Emotional Labour

Emotional labour was conceptualised in the mid-1990s, defining the professional requirement for workers to extensively moderate their emotional responses in various professions. Furthermore, these workers were defined as an emotional proletariat, estranging their emotions to be marketized and exploited.

The term has since expanded into the personal sphere, being used to describe the emotional ‘burden’ taken on by partners in a relationship.

Of course, the existence of emotional labour cannot be disputed, and describes an indisputably real phenomenon.

However, when a phenomenon is so abstract, the conceptual lines we draw around it and the ideas we connect it to are fluid; there are many ways to accurately understand what is being described, with radically different implications. For example, we could understand the underlying phenomenon in terms of gender, psychoanalysis, or religion, rather than the explicitly economic language of ‘emotional labour’.

So why has the idea of emotional labour become so widespread? What are the implications of using this phraseology?

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Under capitalism, labour is explicitly transactional. A worker enters a contract with an employer to sell their labour power for less than the value it creates, in exchange for a wage. Their labour is estranged, as they have no control over its activity, outcome, or value.

In a professional context, emotional labour is therefore a perfectly appropriate description: An employee is estranged from the expression of their emotions, performing alienated emotional labour in exchange for a wage. This is an explicitly transactional relationship, entered under duress for fear of financial hardship, natural means of subsistence privatised and restricted.

The precursor to this is a system of direct exchange. Rather than an exchange of labour for wages, parties barter physical goods or services. As economies enter a capitalist phase, production becomes generalised, and currency dominates as a universal measure of exchange-value. Every commodity takes on a socially objective price and is exchanged for any other commodity through the universal medium of currency.

What happens when the concept of emotional labour is brought into a non-professional relationship?

The first implication is that authentic relationships consist of a discretised exchange of services. Participants are conceived to be alternately estranging different elements of their labour for the other/s. An equal relationship is therefore one of equal alienation, where all participants exchange equal services.

However, if participants consider themselves to be providing services, performing labour, from which the ‘equality’ of the relationship is restored by a reciprocal service, it is fundamentally a barter relationship.

This can even extend to sexual relationships, which are reduced to a simple exchange of sexual services, or sexual for non-sexual services. How can this be understood as anything but barter prostitution?

Understanding relationships through this lens is a natural step towards general commodification. Once conceptualised as emotional labour, there automatically arise emotional commodities and an emotional proletariat. There is already a growing industry of ‘friends for rent’, and what do therapists provide if not emotional commodities?

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Proletarian labour is defined by duress – the labourer is compelled to estrange their labour by the lack of alternatives, with natural means of subsistence privatised and restricted (doesn’t the commodification of relationships motivate privatisation and restriction of natural emotional support mechanisms?).

With obvious exceptions (sugar babies, trophy partners, non-consensual relationships etc.) in a romantic or friendly relationship the component of duress does not exist. To conceive emotional labour and an emotional proletariat in this context implicitly sanitises labour and exploitation in the economic sphere, implying that class dynamics are not defined by exploitation or dependent on duress.

Conflating economically compelled labour with emotional labour which does not have a component of economic compulsion propagates a bourgeois humanist socio-economic worldview.

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The framing of emotional labour as a service for exchange conceives a moment of support as an isolated positive for one participant, and an isolated negative for another. The definition of these moments and implicit measurement of their value requires an understanding of relationships as a series of discrete episodes, with discrete transfers of value.

This framing distorts the basic nature of relationships in general, presenting a metaphysical view without context or connection.

A proletarian does not cease to be proletarian the moment they stop selling their labour power, just as a bourgeois does not cease to be bourgeois the instant they stop actively participating in exploitation. If class relationships were confined to the discrete interactions, how could the classes have such radically different philosophies, moralities, and economics?

In the same way, a friendly or romantic relationship cannot be confined to discreet interactions which can be neatly measured and exchanged. A relationship does not end the moment an interaction ends, but has a constant and lasting effect on the consciousness of its participants.

Social relations create consciousness, and we can never exist outside of our social relations. It is not possible to divorce a relationship (or a specific moment of a relationship), from social context, because a relationship is social context.

A moment of genuine support and closeness can be positive and meaningful for all participants. It can be a positive experience for both a supported and a supporting partner - a development of trust and understanding for everyone involved. It can have an immeasurable value across a lifetime.

While labour is defined by alienation, closeness is the definition of disalienation.