Notes on Essential Labor

Abstract

The pandemic exposes (and leaves us exposed to) the totality of capital; its most intricate and subterranean links come to light. The extractivist push and its relation to Indigenous genocide in the Amazon, as well as its direct effect on the financialization of land in cities’ poorest neighborhoods becomes apparent. It also becomes clear how the precarization of labor manages to extend working days in a way that relaunches the silent war that Marx saw condensed in its duration. At the same time, it highlights how tasks of reproduction are directly assembled with the so-called platform economy. From August 2019 to now, the Amazon experienced its largest fire in its history, and today clearcutting continues at full pace, while the e-commerce platform with the same name is one of the companies that has most profited from the pandemic, in what continues to be a literal catastrophe.