Karl Marx’s unfinished critique of political economy is oriented towards an Aufhebung [sublation] of classical political economy, for opening up the frontiers of its future as a science, to facilitate the self-emancipation of the wage-labourer.
He divided his corresponding task into 6 topics: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the state, foreign trade and, world market. His output continues to be published within the now stalled Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe[MEGA2] I-IV. Some of these materials are in the publication mode; the rest are either in the research mode or, are contained in his correspondences. Everything therein is open ended.
One of the open ended issues here is wage-labour. Wage-labour and wageless slave labour together constitute the universe of discourse of labour in the world as a whole. Both kinds of labour can be measured by time use studies.
This paper in Bengali proposes a research programme for extending the wage-labour related component of Marx’s critique of political economy, by utilizing the data generated on wageless-labour through inequality revealing time use studies. The domain of wageless hence slave labour extends from the labour of all women and children producing use values in the patriarchal families, to that of all non-commercial users of the world wide web who help generate revenue for the owners of various search engines and platforms on that web.
This paper was first published on Bhalobhasa on 21 March 2023:
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