Political Order and the Law of Labour
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... For a thorough attempt at a dialectical exposition of the economy and the state together seeKay andMott 1982, andReuten 2019. For economy and law, specifically, the old work by Evgeny Pashukanis is still valuable(Pashukanis 1978). ...
... of labour (employment) on the civilian population at home and abroad (Kay and Mott 1982;Neocleous 2000). Civic was not some philosophical ideal based on an abstract understanding of the public good; rather, to be civic was a virtue associated with those who owned, and aspired to own, property (Perelman 2000). ...
... Citizenship bestows the right to own property, including one's own labour power, and should not be seen as an antidote to economic exploitation. Citizens are the objects of administration as well as the bearers of rights (Kay and Mott 1982). To be civic is the epitome of liberal aspiration, which, during the period in which the civic ideal emerged, combined a toxic mix of "capitalism, European colonialism, slavery and 'race' ideology…complicit in racial tyranny, imperialism and class domination" (Seymour 2012, 271). ...
This article reviews an attempt to rejuvenate the concept of the civic university in the United Kingdom through the establishment of the Civic University Commission in 2018 by the UPP Foundation. This review is based on a critical appraisal of the concept of ‘civic’ on which the idea of the civic university relies. The review suggests another formulation for higher education: not the civic university but the university of the earth, built on a convergence of the social and natural sciences and Indigenous knowledges connected to world-wide progressive social movements and political struggles. The university of the earth supports an intellectual insurgency to deal with emergencies confronting humanity and the natural world.
... Had he written Capital only forty years later, the theory of relativity would have been to hand to provide a more adequate language for his thought, which was in advance of the science of his day.. Unfortunately the language of Marxism has not taken advantage of the theory of relativity, and for the most part has remained Newtonian, spiced with the imagery of geology (levels and fissures). (Kay and Mott, 1982, p.77). ...
... Karl Marx is describing a social world where subject and objects are compressed into each other in a space that ceases to be symmetrical. Just as Einstein forced physics to break with the conception of linear motion and the separation of energy (motion) from inertia (rest) and define a world in which forces acting at a distance across space from one object to another, force object and space-time where united in a single concrete formulation, whose structural principle was discontinuity; so too, within Marx's exposition of the production of surplus-value, the subjects and objects of property were compressed into each other by class struggle (Kay and Mott, 1982, pp.75-78). What makes the concept and reality of value so " cosmic " is that social science has no way of dealing with the concept of value as understood by Marx. ...
This paper generates a theory of social time based on Karl Marx's concept of socially necessary labour-time. In the process, it critiques mainstream sociological theories of time.
... A list for such projects has already been provided by Dyer-Witheford and includes: the establishment of new indices of well-being beyond monetised measures; the new capacities for democratic planning afforded by new technology; systems of income allocation outside of wage-labour; the development of peer-to-peer open source communications networks; research projects that seek to enrich critical political economy with ecological and feminist knowledges, and the formation of aesthetics and imaginaries adequate to the scope of what a progressive and sustainable humanity might become (2004: 90-1). In this way the pedagogy of excess becomes a learning process which promotes the creative capacity of people in accordance with their needs as social individuals (Kay and Mott 1982). ...
Until recently government policy in the UK has encouraged an expansion of higher education to increase participation and with an express aim of creating a more edu cated workforce. This expansion has led to competition between higher education institutions , with students increasingly positioned as consumers and institutions working to improve the extent to which they meet 'consumer demands'. Especially given recent government funding cuts, the most prevalent outlook in higher education today is one of business, forcing institutions to reassess the way they are managed and promoted to ensure maximum efficiency, sales and 'profits'. Students view the opportunity to gain a degree as a right, and a service which they have paid for, demanding a greater choice and a return on their investment. Changes in higher education have been rapid, and there has been little critical research into the implications. This volume brings together internationally comparative academic perspectives, critical accounts and empirical research to explore fully the issues and experiences of education as a commodity, examining: • the international and financial context of marketisation • the new purposes of universities • the implications of university branding and promotion • league tables and student surveys vs. quality of education • the higher education market and distance learning • students as 'active consumers' in the co-creation of value • changing student experiences, demands and focus. With contributions from many of the leading names involved in higher education including Ronald Barnett, Frank Furedi, Lewis Elton, Roger Brown and also Laurie Taylor in his journalistic guise as an academic at the University of Poppleton, this book will be essential reading for many. The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer offers a groundbreaking insight into the effects of government policy on the structure and operation of universities.
