Violent (Non-) Labour: On the Social Reproduction of the Clone in Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones

Abstract

In a reading of Carola Dibbell’s debut novel The Only Ones (2015), this article deploys the term “(non-)labour” in two senses: one is a cheeky description of cloning as the activity of reproducing human beings without the traditional sense of labour as delivery of an infant, and the other draws on Marxist-feminist accounts of care work as the remunerated or unremunerated, though structurally necessary, labour required to reproduce the workforce. Dibbell’s novel presents a version of the human as a worker always already embedded in social relations, revealing the violence that thoroughly saturates the biomedical industry. Yet, as this article argues, violent labour is most evident when characters do work that has too long been imagined outside the sphere of value production. The Only Ones illustrates the impossibility of producing value without labour, violent or otherwise; it directs readers to the unlikely places where we already give away our work for free.