Value, Price and Profit

2021 ◽  
pp. 001946622110172
Author(s):  
Prabhat Patnaik
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
The Political ◽  
Real Wages ◽  
Economic Level ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Novel Reading ◽  
Rate Of Profit ◽  
The Relationship

Value Price and Profit was a speech delivered by Marx at a meeting of the First International where he used ideas of his not-yet-published Capital to present what later came to be known as the “w-r-frontier”. He argued on its basis, against the position of John Stuart Mill, that workers as a whole can obtain higher real wages at the expense of the capitalists’ rate of profit. The relationship between economic and political struggles outlined in Value, Price and Profit is a novel one: the weakening of working-class capacity to intervene at the economic level is supposed to bring on the agenda greater political struggles. This novel reading of the relationship between the economic and the political also has much relevance for today’s world.

scholarly journals Workers-as-consumers: Rethinking the political economy of use-value and the reproduction of capital

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niamh Mulcahy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
The Political ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Use Values ◽  
Continuous Reproduction ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Labour Power ◽  
Means Of Production

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.

Civil Disobedience and the City

2019 ◽  
pp. 263-284
Author(s):  
Robert Rahman Raman
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Working Population ◽  
National Congress ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Indian National Congress

This essay examines the interaction between different sections of Bombay’s working population and the Indian National Congress during the first two years of the Civil Disobedience movement. It looks at this engagement primarily through the vernacular archives, and explores the divergent, sometimes conflicting, trends in the articulations of nationalism in the Civil Disobedience movement and the Congress. This essay draws upon Masselos’ work and focuses on the spatial templates of the Civil Disobedience movement. It maps the relationship between the functioning of the local units of the Congress and the political infrastructure of the city’s mill districts. It argues that there was a co-relation between their mobilization practices in the city’s working-class neighborhoods and their attempt to appropriate social spaces.

Letter From Poland

1991 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-228
Author(s):  
Antoni Z. Kaminski ◽  
Joanna Kurczewska
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Class Background ◽  
The World

WE STARTED WRITING THIS LETTER ON 22 DECEMBER 1990, the day that Lech Walesa was sworn in before the Polish Sejm as the first President of Poland ever elected in national elections. Even during this memorable ceremony, some MPs could not hide their deep dissatisfaction. They shared with a large portion of intellectuals of the world the conviction that Mazowiecki, a journalist, would be a far better president for Poland than Walesa the shipyard - worker.Having followed with some curiosity the Western coverage of the Polish elections, and of the political struggles that preceded it, we have the impression that the coverage was biased, and often misleading. Commentators repeated misleading stereotypes, identifying themselves with one side in the political conflict in Poland. They presented a black-and-white picture of the conflict. Tadeusz Mazoweicki symbolized stability, democracy, tolerance, open-mindedness, ‘true’ pluralism, etc.; while the ‘terrible Lech Walesa’ represented dictatorship, obscurantism, anti-Semitism, populism, and chaos. Subtle references were made to Walesa's working-class background, to his lack of poise and education. We find such journalistic bad manners outrageous.

Broadcasting to Afghanistan: A history of the BBC Pashto Service

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabelle Sreberny ◽  
Massoumeh Torfeh
Keyword(s):  
Information Service ◽  
The Political ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis paper traces the history of BBC World Service (BBCWS) broadcasts to Afghanistan and the political struggles that led to the establishment of a Pashto language service to complement BBC broadcasting in Persian. The complex linguistic, ethnic, and tribal diversity of Afghanistan makes providing appropriate and relevant news, and an information service in the right language, accent, and idiom for Afghanistan, a daunting task. The paper analyzes the relationship between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the BBC, and the impetus behind the launch of a Pashto service for Afghans. It also explores the tensions between providing impartial news and engaging in communications for development purposes.

CULTURAL CAPITAL AND THE SCENE OF RIOTING: MALE WORKING-CLASS AUTHORSHIP IN ALTON LOCKE

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Menke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Intellectual Labor ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm ◽  
Title Character ◽  
Do So

IN ITS VERY TITLE, Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography hints at a set of questions that the novel itself never manages to answer in a very clear or convincing way: what is the relationship between manual and intellectual labor, between industrial and poetic production, between making a coat and writing a poem? How might the early Victorian imagination conceive of a working tailor who is also a working poet — especially in light of the various actual working-class poets who appeared on the literary scene in the first half of the nineteenth-century, complete with occupational epithets, such as Thomas Cooper, the “shoe-maker poet” (a figure who in many ways provided a model for Kingsley’s fictional protagonist)? And what if, like a fair number of urban artisans, including Cooper himself, the tailor-poet is also a Chartist — as Alton Locke indeed turns out to be? What is the relationship between the Chartist call for reform and for representation of disenfranchised men in the political realm, and the attempts of a fictional working-class man (since the novel’s treatment of gender, as I will argue, is crucial to its treatment of politics and culture) to enter the early Victorian field of literary production? Or why, in the first place, should a novel that treats the “social problem” of class in the hungry forties and the appalling working conditions of the clothes trade do so by way of the literary aspirations of its title character, that is, through a fictional construction of working-class authorship?

