What is the Role of Adult Facilitators in Critical Participatory Action Research? Employing Affective Labor While Navigating the Politics and the Perils Alongside Minoritized Youth Researchers

Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) represents a tool for minoritized youth in shaping educational policies. Despite its promise, the politics of engaging in CPAR within structures ensnared in hegemonic ideologies can negate, devalue, and deny the contributions of youth voice. This study highlights how adult facilitators supporting youth researchers negotiate methodological tensions when the politics nested within oppressive structures converge with the ideals of CPAR. Using LatCrit methodology and employing affective labor theory, this qualitative study offers four counterstories interrogating the role of adult allies in CPAR, navigating the politics and perils of engaging in this work alongside minoritized students.

Back to Basics with Labor-Power

Ted Striphas recently called for a return to the “problem of culture” within cultural studies. This is a political as much as a methodological provocation: “culture” became an object of analysis among mid-twentieth century scholars in dialogue with Marxist accounts of ongoing political crises. Taking a cue from this past, this essay rethinks culture in relation to the ongoing crisis in social reproduction via Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). Within some Marxist feminist currents, “social reproduction” refers to the reproduction of labor-power, Marx’s term for the capacity to work sold on the market in exchange for wages. Marxist feminists have theorized such matters at length via their analyses of the practices undergirding the reproduction of labor-power. SRT is not unfamiliar to cultural studies scholars, but those engaged with it tend to explore the representation of socially reproductive practices within culture rather than the ways culture itself contributes to labor-power’s reproduction. This is unsurprising. Historically, the field has discussed labor-power in terms of its circulation rather than its reproduction, detailing culture’s role in reproducing social systems. Drawing upon Michael Denning’s “labor theory of culture,” recent work in SRT, and Marx, I argue that culture functions in a socially reproductive capacity within the logic of capitalism. In doing so, it casts cultural struggle as a form of social reproduction struggle at the intersection of labor-power’s reproduction and that of the society that requires it. This essay constructs a systematic account of culture’s socially reproductive before using it to consider its historical expression in the current moment.

Response to Moseley

In “A Marxian reply to Hahnel: The relative explanatory power of Marx’s theory and Sraffa’s theory,” Moseley begins by arguing that I misrepresent Marx. For any like myself, who believe that because we now have linear algebra, and the theorems of Frobenius and Perron to take advantage of, we are able to elaborate a better formal framework for understanding prices and income distribution in capitalism than was available during Marx’s time, the past fifty years has become a game of whack-a-mole: whenever anyone rebuts one particular defense of using a labor theory of value framework, a different variation rises in its place.

Endurance running as one of the factors of anthropogenesis

The goal of this research lies in the philosophical perspective on critical analysis of the hypothesis advanced by the American biologists Daniel Lieberman (Harvard) and Dennis Bramble (University of Utah) on endurance running as one of the most significant factors of anthropogenesis. The article determines its strong and weak sides, as well as cognitive potential for further research in the sphere of anthropology. The hypothesis under review correlates with other rationalistic and evolutionary concepts of anthropogenesis, being considered as a means for clarification and substantiation of their basic provisions. The key research methods are analysis and comparison. The acquired results complement the labor theory of anthropogenesis with modern interpretation of natural science data. The area of application of the research results is the philosophical anthropology and philosophy of sports. The novelty of this work consists in philosophical comprehension of endurance running as a component of pre-instrument collective labor activity of the ancestors of modern man, one of the prerequisites for the development of abstract thinking, as well as a means of youth initiation and team bonding, which balances the gender differences in the process of adulting and procuring food by primitive hunters.

