I am grateful to Avery Kolers for his generous and insightful reading of my book, which is manifest even in the concerns he raises. Nevertheless, I think that some of these concerns can be answered.

Kolers argues that by emphasizing the collective, rather than individual, contributions to productivity, my account is compatible with justifying capital appropriation of surplus value, contrary to the stated intent of my analysis. Take my example of the value of a building. I argue that at least part of it cannot be reduced to the separate contributions made by construction workers, engineers, architects, and so on because the labor from each of these positions presupposes labor from the other positions. Each type of work is equally necessary and, therefore, I argue, equally valuable. Kolers thinks that I am not entitled to this conclusion, that “the coequal necessity of each contribution does not imply the coequal value, to the enterprise, of each contributor.” He is right that capital can define an enterprise in a way that creates a hierarchy between more or less valuable work. For example, capital can determine that aesthetic concerns are peripheral to building making and therefore that artistic work that makes buildings beautiful is of little value. Outsourcing is one tool in this process. Janitorial services at the University of Chicago, for example, used to be provided by university employees. Now they are outsourced to independent firms.

By doing so, however, the university did not eradicate the need for janitorial services. They continued to be necessary to the work of the other university employees; janitorial services continued to respond to human needs, and thus produce value. Outsourcing may render this value invisible, but it does not annihilate it. By focusing on networks of work beyond the firm, my analysis makes this value visible. In doing so, it also makes the connections between workers with different skills visible. So if we understand value in the sense of something that responds to human needs, the value created by low-skilled work does not depend on capital in the way Kolers suggests.

This leads me to the last concern raised by Kolers’s review. On my account, contributions to the structure and product of a network are equal across all participants. Hence, the oppressed and the privileged are equally responsible for dismantling oppressive structures. This makes my account unable to prioritize the perspective of the oppressed, as Kolers thinks it should. While I am skeptical, for reasons I explained in my review of his book, of this requirement to prioritize the perspective of the oppressed, I think my account of responsibility is compatible with it. On my view, oppressive structures are social practices; we all participate in and sustain them. It does not make sense to separate individual contributions to these structures and to assign responsibility based on individual contributions. This social metaphysical view grounds my (normative) view of responsibility: One’s responsibility for dismantling oppressive structures is based on the ability of one’s actions to sustain (and, hence, also transform) the structure. Thus, one’s responsibility is a function of one’s position in the structure, of whether one is privileged or oppressed within the structure. However, this leaves open the epistemic question of how to find out which actions are required of us. Kolers’s requirement to prioritize the perspective of the oppressed applies, I believe, at this epistemic level.