Commentary on “Revaluing work after COVID-19” by Jane Collins

Written in the swim and wake of the world financial crisis, Jane Collins's book The Politics of Value: Three Movements to Change How We Think about the Economy (2017) tells a history of the US economy and finance that is fundamentally and distinctively anthropological. By this I mean not that it draws on research outside of the so-called West or so-called market-based societies but that it begins its analysis by questioning the taken-for-granted assumptions upon which the economy is organized and work is valued.¹

In The Politics of Value, Collins told the history of the decline of “the embedded liberalism compromise” (Ruggie, 1982, 1991). A major catalyst and symptom of this decline was the rise of the preeminently disembedded concept of shareholder value, which allowed for the dislocation of social utility or a labor theory of value from share prices (Collins, 2016, 2017). Like a number of other scholars (Federici, 2018; Fraser, 2017; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Graeber, 2019; Hart et al., 2010), she focused attention on how valuation happens in capitalist economies and how definitions of value render certain problems and populations outside its frame, literally invisible or, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot would describe it, “unthinkable” (1991). Collins aims to expand the thinkability of forms of valuation that account for things like just distribution, social reproduction, and generational transfer.

The Politics of Value focused on three cases emergent in the mid-2010s, centered on ethical corporate practices, place-based and “slow” capital projects, and contention over labor in the context of public and civil service. Building on the insights of that earlier inquiry, especially the focus on valuation as political, Collins opens her 2023 article by saying, “Calling something valuable is always a discursive move, but it is part of a discourse about materiality. The conversations about economic value described in this paper all contend with the fact that our contemporary accounting practices fail to register activities essential for social life and that this failure has material consequences” (2023, 2). Materiality here has two related and important meanings: it refers to the tangible, apprehensible effects of valuation and revaluation, and also their relevance—how they matter for people. The COVID-19 pandemic, especially in its earlier phases, caused us to focus attention on what matters—thus bringing into view who the “essential workers” are, what is “essential” in the economy, and what infrastructure is required, in the first place, to meet social needs. Collins's emphasis on value as political and therefore contentious allows us to see how people prise open spaces where these questions can be seen, can be discussed, and can become thinkable in the first place.

Collins soberly describes the catastrophic circumstances of 2020–2021 while also keeping an eye on the ways revaluation projects provided chances for greater alignment between the economy-as-it-is and the economy-as-it-could-be with greater inclusion, distribution, and welfare. Words like open, question, and visionary reflect Collins's emphasis on how crisis created opportunity for change, particularly conceptual and political change at the level of value. And at the time of the Conrad Arensberg panel at the American Anthropology Meetings in 2021, rescheduled from 2020, hybrid in format and hemmed in all sides by lockdown, dislocation and uncertainty, this fragile optimism was palpable. Paradoxically, even as we couldn't move around physically and the outside world seemed (and for some more than others) full of danger, the roadblocks to collective discussion and action seemed to have crumbled.

As Collins notes in the latter part of her essay, the original parts of the Build Back Better legislation focused on “care as infrastructure” did not survive the lengthy congressional battles, harkening a gloomier, though not unexpected, closure of this period of openness. In early 2023, the thinkability of what can and cannot be done in work and policy seems to be receding, replaced by a business-as-usual, head-in-the-sand public mood, punctuated by booms and panics around cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence (AI). It would seem then, that this is the moment of renewed pressure and activism for those who have seen these things for a long time.