scholarly journals Marx’s law of value: a critique of David Harvey

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-98
Author(s):  
Michael Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Short Paper ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
Eminent Scholar ◽  
Use Values ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
Human Geographer

In 2018, Professor David Harvey, the human geographer and the eminent scholar of Marx’s works and their modern relevance, wrote a short paper entitled ‘Marx’s refusal of the labour theory of value’. In this paper, Harvey presents a series of theoretical confusions. The dual nature of value in a commodity is ignored by him. So Marx’s theory of crisis (based on insufficient surplus value) is replaced with insufficient use values for workers as consumers. The class struggle becomes not workers versus capitalists, but consumers versus capitalists or taxpayers versus governments. This is confusing to a class analysis and strategy for the working-class struggle.

scholarly journals “The History of all Hitherto Existing Society:” Class Struggle and the Current Wave of Resistance

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 577-587
Author(s):  
Todd Wolfson ◽  
Peter Funke
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
Current Wave ◽  
History Of

Across the last decade we have witnessed a growing wave of resistance across the globe. In this article we argue that it is critical to utilise class analysis to understand contemporary social movements. We maintain that class analysis begins with understanding class as a series of relations and/or processes that condition both the objective and subjective dimensions of class. Following this, we illustrate how sectors of the contemporary working class are in struggle, yet struggle differently, based on their structural location as well as differing nature of their resistance. In taking this approach to class and social movements, we argue that scholars can begin to unmask the central role of capitalism and the attending regimes of accumulation in the current wave of resistance even when they appear disconnected.

scholarly journals "Probleme des Klassenkampf" im Betrieb

1995 ◽  
Vol 25 (100) ◽  
pp. 341-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bodo Zeuner
Keyword(s):  
Class Struggle ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
Political Analysis

The artide presents a review of the class struggle debates in PROKLA up to the 80s (which were then interrupted) as well as more recent approaches of class analysis. The review shows that class and class struggle cannot be examined without a political analysis. However, a political analysis of modern societies, in opposition to the trend prevailing today, is not sufficiently informed without a class analysis, because an abstraction from class interrelations in capitalism is not possible.

scholarly journals Engels’s Theory of Social Murder and the Spectacle of Fascism: A Critical Enquiry into Digital Labour and its Alienation

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-67
Author(s):  
Aishik Saha
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Digital Capitalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Similar Development

In this paper, I shall attempt to respond to the charge that the digital labour theory, as developed by Christian Fuchs, doesn’t faithfully stick to the Marxist schema of the Labour Theory of Value by arguing that Marx’s critique of capitalism was based on the social and material cost of exploitation and the impact of capitalist exploitation of the working class. Engels’s analysis of The Condition of The Working Class in England links the various forms of violence faced by the working class to the bourgeois rule that props their exploitation. I shall argue, within the framework of Critical Social Media Studies, that the rapid advance of fascist and authoritarian regimes represents a similar development of violence and dispossession, with digital capitalism being a major factor catalysing the rifts within societies. It shall be further argued that much like the exploitative nature of labour degrades social linkages and creates conditions of that exaggerates social contradictions, the “labour” performed by social media users degenerates social relations and promotes a hyper-violent spectacle that aids and abets fascist and authoritarian regimes.

Chapter 7 The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value

Capital ◽  
2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Marx
Keyword(s):  
Surplus Value ◽  
Labour Process ◽  
Use Values ◽  
Labour Power

Section 1. The Labour-Process or the Production of Use-Values The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually,...

scholarly journals Claude McKay, The Workers' Dreadnought, and collaborative poetics

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Stephanie J Brown
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Judgment ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Arts ◽  
East End ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Holistic Representation

This paper considers the journalism and poetry Claude McKay produced for Sylvia Pankhurst's communist weekly Workers' Dreadnought in 1920 as a collaboratively produced body of work. This allowed Pankhurst to have a Black communist commentator on hand to cover workers' issues, and McKay used Pankhurst's periodical as a platform from which to dramatise the aesthetic and political potential inherent in collaboration between working-class activists, journalists, and artists for the paper's readers. In the Dreadnought's pages, McKay's poems very publicly weighed the value of collaborative labour and considered the arts' place in the class struggle. He simultaneously produced journalism that advocated collaboration among races to resist the racial antagonism that sparked violence in the most impoverished East End communities in the summers of 1919 and 1920. Ultimately, McKay's work for the Dreadnought produced a holistic representation of working-class intellectual life founded on the production of beauty and the exercise of aesthetic as well as political judgment, one that depicts these activities as inevitably commingled and collaboratively produced.

Contextualising Organised Labour in Expansion and Crisis: The Case of the US

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Moody
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Strategic Choices ◽  
Real Wages ◽  
Union Leadership ◽  
The Us ◽  
Labour Power

AbstractWhile, as Marx argued, periods of expanded accumulation present the best conditions for increasing working-class living standards, the expansion that began in 1982 was based in large part on the rapidfallin the value of labour-power in the US. This recovery and rapid rise in the rate of surplus-value in the US was enabled by the collapse of union-resistance beginning in 1979 and the strategic choices made by union-leaders across the economy from that time on. The expansion was sustained in the 1980s by dramatic work-reorganisation, enabled by the embrace of labour-management cooperation-schemes by much of the trade-union leadership, and the restructuring of several major industries that undermined the industry-wide bargaining on which rising postwar incomes had been based. Productivity, boosted by lean production-methods, would continue to outstrip real wages up until the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008 and resume again in the wake of a weak recovery in the US. The rapid geographic expansion of capital after 1990 provided new investment-possibilities, as did the explosion of financial instruments. What stands out, however, is that rising productivity, far from providing the basis for increases in working-class income, had become coupled with flat or declining real wages and a fall in the value of labour-power as the necessary condition to sustain almost any level of growth in the real economy. The link between productivity and wage-increases, central to Keynesian and institutional collective-bargaining theory, had been broken and Marx’s idea of the most favourable conditions stood on its head. The breaking of this link had, in the final analysis, been an outcome of class-struggle in which capital had the upper hand. All of this underlines the failed strategies and practices of most of the trade-union leadership in the US since 1979. New approaches to the workplace and broader forms of mobilisation will be needed. Signs of worker-resistance to the latest neoliberal clampdowns in Latin America, Europe, China, and even the US, however, may point to a renewed era of intensified class-struggle.

scholarly journals Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation

1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret R. Somers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of

The nineteenth-century English working class bears a most peculiar burden and embodies a most peculiar paradox. Like Auden’s academic warriors who spar with “smiles and Christian names,” historians, economists, and sociologists have pushed and prodded early nineteenth-century English working people into procrustean political positions to support or disconfirm Marx’s predictions of revolutionary class conflict erupting from the contradictions of capitalism. A Manichaean concern locks the debate into an impasse. Were early nineteenth-century workers revolutionary or reformist? Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. Yet, surely it is the history of English working peoples that has suffered from this burden of praising or burying Marxism through competing interpretations of their early stories?

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