Most of social sciences’ research on Israel emphasizes ethnicity, status, nationality, identity, gender or coloniality as the central explanatory concepts. This article argues that in order to understand the emergence (as well as the limitations) of phenomena such as the 2011 social protest, the analysis must incorporate a class perspective. In answering questions such as which social groups initiated and supported the protest, what the socio-economic causes of the protest were and what explains the characteristic political patterns of the protest, the article proposes the following theses: (1) The protest was launched and led by the ‘bohemian-bourgeois’ sector of the middle class, but was joined by other groups; (2) The protest was the first large-scale display of class resistance to the post-Fordist, neoliberal socio-economic system; and (3) The protest manifested the emergence of a new kind of ‘post-postmodern’ politics, in response to both the representation crisis of the political system and to the failure of postmodern politics to address socio-economic concerns.
Noting the recent resurgence of housing as a political issue, this article takes a historic view of the origins of the current housing crisis. While the foundations of the contemporary housing system were laid in the period following the First World War, the roots of the crisis lie in two developments in the 1980s: the privatisation of the social housing stock through the Right to Buy and the growth of mortgage lending in response to financial liberalisation. These two changes combined to produce an upsurge in ground rent on residential land and a restructuring of housing consumption and production around the pursuit of this ground rent. This article ends by outlining a range of policy measures and considering the prospects for their implementation.
This article reconsiders what Marx says about what has come to be known as the transformation problem in Chapter IX of Capital Volume III, in the light of Marx’s claim, made in Capital Volume I, that the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour-time that goes into its production. I criticise the traditional way of thinking about the transformation problem, according to which what Marx is doing in Chapter IX is considering the transformation of values into prices (‘prices of production’). I argue that Marx’s prices of production may be thought of as modified values. The discussion in Chapter IX is usually seen as a supplement to the labour theory of value. On this view, its purpose is to explain how and why the prices of commodities sometimes deviate from their values. Against this view, this article argues that Marx’s remarks in Chapter IX can be seen as an elaboration on or development of the labour theory of value. It is a refinement of the account offered in Capital Volume I, which takes into consideration what Marx had in mind there when he introduced the notion of socially necessary as opposed to actual labour-time. The article draws attention to the importance of Marx’s distinction between the individual value of a commodity (determined by actual labour-time) and its social value (determined by socially necessary labour-time). It also draws attention to the methodological difficulties that are generated by any attempt to read Marx in this way.
The categories of productive and unproductive labour have been a source of contention among Marxist scholars since Marx first committed them to paper. This article will offer a critique of both the orthodox and autonomist approaches to this issue, arguing that they constitute transhistorical and analytically inadequate interpretations. In contrast, a social form approach to productive and unproductive labour provides a substantive definition of these categories in relation to the commodity form, and brings class struggle back to the forefront in a theoretically consistent manner.
Debates about the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 have pointed at institutional and individual-behavioural factors as its causes. Using the British Household Panel Survey, this article highlights marked differences in perceptions of societal and economic fairness among financial services employees in investment or management positions in the United Kingdom and the general working population at the brink of the Global Financial Crisis. Panel data analysis suggests that financial services and occupations did not necessarily attract employees with pro-market attitudes, but that employment in these institutions and occupations made it more likely that employees came to display these perceptions, contributing to the construction of a distinct attitudinal profile of finance employees.
The article offers a critique of the ‘militarization of the police’ discourse, which has gained substantial attention in both academia and the media. Particularly influential in the United States, proponents of this concept claim that the ‘traditional’ boundaries between war and policing are blurring. However, this concept is both historically and politically problematic. The fact that right-wing libertarians have been at the forefront of calling attention to the militarization of the police highlights that while it is a thesis which critiques state power it fails to provide a critique of capital. As a result, it constantly falls back into a liberal frame of trying to delineate boundaries between military and police, rather than looking at how war and police power overlap and conjoin in everyday pacification.
