Theatre Survey 58:1 (January 2017)

© American Society for Theatre Research 2017

doi:10.1017/S0040557416000661

Michael Shane Boyle

P ERFORMANCE AND VALUE : T HE W ORK OF T HEATRE IN K ARL

M ARX ’ S C RITIQUE OF POLITICAL E CONOMY

That theatre is a place of work seems beyond debate. But what kind of work-
place is it? And under what conditions does theatre conform to a capitalist produc-
tion process? At first glance these questions may seem obviously, even
inextricably, linked; but investigating theatre as somewhere people go to work
is a far different enterprise than specifying its economic connection to capital.
Over the past decade there has been a surge in attention to the labor that goes
into performance, with most scholars, artists, and activists tackling how theatre
functions as a workplace. Nicholas Ridout, for instance, describes theatre as a
place where “one group of people spend leisure time sitting in the dark to watch
others spend their working time under lights pretending to be other people.”1
Others like Christin Essin redirect our gaze backstage to where designers and tech-
nicians perform the essential theatrical work that often goes unseen or unre-
marked.2 And thanks to the workplace interventions of groups such as the
Precarious Workers Brigade, it is hard to ignore how even ostensibly ”progressive”
theatres rely profoundly on the exploitation of unpaid interns and overworked cus-
todians.3 These and other varied efforts at shedding light into the hidden abode of
theatrical production have done much to reveal the type of workplace theatres are,
but even they do not explain the circumstances under which theatre corresponds to
the capitalist production process. To examine theatre as a site of capitalist com-
modity production requires probing more than the “content” of theatrical labor;
one must also concentrate on the “social form” this labor takes.
By “social form” I do not mean the aesthetics or even the formal qualities of
a given job within the theatre (e.g., its requisite behaviors, costumes, and gestures).

Michael Shane Boyle works in the Drama Department at Queen Mary

University of London. He is currently writing a book called Infrastructural
Aesthetics, which studies how contemporary art and theatre deploy technolo-
gies that undergird global capitalism, such as shipping containers, drones,
and the Internet.

For their helpful suggestions on the material presented here, many thanks to
Morgan Wadsworth and two anonymous readers who offered feedback.

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 Theatre Survey

Instead I have in mind how Karl Marx used the term when in the opening chapter
of Capital he writes that as soon as people “start to work for each other in any way,
their labour also assumes a social form.”4 For Marx social form refers to the spe-
cific relations that emerge among parties involved in a given production process.
The social form that labor takes can vary across different historical modes of pro-
duction, and Marx’s focus of course was capitalism, in which the concrete activity
a worker does is made into an abstraction. And within capitalist production it is
only when the particular labor of a worker becomes a commodity that this labor
becomes exchangeable socially with other instances of work. It is only when a
commodity objectifies concrete labor that has been rendered abstract that the val-
orization of capital—the very aim of capitalist production—is possible.
Whereas political economy before Marx focused on how the content of labor
(the actual work and time that goes into a product) determines the value of a com-
modity, Marx set out to investigate “why this content has assumed that particular
form, that is to say why labour is expressed in value” (Capital, 1: 174). According
to Marx, the value of a commodity could not be found in the commodity itself
since value is not a commodity’s “natural property”—like, for instance, the hard-
ness of a table is (1: 127). Value exists not in a “natural form” but only in a social
form, that is, as a social relation between people that appears fetishistically in “the
fantastic form of a relation between things” (1: 165). Marx was not satisfied with
only studying the actual work people do, but sought instead to clarify what distin-
guished the capitalist mode of production as a specific historical system from all
others. It is the abstracted form of labor, Marx believed, that “bear[s] the unmis-
takable stamp” of capitalism, “a social formation in which the process of produc-
tion has mastery over man, instead of the opposite” (1: 174–5). One can stitch a
jacket or perform a monologue within various modes of production, but the social
relations under which tailors or actors work vary enormously across these systems.
To ask whether theatrical labor has been subsumed to capital requires examining
the social relations that give form to value itself. Considering the level of abstrac-
tion such a Marxist enquiry entails, it may seem reasonable that both performance
scholarship and activism tend to focus more on the seemingly practical matter of
how people work in theatres than on the social form this labor assumes.
Even so, as this special issue of Theatre Survey evidences, there is growing
interest in what Marxian theory can offer theatre and performance studies. But this
(re)turn to Marx comes at a time when the place of performance within Marx’s
value theory is being deeply scrutinized. The most influential of these critiques
originates not from performance scholars, but from figures associated with the
“autonomist” thought that has roots in postwar Italian operaismo. Paolo Virno,
for instance, argues that Marx all but dismissed activities that have the quality
of performance from his study of the capitalist production process, including
everything that does not result in a physical product—from cognitive and emo-
tional labor to service work and the performing arts. Such an assumption, Virno
suggests, “places Marx in an embarrassing situation” now that we have entered
a post-Fordist service economy “in which all wage labor has something in com-
mon with the ‘performing artist.’”5 Virno is referring here to the epochal shift
in the economic output of deindustrialized countries from the production of actual

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 Performance and Value

things to less tangible phenomena like services and communication. Marx’s

refusal to consider the performing arts and other types of “immaterial labor” as
a potential source of surplus value leads Virno to dispute the political and analyt-
ical relevance of Marx’s entire value theory today. Virno’s critique, which is fre-
quently cited by theatre and performance scholars, participates in the broader
move of key autonomist figures to shelve Marx’s theory of value for being “out
of date”—to use the words of Antonio Negri.6
Whereas many critics beyond theatre and performance studies have pointed
out the categorical errors that underpin the autonomist dismissal of Marx’s value
theory, my purpose here is to consider the claim Virno and others make that Marx
excluded performance from the capitalist production process.7 By focusing on the
value theory Marx developed in Capital and associated works from the late 1850s
onward, I revisit the role in which he casts performance in his critique of classical
political economy. As I show, Marx does posit performance as exceptional to cap-
italist commodity production, like Virno insists; however, this is only one part of
Marx’s argument. In addition to noting cases when performance should be kept
out of consideration, Marx also emphasizes scenarios in which performance is
organized in a capitalist fashion—namely, when it is organized as theatre. As a
means for giving “social form” to the work of performance, theatre exemplifies
for Marx the capitalist mode of production’s capacity to bend human activity to
the law of value. Marx’s attention to theatre does not stem from any special con-
cern for the economics of theatre; instead, he posits his analysis as a riposte to the
eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, who himself had insisted
performance was exceptional to capitalist production.
My project to chart the role theatre plays in Marx’s critique of political econ-
omy can be read partly as a response to what Shannon Jackson has called “the cur-
rent rush to quote the post-Operaismo school” in theatre and performance studies.8
Autonomism’s appeal to performance scholars owes no doubt to the important
place of performance in autonomist theories of labor. This means, however, that
the recent workerist turn in performance scholarship—which also frequently
quotes Marx—tends to pivot on a theoretical approach that all but dismisses the
cornerstone of Marx’s theory: value.9 It may very well be that Marx is being
read more today by performance scholars than in half a century, but what sort
of reading is this exactly? And what aspects of Marx’s thought that speak directly
to theatre and performance does the autonomist interpretation of Marx obscure?
The reading of Marx I apply in this essay departs from autonomism and
draws instead on a set of wide-ranging debates that unfurled internationally in
the wake of 1968, which today often travels under the name of value theory. Of
particular significance here is a strand of heterodox conversations in
Anglophone economics and the so-called neue Marx-Lektüre (the New Reading
of Marx) initiated by students of Theodor Adorno in West Germany.10 Despite
the many differences and disagreements within the bodies of work that get lumped
beneath this blanket term, value theory typically prizes a rigorous and philologi-
cally nuanced reading of Marx’s oeuvre. Those associated with value theory insist
that Marx did not try to continue or even correct classical political economy, but
instead leveled a categorical critique of its very foundations. As Michael Heinrich,

