London School of Economics Review of Books: Dead Labor

Review of Dead Labor by James Tyner

A groundbreaking consideration of death from capitalism, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century

In Dead Labor: Towards a Political Economy of Premature DeathJames Tyner offers an urgent examination of the extraction of surplus value from the death of labouring bodies. While the book does not discuss the histories of slavery or the effects of the truncation of life upon reproductive labour, it is a fluent, accessible and illuminating read that should stimulate consideration beyond the US context of the complicated network of social relations sustaining the devaluation of life under capitalism, writes Debolina Majumder.

 

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