Search

This essay brings together J. K. Gibson-Graham’s diverse-economies framework and Kalyan Sanyal’s postcolonial capitalist development to unpack the heterogeneous economic processes of clay idol making practice in the Kumartuli neighborhood of Kolkata, India. This craft is rapidly getting transformed through state sanctions and corporate funding. Consequently, scholars have identified this encounter as this craftwork’s exposure to and absorption within capitalism. This essay unconventionally reads the differences within Kumartuli’s seemingly capitalist modes of production to make legible the absence of alternative discourses, thereby teasing out regimes of enterprises, coexisting class processes, and noncapitalist labor relations within a wage-labor setup. The paper examines the financial sector's sponsorship and the postcolonial state's development-driven governmentality, yet at the same time, identifies how they do not fully enroll the sector within capitalist production logic. Craft workers’ and women owner-artisans’ mundane counterhegemonic politics, which claims socio-economic justice, is seen as disrupting the processes of the accumulation economy.

Struggles over dignity and dignity denial are a central facet of class struggles and other struggles under capitalism. Marxist theory, however, has not developed an adequate understanding of dignity denial or of struggles against it as a crucial part of capitalism and its dialectic. This paper discusses dignity denial as inherent both in a society based on commodity production for profit and also in the political, ideational, and social implications of capitalist production. It shows how struggles against such dignity denial are also inherent in capitalism. Finally, the paper suggests that an enhanced appreciation for and theorization of dignity denial and the struggles around it can help when framing issues for concrete conflict situations and can also help the development of firmer and better visions of a future socialism. Fil: Friedman, Sam. No especifica; Fil: Rossi, Diana Graciela. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Instituto de Investigaciones ; Argentina Fil: Ralón, Gonzalo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Instituto de Investigaciones ; Argentina

Management knowledge and practice is a powerful intermediary regime that orchestrates societywide political, cultural, and class processes. As a field, Postmodern Class Analysis paid little attention to management knowledge and practices. This paper shows how closer linkages with the field of Critical Management Studies might support the development of such analysis. The paper also outlines how Critical Management Studies might reconnect with class in surplus terms.

This paper seeks to understand globalization as a new paradigm. It recognizes that there is much about the discourse of globalization that is ideological, that seeks to cover up the detrimental consequences of globalization for the majority of the world's population. It suggests nevertheless that there may be much to be gained from viewing it as a new paradigm, albeit a contradictory one, that has replaced an earlier paradigm of modernization. It makes an analytical distinction between globalization as historical process, which is at least as old as the history of capitalism, if not older, and globalization as a new way of looking at the world and its past, which is quite novel. To illustrate its argument, the paper contrasts present-day political and intellectual consequences of globalization with the late nineteenth-century, where several observers have identified a level of economic globalization greater than that of the present. It argues that whereas earlier globalization produced nationalism, colonialism and epistemological universalism, globalization presently is postcolonial, challenges the nation-state, and is marked by a break-down of universalism. It follows that globalization needs to be understood not just as global integration, as suggested by its ideologues and in economistic interpretations, but equally importantly as a new mode of fragmentation. An analytical distinction between globalization as process and paradigm is necessary to grasping globalization as a new mode of comprehending the world, but it is nevertheless necessary from a critical perspective to keep in mind the historical relationship between the two; globalization may be viewed as a new beginning in breaking down old hegemonies, but globalization may be viewed also as the ultimate victory of capitalist modernity. The contradictoriness may be perceived in the epistemologies of postmodernism and postcolonialism. The paper suggests that these epistemologies are best grasped as symptoms of globalization, that seek to break with modern and colonial ways of knowing, and yet are stamped by those very legacies. The discussion turns, by way of conclusion, to the relationship between globalization and history. While globalization is best understood historically, it also has produced new ways of looking at history. Three modes are selected here as products of globalization: world history writing, which is consciously motivated at the present by the idea of globalization, and seeks to understand the past in nonEurocentric ways, but may be understood also as a mode of containing the break-down of universalism; and two different perspectives on the "end of history" as we have known it. First, a EuroAmerican perspective that sees in the end of universalism (and the crowding of the past with incompatible and incommensurate cultural claims) also the end of history. Second, a conscious challenge to history as a modern way of knowing in the name of "alternatives to history." The paper concludes that these conflicts over history, too, point to the present as both an end, and a possible new beginning-but only as a possibility.

This paper connects a stylistic hallmark of Marx's work—a dramatic antipathy to imitation and copying—to his rejection of the epistemology of likeness or “harmony” in French romantic social Utopian thought. A space of the common without social mimesis—not just representation and imitation but competitive appropriation, likeness-based equality, social unity, cultivated resemblance, and so on—is in some ways paradoxical. But Marx upholds a vision of the common as collision, foreshadowing Althusser's notion of aleatory materialism, through a discourse of the atom. He moves from atheistic Epicurean models of abstract individuality and opposition to false universalism, to Hegelian ideas of the disaggregated atoms of political class activity, to a rejection of Buonarroti's ambition to harness self-seeking atoms in the collectivity, to a championing of real rather than ideal collisions. Acutely aware of social mirroring processes in the paradigm of the fetishism of the commodity, Marx puts the Lucretian “uproari...

Drawing upon Peter Ives’s book Gramsci’s Politics of Language, this article examines the linguistic origins of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. This is then compared with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus, with a particular focus on how the two theories conceptualize social change. Ives shows that Gramsci understood language standardization as either democratic or repressive, depending on the nature of the standardization process. Ives uses this to argue that the opposite of repressive hegemony is not the absence of hegemony but a progressive hegemony grounded in democratic processes. While Bourdieu’s emphasis on social reproduction over social change makes his work less useful for conceptualizing such a progressive hegemony, this paper argues that his theory of symbolic capital (including linguistic capital) offers us a unique insight into the obstacles faced by agents of progressive social change and, in so doing, sheds light on the limitations of Gramsci’s approach.

The paper extends our previous class analysis of the household and family life to include children, interactions between class structures of households and enterprises, struggles over the family budget, and father’s household labor. Analysis show how the good and bad of family life are connected to class. JEL Categories

The qualifications for employment within the modern microelectronic-based, automated systems can be understood as a negation of the Marxist claim that work would come to demand less skill as technology developed. This paper attempts to criticize this interpretation by seeking the work-deskilling concept in the writings of Marx himself. The result is the proposition that that which is observed in the modern factory—that is, the radical dispensability of living work—really mirrors work deskilling according to Marx. The more usual idea of work deskilling, attributed erroneously to Marx, is in reality Smithian in nature. Based on this analysis, a critical analysis is made of Labor and Monopoly Capital by Braverman, which has become accepted as the definitive interpretation of the ideas of Marx on the subject. The sole cause for confusion arising from equating the Marxist and Smithian analyses concerning technology and work should be attributed to an incorrect understanding of Taylorism and Fordism. Here we pr...