This article addresses the question of ‘the left’ in contemporary South Africa in two senses: first, in terms of assessing the health of leftist politics; second, it asks to what extent are the self-identified left progressive in any meaningful sense. The first half of this article reflects on the current development situation in South Africa. Here, it is argued that within most sections of the South African left, there is broad agreement on the need to address the triple challenge of unemployment, rising inequality and poverty. The second half of this article identifies three broad sections to the contemporary left in South Africa (the Tripartite Alliance, the left outside the Alliance and the remnants of the revolutionary socialist left). It argues that the left within the Alliance, despite the launch of the New Growth Path, are failing to implement the sufficiently radical policy changes that are required to address the development challenges identified in the first half of this article. The left outside the Alliance, meanwhile, despite recent attempts at coordination, lacks influence and remains disconnected from the masses.
My article offers a sustained critique of the idea of critical social theory presented by Axel Honneth in Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. My article articulates three specific criticisms: (1) the focus on normative relations of recognition obscures the class-based forms of power that pervade contemporary advanced democracies, (2) the method of normative reconstruction cannot make sense of the open-ended nature of class struggle that drives social change in capitalist societies, and (3) Honneth’s political and social prescriptions ignore the consequences of the failure of traditional progressive politics. My article makes an important and original contribution to the literature on Honneth’s recent work in two major respects. First, I argue that Honneth’s descriptions of the fate of the family and the market today betray a failure to understand the configuration of class power in contemporary neoliberal societies. Second, I make the case that the basis for a more successful theory of class power, identity formation, and social change can be found in the ‘first-generation’ critical social theory of Erich Fromm.
The relationship between the working class and consumer culture is undoubtedly contentious and often held as problematic in Marxist critical theory, owing to the exploitative nature of the mass production that facilitates consumption. Consequently, consumption sometimes appears as a distraction from the inequality perpetuated during the accumulation of capital, and thus as a social problem with normative undertones. As I reiterate in this article, however, workers are not simultaneously consumers because they have been inundated with consumer culture and advertising, but because they are separated from the means of production and must resort to exchange to reproduce their labour-power. As a result, they seek commodities as use-values, which is altogether different from a capitalist’s desire to realise exchange-value in the sale of commodities. This article is an attempt at examining the contradictions that arise in working-class interests in consumption, in order to illustrate why the act of consumption does not necessarily engender the continuous reproduction of capital, and thus of exploitation.
This article focuses on the link between alienation, commodity fetishism and human development. Alienation and commodity fetishism appear in different ways, very abstract and invisibly. People engage innocently with these phenomena without awareness of how their well-beings are related to. Empirically, this research reveals the alienation and commodity fetishism expressed in the adaptation of workers, managers and owners in factories during economically troubled times. What must be considered, however, is the consequences of all this for human development. After some criticism of human development based on the capability approach, Marxist implications are drawn for understanding of this process.
Neoliberalism is a slippery concept, neither intellectually precise nor political useful. It is used so widely, to mean such different things, that it becomes almost impossibly vague, while dissimilar international experiences of social change undermine the sweeping designation provided by most presentations of neoliberalism. The term is too often used as a catch-all category or as a category that catches selectively whatever a particular author chooses and disapproves. It is a word of the academic ‘left’, accepted neither by our opponents, the supposed neoliberals, nor in popular discourse, and its use perpetuates a self-referential world of our own. There is little new or liberal in the ideas or practices of ‘neoliberalism’. The term is politically unhelpful, little use in identifying strategic priorities. A tendency to reproduce a binary, which posits the state as good and market as bad, is particularly unhelpful.
This article argues that a media and communication studies perspective on reading Marx’s Capital has thus far been missing, but is needed in the age of information capitalism and digital capitalism. Two of the most popular contemporary companions to Marx’s Capital, the ones by David Harvey and Michael Heinrich, present themselves as general guidebooks on how to read Marx, but are actually biased towards particular schools of Marxist thought. A contemporary reading of Marx needs to be mediated with contemporary capitalism’s structures and the political issues of the day. Media, communications and the Internet are important issues for such a reading today. It is time to see Marx not just as a critic of capitalism but also as a critic of capitalist communications.