Dario Fo, the Commune, and the Battle for the Palazzina Liberty

2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-109
Author(s):  
Tom Behan
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
Secure Control ◽  
Revolutionary Ideology ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Battle

In 1974 Dario Fo and ‘The Commune’ theatre collective were forced to engaged in a political battle to secure control of the ‘Palazzina Liberty’, a nondescript building once a market canteen, set in the middle of a park in a south-eastern suburb of Milan. Here, Tom Behan describes how mass support, derived from a revolutionary ideology, secured The Commune's control over the building for several years. The relationship between this political movement and the political content of the shows performed at the Palazzina is then discussed with reference to Can't Pay? Won't Pay!, Fanfani Kidnapped, and Mum's Marijuana is the Best. Tom Behan, is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Kent at Canterbury. His article began life as part of the research for his Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre (Pluto Press, 2000), and forms a companion piece to ‘The Megaphone of the Movement: Dario Fo and the Working Class, 1968–79’, published in The Journal of European Studies, XXX (September 2000).

Kämpfe um Bergbau und die Möglichkeiten demokratischer Transformation

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (189) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Dietz
Keyword(s):  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Mining Project ◽  
National Governments ◽  
The Relationship

The article explores the political effects of popular consultations as a means of direct democracy in struggles over mining. Building on concepts from participatory and materialist democracy theory, it shows the transformative potentials of processes of direct democracy towards democratization and emancipation under, and beyond, capitalist and liberal democratic conditions. Empirically the analysis is based on a case study on the protests against the La Colosa gold mining project in Colombia. The analysis reveals that although processes of direct democracy in conflicts over mining cannot transform existing class inequalities and social power relations fundamentally, they can nevertheless alter elements thereof. These are for example the relationship between local and national governments, changes of the political agenda of mining and the opening of new spaces for political participation, where previously there were none. It is here where it’s emancipatory potential can be found.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

Nation, Locality and Radical Identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Petrie
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Control ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Political Left ◽  
National Model ◽  
Selection Of

Concentrating upon the years between the 1924 and 1929 general elections, which separated the first and second minority Labour governments, this chapter traces the rise of a modernised, national vision of Labour politics in Scotland. It considers first the reworking of understandings of sovereignty within the Labour movement, as the autonomy enjoyed by provincial trades councils was circumscribed, and notions of Labour as a confederation of working-class bodies, which could in places include the Communist Party, were replaced by a more hierarchical, national model. The electoral consequences of this shift are then considered, as greater central control was exercised over the selection of parliamentary candidates and the conduct of election campaigns. This chapter presents a study of the changing horizons of the political left in inter-war Scotland, analysing the declining importance of locality in the construction of radical political identities.

Imagining the Sudan in British Film, 1925–53

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-354
Author(s):  
Zach Bates
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
The Relationship

Due to its status as a territory under the joint rule of Egypt and Britain, the Sudan occupied an awkward place in the British Empire. Because of this, it has not received much attention from scholars. In theory, it was not a colony, but, in practice, the Sudan was ruled primarily by British administrators and was the site of several developmental schemes, most of which concerned cotton-growing and harnessing the waters of the Nile. It was also the site of popular literature, travelogues and the most well-known of Alexander Korda's empire films. This article focuses on five British films –  Cotton Growing in the Sudan (c.1925), Stark Nature (1930), Stampede (1930), The Four Feathers (1939) and They Planted a Stone (1953) – that take the Sudan as their subject. It argues that each of these films shows an evolving and related discourse of the region that embraced several motifs: cooperation as the foundation of the relationship between the Sudanese and the British; Sudanese peoples in conflict with a sometimes hostile landscape and environment that the British could ‘tame’; and the British being in the Sudan in order to improve it and its people before leaving them to self-government. However, some of the films, especially The Four Feathers, subtly questioned and subverted the British presence in the Sudan and engaged with a number of the political questions not overtly mentioned in documentaries. The article, therefore, argues for a nuanced and complex picture of representations of the Sudan in British film from 1925 to 1953.

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