The Nature of Property: Locke and Labor in the Anthropocene.

The contemporary accumulation of environmental crises poses a radical challenge to the modern Western political imaginary and the history of political thought by unsettling its understanding of ‘nature.’ Insofar as our political notions, like labor, depend on this understanding, we cannot rely on them to orient ourselves anymore. This paper has argued a paradoxical return to Locke against Locke can help confront this predicament. The first part recovered from the critical scholarship on Locke the ways in which Lockean ideas about labor are enmeshed with assumptions about colonialism, gendered hierarchies, and nature. The second part argued no singular conceptual reconstruction of labor can do justice to its hybrid character, which the present predicament has revealed. The third part argued, by recovering what the Lockean heritage has obscured, this scholarship gives us a way into the knotty problems of the organization of labor and the structure of the political collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]