This article contends that there is a growing, if uneven, crisis in public sector trade unionism masked by relatively high membership figures that obscure a weakening of trade unions in the workplace, leaving hollowed out organisation vulnerable to further legislative and employer-led onslaughts. The weakening is not inevitable but to overcome it requires a refocusing of organising efforts on the everyday concerns of members such as understaffing and the provision of better public services. Only with an engaged membership will national issues and wider campaigns have material force. Having outlined a general argument, the article takes as illustrative the nature and performance of trade unions, and particularly UNISON, during the Mid Staffordshire hospital crisis.
This article examines the impact on staff of state-imposed public sector reforms alongside austerity cuts since 2010 in the emergency services of England. We discuss the contextual imperatives for change in the police, fire and ambulance services while exploring their unique labour management and industrial relations’ structures and systems. As elsewhere, the burden of cuts and reforms has fallen on the workforce managed through skill mix changes. Such site-level management responses to austerity are being implemented despite staff concerns, increased dangers to the public, and their non-sustainable nature.
This article deploys Bob Jessop’s strategic-relational approach to ask two questions: First, how is China’s party-based power bloc seeking to renew its hegemony, as the symbolic power of ‘Dengism’ erodes in an age marked by class formation and increasing social tensions? Second, how are subaltern social movements seeking to influence the articulation of a new, less elitist hegemonic project? Based on original interview data, I compare two of China’s most famous organic intellectuals, both centrally placed in class-based counter-movements triggered by China’s marketization. Both advocate a non-dissident strategy of change within rather than against the party-state, but their visions differ greatly. Trade unionist and 1989 protest leader Han Dongfang favors a social democratic vision based on strengthening the collective bargaining power of the Chinese working class within the market economy. In contrast, the self-declared ‘petty bourgeois’ vision of agricultural economist Wen Tiejun advocates resisting marketization, reinvigorating traditional lifestyles, and enhancing the power of the peasantry through self-organization. I argue that both visions are in partial tension with the status quo: While Han’s ‘laborism’ is compatible with the power bloc’s plans for a post-exportist accumulation strategy centered on domestic consumption, its liberal democratic premise contradicts the dictatorial state project of the Communist Party of China. Conversely, Wen’s ‘peasantism’ is symbiotic with the Communist Party of China’s hope to renew its political-ideological mandate by revitalizing Chinese culture, yet its radical economic underpinnings (emphasizing de-commodification and de-urbanization) make it hard to square with the overall logic of capitalist reform and opening-up. The successful articulation of a populist counter-hegemony depends on the extent to which the gap between laborism and peasantism is overcome both organizationally and intellectually.
In the contemporary dual crisis, economic crisis policies cannot be dealt with in isolation from the rampant and acute ecological crisis – and vice versa. In this article, we challenge the hegemonic positions in purported attempts to solve the crises so far: in the economic realm, the Keynesian episode of 2008–2009 as well as austerity policies, and with regard to the ecological crisis, ecological modernization and green economy. Instead, we will propose that both the economic and the climate crises can be ‘solved’ through the destruction of a particular kind of capital, that is, fossil capital. Given that capital destruction in general seems to be an essential part of overcoming capitalist crises historically and given the urgent need to demolish large parts of the fossil infrastructure in order to avert climate change, we discuss in this article the possibilities to politically steer the processes of creative destruction so that crises policies benefit the economy and the environment to highest possible extent.
The article reviews debates concerning financialization in South Korea, with a focus on ongoing arguments between liberal, post-Keynesian, institutionalist and Marxist economists. It argues that post-Keynesian and institutionalist perspectives in particular neglect important class processes through which the financial circuit operates within the Korean economy, especially the power of Korea’s large, family-led conglomerates, or chaebol. In order to build upon Marxist approaches to Korean finance, we argue that Nitzen and Bichler’s approach to the ‘capitalization’ of capitalist class power provides a useful heuristic for understanding the differential power of Korean chaebol and their integration into global capital.
