The case for Agrarian capitalism: A response to albritton

Albritton finds Brenner's designation ‘agrarian capitalism’ inappropriate for early English agriculture, as the law of value and the commodification of labour are undeveloped. But Brenner is not theorising a ‘full‐blown’ capitalism. His theory traces a process of transition, by which new rules for social reproduction and a new capitalist logic unfolded gradually. Albritton's evidence, moreover, actually supports Brenner's thesis. Charges of class reductionism misconstrue Brenner's efforts to overcome the tendency to dichotomise society into political and economic spheres. Brenner's theory provides what the bourgeois paradigm does not: a logical explanation of how market dependency and capitalist classes emerged.     

Non‐capitalist relations of production in capitalist society: The khammessat in Southern Tunisia ∗

The khammessat is one of the most ancient social institutions regulating agricultural labour in the Magrheb. This article seeks to answer three questions: (1) What is the nature of the relationship between agricultural labour and landowner in a society dominated by a non‐capitalist mode of production? (2) What was the impact of capitalism on such labour relations? (3) Is there any possibility of the development, within the khammessat system, of a labour organisation and the demand for rights?     

sexual freedom and the promise of revolution: Emma Goldman’s passion

This article explores the contributions to a history of sexuality, capitalism and revolution made when we consider the work of anarchist thinker and activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940). I suggest that Goldman's centring of sexual freedom at the heart of revolutionary vision and practice is part of a long tradition of sexual politics, one which struggles to make sense of how productive and reproductive labour come together, and to identify the difference between sexual freedom and capitalist opportunity. Goldman's concern with the significance of kinship in holding together capitalism, militarism and religion, as well as sexual feeling's capacity to disrupt those relationships, echoes across more than a century to resonate with Marxist, feminist and queer scholars' engagements with similar issues. But where contemporary scholars often tend to retain the opposition between culture and society, representation and the real, making it difficult to produce a materialist analysis of sexuality as transformative rather than always already overdetermined, Goldman's energetic insistence on sexual connectivity as freeing provides an important vantage point. Not only does Goldman consistently situate sexuality in a broad political context of the sexual division of labour, the institutions of marriage and the church, consumerism, patriotism and productive (as well as reproductive) labour, she frames sexual freedom as both the basis of new relationships between men and women, and as a model for a new political future.     

Capitalism obscured: the limits of law and rights-based approaches to poverty reduction and development

The Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP) was established by the United Nations in 2005 and concluded in 2008. Although inspired by Hernando de Soto's analysis of the role of property rights in economic development, the scope of the Commission was defined as ‘legal empowerment’ in general. This commentary offers a critique of the CLEP report, and argues that its underlying assumptions rest on an idealised version of liberal democratic capitalism in which a dynamic market economy assures ‘win-win’ solutions for all. This implies that there are no tensions between the four ‘pillars’ of legal empowerment identified by CLEP (the rule of law, property rights, labour rights, and business rights). However, in the real world of capitalism, in both democratic and authoritarian versions, there are structural tensions between classes of capital and classes of labour, which result in the economy and its underlying institutional order becoming a key site of contestation. The case of farm labour in rural South Africa is used to illustrate this argument. A focus on legal rights can, however, be ‘empowering’ to a degree, when it helps defend poor people from exploitation and abuse, or is located within broader strategies to eradicate systemic poverty.     

The landless rural workers movement (MST) in Brazil

This translation of the 1912 preface by Karl Kautsky to Salvioli's book about captalism in the ancient world confirms the centrality to his interest of the way in which economic history informs the present and maps out the future. It reveals a concern not only with pre-capitalist and capitalist systemic transition but also economic development in turn prefigures socialism. Accordingly, kautsky's focus is on the connections between yet the distinictiveness of historically specific modes of production, their forms of property and propertylessness, and the links between production for consumption and for exchange, plus the resulting patterns both of the social relations and the forces of production and of surplus appropriation licensed thereby. For Kautsky, therefore, the value of understanding the economic conditions preceding capitalism itself, and thus also the reasons for its transcendence.     

