The Revolution Requires Your Unpaid Labour

Understanding Capitalism as an Entropic System and Why Freely Given Work Metabolizes Disorder

Earlier this summer, I posted a question on Substack that often swims around my head. It comes from the tension between dreaming about post-capitalist structures and the reality that everything we build still has to operate inside capitalism. I asked whether designing projects that needed to be financially sustainable meant that those projects were, by definition, still capitalist. Was I just dragging my imagination back into the very system I wanted to escape?

If my daydreams of post-capitalist structures dissolve into internal debates around whether those structures are financially sustainable (not profitable, but sustainable) within capitalism (because we’re still here despite my best efforts), does that render them as capitalist institutions themselves rather than post-capitalist? Is it just dreams outside of capitalism getting sucked back into the system or is there room for financial sustainability within a post-capitalist framework?

Anarcasper responded with a comment that clicked something into place. He said that the defining feature of capitalism isn’t necessarily profit but more the consolidation of power. He reminded me that building anything new “in the shell of the old” will naturally require some engagement with the current economic system but that the crucial thing is to “design for decay”: to build systems that expect to become obsolete as better forms take shape.

Design for decay. That line stuck with me so much that it now is written down on sticky note next to my computer. It also mapped with something I had recently read in Liam Heneghan’s essay in Emergence Magazine that frames living things as simply resisting decay. If you flip the idea around, you can imagine how systems might operate in a way that don’t just resist decay, but actually rely on decay being built into a closed system, much like how our planet operates around us.

Anarcasper also linked to an article that explores this idea of design for decay, The Energy of Care, in which he explores the whole idea of capitalism as an entropic system that continually produces disorder in the wake of it’s operations. It’s an excellent read if you have some time.

Capitalism as an Entropic System

Entropy is the disorder that accumulates whenever you convert energy from one form to another. Every system creates some amount of it. Ideally, a system can metabolize the disorder it generates, otherwise it has to dump it’s disorder somewhere else. Imagine how a body functions versus how a factory operates. Your body repairs cells, clears toxins, and recycles worn-out materials internally. A factory expels its waste into air, rivers, or the surrounding community. One metabolizes. One externalizes.

In thermodynamics, entropy describes what happens when a system uses energy: some of that energy becomes unavailable for future work, dispersing as heat or randomness into the environment. It’s why car engines eventually wear down, why forests need nutrient cycles, or why living organisms require inputs like food to function. In this context, entropy isn’t doom; it’s just the cost of being alive. But it’s important to understand here: healthy systems have built-in processes to handle the entropy they make as a byproduct. Forests compost their waste. Oceans circulate heat. Bodies repair cells. Complex systems only survive when they can absorb, recycle, or transform the disorder they create. When they can’t, disorder accumulates faster than the system can correct for it and the system eventually collapses.

I think you can see where I’m going here.

Capitalism generates a staggering amount of disorder (ecological, social, emotional, cultural, etc.) and cannot absorb its own waste. Instead, its survival has always depended on moving that disorder outside of itself.

This is why capitalism expands. It needs new places to put the mess.

Pollution, exhaustion, depleted soils, burned-out workers, collapsing ecosystems: these are all entropic byproducts of extraction in a capitalist system. And what makes this even worse is that capitalism externalizes those costs so they don’t appear on the balance sheet. They pretend that the disorder generated as a byproduct doesn’t even exist.

In his essay, Anarcasper draws from Jason W. Moore, whose world-ecology framework helps explain how capitalism has been able to offload its disorder for so long.

Moore believes that capitalism is a way of reorganizing human and extra-human nature into a single operational system structured around extraction. In this framing, capitalism can only “keep going” because it continually finds low-entropy, high-order systems to consume.

“The endless frontier strategy of historical capitalism is premised on a vision of the world as endless… The creation of socially necessary labour-time is constituted through a shifting balance of human and extra-human work; the co-production of nature, in other words, is constitutive of socially necessary labour-time. … The law of value in capitalism is a law of Cheap Nature.”
— Jason W. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature”

Moore’s point is pretty blunt: capitalism works by appropriating unpaid work/energy from both humans and ecosystems. But this isn’t just economic appropriation, it’s thermodynamic.

Capitalism consumes ordered systems like forests, soils, rivers, cultures, reproductive labour, colonized peoples (the list goes on and on) and releases the resulting disorder somewhere else so it doesn’t have to think about the byproduct and can continue pretending it’s operating perfectly.

In other words, capitalism survives by eating order. But we know that ordered systems are finite. So this is where colonialism comes in as an ongoing logistical strategy to support capitalism’s endless appetite.

Colonialism is capitalism’s mechanism for securing new ordered systems to consume. It provides new lands, new peoples, new ecologies, new “cheap natures” that capitalism can convert into resources while offloading the entropic disordered waste (environmental, cultural, emotional, social) onto those very same bodies and places. It chews them up and shits out the junk.

Moore explores this idea: capitalism depends on a process that make some humans, and most of the extra-human world, cheap.

When you read him through an entropic lens, the pattern becomes this:

Capitalism needs low-entropy inputs.
Colonialism supplies them.
Capitalism creates high-entropy waste.
Colonialism absorbs it.

This metabolic relationship is what allows capitalism to appear “productive” despite being structurally entropic. For more on this, I highly recommend Moore’s The Rise of Cheap Nature.

Design for Decay: Learning From Ecological Systems

This is why designing for decay is so appealing.

If capitalism survives by dumping its disorder, any post-capitalist project must do the opposite: absorb, metabolize, or transform the disorder it generates.

Ecological systems already do this: Compost is decay becoming nourishment. The death in fall makes spring possible.