This article critiques post-operaist conceptualisations of immaterial labour from the perspective of Marxian value-form theory. Critiquing the idea of the ‘crisis of measurability’ created by immaterial labour and the contention that this makes redundant the law of value, it contests the novelty, immediate abstractness and immeasurable productivity post-operaists attribute to contemporary labour using the New Reading of Marx. The first part explores this theoretical conflict, asserting that post-operaismo refutes Marx’s value theory only insofar as it holds a productivist understanding of value to begin with. The second reflects upon the political implications through a consideration of the post-operaist advocacy of a universal basic income. Appeals to reward, recompense and redistribution rest upon the veracity of the claims made in the post-operaist treatment of labour, value and their immateriality and immeasurability. A value-form analysis exposes flaws in the assumptions about value and labour that support their case for a universal basic income.
This article re-claims and invigorates the debate on ‘New Materialism’ as it is unfolding within Marxist political economy specifically. We choose this site to make our intervention in the debate because, while Marxism claims to makes visible the poor, dispossessed and those ‘left behind’ in the contemporary global capitalist economy, we discern, in contributions made thus far, a marked tendency to sideline the rich tradition of feminist historical materialist scholarship. We contend that feminist analyses are vital in elucidating the ‘gendered face’ of global financial crisis and austerity. Accordingly, after first mapping the contours of current discussion, we briefly revisit feminist critiques of Marxism; interrogate the inter-relationship between neoliberal capitalism, the gendered nature of labour markets, the ‘patriarchal’ state and social reproduction and unpaid care work; and, finally, we further develop our argument through an analysis of the gendered impacts of current austerity measures in the United Kingdom.
Many intellectuals, various social movements, as well as all manner of individuals from around the globe who are critical of the ills of global, expansionist capitalism have written, spoken out about, and called for everything from minor changes to radical changes to the existing social, political and economic order. Moreover, many of these groups and individuals have used the tools of Marx’s critique of capitalism in order to advance their positions and calls for change. While most critics of the existing social, political and economic order advance their critical examination of capitalist-spawned injustices with the hope of providing a foundation for us to explore ways to resist, disrupt and replace them, with few exceptions, usually this exploration is confined to (or at least focused on) human communities. However, in this essay, using some key concepts in Marx’s oeuvre, I examine how the global expansion of capitalism, together with its requisite increase in structures of power and domination, are responsible for the intensification of similar injustices for non-human animals, which, according to Marx’s own theoretical commitments, I argue, should also be resisted and, indeed, eradicated. On the flip side, in addition to arguing that a proper understanding of some of Marx’s most fundamental commitments requires us to fight not only for human but for non-human animal liberation, I also argue that genuine animal liberation requires the radical disruption of capitalism and that the more common, less radical animal liberation movements are insufficient for bringing about this end.
Foucault was preoccupied with Smith’s alteration of the concept of labor as a unique representation of wealth. Smith, contrary to his contemporaries, posited labor as the determining sign that represents money and exchange and designates the economic existence of all signs of wealth. Foucault stated that Smith took the incipient step from the old science of wealth to the modern political economy. However, it is equally important to discern the fact that Smith did not separate his economic content from his overall concern about morality. When transposing Foucault’s analysis of wealth onto Smith’s moral science, Foucault’s fundamental conclusion is reaffirmed: that Smith developed his theory of a moral subject, simultaneously engaged in laboring and exchanging processes, within the classical episteme. At the same time, Smith attempted to revise this episteme and gave indications about its epistemological limitations. On the one hand, Marx’s historical-critical approach underlines the ideological tensions between a text as a material product of historical social relations and the ideological appropriation and restructuring of the text by the present-day dominant class. On the other hand, it traces the inherent logical contradiction and omissions of the text. This approach demonstrates Smith’s affinities with the eighteenth-century science of man and that the transition towards capitalism determined both his value theory and his moral system.
The effects of precariousness, as a product of the neoliberal transformation of the labour markets, go beyond the workplace to become a factor of everyday life, and as such can be regarded as a constitutive factor in the formation of a working class within the neoliberal context. Despite having similar experiences under precariousness, it would appear that tourism workers in Antalya do not develop a class consciousness, and as such do not constitute an organised class movement. According to the findings of a qualitative case study of 42 tourism workers in various tourism centres of Antalya, the spatial dispersion of workers is the predominant factor preventing the formation of a class consciousness.
