What follows examines the shifting nature of work to argue that we need to look beyond the employment relationship and the work organization to understand labour. It suggests one tendency in capitalism is to generate ‘all labour as productive of value’ (Harvie, 2005: 161), so that we subsume life to work. The article also suggests that, rather than being new, this development is an intensification of the past. Indeed, by returning to early management writers, it asserts that we can see the scale of management’s political ambition to subsume life to work. As such, to understand labour we need to comprehend the broader issue of capitalism’s social reproduction and the manner in which it recalibrates the subject as a ‘subject of value’.