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 Theatre Survey

an important figure in neue Marx-Lektüre, notes, “This critique of categories

begins with the most abstract category of political economy, that of value.”11
As understood here, value is not something that exists within a commodity as
determined by the content of the labor that went into it; rather, value is a social
relation objectified in the commodity. In addition to breaking with classical polit-
ical economy, value theory rejects the determinism of major orthodox Marxist tra-
ditions. But the economic focus of value theory also separates it from the dissident
stream of Western Marxism (à la the Frankfurt School) that concentrates largely on
matters of culture, ideology, and sociology. To date value theory has only rarely
been applied to the cultural sphere, though recent efforts have been made to do
so with respect to visual art and literature.12 The present essay looks to add to
this understanding of what value theory can say about artistic production by turn-
ing to the world of performance and outlining a Marxist economic analysis of
theatre.

T HE A BSENCE OF A M ARXIST E CONOMIC A NALYSIS OF T HEATRE

Half a century ago, in their groundbreaking study Performing Arts—The
Economic Dilemma, the economists William Baumol and William Bowen argued
that performance is not “an intangible manifestation of the human spirit” exempt
from economic analysis, but rather an exemplary “productive activity.”13
Performing arts like theatre and orchestral music, they wrote, are emblematic of
service work in which the activities of workers “are themselves the consumers’
good.”14 In many ways Baumol and Bowen’s influential alignment of performance
and service work anticipated the current torrent of scholarship that examines what
the world of performance shares with a postindustrial society increasingly filled
with service jobs and provisions.
For some working in theatre and performance studies today, performance
has come to be more than just an example of a service industry; it is often rolled
out as “the central scaffolding of a service economy.”15 While a number of schol-
ars deploy acting theory to explain the qualities required by many kinds of service
work, others argue that modern managerial science is tapping into the creative and
flexible capacities of performing artists themselves. Most often the tribulations of
artists and performance ensembles are taken to be paradigmatic of the precarious
experience of working in a neoliberal society.16 As Theron Schmidt puts it in his
gloss on this workerist turn in performance scholarship: “artists, performance-
based or otherwise, can no longer claim some vantage point outside of advanced
capitalism, but, it may be argued, are its most exemplary labourers.”17
Perspectives like these help us to grasp the myriad overlaps between the
worlds of performance and capitalism today. But attempts to describe how capital-
ist society impinges on performance tend to look past or even overstate the specific
economic relation performance has to capital. That performers are now “exem-
plary workers” does not necessarily mean that performance has become an exem-
plar of capitalist production. That entrepreneurial values and market pressures
have snuck into theatres in unprecedented ways is not proof that theatrical perfor-
mance is now indistinguishable from the capitalist commodity. In other words,

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 Performance and Value

there is a crucial but frequently overlooked difference between the relationship

performance has with capitalist society and the extent to which it conforms to cap-
italist production. Too often scholars and critics seem to assume that since a per-
formance is produced in a capitalist society it must have been produced in a
capitalist fashion. Not only does such an assumption risk selling performance
short, but, more crucially, it compromises our understanding of capital.
In his recent book Art and Value, Dave Beech makes a similar point, but
with regard to visual art:

The question of whether art conforms to the capitalist mode of production can-
not be determined simply by observing certain capitalistic elements at work in
the production or circulation of art but depends entirely on whether art embod-
ies the social relations in which the capitalist subjugates production through
the ownership of the means of production and the payment of wages to pur-
chase labour power.18

Beech’s argument challenges longstanding assumptions that visual art pro-

duction has become identical to capitalist commodity production. He opens his
study by noting an “extraordinary convergence” between mainstream economics
and Marxist cultural analysis, both of which insist “art is, always has been, or
has recently become nothing but a commodity” (A&V, 1). Even towering figures
like Theodor Adorno go awry in Beech’s book for failing to distinguish between
art’s relationship to capitalist society and its economic relationship to capital.
Cultural Marxist thought from the Frankfurt School and Fredric Jameson up
through the likes of Stewart Martin has tended to focus primarily on how capitalist
society influences the themes and values of art, the market available to it, and how
it gets consumed, rather than its specific mode of production. Despite Western
Marxism’s rigorous sociological and philosophical investigations of capitalist
society, there remains, Beech avers, “the absence of a Marxist economic analysis
of art” (217).19 By this he means that even ostensibly Marxist cultural thought
tends not to specify the economic relation of artistic labor to capital. We are famil-
iar with arguments attesting to the “apparently cosy relationship between art and
capitalism” but what often goes unexamined “is the difference between art’s cul-
tural, social and political incorporation by capitalism, on the one hand, and its eco-
nomic incorporation, on the other” (1). To put it another way: much of what passes
as Marxist cultural analysis does not separate the impact of capitalist society on art
from art’s potential production as a capitalist commodity. If, as Beech insists, the
orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky “said a great deal about economics and very
little about art,” then “Western Marxism said a lot about art and aesthetics but vir-
tually nothing about economics” (213). What is needed, therefore, is an economic
analysis of how “art corresponds to the capitalist mode of production” (5). The
same goes for theatre and performance.
Art and Value moves against the grain of much arts commentary to contend
that, far from being subsumed to the social relations of capital, artistic production
is “economically exceptional” to the capitalist mode (20). Although art certainly
can metamorphose into a commodity and function like one within a market, it is

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 Theatre Survey

not a capitalist commodity like any other because ordinarily it is not produced in a
capitalist fashion. The social relations under which artists work—when producing
art, at least—tend to depart from those that determine the capitalist production pro-
cess described by Marx. Artists do not earn a wage for the productive activity they
perform, but typically they sell their products themselves or through someone
working on their behalf. Moreover, artists when producing art do not usually
exploit workers, at least for the purposes of generating surplus value. As such, art-
ists occupy the position of neither labor nor capital. Their product is not a standard
commodity, since the price set for it rarely accords to anything like an average
socially necessary labor time. However, the prospect of art’s economic exception-
alism is hardly cause for celebration, and Beech explains it does not amount to “an
economic argument for art’s autonomy” (27). As Western Marxist thought has
proven, art and artists are hardly freed from the vagaries and vicissitudes of cap-
italist society when artistic labor is not subsumed to capitalist production.
Beech’s method is instructive for theatre and performance insofar as it
emphasizes the need to look to art’s mode of production and the social relations
therein, rather than at the content of any particular instance of artistic labor. The
study’s usefulness notwithstanding, the actual conclusions Art and Value reaches
cannot be assumed to hold for theatre, for as Sarah Brouillette notes, Beech’s
insights “can be applied rigorously only to works of irreproducible fine art.”20
Beech himself admits as much, even claiming disciplinary specificity (he focuses
almost exclusively on visual art and sculpture) to be an essential methodological
premise:

