Originally published for Jacobin. Ever since Robert Brenner published his essay “The Economics of Global Turbulence” in 1998, there has been a wide-ranging debate about his understanding of the period since the 1970s as a “long downturn.” Seth Ackerman and Aaron Benanav have recently been extending this debate in Jacobin. Some of the claims that Benanav puts forward in his reply to Ackerman, largely […]
Tag: Marx
The original post on Brave New Europe. The gig economy is often talked about as ‘the future of work’, but if we look at history we find that its wage model – paying per output, rather than per hour – actually goes back hundreds of years. In the 19th century, this was called ‘piece wages’, […]
Technological change is often be viewed as an exogenous force, a deus ex machina “outside the domain of economic theory” (Schumpeter 1911:11), or an endogenous force, subordinate to the institutional régulation of capitalism (Gentili et al. 2020; Montalban et al. 2019; Spencer 2017). Drawing on neo-Schumpeterian and régulation theory, this paper sublates these antithetical positions to form an alternative approach that re-examines the […]
Cloudwork is absorbing an increasing proportion of the world’s labour and has been significantly boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic (ILO, 2021). We use cloudwork to refer to remotely performed labour mediated by digital labour platforms – companies that connect workers with clients through a digital interface, exert control over and extract value through the labour process […]
On the Trade Union Congress’ (TUC, 2019) 15th annual ‘Work Your Proper Hours Day’, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady asserted, ‘It’s not okay for bosses to steal their workers’ time’, pointing to the chronic theft of workers’ time and money in the United Kingdom (UK). Over five million UK workers laboured a total of two […]
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The Wage Theft Epidemic
Originally published for Tribune. Every society with a concept of property also has a concept of theft. They are mutually constitutive, as Proudhon argued in 1840. To privatise public land is a form of theft; to alienate an object from its rightful owner is a form of theft; to plagiarise another person’s idea is a […]
See Novara for the original. In 2013, the academics Carl Frey and Michael Osbourne predicted that up to 47% of American jobs were at high risk of automation over the next two decades. Their paper provoked automation hysteria, reflected in pronouncements of the “second machine age”, “fourth industrial revolution” and “industry 4.0”. Seven years on, the reality […]
Image Credit Chris Koch Reposted from Salvage Quarterly According to the speculations of techno-futurologists, left and right, the machines are here to liberate us. Most of the discourse is dominated by the neoliberal right such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and Andrew Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England. Their arguments, avoiding questions […]
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A Note on Fieldwork
A key element of the fieldwork involves the contrasting narratives of management and workers with regard to conflict and cooperation in the workplace. Through exploring contrasting accounts between workers and mangers at the sectorial level, I will be able to articulate the politics of ‘service’ production in the workplace. From the data, I hope to be […]
Currently, there is resurgence in scholarship on Marxian conceptions of value. However, much of the discourse has remained within the realms of heterodox economics, political economy, and philosophy. I would like to set out a new line of inquiry, which shifts the aims of this research from the abstract and quantitative toward the concrete and qualitative. Following this line, we will investigate aspects […]
Matthew Cole 