The Political Economy of Health: Revisiting Its Marxian Origins to Address 21st-Century Health Inequalities

The “political economy of health” is concerned with how political and economic domains interact and shape individual and population health outcomes. However, the term is variously defined in the public health, medical, and social science literatures. This could result in confusion about the term and its associated tradition, thereby constituting a barrier to its application in public health research and practice. To address these issues, I survey the political economy of health tradition, clarify its specifically Marxian theoretical legacy, and discuss its relevance to understanding and addressing public health issues. I conclude by discussing the benefits of employing critical theories of race and racism with Marxian political economy to better understand the roles of class exploitation and racial oppression in epidemiological patterning. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print December 22, 2020:e1–e8. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305996 )

Hannah Arendt’s Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy

This article provides a genealogy of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of political economy in the years prior to the publication of The Human Condition (1958). In the early 1950s her archival papers and diary entries display deep concern for a host of topics at the intersection of political and economic thought: labor, work, slavery, consumption, industrialization, and automation. Such interests, which were passed through the philosophical canon from Aristotle to Marx, would serve as the theoretical basis for many of the distinctions that define The Human Condition. When set within the context of midcentury debates around political economy, it becomes clear that Arendt conceived the distinctions not only to respond to the aporias of Western philosophy but also to contest contemporaries who put stock in dialectical materialist accounts of political emancipation. Understanding Arendt’s adversaries more clearly provides the chance to see her conceptual distinctions as interventions into concurrent attempts to revise Marxian political economy in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Productive Labour in the Information Sector

Background This article addresses the question of productive labour in the information sector. Based on Marxian political economy, it provides a critical assessment of Dan Schiller’s (2007) arguments on productive and unproductive labour. Unproductive labour, it argues, is not something a) unnecessary, b) morally inferior, c) outside of a wage relationship, or d) unprofitable. Analysis Following an orthodox Marxian interpretation, this article claims that unproductive labour is a category that revolves exclusively around the concept of surplus value, and that this recognition is vital to understanding the type of labour that takes place in those businesses whose main commodity is information. Conclusions and implications The article ends with a more sophisticated account of how to apply the category of productive labour to the information sector. Contexte Cet article traite de la problématique du travail productif dans le secteur de l’information. Sur la base de l’économie politique marxiste, les arguments autour du travail productif et improductif de Dan Schiller ont été évalués de façon critique. Je soutiens que le travail improductif n’est pas quelque chose a) d’inutile b) ni moralement inferieur, c) ni exempt d’un rapport de salaire, d) ni lucratif. Analyse Suivant une interprétation marxiste orthodoxe, je postule que le travail productif est une catégorie en rapport exclusivement avec la production de plus-value et cette reconnaissance est vitale pour comprendre les types de travaux qui se réalisent dans les secteurs où la principale marchandise est l’information. Conclusions et implications Pour conclure j’apporte une explication plus sophistiquée pour appliquer la catégorie de travail productif au secteur de l’information.

Rethinking Industrial Relations, or at least the British radical frame

This article provides a short overview of the analysis in John Kelly’s 1998 book Rethinking Industrial Relations ( RIR) of long-run cycles and trends in worker collective mobilization and conflict, Kelly’s development of a model to explain these patterns, the model’s integrative combination of ideas drawn from Kondratiev long wave theory, Marxian political economy, and Tilly’s sociological model of social mobilization theory, and the book’s central prediction – a resurgence in union growth and industrial conflict. The second part of the article provides a critical evaluation of RIR as a general work in industrial relations theory, the strengths and weaknesses of Kelly’s theoretical model, and an assessment of its empirical explanatory power. The conclusion is that RIR provides an insightful conceptual framework for studying worker mobilization but falls short in both theory and empirical explanation because of defects in its Marxian/long wave foundation and overly British-centric focus.