Search

This paper analyzes the nature of capitalism by critically employing Marx’s comments in Capital on forms of subsumption of labor. It argues that to the extent that property owners employ wage laborers to produce for the market for a profit, they are capitalist, even if they may not reinvest their profit in technology. In this situation, wage-labor is formally subsumed under capital. The transition from this stage to real subsumption of labor, which signifies capitalist development with technological change, is not, however, automatic, as Marx tended to assume. It is mediated by class struggle, which occurs in the context of geographically varying factors, such as state interventions. Uneven development, seen as the uneven transition to real subsumption, is partly a product of place-specific outcomes of class struggle. The paper thus emphasizes the relation between class struggle and dynamics of capitalism including technological change. The conceptual arguments are illustrated with empirical evidence from India. The implications of the arguments for radical development theory and politics are also briefly explored.JEL classification: P16, O53, O14, B24 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contrary to his theoretical expectations, Veblen provided various reasons as to why a revolutionary overturn by the technicians was a remote possibility in America. In contrast to the American engineers, the engineers of Turkey have constructed an engineering outlook commensurate with Veblen's abstract line of reasoning and participated in a political struggle against business interests. In this paper, using Veblen's cumulative causation methodology, a theoretical answer for the origin, growth, persistence, and variation of the anti-business engineering outlook in Turkey is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jim Crotty was a beloved teacher and mentor and a treasured colleague at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In this short essay, we try to convey Jim's enormous contributions to his students, colleagues, and friends, and to the development and reproduction of heterodox macroeconomic theory and practice. JEL Classification: B4, B5, E [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vast majority of analyses on precarious labor depart from a sense of exception, either in the 1970s and 1980s or from the financial crisis of 2007–8, where a stable (stable, regulated, unionized) pattern of work levels would cease to be the preponderant factor for the proliferation of a new precarious norm. This reduction of the precariousness of labor leads to a series of misconceptions that prevent the understanding of the new forms and particularities of the processes of domination and exploitation of capitalist sociability at the turn of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the received wisdom on the value of labor power that posits the workers' material reproduction and the class struggle as two independent factors that determine the bundle of wage-goods consumed by the working class. It shows that this reading has no solid textual basis on Marx's writings. Furthermore, it argues that it rests on a problematic separation of the actual immanent unity between materiality and social form in the capitalist mode of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]