The genetics of capital: An examination of Marx's labor theory of value and women's labor in the global garment industry

My aim in this project is to delineate the features of an adequate critical social theory which can explain the core mechanisms that give rise to the ethical dilemmas of women's labor along the global assembly line in the garment industry. I argue that the nature of the capitalist structure exerts a power over human beings that results in devastating patterns of human interaction particularly within the field of labor. I attempt to explore from a feminist liberationist perspective how the capitalist system impels a process of production that converts women laborers within the garment industry into embodied mechanisms of value production.My work is a response to and a referencing of historian Moishe Postone's reinterpretation of Marx's mature critical theory in Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Postone's rethinking of Marx's central categories provides an in depth view into the core structure of capitalism. I argue that ethicists familiar with Marx's central categories of commodity and capital are better able to interrogate the causal links between the structure of capitalism and the human and labor rights violations occurring in factories throughout the global garment industry.Production and social relations in capitalism are constituted by the value form of wealth. Value is measured according to labor time expenditure. The process of capitalist production and the temporally determined form of wealth create a dialectic which gives way to a form of abstract structural domination. This impersonal abstract form of domination operates above the heads of laborers and capitalists even though they themselves constitute it. This project probes the internal mechanisms of abstract domination which I refer to as the genetics of capital.