The Body Productive: Rethinking Capitalism, Work and the Body [Paperback]

The Body Productiverepresents a new and radical approach to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body. Self-evident, natural, biological - this is how we think of the body on an everyday basis. However, this supposedly most direct aspect of our being may in fact be a primary site of socio-economic mediation and ideological reproduction. How are bodies produced under capitalism? How, in turn, does capitalism make bodies productive? How is the body (and knowledge of the body) shaped by demands of production, consumption and exchange, and how can these logics be resisted, challenged and overcome?

These are the questions at the heart ofThe Body Productive,a collection of original, radical new approaches to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body from an international group of scholars and activists. Taking inspiration from the neglected theoretical work of Fran?ois Gu?ry and Didier Deleule, and bridging Marxist and Foucauldian traditions, this book rethinks the relationships between the biological and the social; the body and the mind; power and knowledge; discipline and control.

Steffan Blayneyworks for a trade union in London and is an honorary research fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Joey Hornsbycompleted her PhD in 2021. Her work was recently published inNottingham French Studies.

Savannah Whaleyis a lecturer in theory and performance at King's College London, UK.

If Marx taught us that capitalist labour 'mortifies' the body of the worker, this book is an urgent and critical analysis of that process of mortification. The book refocuses our attention to how the body is both produced and becomes productive under capital's strident demands upon it. But the authors urge us to consider not the passive trope of bodily resilience when it comes to the global working class, but the constant running script of bodily resistance as workers hide from, defy, or lƒ”