for speed-ups in the production of exchange value. But Battistoni emphasizes that much wealth depends on natural processes that are difficult if not impossible to speed up. In many such cases capitalism forgoes direct control of labour and finds other ways to extract value. She writes,
“‘Nature-based’ sectors, in which nature is directly cultivated or extracted, remain perpetually reliant on biophysical processes, which operate according to their own logics, and which often preclude rationalization on the factory model. These sectors have tended to deviate from the industrial rule.” (p. 85)
Such biophysical processes, and their implications for attempts at wealth extraction, play starring roles in Bathsheba Demuth’s 2019 book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait.
This book had been on my short list “to read soon” for the past six years without quite making it to the top2 – until last December. It did not disappoint. Floating Coast is a rich history of one particular area of the earth, its diverse species, and cultures which have learned over centuries how to be deeply-rooted participants in these ecosystems. At the same time it paints vivid pictures of other cultures which recently arrived in the Bering Strait, and which have tried many methods of extracting market value from the gifts of nature over the past 150 years. As such Demuth’s history of a specific place offers a wealth of examples of the often abstract principles in Free Gifts.3
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“Does a worker in a factory produce only cotton?” Marx asked in 1847, and he answered “No. He produces capital.” But the necessary inputs for the surplus value that increased capital went beyond the hours of wage labour. The raw cotton, of course, was likely produced by slave labour or by share-croppers, not people who were selling their labour by the hour.
And there were other inputs which did not enter the market through wage labour. Factories needed lubricants, and in the mid-nineteenth century those lubricants came from the bodies of whales killed thousands of kilometers away. “Whale products were critical to textile production,” Demuth wrote. “A single factory would use nearly seven thousand gallons – three sperm whales’ worth – of oil in a year.” (Floating Coast, p. 27) Factories needed artificial light as well, and that came via lamps burning whale oil.
By the mid-19th century, however, Europeans and colonists had carried out intensive commercial whaling for hundreds of years. In most of the earth’s oceans whales were getting scarce. The Bering Strait was remote and its icy waters were only accessible to ships for a few months each year, but commercial whalers eventually found their way to the home of the large whales which summered there.
Demuth sets the context:
“The Bering Strait is the terminus for the world’s deep ocean circulation. Water that began in the North Atlantic arrives in the Bering Sea centuries later, dense with nutrients shed by great rivers. Where the continents lean toward each other at the strait, wind and undersea topography create turbulence. Warm waters mix with cold, roiling iron, nitrogen, and phosphorus upward. At the surface, these elements meet with summer’s abundant solar energy, with atmospheric carbon, and with the organisms that make their cells from this mixture. Where air touches water, over two hundred species of photosynthetic plankton give physical shape to sunlight. These algae and diatoms are the Bering Strait’s primary form of productive life.” (Floating Coast, p. 16)
Energy here was abundant but was diffused both temporally and spatially. Whales, however, were key agents in an age-old process. Demuth explains: “The work of a whale is to turn this distilled energy into hundred-ton bodies. … Bowheads carry more calories per pound of flesh than any other Arctic species on land or sea” (p. 16–17).
Among the many creatures whose lives depended on the energy-capture-and-storage talents of whales were the indigenous peoples who have inhabited Beringia’s shores for centuries or millennia. Whales fed families and villages through the long months of the arctic and subarctic winters, and indigenous people cultivated reverence for the lifeways of the whales. Thus they were able to find constancy in an environment with challenging seasonal dynamics, severe storms, and population booms and busts among smaller animals. Whales were their neighbours for just a few months each year, their numbers were never large, and their life cycles were measured in centuries rather than months. But people who adapted to those timetables, people who regarded themselves as part of this ecosystem, could, like the whales, thrive in this environment.
The new whalers who arrived on big ships about 1850 were also intent on capturing energy – but they regarded the region’s seasonal timetables as mere obstacles standing in the way of accumulation. Rather than asking, “How many whales will our village need to feed us for the coming year?” they asked “How can we turn as many live whales as possible into barreled oil? How can we kill even more whales this year than we did last year?”
The captains and the crews of the ships were the local face of this extraction; the drivers were financiers in the ports of New England and buyers for industrial concerns elsewhere in the US and in Western Europe. At the foundation of the extraction was a worldview that differed radically from that of the indigenous peoples of Beringia. In the increasingly dominant worldview, the ‘free gifts of nature” were being turned into wealth via exchange value. In Demuth’s phrasing, “As labor improved land by farming it, in the theory of the time, so turning whales into oil improved the sea by making it yield currency” (p. 30).
The new whalers in Beringia were cogs in a recognizably capitalist machine – but, key to our discussion here, hourly wage labour was absent. It simply didn’t pay for the heads of this industry to buy labour by the hour or to take direct command over when, where and how the work was done. The returns were too dependent on nature’s timetables, too far away in space, too far away in time, with too many uncertainties – a ship-wrecking storm enroute to the whaling waters, for example, or a late spring that might choke the Bering Strait with ice, preventing wooden ships from chasing bowheads.
