Capitalism profits most from labor it never commodifies or pays

Evidence

Immanuel Wallerstein observed that “profit is often greater when not all links in the chain are in fact commodified.” By this he meant that capitalism has always relied on indirect modes of exploitation that can operate in addition to the direct modes of exploitation related to wage labor. Put differently, unpaid or underpaid work is of utmost importance in capitalism, whether that work is the work of the slave, the housewife, or the selfie poster. Historically, this has served both to externalize costs so that it is members of society, not employers, who have to bear them and to extend capitalism beyond the formal economy. Today, social quantification represents the most extensive attempt to construct a whole economy based on the free ride that capitalism can extract from our lives, so that modes of unpaid and underpaid work that were unimaginable before are legitimized, normalized, and, in the long run, naturalized. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 214

Categorization

• XREF: Wallerstein-derived claim about unpaid work; speaks to debates with autonomist Marxists (post-workerism, digital labor) in the attention economy school. — connects to: Human labour contains an uncommodifiable part beyond its market price — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 68; Capitalism must keep finding uncommodified experience to profit from — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 129; Capitalism profits most by leaving parts of the production chain uncommodified (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalism profits most by leaving parts of the production chain uncommodified #corroborates (0.95)
• Profit arises from labour’s uncommodifiable experiential dimension #expands (0.85)
• Capitalist profit also depends on unpaid domestic labor #exemplifies (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 106
• Capitalists profit from unpaid reproductive and domestic labor without bearing its costs. #exemplifies (0.78) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 106
• Domestic labor sustains capitalism by reproducing labor power for free #exemplifies (0.75) — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, 68