Making the relationships organizing our lives visible.
Economic institutions have histories. Studying them means asking how they emerge, reproduce, and change without reducing every event to one cause.
A labor market presupposes historically organized property, rights, and livelihoods.
Human activity can produce conditions that escape producers and confront them. The concept exceeds a subjective feeling of unhappiness at work.
Lacking control over a product’s use reveals an objective dependency.
Labor-power can produce more value than its reproduction requires. Exploitation therefore need not involve a legally fraudulent contract.
An accepted wage alone does not settle how the product is distributed.
Social relationships can appear as properties of exchanged objects. Understanding price requires revealing human activities and relationships.
Behind a price, investigate production conditions and bargaining power.