Financiers preferred to shunt much of the risk onto the people who did the work. Thus the whaling ships departed home ports with each crew member promised a specified share of the eventual profits – assuming there were profits. In this nineteenth-century gig, workers might do very well at the end of a good year, or come home with little or no cash to claim for months of brutally dangerous work.
“Harbingers of an uncertain future”
Sending gig workers to the ends of the earth to turn whales into currency may sound like an archaic form of capitalism. But Alyssa Battistoni emphasizes that there are many sectors, even today, in which taking direct control over hours of labour is not part of the capitalist playbook. One such sector is arguably the most fundamental of all economic sectors: agriculture.
A factory model works by controlling “abstract time” – the hours measured by the clock. Agriculture answers first of all to “concrete time” – in Battistoni’s words, “time measured in relation to natural processes, from the length of a day to the cycle of the seasons …” (p. 102).
Capitalism’s resulting aversion to exerting direct control over most agricultural labour was explored by Eric Holt-Giménez in his 2017 book A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism (reviewed here).
“Today, despite centuries of capitalism, large-scale capitalist agriculture produces less than a third of the world’s food supply,” Holt-Giménez wrote. “Peasants and smallholders still feed most people in the world, though they cultivate less than a quarter of the arable land.”
Even in the US, where most agriculture is highly industrialized, most farms are family-owned, not corporate-owned. As Holt-Giménez explained, family farms invest their own capital into expensive land and machinery, while bearing the inevitable risks of bad weather. The typically long but irregular hours of work needed to bring in crops are managed by the individual farmers or their families: “Ninety-seven percent of farms in the United States are family-owned and a full 87 percent rely mostly on family labor.”
While capital risk and labour management remain with farmers, there are many other ways in which corporate agribusiness can extract value. “The agrifoods sector is extraordinarily adept at inventing technologies or services to make profits without actually engaging in the risks and limitations of farming,” Holt-Giménez wrote. Farm commodities are bought, sold and processed through a tiny handful of huge corporations, leaving farmers with little control over the prices they receive. Likewise, the markets for inputs including chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery are also controlled by a few corporate players.
In the political economy of agriculture, capitalism employs different strategies than it uses in controlling wage labour in factories. Battistoni emphasizes that this should not be written off as a quirk of history:
“The oddities of agricultural production, then, are not so much the stubborn dregs of a bygone age as the harbingers of an uncertain future, as important for understanding the politics of capitalism as any struggle within the factory.” (Free Gifts, p. 115)
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What capitalism has regarded as the “free gifts of nature” often come with very particular limitations that restrict how surplus value can be extracted. By paying close attention to these particularities, Battistoni provides insight into struggles that may not seem otherwise related. We’ll conclude this essay with a brief discussion of the constellation of subjects often grouped under the heading of “care work”.
The importance of care work has long been recognized as critically important to every aspect of society including the market economy. Where the economy is dominated by industrially organized wage work, children need decades of care before they can become the next wave of that industrial work force. Yet capital has typically declined to invest in this crucial work, leaving care work to be funded, if at all, not by the market but by a combination of families and governments. Why?
In a chapter entitled “Labor of Life,” Battistoni pays homage to the feminist Marxists who started the Wages For Housework movement4 and whose influence continues to be felt today. As Selma James wrote in 1972, “Wagelessness and the resulting dependence on men is the form patriarchy takes under capitalism”.5 Battistoni argues that, as important as patriarchy is, there is more to the devaluing of essential care work than sexism. She asks us to look also at the common factors that make some kinds of work amenable to value extraction through direct control of labour – while others are mostly left out of the labour market:
“It is the very indeterminacy and unpredictability of human needs, born out of the resolutely qualitative processes of bodily function and the subjective elements of human consciousness, that make the act of tending to these needs nearly impossible to standardize or mechanize – and that render the labor processes built around them especially difficult for capital to make productive.” (p. 171; emphasis mine)
“Productive” is used here in the capitalist sense – that is, producing exchange value for the benefit of the capitalist. Battistoni argues that, whether care work is waged or unwaged, and whether it is being done in a given case by women or men, it tends to be systematically undervalued in the market economy because it does not lend itself to the extraction of exchange value.
Footnotes
1 In Wage Labour and Capital, accessed via Marxists Internet Archive.
2 For an introduction to Demuth’s work check out this Cultures of Energy podcast episode from 2019.
3 The extractivist colonizers in Floating Coast include not only agents of capitalism on the Alaskan side of the Bering Strait, but the self-styled disciples of Karl Mark on the Siberian side. Spoiler alert: the ecosystems and the cultures of Beringia suffered violent disruption in both cases.
4 Disclosure: I read this chapter with particular interest because one of my dearest friends, Francie Wyland, was a leader of Wages for Housework in Canada. During her last decade of life Francie was interviewed extensively by Christina Rousseau for her York University PhD thesis Housework and Social Subversion. I have no doubt Francie would have been keenly interested in Battistoni’s discussion of Wages for Housework and its successors, and I wish I could know Francie’s thoughts in response.
5 Selma James, “Women, the Unions, and Work, or, What is Not to Be Done,” in Sex, Race and Class, 68, quoted in Free Gifts, p. 153.