Capitalism and Bonded Labour in India: Reinterpreting Recent (Re-) Interpretations

Examined here is the way the link between capitalism and bonded labour has been interpreted and reinterpreted in the debate over the past half century about rural development in India. A number of those who initially equated debt bondage with a pre-capitalist production relation, and dismissed arguments that unfree labour and accumulation were compatible, changed their minds and espoused the interpretation they had previously opposed. Among the resulting errors perpetuated by more recent entrants to this debate is a misinterpretation of Marxist theory about both relational and systemic transition. The ensuing confusion has prevented them from understanding either the genesis of the debate about the role of unfreedom in advanced capitalism, or why – in the form of deproletarianisation – bonded labour currently serves the ends of the agribusiness enterprise.     

Agrarian capitalism: A response to Michael Zmolek

While Brenner's theory of ‘agrarian capitalism’ with its emphasis on class struggle provides the best starting point for understanding the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the theory is not without flaws. The flaws mostly stem from the lack of a determinant theory of precisely what capitalism is in its inner most logic. Marx's Capital as reconstructed by Sekine [1997] provides such a theory, and if we are clear that the theory of capital's inner logic is a theory of pure capitalism, then it follows that this logic is never more than partially in command at the level of history. Such a theory implies not only a careful analysis of the degree to which labour power was commodified and the degree to which ‘relative surplus value’ was in force, but also it would mean considering other important elements of capital's inner logic both inside and outside the agrarian sector so as not to overstate the capitalist character of agriculture nor its particular causal efficacy in the rise of capitalism.     

Wage labour and capitalism: a comparative and historical analysis of Eritrea and Kenya

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain the development of capitalism in Eritrea and Kenya from a labour history perspective. Indeed, the assumption in this research is that capitalism can only be explained by taking into consideration free wage labour as one of the sine qua non conditions for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, the article looks at the paradigmatic socio-economic shifts: from unfree to free labour, from free to precarious labour and from unfree to precarious labour. These are the result of the complicated relationship that exists between capital and labour. The point of departure of the analysis is the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis on the structural origins of slavery, which despite severe criticism, it has been largely remained unchallenged until the present. In Eritrea, colonised by Italy, and Kenya, colonised by England, free wage labour fully developed between the nineteenth and twentieth century. This could be considered the era of the advent of capitalism, with the advent, for a fraction of the working population, of labour relations based on wages. The precarisation of life of free wage workers is also partially analysed in this article.     

Food regimes and the production of value: Some methodological issues

In critically re-examining the concept of food regime this article argues for an alternative formulation thatposits the concept on the foundation of the theory of value, rather than the developmentalist framework of the regulation theory within which it was originally posed. This is possible because while the insights of food regime analysis were rooted in a world historical perspective on global value relations, its presentation always subordinated the latter to the more abstract stage theory of the regulation school. Disentangled from regulationism, the concept of food regime is central for a labour-oriented perspective on imperialism as a relation of production embedded in global value relations. This is part of a broader methodological critique that locates the problematic of development (and consumption, in the postdevelopmentalist era) within the discourses of bourgeois modernity (and postmodernity) and seeks to differentiate these from the problematic of labour and labour emancipation. The article addresses the problem of a conflation of theory and history in connection with a developmentalist/positivist reading of Marx, and suggests 'global value relations', 'global working day', 'global worker', as world historically informed concepts that capture the 'unity of the diverse'. Global value relations include the politics of state relations, the world market, colonization and imperialism, and the (often geographically segregated) labour regimes of production of relative and absolute surplus value. The latter is posed as a contemporary relation of neo-liberal capitalism involving (postmodern) over-consumption on the one hand and (still modern) forced under-consumption on the other hand. 'World hunger amidst global plenty' is an expression of these relations.     

近年来发达资本主义国家“四天工作制”运动的理论与实践

“四天工作制”即一周工作 4 天或 32 小时的工时制度。从 2015 年到 2022 年，在世界经济疲软 衰退和新冠疫情全球大流行的背景下，欧洲、大洋洲、北美洲、亚洲的主要发达资本主义国家都在不同程度上实 施了以“四天工作制”为代表的缩短工作时间的试验。“四天工作制”运动的组织和研究者也从经济、劳资关系、 社会三方面提出了理论主张。“四天工作制”运动本质上是资本主义国家和企业通过缩短工时的手段，应对资 本主义经济困境的举措，一定程度上面临着后劲不足、易于反复的困境。“四天工作制”运动对我国具有两点启示： 其一，应完善劳动关系三方协商协调机制，提高劳动者议价能力，稳步降低劳动时间，维护劳动者合法权益；其二， 在未来继续缩短工作时间的问题上应警惕发达资本主义国家设置的“缩短工作制陷阱”。     