There is not only one economics of art. Since the arts are not economically
unified, the economic analysis of one sector cannot stand in for the economic
analysis of another. Different disciplines within the arts, including theatre, lit-
erature and the visual arts, have different modes of production, distribution
and consumption. (23)

There is good reason to doubt theatre’s economic exceptionalism; as I have noted,

theatre is widely recognized as a site of waged work, and it is hardly a stretch to
identify the commodity character of theatrical labor despite its putative ephemer-
ality. But taken on their own, categories like waged work and the commodity do
not amount to a capitalist production process. What must be determined are the
conditions under which the labor of performance crystallizes into the social
form of a capitalist commodity.
In reviewing Art and Value, Jasper Bernes and Daniel Spaulding distinguish
theatre as a “borderline case” in its correspondence to capitalist production.
Theatre is less like visual art than the publishing industry, they suggest, “in
which enterprises may be organized along either capitalist or non-capitalist
lines.”21 Bernes and Spaulding make this point only in passing, but it seems gen-
erally correct by implying that “theatre” does not comprise a singular mode of pro-
duction. There are many types of theatre, of course, but what remains to be shown
is how and when performance is organized along capitalist lines. That such a sit-
uation for performance exists was already noted by Marx, something critics seem

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 Performance and Value

to miss when claiming he excepted performance from the capitalist production

process.

P ERFORMANCE AND C APITALIST P RODUCTION

What then is the capitalist production process? And what would it mean to
say that a performance conforms to it or not? In Capital and related works, Marx
offers a theoretical rather than a historical analysis of capital’s mode of production.
Instead of charting a history of capitalism or examining a particular historical
phase of capitalism, he describes the fundamental categories that distinguish the
capitalist mode of production as an identifiable historical system. His task, in
the words of Michael Heinrich, is to outline “those elements which must remain
the same regardless of all historical variations so that we may speak of ‘capitalism’
as such.”22 Daring to speak, as Marx does, of “the invisible essence of capital”
might seem cause to accuse his project of being transhistorical—or even ahistor-
ical—but this would ignore his sense of dialectics.23 Marx conceded that capitalist
society shifts and alters over the course of its own history, noting this most
famously in The Communist Manifesto from 1848. But in addition to foreground-
ing that capitalist society requires constant innovations and drastic ruptures just to
survive, Marx also focuses attention on the categories that are fundamental to cap-
italism as a historical mode of production. This is what Marx seeks to do in
Capital: to “present the internal organization of the capitalist mode of production,
its ideal average, as it were” (Capital, 3: 970).24
Just as Marx’s overview of the capitalist mode of production cannot ade-
quately describe every particular instance of it, the same holds true for his theoret-
ical analysis of theatre: it does not account for every—or even any—actual theatre.
Modifying Heinrich, we could say that Marx outlines the elements that “must
remain the same regardless of all historical variations so that we may speak of”
a capitalist theatre “as such.” For this reason, the ideal average of a capitalist the-
atre Marx details in his writing beginning in the late 1850s is not unfit for studying
theatre today unless one thinks we no longer live in a historical system dominated
by capital as Marx understood it.
To explain capitalism as a historical mode of production, Marx distinguishes
capitalist commodity production from a general type of commodity production
found in other historical modes. He describes this latter noncapitalist commodity
production as a circuit in which commodity producers sell their commodities (C)
to earn money from buyers (M) that they then use to buy other commodities (C).
Whereas this simple form of commodity circulation, C-M-C, has as its end “the
satisfaction of needs,” the goal of capitalist commodity production is to increase
the sum of the value invested in the production process (Capital, 1: 250). Both
money and commodities are still in play in capitalist production, but they now
operate as capital. In the C-M-C circuit, commodities get privileged for their
use value, whereas the “driving and motivating force” of capitalist production is
“exchange-value” (1: 250). If the rationale behind C-M-C is to acquire a commod-
ity that is qualitatively different than the one a person already has, then capitalist
production looks to increase quantitatively what a capitalist starts with, which is

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 Theatre Survey

money (M). The circuit of capital begins with money (M) that gets invested to pro-
duce a commodity (C), which is then sold for a higher order of money than opened
the process (M´)—Marx represents this as M-C-M´ (1: 247). The value invested as
money at the start of the circuit must return to the capitalist in excess; otherwise
there would be little point. Marx calls this process of increasing the total sum of
one’s value “valorization,” and the excess accrued over the original value
advanced is surplus value. In other words, M-C-M´ describes the movement of
capital. No matter the form it takes, be it money or a commodity, capital is “a
sum of value that performs this movement.” It is not a static thing, “not merely
value, but rather self-valorizing value”—value that expands itself.25 Any actual
needs satisfied in the circuit of capital are auxiliary to the aim of capitalist produc-
tion, which is to generate surplus value.
But what is the source of surplus value? The circuit of capital is not just a
case of buying low to sell high. Nor is it (only) systemic thievery. Were either
the case, capitalist production would be a zero-sum game. At stake in the capitalist
production process is the creation of new value.
Surplus value emerges sometime between the two phases of capital circula-
tion, M-C and C-M´. To find the source of surplus value Marx famously descends
into the “hidden abode of production,” which consists of the varied activities that
unfold between these circulatory phrases (1: 279). To kick the process off a cap-
italist first needs to acquire the commodities necessary for production, which hap-
pens in the first phase, M-C. In addition to buying the requisite means of
production (the raw materials and equipment) whose value is expended in produc-
tion, the capitalist also purchases the “special commodity . . . whose use-value pos-
sesses the peculiar property of being a source of value.” This special commodity is
“labour power,” the capacity of a worker to work for a specific duration (1: 270).
Marx describes the means of production as “constant capital” since their value
remains fixed when transferred into the final product, distinguishing labor
power as “variable capital” because the value a worker transfers to the final prod-
uct varies according to the conditions of the production process itself (1: 307–19).
Surplus value accrues when a capitalist pays a worker a sum of value in wages that
is less than the total value a worker confers to the final product. Marx calls this
extraction of surplus value from labor power exploitation. The social relation
that undergirds the capitalist production process exists between capital and
labor, and not as a contract freely and directly agreed upon by a capitalist and a
worker.
From the standpoint of capital, the actual use value of a produced commod-
ity (its usefulness for a purchaser) is irrelevant, since the motivation of M-C-M´ is
exchange value. Likewise the actual content of the labor performed in the course of
production does not determine whether the process is capitalist or not. Just as Marx
identifies value as consisting of both use value and exchange value, so too does
labor have “a twofold nature” (1: 132). Labor generates use values as well as
the exchange value that forms the substance all capitalist commodities have in
common. Just as a commodity is use value and exchange value, it also contains
concrete and abstract labor. Whereas concrete labor is “useful labour, i.e. produc-
tive activity of a definite kind” (1: 133) that yields use values, abstract labor is “the

