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Marxists often link the emergence of finance capital to developments in the categories of capital, such as flight to money capital, sometimes associated with changes in the organic composition of capital. While not disputing the importance of transformations in capitalist categories, this paper examines the causal role of working-class agency in the emergence of finance capital. The paper addresses finance capital in Britain, giving due consideration to a variety of causal factors cementing its dominance. It then considers the role of labour unrest in developing a working class in itself, gravitating towards and away from political expressions (syndicalism, social democracy) in pursuance of its immediate economic struggles. The overall argument is that the emergence of finance capital in the parasitic form it took in Britain was fundamentally a response to the power of a working class in itself. Parasitism became the default trend to control the working class and prevent any potential movement towards a working class for itself from gaining hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a critical assessment of David Harvey's perspectives on Marxism this paper examines current developments in dialectical materialism that offer alternative possibilities for class-based movements struggling to overcome neoliberal policies around the world. My objective is to show that, despite his self-declared Marxism, Harvey's version of Marxism remains tethered to the prevailing bourgeois logic of fetish-forms and fails to provide us with a sufficient description for the organization of a new form of class struggle appropriate for the 21st century. Methodologically situated within the wider context of Western Marxism, this paper juxtaposes two versions of how Marxist dialectics can be evaluated: the work of Louis Althusser, which in my view Harvey follows, and the Open Marxist path that I regard as closer to what Marx had in mind in his interpretation of social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates Marx's contribution to a theory of money and assesses its implications for an understanding of contemporary capitalism. It is argued that Marx viewed commodity-money as the essence of money, and that central to this essence was the antagonism between capital and labour. The article takes issue with Neo-Marxist interpretations of Marx which emphasize the symbolic nature of money and the rational calculative aspects of capitalism in place of the connection between commodity-money, symbolic forms of money and the class struggle. Finally, it provides an outline of how one might draw on Marx's work to further an understanding of the modern economy, where symbolic forms of money have displaced commodity-based money in the circulation and reproduction of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the postwar period, a set of transient historical conditions gave rise to many of the policies that came to define modern labour legislation, constituting the crowning achievement of working class economic and political power in Europe and North America. However, the conflicting claims of capital and labour to the social product came to a head by the 1970s as profit margins began to decline across the board. Capital's opposition, previously tolerated and disguised by the relatively high living standards, intensified in the form of state-led attacks on labour's postwar gains. The class struggle from above saw the whole spectrum of extra-market protections extracted from the system by workers placed in the crosshairs of capital. While they were necessary to its reproduction, capital was inclined not to pay for any of it if it could possibly help it. Central to capital's all-out offensive was the roll back of union rights, occupational health and safety regulations, workers' compensation and unemployment insurance. In Canada, the Harper years were largely a continuation of earlier decades of this class war and retrenchment of labour legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of labour standards is at one and the same time the history of the formation and struggles of the modern working class. However, at every stage of their development there have been contradictory tendencies towards regulation and deregulation, reflecting the conflict of interest between capital and labour over the distribution of the share of total value created. Labour standards and the accumulation process are contradictory in principle, and so the development of labour standards can in one sense be seen as the legislative and ideological expression of this centuries-old conflict between capital and labour in which both sides have had different degrees of economic and political leverage to advance their respective interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world economy is in a Long Depression. However, world capitalism will not stay in this depressed state. Eventually, probably after another slump that will destroy more capital values (the value of means of production, fictitious capital and employment), profitability for those that survive will rise sufficiently to start an upwave in investment and growth. This assumes, of course, that the class struggle does not lead to the forces of labor triumphing over capital in any major economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period of economic and political crises that began with the Wall Street crash in 2007 in many ways resembles the conditions of global capitalism at the time Rosa Luxemburg published her Accumulation of Capital. This article argues that Luxemburg's political economy entails the theoretical tools necessary to understand capitalist development since the early 20th century and that capitalism indeed faces as great a crisis as it did at that time. Amended by ideas from long wave theory and Polanyi's concept of a great transformation, the article analyzes the subsequent Keynesian and neoliberal waves of accumulation and the crises that led from on to the other. It concludes that no further capitalist expansion is readily possible at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neoliberal project for globalisation is characterised by two interlocking characteristics of economic liberalism imposed through an imperialist agenda. The global epidemic of HIV/AIDS can act as a model to show how neoliberal policies have been responsible for the unprecedented explosive spread of the disease, through its effect on income inequality, regional wars, women and the sex trade, mass migration, the 'brain drain' and the global drug trade. The implementation of neoliberal policies such as privatisation of health services and intellectual property rights by the World Bank, IMF and the WTO also severely inhibit our ability to control the biggest epidemic since the plague. The physical debilitation of large numbers of people in their productive and reproductive age inevitably effects the class struggle in many countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]