Search

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]

This paper introduces the notion of taste for teaching a subject, especially science, as a conceptual framework to analyse the aesthetics of teacher development as a lifelong process. We draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and John Dewey in order to account for how teachers distinguish admirable practices and, in doing so, distinguish themselves as inspiring professionals. In order to illustrate this framework, we report a narrative inquiry on the life story of Tomas, a white man nationally prized for his science teaching. This inquiry was inspired by sociological portraits recommended by Bernard Lahire. Results indicate how a practical disposition (as opposed to a theoretical one) played an important role in developing Tomas's individual taste for science teaching, producing a strong continuity between his early experiences as a masculine boy raised in a family of construction workers, on the one hand, and his later experiences as a biologist and a science teacher enacting inquiry-based activities. The significance of the findings for science education is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The progressive integration of Tunisia into the international capital market implies deep institutional and social transformations as well as the positioning of the country in the semi-periphery of the capitalist world-economy. From the mid-19th and during the twentieth century, the growing Tunisia's debt paved the way to a compulsory financial administration of the North African country by 1870. Likewise, this process favoured the development of a capitalist class, whose origins were both exogenous and endogenous, drawing its power from doing business with the global financial élites. Thus, we assist to the birth of a capitalist class with local and international interests, also called afterward compradors. Adopting an original comparative approach, this article shows that the integration of a country into the global economy, mainly when occurring through a growing foreign debt, paves the way not only to the birth of a local capitalist class drawing its power from the circulation of capital but also to the permanent positioning of the country in the semi-periphery of the capitalist world-economy. The access to the international capital markets, according to the rules of the controlling powers and elites, makes the indebted country less independent in its economic policy choices, thus modifying its class structure in favour of the new capitalist elites, and their interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illuminates the contemporary vitality of Lenin's theory of ideology. Since the collapse of Soviet socialism, some have attempted to dismiss Lenin's theory as anti-Marxist and lacking in critical power. More recent studies of the Marxist theory of ideology have neglected Lenin entirely. Contrastingly, this article argues that Lenin's theory of ideology remains relevant, albeit misunderstood. First, Lenin highlighted the class essence of ideology with unparalleled force and clarity. He emphasised that every ideology serves the power of a definite class. Second, Lenin clarified the role of ideology as a weapon in the class struggle. He urged the working class to use socialist ideology to further its interests and overthrow capitalism. Third, Lenin outlined the principles for engaging in the ideological struggle. He instructed Marxists on how to advance their ideas and defeat bourgeois ones. These insights remain indispensable for communists, a hundred years after Lenin's death in 1924. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the "colonial modernisation" thesis and its nationalist critique, the thesis of "colonial plunder" in the context of Korea. The two accounts have long been subject to politically charged disputes: while the former posits a causal link between Japanese colonialism and Korea's rapid industrialisation, the latter suggests that Korea's transition to capitalist development was blocked and distorted by Japanese colonialism. This article offers a critique of both accounts at the theoretical and historical levels. For a theoretical critique, it draws on the Marxist discussions of the notion of the "peculiarities" of national capitalism with reference to Britain and Germany. The article argues that both theses, by deriving the presumed ills or virtues of Korean capitalism from Japanese colonialism, assume the existence of a "normal" and "benign" path to capitalism and look at Korean capitalism and Japanese colonialism in isolation from the universal contradictions emanating from their being integral to the capitalist world-system. For a historical critique, this article assesses the dissolution of Chosŭn Korea at the turn of the twentieth century and the formation of the Korean capitalist class and shows that Korea's transition to capitalism was both an inherently global process and driven by violent class struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-Peoples Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) represents the most dramatic regional departure from neoliberalism under Latin America's pink tide, based on principles of anti-imperialism, mutual development, and barter exchange. Since 2015 however, trade and social programmes between member countries have deteriorated, while regional support for ALBA has declined. In order to account for the rise and relative fall of ALBA-TCP, this article mobilizes the theory of social property relations to trace the international, regional and national forces and structures that have shaped the development trajectory of the ALBA since its creation in 2004. It argues that ALBA's characteristics are principally constituted through concrete class formations, struggles and institutional resolutions that shape the pattern of ALBA's international relations. Ultimately, the contradictions of ALBA's social base with its uneven insertion into the broader international division of labour has created a series of tensions and roadblocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between economic and political realms by reference to the Marxist conception of the economy as the 'motor of history'. The discussion is framed through a recent debate around Cultural Political Economy (CPE) and its efforts to keep Marx's materialist premises without falling into economic reductionism, or 'bend the stick too far' into the opposite direction and fall into 'constructivism'. Despite the efforts to avoid said extremes, CPE have been criticised for being both reductionist and constructivist This piece will defend CPE against the above charges while also highlighting some unresolved tensions within the method. I will then propose ways to resolve said tensions as well as providing the means of extending the scope of CPE to deal with political issues going beyond the economic realm, without losing sights of their connections to regimes of accumulations and resulting material needs and grievances of various groups. I will argue that this further development is necessary to analyse an increasingly unpredictable political landscape where tribal enmities and xenophobic feelings are returning to mainstream politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I study the supermarket in Diamela Eltit's Mano de obra as a site of class struggle. Despite readings that see in the novel a representation of post-work society, several scholars have noted that Mano de obra can be productively read as a novel that explores the centrality of labour in present-day capitalism. In this article I suggest that Eltit's novel offers, at the level of form, a powerful reflection on labour exploitation as mediated by the sale and purchase of labour-power. I emphasise two processes that the novel registers in relation to the neoliberal working-day: the changes in the inward notation of time brought about by the expansion of the service industry, and the compenetration between the disciplinary practices of the workplace and the affective structures of the household. I conclude the essay by showing how the punctuation of the novel, in particular the overabundance in the use of parentheses, gives formal expression to the fundamental reality hidden behind the sale and purchase of labour-power: the dispossession of the worker from her own living body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]