The next systems we build must be designed not for permanence, but for decomposition and decay, to make room for cycles of rest and renewal. When we look at capitalism through this lens, permanence becomes an illusion.

So how the heck do we do this? We’ve been trained to think that decay is a bad thing - that it’s wasteful. There are obvious examples in food systems or even home building, but what about other resources like labour?

Labour in capitalism isn’t just an economic variable. Looking at it from the perspective of entropic systems, it becomes one of the ordered inputs capitalism consumes to stay alive. Human time, attention, and care are treated as endlessly available “Cheap Nature”, to use Moore’s term. Labour is seen as a reservoir of low-entropy energy chewed up, sometimes even without acknowledgment. Wage labour doesn’t just produce goods under capitalism; it also produces disorder: exhaustion, stress, isolation, disconnection, and the wearing away of the relationships we need to survive. If we can acknowledge that capitalism relies on this type of forced wage labour, then we must firmly explore other options in designing post-capitalism. We cannot rely on this system of exploitation without being pulled back into capitalism’s metabolic vortex.

Why Post-Capitalism Requires Freely Given Labour

This is where we need an important distinction.

Silvia Federici’s analysis of unpaid reproductive labour is vital for understanding capitalism. She shows that capitalism is built on huge amounts of unpaid work - cooking, cleaning, childcare, emotional labour, the maintenance of daily life. This work then must be seen as exploitative and invisibilized, and in our current system it absolutely deserves wages, resources, and political recognition.

But Federici’s framework still assumes the wage relation as the norm. Her argument is that this labour should be paid under capitalism.

And she’s absolutely right - under capitalism.

But for imagining what systems might allow us to thrive beyond capitalism, this is where her analysis becomes a barrier. It keeps us stuck in the assumption that all valuable work must be waged, that the only alternative to exploitation is to make sure “everyone gets paid”. If we stay in that frame, we’re still stuck inside capitalism’s metabolism.

Once labour becomes something you must sell in order to live, labour necessarily becomes an ordered extraction in a entropic system. It is the way in which capitalism eats time, care, and attention and spits out exhaustion and disconnection.

Fortunate for us, there are still other categories of labour that exists outside of this equation: mutual aid, volunteerism, community care, ecological stewardship, gift economies. This is freely given labour: not coerced, not extracted, not exploited, and not waged. It circulates energy within communities rather than extracting it outward. It metabolizes disorder instead of exporting it.

Why Freely Given Labour Metabolizes Disorder

What makes freely given labour feel so different (and necessary) is not soley that it sits outside the wage relation. It’s because this kind of work behaves differently at the level of metabolism. It doesn’t feed capitalism’s entropic machine. It nourishes the system that produces it. It supports the producers - us!

When people show up to weed a community garden, or help run a food pantry, or tend a trail, or cook for a neighbour, the work itself becomes regenerative. Energy goes back into the community rather than being siphoned out of it. There is no surplus extraction. No conversion of attention into profit. No coerced clocking of time for someone else’s accumulation. The work stays where it was generated, often creating a positive feedback loop.

This is why freely given labour is able to metabolize disorder. Because instead of exporting the mess outward, it turns back into nourishment. It works like a compost system does in your garden: what would otherwise be waste becomes the basis for future growth. While capitalist wage labour pushes its waste outside the system into pollution, burnout, exhaustion, etc. and forces someone else to absorb it, freely given labour absorbs it’s byproduct into strengthening social ties, emotional connection, and fuel for continued work. It circulates, rather than drains. It replenishes, rather than depletes.

One way that freely given labour nourishes the labourer is by increasing social cohesion. When people engage in shared, voluntary work, it strengthens relational bonds, which themselves are a form of order in an thermodynamic system. Émile Durkheim, writing more than a century ago, understood this clearly: in The Division of Labor in Society, he writes that collective activity produces a kind of stabilizing force:

“The more individuals are attracted to one another, the more they also depend upon one another, and the stronger the cohesion of the society.”

For Durkheim, cohesion isn’t just togetherness; it is a force that helps to manage the frictions, confusions, and ruptures that would otherwise accumulate as social disorder. Shared work becomes a site where tension is processed, differences are negotiated, meaning is made, and belonging is reinforced. In some ways, social cohesion allows communities to digest the entropy produced by daily life.

This is why freely given labour is powerful. It doesn’t just “get things done”. It produces the bonds that allow a community to sustain itself - emotionally, structurally, and ecologically.

Freely given labour also tends to be slow. Not because people are lazy, but because slowness is what happens when work is decoupled from a purely profit motive.

Capitalism optimizes for speed, efficiency, and output because these are the conditions required for more profitable extraction. Slow work does something else entirely. It tracks the rhythm of bodies, seasons, weather, community capacity. It pays attention to detail. It listens. It adapts. Slow work metabolizes disorder by allowing feedback loops to be felt, relationships to be tended, and consequences to be integrated rather than ignored.

And this is where we return to Anarcasper’s ideas about negentropy. To be negentropic is to increase coherence, to bring energy back into ordered form, to create the conditions for sustained life rather than accelerated breakdown.

Freely given labour is negentropic because:

- it nourishes rather than drains
- it strengthens bonds rather than erodes them
- it maintains cycles rather than ruptures them
- it produces meaning rather than alienation
- it keeps energy circulating rather than extracting it

While this change in labour isn’t the only thing required to design post-capitalist systems, it is one of the elements that prevents new structures from falling victim to capitalism’s entropic metabolism. We need some sphere of labour that isn’t governed by wages, efficiency, or profit. Otheriwse, new systems have and will continue to be pulled back toward the very framework they are meant to outgrow.