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 Performance and Value

expenditure of human labour in general” (1: 137). Abstraction explains how an act
of concrete labor comes into relation with all other acts of concrete labor in society,
forming the very “social substance” of a commodity that allows it to be exchanged
with any other commodity (1: 138). Concrete and abstract labor are not opposites,
nor are they “different types” of labor. They are, Diane Elson explains, “different
aspects of labour.”26 But the dominance of abstract labor is historically specific to
capitalist commodity production insofar as it comprises what Marx calls “value-
forming substance” (1: 129). The capitalist commodity, thus, is the objectified
form that abstract labor takes, and its value indexes the social relation between cap-
ital and labor.
Marx’s value theory is hardly straightforward, but nor is his object of study.
Value, writes Joshua Clover, “is without a doubt the most elusive of [Marx’s] cat-
egories,” but it grounds both his “critique of all existing political economy, and his
own propositions about capital’s laws of motion.”27 As Elson puts it, value is the
“foundation” not just of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, but his very attempt to
understand capital “in a way that is politically useful to socialists.”28 In other
words, value drives capitalist commodity production and also shapes the terrain
on which efforts to undo capital must be fought. For the present argument, it
should suffice to note that determining whether performance conforms to capitalist
commodity production requires looking for the starring role of abstract labor
instead of describing the concrete activity someone performs. This means exam-
ining the social relations within which performance might take the form of
waged labor that has been hired with capital to be exploited as a source of surplus
value. As we will see, theatre is the name Marx gives to the set of social relations
that organizes performance into a capitalist commodity.

P ERFORMANCE AS P RODUCTIVE L ABOR

In a capitalist theater, the actors are therefore just as much “productive labor-
ers” as steelworkers who work in a capitalist steel mill.
—Michael Heinrich29

To state the obvious, theatre was never Marx’s object of study. When Marx
speaks of theatre—and other performing arts, like dance and music—it is almost
always in response to what Adam Smith had to say about it.30 In The Wealth of
Nations from 1776, Smith mentions theatre to illustrate his theory of unproductive
labor. For Smith the work of a performer—be it “the declamation of the actor, the
harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician”—coincides with that “of the
menial servant” insofar as “the work of all of them perishes in the very instant
of its production,” leaving behind no “vendible commodity.”31 Workers who per-
form services instead of producing goods can never be productive laborers in
Smith’s world, no matter how necessary or important their work may be. If work-
ers do not produce actual commodities that can store the labor that went into them,
they cannot generate material wealth for their employers.
Smith’s focus, like Marx’s, was less the use value of commodities than that
for which they can be exchanged. Nonetheless Marx subjects Smith’s emphasis on

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 Theatre Survey

the materiality of the commodity in capital accumulation to extensive critique. He

scrutinizes Smith’s theory of productive and unproductive labor most thoroughly
in Theories of Surplus Value, a work written in 1862–3 but published posthu-
mously. Sometimes described as the fourth volume of Capital, Theories of
Surplus Value departs from the other three by engaging even more overtly with
classical political economy. It features lengthy commentary on figures like
Smith and David Ricardo, and at times reads more as a critique of claims made
by others than an attempt to lay out fundamental features of capitalism. It is
here, while dissecting Smith’s concept of productive labor, that Marx offers his
broadest account of theatre.32
As we have already seen, neither the concrete labor performed nor the con-
tent of the commodity produced indicates for Marx whether a production process
is capitalist. This is a clear break with Smith, but Marx does not entirely reject his
claim that performers and service workers engage in “unproductive labour” of the
sort that does not add “to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed.”33
According to Marx, the work of an actor or a butler can be either productive or
unproductive depending on the social relations at play. He explains that categories
like productive and unproductive labor should index the social form labor takes,
and not the content of labor or its product. In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx par-
rots Smith’s position on unproductive labor, but not without reframing it in a cru-
cial way:

[A]n entrepreneur of theatres, concerts, brothels, etc., buys the temporary dis-
posal over the labour-power of the actors, musicians, prostitutes, etc.—in fact
in a roundabout way that is only of formal economic interest; in its result the
process is the same—he buys this so-called “unproductive labour,” whose
“services perish in the very instant of their performance” and do not fix or real-
ise themselves “any permanent” (“particular” is also used) “subject or vend-
ible commodity” (apart from themselves). The sale of these to the audience
[Publikum] provides him with wages and profit. And these services which
he has thus bought enable him to buy them again; that is to say, they them-
selves renew the fund from which they are paid for.34

Smith assumes that the social relations that define performance and service
work are always direct social relations. He supposes that butlers and actors sell
their services directly to those who consume it. Without necessarily excluding
this possibility, Marx posits another by adding into the mix a third party, referred
to as an entrepreneur, who mediates between the producer and the consumer. This
entrepreneur does not buy the service performed to enjoy it himself. Instead he
purchases “temporary disposal over the labour-power” of the performer. In
doing so the entrepreneur becomes a capitalist and the performer a laborer, and
they relate to each other socially as capital and labor. The capitalist does not con-
sume the commodity as a use value, but transforms it into a vendible commodity to
sell “to the audience.” When the return the capitalist receives on his initial invest-
ment exceeds the value of the labor power, the capital he advanced can be said to
have been valorized. In such a case, however, the material situation Smith

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 Performance and Value

originally describes still holds; the service perishes “in the very instant” of perfor-
mance, but not before it has transformed socially into the form of a capitalist com-
modity. Marx moves the actor’s performance that Smith describes as unproductive
into a new set of social relations through which the very same labor yields surplus
value.
It might help to clarify that Marx implicitly distinguishes theatre from per-
formance. Performance pertains to a work performed, and theatre to a set of social
relations that can encompass this work. To put it another way, theatre describes the
social form performance takes under capital. A theatre organized along capitalist
lines need not be structured in an industrialized fashion as may have been found in
Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre, but it must entail the social relations specific
to the capitalist mode of production.35 For theatrical labor to be “productive” it will
be organized as wage labor for the purposes of creating commodities that yield sur-
plus value. As Marx explains in Capital:

The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the
capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-valorization of capital.
. . . The concept of a productive worker therefore implies not merely a relation
between the activity of work and its useful effect, between the worker and the
product of his work, but also a specifically social relation of production, a rela-
tion with a historical origin which stamps the worker as capital’s direct means
of valorization. (1: 644)

Marx is not specifying a literal organization of the production process here. By his
definition of capitalist production, even the most experimental and freewheeling
venue can be organized in a capitalist fashion so long as labor is subsumed to
capital.
The variety of locales in which Marx claims productive labor can be found is
striking; they include not just theatres, but also concert halls, brothels, restaurants,
hotels, and more. Since Marx’s chief interest is abstract labor, his attention to such
places should not be misunderstood as a particular concern for activities like the-
atrical labor, cooking, or sex work. Moreover, references to the theatre are meant
primarily as rhetorical ripostes to Smith’s argument that it is not just “some of the
most frivolous professions” that should be classed as unproductive, but even
“some of the gravest and most important” services, such as those offered by law-
yers, priests, and doctors.36 If something as “frivolous” as theatrical labor could
exploited for surplus value, Marx insists, then why should we expect other activ-
ities to be an exception.