This article provides a critical examination of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s and John Holloway’s theory of revolutionary subjectivity, and does so by applying their theories to the Occupy movement of 2011. Its central argument is that one should avoid collapsing ‘autonomist’ and ‘open’ Marxism, for whilst both approaches share Tronti’s insistence on the constituent role of class struggle, and also share an emphasis on a prefigurative politics that engages a non-hierarchical and highly participatory politics, there nevertheless remain some significant differences between their approaches. Ultimately, when applied to the Occupy movement, whilst their theory isn’t entirely unproblematic, I will argue that Hardt and Negri’s ‘autonomist’ approach offers the stronger interpretation, due mainly to their revised historical materialism.
Recent approaches to class analysis in advanced capitalism have been largely disconnected from the capitalist labour process. This paper has three basic goals. First, we suggest a composite Marxist model of current class structure grounded in ownership, managerial authority, specialized knowledge and value relations in the capitalist labour process. Secondly, this model is used for an empirical assessment of continuity and change in class structure, based on a series of national surveys in Canada in the period 1982–2010. Thirdly, using the same series of surveys, we use this model of class structure to evaluate the extent to which employment class positions are relevant for understanding shifting expressions of class consciousness. Within the employed labour force in this particular advanced capitalist country, we find a generally declining conventional working class and expanding proportions of managerial and professional employees. Connections between employment class positions and class consciousness can involve complex mediations. Evidence for the persistence of strong hegemonic consciousness among corporate capitalists is provided by an additional unique series of surveys. This persistence contrasts with declining working class identity and increasingly mixed class consciousness among most other employment class positions. However, pro-labour oppositional consciousness is found to dominate among unionized industrial workers and professional employees in the private goods-producing sector, who may be among the most directly exploited workers in value terms in an emergent ‘knowledge economy’. The findings suggest the continuing relevance of pursuing class analyses based on production relations in advanced capitalist economies.
Marxian thinking following the TSSI (temporal single system interpretation) of Marx’s work is applied to refute the allegation of a tautology in the resource-based view of the firm, paired with the provision of an explanation of how and why resources create value, where resources are synonymous with Marx’s categories of constant and variable capital. Refuting the allegation naturally leads to the Holy Grail of resource-based thinking: the question of what, conceptually, constitutes a firm’s competitive advantage within the industry context. This article achieves its objectives by tying the resource-based view into Marx’s theory of value.
For critical theory, the critique of capitalist society is subversive in character. It dissolves the dogmatic appearance of society as a manifestation of economic nature and rejects traditional anti-capitalist ideas about socialism as a planned labour economy. Traditional theory does not think against the grain of society. Rather, it thinks with the flow of society and in doing so, it disarms itself by looking on the bright site of a hellish world. In contrast, at its best critical theory looks into the eye of the storm to recognise the conditions of misery and to prevent the critique of capitalist conditions from becoming yet another means of capitalist reproduction.
This paper uses Canada’s corporate criminal liability legislation as an empirical exemplar with which to interrogate the limits of using the law to address the abuses of corporate power and to protect workers’ safety. The author draws from Althusser’s notion of interpellation to contemplate whether demands to discipline corporations through the law, particularly by labour/unions, misrecognise the problems of workplace safety, including that workers are routinely injured and killed in the pursuit of surplus profits. The author concludes that the problems of workplace safety ultimately demand broader strategies that challenge and transform the capitalist mode of production.
A dominant strand of literature adopting an identity-oriented approach towards industrial decline and post-Fordist flexibilisation argues that we are in a ‘post-industrial’ world in which class struggles and ‘old’ labour movements have been replaced by struggles around identity. This article examines working-class politics in the city of Ahmedabad, India, in the pre- and post-liberalisation phases in order to understand whether class struggle is indeed being replaced by identity struggle. In juxtaposing Marx with E.P. Thompson, the article re-visits concepts such as class, class struggle and exploitation in order to understand them in new ways in an increasingly ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Fordist’ world.