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Dead Labor: Towards a Political Economy of Premature Death. By James Tyner

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James Tyner’s Dead Labor (2019) raises the important question of not only who lives and who dies in contemporary capitalism but also, crucially, “who increasingly profits from the death of… Click to show full abstract

James Tyner’s Dead Labor (2019) raises the important question of not only who lives and who dies in contemporary capitalism but also, crucially, “who increasingly profits from the death of the other?” (p. 128). In naming necrocapitalism as a system that not only lets die but makes death productive as a vehicle for accumulation, the book seeks to (following Mitchell 2000) “consider how dead and dying bodies ‘work’ for political and economic purposes” (p. xi). It is therefore, a potentially timely contribution that calls for attending to the economic in relation to necropolitics. At points, however, these are curiously presented as in competition—with Tyner stating that, under capitalism, death has been “outside the realm of the biological or the biopolitical” and is now moving into the realm of the bioeconomic (p. x). For Tyner, economic analysis flows first and foremost fromMarx. The order of the book is (therefore) to treat labor first as living, then commodified, then surplus, then redundant, and finally disassembled. FollowingMarx, the transition from living to commodified labor involves the formal subsumption of labor to capital through dispossession, followed by its real subsumption through waged work. While formal subsumption exposes workers to premature death through tying their very survival to waged work, real subsumption exposes them to premature death through the conditions of this work. Tyner then considers uneven access to health care as a further facet of capitalist labor relations, which likewise constitutes exposure to premature death. Following this, surplus labor is presented as that which is not currently productive for capital but that may be made productive through means such as workfare or reintroduction to the labor force. With some comments on the globalization of production, the main example in this chapter is migration. Tyner focuses in particular on undocumented migration fromMexico to the US, in which deadly conditions are imposed on unauthorized labor migration. In the discussion of redundant labor—which capital sees no further use for—the book begins to delve into the ways that death might be made productive for capital. In this chapter, Tyner offers a detailed history of trade in life insurance policies (mainly focused on the US) from life wagering to the viatical (or life settlement) industry to the flipping of life insurance policies and finally the creation of corporate-owned life insurance taken out by employers on their workers. This is fictional capital in which profits are made from death, with Tyner amply demonstrating how this defies everyday ethics. The chapter on disassembled labor focuses on organ (specifically kidney) selling. Here what are emphasized are the negative health consequences of selling one’s kidney, potentially leading to a premature death—or truncated life, a phrase that, according to Tyner, emphasizes social relations over biological facts. The book therefore calls for thinking far more carefully about how capital not only lets die but, in some instances, profits from death. In spite of the stated significance of labor as embodied and the strong ethical concerns expressed, however, the book pays remarkably little attention to workers’ bodies, lives, and relations. For example, while including evidence from studies 80 BO O K R EV EW

Keywords: death; labor; premature death; book; tyner; life

Journal Title: Economic Geography
Year Published: 2019

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