T HEATRE AS A S ITE OF P RODUCTION AND C ONSUMPTION

Productive labor is not an essential category for Marx in the way value is.
His writing on this topic is notoriously tricky, not the least because the very dis-
tinction between productive and unproductive labor is, as Ian Gough notes, “one of
the most suspect legacies of classical political economy.”37 Although Marx turns
to productive labor in order to critique Smith’s contribution to classical political

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 Theatre Survey

economy, Marx’s perspective on what counts as productive labor has been tren-
chantly criticized itself. Given that Marx provides his take on capitalist theatre
in the course of defining productive labor, critiques of his distinction between pro-
ductive and unproductive labor can help clarify the limits and usefulness of Marx’s
performance theory.
Arguably the most thoroughgoing charges against Marx’s writing on pro-
ductive labor have come from figures tied to the 1970s Wages for Housework
Campaign. Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma
James, and Leopoldina Fortunati targeted how Marx’s emphasis on the exploita-
tion of labor power within the capitalist production process deprivileges other
kinds of work that are essential to reproducing labor power.38 Marx himself
acknowledges that his definition of productive labor does not cover all activities
that produce things or contribute to social reproduction. But Marx contends that
his task is to define productive labor specifically “from the standpoint of capitalist
production.”39 And yet, Marx’s claim that he includes only labor that produces
surplus value in no way resolves the critiques that he overlooked the various
acts of unpaid reproductive labor that women perform to support working men
and children. In addition to depoliticizing reproductive work, Marx’s elision nat-
uralizes the exploitation of women in the domestic sphere. But instead of dismiss-
ing his theory of value entirely, many Marxist feminist critics have sought to
supplement it with a gender critique.40
More recently Marx has come under fire from critics who claim he excludes
from his analysis of capitalist production innumerable forms of intellectual, crea-
tive, and emotional labor that do not result in an actual material product. As noted
above, chief among these critics are autonomists like Paolo Virno, for whom the
post-Fordist world of wage labor is full of “virtuosic” workers who “produce sur-
plus value” by behaving like performing artists. By this Virno means that the
immaterial labor of information and communication work essential to capitalist
production today tends to depend on “the presence of others” and find “its own
fulfillment” in the fact of its own unfolding.41 The transition to a postindustrial
society has compromised the usefulness of Marx’s theory of value, Virno argues,
since Marx did not believe that such forms of performance-like work could pro-
duce surplus value:

In principle, there is nothing to say that a dancer does not give rise to a surplus
value. However, for Marx, the absence of a finished work that lives on beyond
the activity of performance puts modern intellectual virtuosity on a par with
actions undertaken in the provision of a personal service: services that are
seen as being nonproductive, because in order to obtain them one spends
income, not capital.42

In Virno’s account, Marx excluded performing artists and other virtuosic

workers as productive laborers because they do not produce a product that is inde-
pendent from their performance. “In conclusion,” Virno insists, “virtuosic labor,
for Marx, is a form of wage labor which is not, at the same time, productive
labor.”43

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 Performance and Value

It should be clear from the previous section that the perspective Virno attri-
butes to Marx more resembles that of Adam Smith, whose theory of the productive
labor of performance Marx rigorously critiques. The autonomists’ interpretation of
Marx’s value theory itself has been heavily criticized. At times their misreading of
Marx carries an air of willfulness, no less so than in Virno’s work. According to
Virno, Marx “for the most part,” “virtually,” and “almost always” dismissed per-
formance as productive labor.44 Hedges like these are striking; they nearly suggest
Virno knows his gloss does not represent Marx’s position on either performance or
productive labor.45 What Marx calls the “correct definition” of productive labor—
which is also capital’s—specifies neither the materiality of labor nor the material-
ity of the commodity, but only the social relation between wage labor and capital
that “produces surplus-value for the capitalist.”46 As noted above, Marx offers no
reason to assume that performance cannot generate surplus value so long as it is
organized in accord with capital. This represents a categorical break with both
Smith and the position Virno attributes to Marx. Virno’s claim that Marx catego-
rizes performance as unproductive labor neglects Marx’s emphasis on social rela-
tions, and privileges instead—as Smith does—the (im)material content of
performance. Marx does not ignore the immateriality of performance, but it is
not materiality that determines whether a performance produces surplus value.
The ephemerality of a theatre’s commodity is irrelevant to whether theatrical
labor can be exploited as productive labor. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse:
“Actors are productive workers, not in so far as they produce a play, but in so
far as they increase their employer’s wealth.”47 That theatrical labor can be a
source of surplus value and theatre can be a site of capitalist production is no rea-
son to rejoice however. As Sianne Ngai reminds us, the category of unproductive
labor is not one of “moral disparagement.”48 So too Marx argues, “To be a produc-
tive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.”49
For Marx theatre is not so different from a factory insofar as it comprises a
set of social relations that gives the labor performed within it a social form distinct
to capitalism, that of the capitalist commodity. But theatre is not just a site of pro-
duction; typically it doubles as a site of consumption. Performance scholars are
familiar with the simultaneity of production and consumption in theatre, but it
has caused confusion for readers of Marx. No less an eminent theorist than
Ernst Mandel in his introduction to the second volume of Capital finds “striking
contradictions” in Theories of Surplus Value on exactly this issue. The trouble
for Mandel comes when Marx claims that an “actor’s labour” in a theatre can
be both productive and unproductive at the same time.50 What Mandel deems con-
tradictory, however, is essential to theatre and the multiple sets of social relations
that undergird it. The first set of relations develops when a performance is con-
sumed by an audience “while it is being performed.”51 This requires the audience
to approach the performance as a means for satisfying a need or want, in which
case the performance is “purchased to be consumed as a use-value.”52 Since the
audience members directly consume the performance they cannot use it to aug-
ment the value they paid for it. In other words, the audience cannot resell a perfor-
mance as a capitalist commodity that generates surplus value. The second set of

