Marx's Theory of Capitalist Development

Author(s):  
V. Y. Kolhatkar
2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (136) ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Tobias Wölfle ◽  
Oliver Schöller

Under the term “Hilfe zur Arbeit” (aid for work) the federal law of social welfare subsumes all kinds of labour disciplining instruments. First, the paper shows the historical connection of welfare and labour disciplining mechanisms in the context of different periods within capitalist development. In a second step, against the background of historical experiences, we will analyse the trends of “Hilfe zur Arbeit” during the past two decades. It will be shown that by the rise of unemployment, the impact of labour disciplining aspects of “Hilfe zur Arbeit” has increased both on the federal and on the municipal level. For this reason the leverage of the liberal paradigm would take place even in the core of social rights.


Author(s):  
Jordan T. Camp

While many analysts have commented on the representation of 1968 campus events and antiwar demonstrations, less attention has been paid to the global significance of the dramatic struggles in industrial Detroit during the period. The meanings of events in the city were intensely fought over. As Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts observed, the events of 1968 were “an act of collective will, the breaks and ruptures stemming from the rapid expansion in the ideology, culture and civil structures of the new capitalism . . . in the form of a ‘crisis of authority.’” In Detroit the crisis of authority was expressed in the form of popular political struggles against racism, state violence, and the contradictions of life in the industrial capitalist city. This article asks and answers the following research questions about the struggle over the meaning of this decisive turning point in US history: What was the relationship between racial ordering, uneven capitalist development, and mass antiracist and class struggles? How did Black working-class organic intellectuals resist and alter hegemonic definitions of the situation? How are the dialectics of insurgency and counterinsurgency to be best theorized during this precise historical conjuncture? 


2021 ◽  
pp. 001946622110212
Author(s):  
Deepak K. Mishra

This article aims to analyse the plight of the migrant workers in India during the Covid 19 pandemic from a political economy perspective. While taking note of the disruptions and uncertainties during the drastic lockdown that was announced suddenly, it is argued that the vulnerabilities of the migrant labour force are deeply embedded in the long-term changes in the political economy of development in India. These changes, on the one hand, have resulted in the gradual weakening of state support to the working classes, and on the other, have resulted in the normalisation of ‘cheap labour’ as a legitimate objective of neoliberal capitalist development. Locating the conditions of the migrant working class on the specificities of the manifold restructuring of the Indian economy under neoliberal globalisation, the study attempts to emphasise the structural dimensions of the current crisis faced by the migrant labourers. JEL Codes: J46, J61, O15, O17, P16


2013 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 170-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verity Burgmann

AbstractThe autonomist Marxist critique of determinist Marxism offers even more valuable insights for labor historians than that mounted by earlier antideterminists, such as Sartre and Thompson, who emphasized proletarian agency to counter determinist orthodoxy in which the accumulative logic of capital unilaterally shapes the world. Autonomist Marxism is more far-reaching. It places labor at the very beginning of the labor-capital dialectic: Labor can exist independently of capital, but capital needs to command labor to ensure profit; therefore, capitalist development does not occur due to internal momentum but in reaction to labor's tendency to unloose itself from capital. Linebaugh and Rediker offer a similar hypothesis in exploring the myth of the many-headed hydra—and demonstrate the fruitfulness of such an approach. By contrast, the notion of the multitude in Hardt and Negri'sEmpirehas not been well received by labor historians due to its inexplicable abstraction when read in isolation from other autonomist texts. This article attempts to rescue the ideas of autonomist Marxist philosophers, especially Toni Negri, from the enormous condescension of labor history.


2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
T. Huynh Tu

AbstractDespite international protests against bonded labor, the flow of indentured laborers during the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries was extensive compared to the earlier centuries. The focus of this article is on the particularity of the “Chinese coolies experiment” in South Africa's gold mining industry which commenced in 1904. This 20th-century episode of indentured labor is notable for several reasons, and it serves as a springboard for the discussion of some fundamental issues in capitalist development, labor and identity formation. This article emphasizes the last, examining how a “Chinese” identity was formed through the development of the gold fields and, in turn, how this formation reinforced a nascent white labor aristocracy. It discusses two dimensions of this labor “experiment” in South Africa: (1) the heady debate on the decision to look to China for cheap labor and (2) desertion by the indentured Chinese laborers from various mining compounds in the Witwatersrand.


1981 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-518
Author(s):  
Gérald Bernier

The study of social classes in the nineteenth century requires the development of conceptual tools able to explain the impact of the Conquest on the pre-existant social structures in determining transformations of the class structure during the subsequent decades.This article examines the work done on this question by Marxist writers. The author criticizes certain conclusions which have been drawn and which suggest deficiencies at a theoretical level. The objections relate to the marked tendency of these conclusions to perceive the structural effects of the Conquest in terms of the formation of a double-class structure characterized by “ethnic origins.” Specifically, the author challenges the notion of the division itself, as well as the criterion on which the division is based.The author proposes that an analysis centred upon the concepts relating to a problem of the transition and linkage of different modes of production permits a more satisfying interpretation, if accompanied by a certain number of considerations of the “upside” and “downside” of the Conquest. To this end, the argument is based on a characterization of New France in terms of the domination of the relations of production of the feudal type and on an analysis of metropolitan centres with intent to evaluate their level of capitalist development at the moment of their respective colonial penetration in Canada. The results of this approach permit one to posit the existence of a single-class structure, characterized principally by the existence of elements connecting diverse modes and forms of production, whose origin reflects the unequal state of economic development in the two metropolitan centres.The empirical demonstration rests on the census data of 1851–1852 and on the complementary information drawn from the works of historians.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110478
Author(s):  
Sagie Narsiah

There is little doubt that the understanding of the dynamics of capitalism has been enriched by Geography. Moreover, geographers utilizing Marxist/Marxian lenses have provided valuable insights into the spatial content of the system. Over the past two decades or so, geographers in no small way have contributed to the demystification of capitalism/capitalist development in its neoliberal incarnation – change as mirage. Furthermore, poverty, inequality, unemployment and related social ills are directly linked to the system. Indeed, they are produced by the system. In this paper, the geographical evolution of the capitalist system in South Africa is examined. Critical thinkers, among them Marxists, influenced the theorization of the relationship(s) between capitalism, apartheid, class and race. In this paper, I focus on the spatial aspects, which in my view have been neglected. I reflect on various historical periods – the apartheid era and the post-apartheid era, in particular. What is apparent is that neoliberalism in South Africa has entered a phase which I label “accumulation by corrupt means”. The class basis of this strategy is examined. Critical (Marxist) geographers are shaped by the direct experiences of material conditions. I describe my experiences in this regard.


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