Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919)

In this chapter, Rosa Luxemburg examines the basic structure of wage labor. For Luxemburg, wage labor is a condition for the systemic, economical exploitation of one free human being by another. Luxemburg analyzes the capitalists’ thinking about wages, their interest in extending the workday and in lowering the pay, and the conflict of interest between the worker and the owner of capital. She also discusses the role of trade unions in keeping not only the real wages but also the social wages above the level of mere sustenance for the individual worker.

Anti-preferences

This Article offers a critical evaluation of preference satisfaction as a frame for normative thinking. It begins with an internal critique of the way preferences work in normative economics, distinguishing among three elements: welfare; preferences; and choices. For preference satisfaction to work well, it must be able to bridge two gaps, one between choice and preferences, and another between preferences and welfare. In contexts where both those gaps are bridged, preference satisfaction offers a workable normative framework; where at least one of those gaps is unbridgeable, the framework should be treated with extreme caution if not jettisoned altogether. The Article then goes on to pursue an external critique, by asking what price we pay for using the preference satisfaction framework when it appears to perform well. The point of the critique is that even when preference satisfaction provides a good normative framework on its own terms, the framework obscures considerations that should not be ignored. By pursuing one concrete example, the Article shows how broad considerations regarding the implications of the regime of wage labor are absent from legal contemplation when labor law is imagined and shaped through the lens of preference satisfaction. The Article concludes with a speculation about how different theories of welfare might be employed in concert, rather than as alternatives. It suggests that a pluralism of theory is a way to expose the political stakes in the kinds of policy discussion where preference satisfaction is often a dominant way of thinking.

Battlegrounds of dependence

Interdependence is a fundamental characteristic of human existence. The way in which certain dependencies are acknowledged as opposed to those that are hidden, or the ways in which some are validated while others are denigrated, is central to how social inequalities are reproduced and recreated. In this introduction we explore how particular dependencies are categorized, separated, and made visible or invisible as part of their performative effect. In particular, we explore the distinction between wage labor and kinship as two forms of relatedness that are often separated in terms of the (in)dependence that they are seen to embody. Even though they are practically entangled, their conceptual separation remains important. These conceptual separations are central to how gender difference is imagined and constituted globally.

Policing Asylum Seekers’ Flight Within Europe

A critical assessment of the Dublin regulation requires a look beyond its official function of allocating asylum seekers across EU Member States. This article argues it embodies the “hidden face” of Schengen insofar as it legally fixes them in the sole country responsible for their application. Because this responsibility lies primarily with the first country of arrival, it is consistent with the core-periphery axis of division of labor in the EU. The first part of this paper examines how the Schengen/Dublin dual regime of (im)mobility might respond to the constant need for bridled labor alongside free wage labor in the world-system. However, equally constant is labor power’s propensity to evade its subsumption under capital; this is exemplified by Dubliners’ appropriation of freedom of movement through irregularity. By deserting the “plantations” of the European peripheries, those “maroons” of our present time disrupt the European geography of power and contest their assigned position in it. But the widely acknowledged failure of this regime to deter “secondary movements” does not necessarily mean it is non-effective. Attention must then be given to mechanisms of “exclusion from within” experimented on Dubliners. The second part will offer an overview of the tactics of internal rebordering that have been recently deployed in core countries and question the extent to which those attempts to recapture their flight meet the conditions for the optimization of capital’s operations.