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 Theatre Survey

social relations arises when someone purchases an actor’s labor power not to con-
sume it as a personal service but to sell it on to an audience as a commodity.
Imagine I commission a performance for my upcoming birthday party. Since
the content of the performance does not matter, this could be a collection of my
favorite Shakespearean monologues or a piece of endurance art. But assume no
one shows up to my party. In such a case, I am left having hired a performer to
perform just for me, and I treat their service as a way to satisfy my wants—
which in this instance is to be distracted from what must seem the sorry state of
my friendships. I have not hired the performer to earn a profit, and their labor
expires in the act of its unfolding. The money I have paid the performer does
not take the form of capital since I have paid this wage to satisfy a want and
not to create surplus value.
But suppose sometime later, having been so impressed by this performer at
my birthday party, I hire them again, but this time to do the same performance for
others who buy tickets from me to see it. Now I am commissioning the performer’s
services not for my own enjoyment but as a production from which I hope to make
a profit. I am investing in the performer’s labor power with capital, the aim being
to recoup and augment through ticket sales the original sum of value I advanced. In
both situations the actual labor performed is physiologically the same. The social
relations between the performer and me, however, are qualitatively different. At
my birthday party the performance is a personal service for which I pay directly
out of my existing income—it is unproductive labor. In the second case, the per-
formance becomes a capitalist commodity that I purchase with capital to sell on to
others for a profit—it is productive labor.
The fact that performers’ work can be productive and unproductive simulta-
neously has nothing to do with their labor as such, but with the social relations at
play. This simultaneity hinges on the two types of consumer in a capitalist theatre:
the audience and the theatrical entrepreneur. Marx explains this by distinguishing
“productive consumption” from “unproductive consumption.”53 To consume a
commodity productively requires transferring the value of one commodity into
the value of a new commodity while supplementing it with the value added by pro-
ductive labor. A theatrical entrepreneur who purchases an actor’s labor power to
valorize capital consumes productively. By contrast, audience members who
buy a ticket to watch the actor’s labor consume unproductively because they
approach the performance directly as a use value, paying for it against revenue.
Even if Donald Trump were part of the audience in question, he would not be
there as a capitalist. In purchasing a ticket, he buys from the theatrical entrepreneur
the right to experience the product of the theatrical production process. Class divi-
sions between Trump and the performers undoubtedly still exist, but Trump does
not approach them socially as capital to labor in his capacity as an audience mem-
ber. Thus, a performance can function differently for two consumers at the same
time without contradiction. As Marx explains:

The same labour can be productive when I buy it as a capitalist, as a producer,

in order to valorise it, and unproductive when I buy it as a consumer, a spender
of revenue, in order to consume its use value, no matter whether this use value

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 Performance and Value

perishes with the activity of the labour capacity itself or materialises and fixes
itself in an object.54

That a performer’s labor can be both productive and unproductive and be con-
sumed productively and unproductively is an essential quality of Marx’s capitalist
theatre.

T HEATRE AS E XEMPLAR
Theatre is more than an example of the capitalist production process for
Marx; it is an exemplar. This is not to say that theatre is exceptionally effective
as a site of commodity production, but that it conforms to Marx’s “ideal average”
of capitalist production in ways that are rhetorically exceptional for his critique of
political economy. One further passage from Theories of Surplus Value should
suffice to demonstrate this:

An actor, for example, or even a clown is a productive laborer if he works in

the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour
than he receives from him in the form of wages; while a jobbing tailor who
comes to the capitalist’s house and patches his trousers for him, producing
a mere use value for him, is an unproductive labourer. The former’s labour
is exchanged with capital, the latter’s with revenue. The former’s labour pro-
duces a surplus value; in the latter’s, revenue is consumed.55

Here Marx again rehearses his argument against Smith about the potential
for an actor to be exploited within a capitalist production process. In addition to
outlining key facets of his value theory, this excerpt is striking for the rhetorical
weight carried by the actor. From the standpoint of capital, Marx suggests, it is
just as possible for an actor to be productive as it is for a tailor to be unproductive.
If the next time you need a new shirt you skipped going to H&M and instead
directly hired an independent tailor to make one for you, that tailor’s work
would not be productive according to capitalist criteria no matter how little you
paid them. They would be performing a personal service for you instead of produc-
ing surplus value, and you would be paying the tailor out of your own existing rev-
enue rather than investing in their labor power with capital. A scenario like this
confounds what classical political economy understood useful and productive
activity to be. It remains compelling today by playing against a proclivity to pri-
oritize concrete activity over social form: how can someone who spends the work-
ing day to produce something that can be worn be unproductive whereas an
activity as “frivolous” as that of an actor (“or even a clown”) may be productive?
The contrast Marx draws between the actor and tailor evinces the unnaturalness
and historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production by upending assump-
tions of what counts as productivity.
Theatre is exceptional to more than classical and commonsensical under-
standings of productive activity; it even breaks in important ways with Marx’s
broader theory of capitalism itself. While the exemplar of theatre bolsters

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 Theatre Survey

Marx’s claims about capitalist production, it clashes with his argument about the
reproduction of capitalist society. In Marx’s account, there is a limit to which a
capitalist system can tolerate productive labor geared to unproductive consump-
tion. As explained above, unproductive consumption occurs when a commodity
sold as such by a capitalist is consumed as a direct use value by its buyer.
People consume use values (like food) everyday as a matter of mere survival,
but Marx does not count means of subsistence into unproductive consumption
because consuming them is necessary for reproducing one’s capacity to work.
Since no one can live off theatrical performance alone, we might say theatre
more resembles the large number of commodities that “[i]n their reality, as articles,
. . . have no use-value for the process of reproduction.”56 For such a reason, theatre
audiences tend to be unproductive consumers.57 This is not to say, however, that
theatre is unnecessary from the standpoint of capital. Marx explains in the second
volume of Capital that even luxury items are essential for keeping capitalist pro-
duction afloat, not the least because they give the relatively wealthy reason to
expend money that cannot be invested in production.58 Whether theatre could
ever be considered socially necessary for the reproduction and accumulation of
capital is beyond both Marx and this essay. That theatre contributes minimally
or not at all to the social reproduction of capital, however, does not change the
fact that it can conform to the rules of capitalist production.
The uncertainty of theatre’s place in capitalist reproduction may only
heighten a sense that Marx’s reference to theatre in his theory of capitalist produc-
tion is merely rhetorical. If this were so, his description of capitalist theatre would
function similarly to mentions of other performances he makes elsewhere, such as
the allusions he offers to Hamlet in The Eighteenth Brumaire, or the famous met-
aphor of the dancing table in Capital that illustrates commodity fetishism.59 Like
these examples, the specter of a capitalist theatre adds force and clarity to Marx’s
argument about capitalist production generally. But references to theatre in Marx’s
critique of political economy are also more than rhetoric. However scattered and
incomplete his understanding of performance, Marx provides a starting point for
evaluating the economic connection of theatre to capital. He outlines the ideal
average of a capitalist theatre. Marx’s approach is all the more useful to theatre
and performance studies because he demonstrates practical meanings of essential
categories like the commodity, labor, capital, and value to performance.
Understood from a Marxist perspective then, a theatrical production com-
bines the value of the constant capital used in a performance—the sets, the build-
ing, the rigging, and so on—with the value added by the labor power of
performers, designers, technicians, and others. What results is a commodity that
has usefulness for audiences and a value for the capitalist; meanwhile the workers
whose labor power is exploited receive a wage they spend on goods they need to
live. Although Marx more or less equates theatrical performance with the work of
other performing arts, theatre departs in a marked way from the concert halls, res-
taurants, and other surprising sites of production he identifies in his critique of
political economy. Not only does theatre demonstrate that “content is completely
irrelevant for determining whether labour is productive or not,” it does so via its
inimitable ability to subsume any activity into production.60 In a theatre organized

