The Labour Process and Health through the Lens of Marx’s Historical Materialism

This chapter illustrates the value of Karl Marx’s historical materialist approach for the analysis of the relation between capitalist development and health depletion. Tracing Marx’s observations on health and exploitation in Capital, the chapter highlights their contemporary relevance and limitations for the study of modern and more contemporary forms of homework. The analysis focuses on the Italian case and confirms the tight interrelation between high degrees of gendered exploitation in the home and adverse health outcomes. It stresses the benefits and challenges of deploying Marx’s concrete methods of enquiry in relation to health and work – often based on detailed reports by labour inspectors and doctors – in general and with reference to the case of Italian homework in historical perspective, and it points at some of the theoretical limitations of Marxian understandings of domestic labour in relation to its social longevity, structural role in capitalist development and relation to the state.