Force of Invisible Hand, Labor, and Just Price: Basic Principles of Sorting and Matching Under Wage and Price Dispersion

If the consumer realistically evaluates the efficiency of his efforts on labor and search, the purchase any quantity demanded will be optimal. Under equilibrium price dispersion suboptimal satisfying purchases represent corner solutions. A buyer who does not claim the optimal purchase either leaves the market or buys optimally. The invisible hand stops the buyer’s search in time and at the place where and when the purchase price allocates his time optimally between labor, search, and leisure and thereby maximizes the utility of his consumption-leisure choice. The producer does not know how much time the consumer has spent on search and what is his willingness to pay. But it is enough for him to know the quantity demanded in order to accurately determine not only the price but also the meeting point. His working time is divided between the actual production and services, for example, the delivery of goods, which saves the consumer's leisure time. A virtual frontier of production possibilities arises where the manufacturer optimally sells goods and leisure to the consumer. Any point on the frontier represents the trade-off between the time spent on search by the consumer and the time spent by producer on the delivery. Sorting sellers and buyers by their industry and diligence, local markets segment the production opportunity frontier. The force of the invisible hand, i.e., the rate of mutual interest, is increasing with seller’s productivity and buyer’s wage rate. The matching occurs at the just price level, which provides the market equilibrium. This price optimizes the distribution of the buyer's time between labor, search, and leisure, and the seller’s time between production and delivery; it equates the producer’s marginal costs with his average cost and maximizes the buyer's consumption-leisure utility. In every local market, a just price also equates the seller’s markup with the actual buyer’s purchasing power. The concept of just price proposed in this article is consistent with both the theory of marginal utility and the labor theory of value.The transformation of producer’s time into consumer’s leisure time discovers the rate of their mutual interest or their gravitation, where its force is directly proportional to the product of quantity supplied and quantity demanded, and inversely proportional to the product of times the parties to the transaction have spent on it.

Crítica a la teoría neo-ricardiana (y clásica) del valor

The marginalist and subjectivist revolution led by Carl Menger during the second half of the nineteenth century turned Economics into a science. However, classical value theory did not completely fade away and it has been trying continiously to replace subjetivist theory. The most serious and exhaustive attempt to recover classical value theory in its Ricardian version was the one developed by the italian economist Piero Sraffa. This article seeks to rebut the neo-Ricardian theory of value, while vindicating the Austrian theory of value, even inside the constrains of the former. Key words: Piero Sraffa, Neo-Ricardianism, Value Theory, Subjetivism, Mar-ginalism, Labor Theory. JEL Classification: B24, B51, D46, E43. Resumen: La revolución marginalista y subjetivista liderada por Carl Menger durante la segunda mitad del s. XIX sentó las bases para que la economía pudiera considerarse realmente una ciencia. Sin embargo, la teoría clásica del valor nunca terminó de desaparecer de la escena y en sus muy diversas manifestaciones siguió intentando sobreponerse a la teoría subjetivista. El intento más serio y exhaustivo de resucitar la teoría clásica del valor en su versión ricardiana fue la del economista italiano Piero Sraffa. En este artí-culo se pretende refutar la teoría neorricardiana y reivindicar, incluso dentro de los presupuestos de esta última, la teoría austriaca del valor. Palabras clave: Piero Sraffa, Neorricardianismo, Teoría del Valor, Subjetivismo, Marginalismo, Valor Trabajo. Clasificación JEL: B24, B51, D46, E43.

Marginalism and Marxism: The first encounter

The paper discusses a critical episode in the history of economic thought of the 19th century — the first encounter between marginalism and Marxism. It happened in 1884, when Philip Wickstead published a short twenty-page text in the magazine of “scientific” socialism “To-Day” under the laconic title “Das Kapital: a Сriticism”. The paper briefly traces the creative path of Wickstead; considers the reasons that prompted him to make a stand against Marxism; analyzes his main criticisms; describes the reaction to them by his contemporaries (both professional economists and adherents of socialism) and evaluates the place of his work in the history of ideas. It is noted that Wicksteed’s article was not only the first encounter of marginalism with Marxism, but also the first popular exposituion of the theory of marginal utility (in the version of S. Jevons), which was completely new for that time. His criticism was radical in nature, since it was aimed not at revealing partial shortcomings, but at the complete collapse of the Marxist construction and its replacement with an alternative theoretical scheme. Amazingly, none of Marx’s supporters dared to accept Wickstead’s challenge and his criticism was never publicly contested by them. This seemingly inconspicuous event turned out to be of crucial historical significance. Under the influence of Wickstead, the Fabians rejected the labor theory of value and British socialism (in its main part) ceased to be Marxist forever.