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 Performance and Value

along capitalist lines, any action—be it an amateur’s hobby or the manufacture of a

widget—becomes a potential source of surplus value. It does not matter if an actor
performs the actions of a military general or a prisoner, a miner or a mother, a
teacher or a politician—from the perspective of capital each of these activities
when performed in a theatre organized along capitalist lines is a potential source
of surplus value. In this sense theatrical labor exemplifies the extent to which
labor can be “abstracted from its concrete manifestation.”61 Theatre can put to
work on the stage almost any activity that can be found off of it.62 For Marx, per-
forming in a theatre is not a means of abolishing capitalist productivity but of
ensuring it. To say this is not to dismiss all that can be accomplished in the course
of performance; but in recognizing the political usefulness of theatre as an aes-
thetic activity we cannot lose sight of the fact that it remains a potentially exem-
plary place of economic activity.
Of course many, if not most, particular instances of theatre are actually
exceptional to capitalist commodity production. This does not mean, however,
that theatre possesses the same sort of economic exceptionalism Dave Beech attri-
butes to visual art. For Beech fine art production tends not to conform to rules of
productive capital, but it can exemplify the commodity features of merchant and
finance capital. Theatrical production by contrast exemplifies the capitalist produc-
tion process, even though the actual theatrical commodity behaves in rather excep-
tional ways. It is difficult but not impossible to envision a performance as
something that can be traded or subjected to financial speculation. And I have
left open important questions about the theatrical commodity’s reproducibility
and the extent to which theatre can squeeze theatrical labor of what Marx calls “rel-
ative” surplus value by, for instance, intensifying or rationalizing the theatrical
production process. But even as a site of production, theatre frequently breaks
with the capitalist mode. Although theatre can be organized along capitalist
lines, counterexamples like community theatres, nonprofit theatres, student the-
atres, amateur theatres, and even state-subsidized theatres are obviously more
the norm than the exception. Even the most profit-oriented theatres could be
expected to buck Marx’s ideal average of a capitalist theatre. None of these excep-
tions undermine Marx’s theory of the capitalist theatre, however; they are the
exceptions that make his ideal average exactly that, “ideal.”
But just because a particular performance may break from the capitalist pro-
duction process hardly means it is immune to capitalist society. This is particularly
evident in the many theatres and performance ensembles today whose production
processes might bear little resemblance to the capitalist mode, but whose work and
livelihood suffer from so many of its ills.

E NDNOTES

1. Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6.
2. Christin Essin, “Unseen Labor and Backstage Choreographies: A Materialist Production
History of A Chorus Line,” Theatre Journal 67:2 (2015): 197–212.

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 Theatre Survey

3. See http://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com/, accessed 17 October 2016.

4. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes
(New York: Penguin, 1990), 164. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
5. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. (Cambridge, MA:
Semiotext(e), 2004), 54; 68.
6. Antonio Negri, “The Specter’s Smile,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques
Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” ed. Michael Sprinkler (London: Verso, 2008), 5–16, at 10. See also
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2001, 27–30.
7. Two perspectives on the autonomist reading of Marx’s value theory from within the human-
ities that inform my own include Joshua Clover, “Value | Theory | Crisis,” PMLA 127:1 (2011): 107–14;
and Annie McClanahan, “Investing in the Future: Late Capitalism’s End of History,” Cultural Economy
6:1 (2013): 78–93. For a critique of the autonomist argument about work, see Sarah Brouillette,
“Creative Labor,” Mediations 24.2 (2009), 140–9.
8. Shannon Jackson, “Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity,” TDR: The
Drama Review 56:4 (2012): 10–31, at 25.
9. Recent articles and monographs in theatre and performance studies in which the autonomist
reading of Marx figures prominently are too many to list here. A notable sample includes the following:
Joe Kelleher, “A Golden Surface: On Virtuosity and Cosmopolitics,” in International Politics and
Performance, ed. Jenny Edkins and Adrian Kear (London: Routledge, 2013): 96–110; Dieter
LeSage, “Permanent Performance,” Performance Research 17:6 (2012): 14–21; Nicholas Ridout,
“On the Work of Things: Musical Production, Theatrical Labor, and the ‘General Intellect,’” Theatre
Journal 64:3 (2012): 389–408; Rebecca Schneider, “It Seems As If . . . I Am Dead: Zombie
Capitalism and Theatrical Labor,” TDR: The Drama Review 56:4 (2012): 150–62. Bojana Cvejić
and Ana Vujanović offer a compelling critique of the autonomist notion of “immaterial labor” in rela-
tion to performance; see “Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable,” TDR: The Drama Review 56:4 (2012):
163–77, at 175–6.
10. For an introduction to value theory, see Endnotes, “Communisation and Value-Form
Theory,” Endnotes 2 (2010), http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/4, accessed 12 September 2016. And
for an overview of neue Marx-Lektüre specifically, see Ingo Elbe, “Between Marx, Marxism, and
Marxisms—Ways of Reading Marx’s Theory,” Viewpoint Magazine, 21 October 2013, https://view-
pointmag.com/2013/10/21/between-marx-marxism-and-marxisms-ways-of-reading-marxs-theory,
accessed 12 September 2016.
11. Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s “Capital,” trans.
Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 33.
12. For examples, see Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in
Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 9; Sianne Ngai, “Visceral
Abstractions,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21:1 (2015): 33–63; Daniel Spaulding,
“A Clarification on Art and Value,” Mute, 28 May 2015, www.metamute.
org/editorial/articles/art-value-and-freedom-fetish-0, accessed 12 September 2016.
13. William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts—The Economic Dilemma
(New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966), 162.
14. Ibid., 164.
15. Jackson, 12.
16. For excellent examples of this scholarship, see: Adam Alston, “Audience Participation and
Neoliberal Value,” Performance Research 18:2 (2013): 128–38; Broderick Chow, “An Actor Manages:
On Acting and Immaterial Labour,” New Left Project, 29 January 2013, www.newleftproject.org/index.
php/site/article_comments/an_actor_manages_on_acting_and_immaterial_labour, accessed 12
September 2016; Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Elyssa Livergant, “The Passion Players,” New Left Project, 23 January
2013, www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_passion_players, accessed 12
September 2016; Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). For influential perspectives like these from outside theatre