Colonial labour,Tawdenni and ‘L’enfer du sel’: the struggle from slave to free labour in a Saharan salt mine

Abstract

Can we understand the arrival of Capitalism in Africa by tracking labour – from unfree to free, from slave to wage? The question supposes slavery to lie at its heart, yet the conversation between labour and slave studies is in early stages. The sources are problematic: the colonial ‘language of labour’ was often political rhetoric camouflaging ongoing forms of slavery. Then, there was the question of how the metropole-incorporated colonies into its economy: French West Africa’s sun and sand offered few economic resources. One was salt. The Niger Bend economy depended on Tawdenni, a desert salt mine controlled by Saharans and exploited by their slaves. In 1910, it was predicted that the French abolition of slavery would spell the end of Tawdenni: “Never will a man from the South – unless a slave – give himself to this work”; what, therefore, was to be done? The paper challenges the view that engagement with colonial capitalism necessarily led directly or even inevitably from slavery to wage labour by exploring how Tawdenni’s servile labour system responded to French colonial attempts to combine political abolition and economic sustainability.     

The Feminisation of Finance

Abstract

This article focuses on recent reconfigurations of the home as a space of financial calculation and speculation that requires new kinds of domestic labour. It considers the 2008 financial crisis, but redirects the analysis towards the ordinary and normalised presence of financial capitalism at the level of domesticity, home-life and the everyday ‘calculative agencies’ which households are now regularly called on to perform. It also examines the constitution of ‘women’ as a target group for personal financial products and services, and addresses the various strategies that promote financial inclusion as a means to secure individual responsibility, autonomy and entrepreneurial consumer participation in a financialised ownership society. The article argues that this feminisation of finance suggests a considerable challenge to received understandings of the relationships between gender and economy, production and reproduction, and life and labour.     

Obstacles to the development of a capitalist agriculture

This paper examines some of the reasons for the maintenance and persistence of family labour farms within agricultural sectors of advanced capitalist countries: some obstacles to the development of a capitalist agriculture are highlighted.

The survival of family farms has called into question Marx's theory of the transitional nature of petty commodity production; hence, Marxism is generally regarded as being unable to account for the viability of family farms. Two theories commonly advanced to explain this phenomenon are examined and found to be inadequate.

This paper suggests that a closer examination of Marx's writings reveals how the peculiar nature of the productive process in certain spheres of agriculture is incompatible with the requirements of capitalist production and, therefore, makes these spheres unattractive for capitalist penetration. Here the implications of Marx's distinction between production time and labour time for the development of a capitalist agriculture are discussed. Specifically, the non‐identity of production time and labour time characteristic of certain agricultural commodities is shown to have an adverse effect on the rate of profit, the efficient use of constant and variable capital, and the smooth functioning of the circulation and realisation process. It is concluded that the reason for the persistence of family farms is not to be found in the capacity of family labour for self‐exploitation, nor in the application of technology per se; rather the secret of this ‘anomaly’ lies in the logic and nature of capitalism itself.     

华中根据地妇女的劳动习惯与家庭地位

华中根据地妇女较多地参与生产劳动的原因首先是与当地的经济结构和妇女的劳动习惯有关。其次是资本主义和商品经济的发展也造成了对劳动力的需求旺盛。再次是地狭人稠的人口分布状况也迫使男性劳动力寻求家庭以外的收入谋生,从而使女性替代了部分男性劳动。虽然妇女广泛参与生产劳动对改善其家庭地位有一定作用,但与其对家庭的贡献并不相称。     

A farewell to urban/rural bias: peripheral finance capitalism in Mexico

Based on a discussion of the structural transformation of the Mexican economy, this paper investigates the impact of financialization on agriculture’s role in capitalist development. It argues that the peripheral financialized economy is a rural–urban economy. On the one hand, agriculture and industry are bifurcated into a growing export sector and a stagnating local economy, and there are no functional ‘developmental’ links between capitalist agriculture and industry. On the other hand, the economic structures have resulted in the consolidation of a huge mass of rural–urban ‘classes of labour’. Capitalist agriculture and industry are linked through and dependent on cheap labour sustaining the export economy. I argue that the current economic formation is not due to ‘urban bias’, ‘rural bias’ or any misallocation of resources among economic sectors. Rather, it can be explained in relation to ‘finance bias’: the taking over of debt relations as the key driving force of economic activities. A major contradiction in peripheral finance capitalism arises from the financing of cheap labour through debt. This is likely to result in new financial crisis, when the contradictions between increasing levels of (private and public) debt, a stagnating domestic economy, and below-subsistence level wages become too large.     

