Life and the Labour Process in the Planetary Social Factory
Bibliographic record
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 points
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".