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 Performance and Value

and performance studies, see: Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human
Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The
New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2005).
17. Theron Schmidt, “Troublesome Professionals: On the Speculative Reality of Theatrical
Labour,” Performance Research 18:2 (2013): 15–26, at 15.
18. Beech, 9. Subsequent citations of this source are given parenthetically in the text.
19. This is found in ibid., “On the Absence of a Marxist Economics of Art,” 211–40.
20. Sarah Brouillette, “On Art and ‘Real Subsumption,’” Mediations 29.2 (2016): 169–76, at
170.
21. Jasper Bernes and Daniel Spaulding, “Truly Extraordinary,” Radical Philosophy 195
(2016): 51–4, at 54.
22. Heinrich, 31.
23. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach
(London: Penguin, 1993), 134.
24. For a more extended discussion of Marx’s historical dialectic as it relates to performance,
see Michael Shane Boyle, “Brecht’s Gale: Innovation and Postdramatic Theatre,” Performance
Research 21:3 (2016): 16–26.
25. Heinrich, 86–7; italics in the original.
26. Diane Elson, “The Value Theory of Labour,” in Value: The Representation of Labour in
Capitalism, ed. Diane Elson (London: Verso, 2015), 115–80, at 144.
27. Joshua Clover, “Value in the Expanded Field,” Mediations 29:2 (2016): 161–7, at 161.
28. Diane Elson, “Introduction,” in Value, i–v, at i.
29. Heinrich, 122.
30. Marx discusses references to performance in the work of other classical economists like
Jean-Baptiste Say and Germain Garnier. Like Marx, their mentions of theatre were responses to
Smith, which is why I focus only on Marx’s engagement with Smith.
31. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Books I–III, ed. Andrew Skinner (London: Penguin
Classics, 1982), 430–1.
32. For a helpful overview of Marx’s perspectives on productive labor, see I. I. Rubin,
“Productive Labor,” in his Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value [1924], trans. Miloš Samardžija and
Fredy Perlman (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2008), 259–75; Ian Gough, “Marx’s Theory of Productive and
Unproductive Labour,” New Left Review 76 (1972): 47–72.
33. Smith, 429.
34. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works,
vol. 31, Marx 1861–1863, trans. Emile Burns, Renate Simpson, and Jack Cohen (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 2005), 21–2.
35. On Stanislavsky and the industrialization of theatre, see Ridout, Passionate Amateurs,
33–57.
36. Smith, 431.
37. Gough, 47.
38. See Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist
Struggle (London: PM Press, 2012); Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction:
Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital [Italian original, 1981], ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Hilary
Creek (New York: Autonomedia, 1995); Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of
Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press Ltd, 1975).
39. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 12.
40. For a review of these perspectives, see Kathi Weeks, “Life within and against Work:
Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in
Organization 7:1 (2007): 233–49.
41. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 55; 52.
42. Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics,
ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, trans. Ed Emory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

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 Theatre Survey

1996), 189–209, at 191. Available online at www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude2.html, accessed

9 September 2016.
43. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 54. Here Virno indicates he is reading Theories of
Surplus Value in making this point.
44. Ibid.
45. Elsewhere Marx describes services as “peripheral phenomena” that “can be ignored when
considering capitalist production as a whole” because they only “are of microscopic significance when
compared with the mass of capitalist production.” Today, when services account for such a large per-
centage of GDP, Marx’s dismissal of services here seems to play into the autonomist argument that the
rise of the service economy renders Marx’s value theory unfit for purpose. But the grounds Marx gives
for excluding services as productive labor are historically exceptional to his overall theory. The exclu-
sion reflects more the shifting industrial composition of 1860s Europe than a fundamental premise of his
theory. Marx tethers his point to a specific historical condition instead of anything historically specific
to capitalist production. Since Marx admits that service work can be productive labor theoretically, it
seems wholly in line with his value theory that such services would count as productive labor if
they were to take on unprecedented consequence and no longer “are of microscopic significance.”
See “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” in Capital, 1: 943–1084, at 1048; 1044.
46. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 8.
47. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin
Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 328–9.
48. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012), 306.
49. Marx, Capital, 1: 644.
50. Ernst Mandel, “Introduction,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 2, trans.
David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 11–79, at 40 n. 43. The passage Mandel cites as evi-
dence is the following from Theories of Surplus Value (28): “As for labours which are productive for
their purchaser or employer himself—as for example the actor’s labour for the theatrical entrepreneur—
the fact that their purchaser cannot sell them to the public in the form of commodities but only in the
form of the action itself would show that they are unproductive labours.”
51. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 28.
52. Marx, “Results,” 1041; italics in the original.
53. For a useful gendered critique of Marx’s theory of productive consumption, see Miranda
Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002),
30–68.
54. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 20–1.
55. Ibid., 13.
56. Marx, “Results,” 1045; italics in the original.
57. There are potentially many exceptions to this, such as journalists and academics who go to
theatre as part of their job. See Ridout, Passionate Amateurs, 138–62.
58. Marx expands on points like these in Volume 2, where he distinguishes productive workers
who generate surplus value when producing, on the one hand, the means of production and wage goods
and, on the other, luxury goods. The former kinds of production are socially necessary for the repro-
duction and accumulation of capital, whereas luxury goods are not.
59. See Martin Harries, Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of
Reenchantment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); David Riff, “Was Marx a Dancer?”
e-flux 67 (2015), www.e-flux.com/journal/was-marx-a-dancer, accessed 12 September 2016.
60. Author’s translation. The sentence in German is “Dieser Inhalt ist für die Bestimmung der
produktiven Arbeit ganz gleichgültig.” Ben Fowkes (1: 1045) translates “gleichgültig” as “immaterial.”
“Irrelevant” is closer to Marx’s meaning here and avoids confusions with the autonomist concept of
“immaterial labor.” See Karl Marx, “Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses,” www.marx-
ists.org/deutsch/archiv/marx-engels/1863/resultate/1-mehrwert.htm, accessed 12 September 2016.
61. Heinrich, 48; italics in the original.

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 Performance and Value

62. Theron Schmidt makes a similar point in his discussion of the performance of backstage
labor in Quarantine’s Entitled: “Theatre may be the name by which some actions may be abstracted
into surplus value, such as the way that people sitting around and talking with one another about
their fictional lives becomes ‘a work.’” Schmidt’s argument resonates with my own insofar as he rec-
ognizes theatre’s ability to subsume under the value relation activities otherwise not validated as labor.
“But,” Schmidt continues, “theatre is also a set of social relations that renders this apparently ‘real’
labour unproductive.” In the very act of showing “labour itself,” the labor performed in a performance
like Quarantine’s “is rendered unproductive.” For Schmidt there is something about theatrically show-
ing labor as labor onstage that makes theatre uniquely equipped to short-circuit capitalist social rela-
tions. “In showing us labour itself, then, what theatre shows us is that it is not there,” he argues.
“The abstraction of capital is doubly abstracted by theatre.” Schmidt leaves open the possibility for the-
atre both to collect together and to refuse the social relations that undergird capitalist commodity pro-
duction. But he overlooks Marx’s crucial point that even though a particular “unproductive” social
relation may exist between spectators and performers, this does not exclude the possibility that a “pro-
ductive” social relation mediated by a theatrical entrepreneur could remain. If the theatre under analysis
is assumed to be a place where surplus value is extracted from labor (as Schmidt suggests), then the
social relations between performers and audiences are already mediated by capital. That something use-
ful might happen in the course of performance is theoretically irrelevant to the capitalist production pro-
cess so long as it does not preclude the creation of surplus value. The fact that “theatre has the effect of
flattening and equalizing whatever behaviour is undertaken within its frame” only speaks to the content
of theatrical labor and does not change the capitalist social relations at play. See “Troublesome
Professionals,” 24–5.

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