There is nothing simple about simple commodity production

This essay offers a theoretical rethinking of simple commodity production that avoids two extreme notions of capitalism: one which readily embraces all relations of production found in the pervasive world system, and another which produces a rigidly eroded model to which everything else is externally articulated. It is argued that some specific forms of SCP can be treated as variations of capitalism integral to its polymorphous logic, and therefore as subjected, under determinate conditions, to a flexibly defined process of labour's subordination (formal and real) to capital. Self‐employed labour is also re‐examined in the light of (a) the basic exigencies of capital accumulation, (b) the contradictions inherent to capitalism, especially those pertaining to the confrontation between intraverted and extroverted economies, and (c) the active struggle of all working classes against their total dispossession from commodified wealth.     

The dynamics of rural poverty in Latin America

The development and perpetuation of a functional dualism between the subsistence sector and the commodity‐producing sector is an objective outcome of the laws of capital accumulation in the periphery of the world capitalist system. The necessity for this dualism derives from the drive of capitalists to maximise profits and thus maintain low wages. Its possibility arises from social disarticulation whereby labour's income does not participate in expanding the market for the modern sector. Through dualism, surplus value is increased not only by the orthodox means of central economies—principally increasing the productivity of work to reduce necessary labour embodied in wage goods—but, in addition, and dramatically more effectively, by collapsing the price of agricultural labour by an amount equal to the production of use‐values by the worker's family in the subsistence plot. In this way, subsistence agriculture supplies cheap labour to commercial agriculture which, in turn, supplies cheap food to the urban sector where it sustains low wages. Socially disarticulated accumulation and functional dualism between capitalist and precapitalist modes perpetuate primitive accumulation in the modern sector based on surplus extraction from the peasant sector fundamentally via the labour market. This specific form of overexploitation of rural labour implies a particular dynamic in the use of labour and natural resources in subsistence agriculture. The pattern of rural poverty and the subjective contradictions of peripheral capitalism can thus largely be understood by identifying the antagonistic contradictions to which the subsistence economy is subject in adjusting to domination.     

The theory of unequal ecological exchange: a Marx-Odum dialectic

A world-system analysis of the ecological rift generated by capitalism requires as one of its elements a developed theory of the unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery. After reviewing the literature on unequal exchange (both economic and ecological) from Ricardo and Marx to the present, a new approach is provided, based on a critical appropriation of systems ecologist Howard Odum's emergy (spelled with an m) analysis. Odum's contribution offers key elements of a wider dialectical synthesis, made possible in part by his intensive studies of Marx's political-economic critique of capitalism and by Marx's own theory of metabolic rift.     

Performance Anxieties

Drawing on the narratives of 23 un(der)employed trans women residing in Ontario, British Columbia, Canada and Washington State in the USA, this article explores the connections between affect, gender and labour in post-Fordist society. Post-Fordism is characterised in part by the putting to work of immaterial labour. Workers' whole personalities are harnessed to produce value for capital through evoking feelings of satisfaction, security and contentment amongst consumers. While women's employment rates have increased dramatically within post-Fordism, I argue that trans women's experiences of marginalisation within and expulsion from the workplace points to the narrow parameters of femininity deemed capable of producing such positive feelings. Trans women's visible, audible and behavioural cues of gender alterity lend insight into criteria that position some women employable and others disposable.     

劳动者举报行为和忠诚义务的冲突与协调 —— 比较法的启示与中国法的完善

劳动者通过举报用人单位的违法行为，可以减少监管成本，保护社会公共利益；然而，这种行 为却违反其所应该负的忠诚义务。因此，只有明晰两者之间的边界，鼓励与规范劳动者举报行为，才可以既保 护社会公共利益，又不至用人单位遭受经济损失。在比较发达国家对劳动者举报行为与忠诚义务相关规定的基 础上，研究认为，应该通过规定劳动者举报行为的合法性要件，明确劳动者忠诚义务来化解其举报行为和忠诚 义务的冲突。此外，应该通过改善对劳动者举报的奖励制度和制定举报救济措施来激励和保障其举报行为。