Life and the Labour Process in the Planetary Social Factory

Abstract

Challenging productivist approaches to Labour Process Theory (LPT) and drawing inspiration from Harry Braverman’s  own call to analyse the labour process as embedded in the broader social relations of capitalism, this article advocates for a ‘life-making’ approach to the labour process, informed by plural strands of social reproduction feminism. Conceptually anchored in the idea of the ‘planetary social factory’ and its many ‘forms of exploitation’ — concepts developed through engagement with the work of Silvia Federici and Jairus Banaji—this perspective redefines the boundaries of LPT by situating work within global, gendered, racialised, and ecological circuits of production and reproduction. The article builds this argument across six sections, where it identifies the manifold ways in which life shapes the labour process and explores key links between workers’ depletion and the planetary ecological harm inflicted by globalised production. The concluding section explores the political implications of this life-making approach to LPT for organising, and calls for an articulation of life, labour, and ecological struggles as intersecting declinations of ‘value struggles’. Though primarily conceptual, the analysis draws from long-term fieldwork in India’s garment industry, offering empirical grounding to its theoretical point