A PRISM FOR CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM: TEMPORARY WORK AS DISPLACED LABOR AS VALUE

Temporary work provides a prism that separates out and thereby makes manifest some of the displacing effects of today's most diversified and expanded divisions of capitalist labor. The chaotic conceptions of statistics agencies and business commentators fail to come to terms with this displacement, while transaction cost theories of flexibility fare little better. By contrast, a Marxist attention to displacements in the chain of value can adequately theorize and explain the capitalist roots of alienation in temping. A Marxist account is also better placed to analyze the spatial and institutional displacement of the labor process through temping. Finally, when sensitized to its own economic limits, a Marxist reading of value formation can also open the door to analyzing other, non-economic, codings of workers' value.