... Surplus-value is the lifeblood of capital, and the social energy (substance) of its many im/material forms (money, state, and so on). Capital is value-in-motion (Kay and Mott, 1982;Allman, 2000). The fundamental phenomena of capitalism are all on the move. ...
A paper presented at the PCET Staff / Student Seminar, University of Greenwich, Queen Anne's Palace, 30 Park Row, Greenwich, London, on 27th March 2000.
... The substance of this social universe is value (Neary, 2000a-b;Neary and Rikowski, 2000;Rikowski, 2000a). Capital is value in motion (Kay and Mott, 1982). Value is not a "thing". ...
This paper was prepared for the Birkbeck College Seminar Series on 'Marx, Individuals & Society' on 26th October 2000. It argues that transhumanists have avoided certain developments in contemporary society that indicate that humans are already transhuman to the extent that they are becoming 'human capital'. In this account, human capital is the capitalisation of humanity; the processes involved in humans becoming a form of capital, capital within the human. Thus, the notion of 'human capital' is far more horrific than any techno-scientific transformation of the human body.
... In the face of the injustices that characterise global society today, premised as it is upon the enforced separation of needs and capacities (Kay & Mott, 1982), should we seek to use information as one means of holding those above us to account? This stance is at the heart of the pamphlet To Speak Truth To Power (American Friends Service Committee, 1955), wherein the likes of Bayard Rustin promulgated the ethos of non-violent activism to a new postwar generation. ...
... Commonly, ownership is understood to take two forms. First, that of direct private ownership, where the worker is separated from owning the means of production and there is no separation between ownership and management (Kay 1982). Owner-managers have but one means to compete and the liquidation of the owner-manager's relationship to the entity is difficult and expensive. ...
Contemporary derivatives mark the development of capital and constitute a novel form of ownership. In abstracting from the object of ownership, the underlying asset, derivatives sever direct material ties be- tween the owner and property and, in doing, transform the capacities of ownership. is transformation is spatial, temporal and legal. is is signi cant for relations between borrowers and lenders, between the various participants in nancial markets, and, indeed, for the overarching institutional fabric of the politi- cal economy. However, one relatively neglected aspect of the transformations manifest through derivatives is the relationship between the scal state and nancial innovation. By recon guring the temporal, spatial and legal character of ownership derivatives present a substantive challenge to the tax collecting state. While scal systems are nationally bounded and inherently static, capital itself is unprecedentedly mobile, uid and fungible. In these terms, nancial derivatives not only challenge default conceptions of the o shore world in International Political Economy, which have predominantly focused on nationally variegated tax systems, but via abstraction recon gure the materiality of contemporary capitalism.
... 152 Kay and Mott, among others, suggest that collective bargaining agreements are de facto contracts, stating that there were no judgements on the issue until 1971. 153 The 1969 decision shows this is not the case. Likewise the Donovan Commission (1968) argued that 'collective agreements are not legally binding contracts' since the parties 'do not intend to make a legally binding contract and without both parties intending to be legally bound there can be no contract in the legal sense.' 154 The attempt in the 1971 Industrial Relations Act to make collective bargaining enforceable in law failed with the rest of that Act. ...
This book is a rethinking of the state-civil society distinction via a theoretical engagement with Hegel, Marx and Foucault and an attempt to apply the argument to developments in the British state between 1834 and 1932. In the process, the book develops the concept of 'political administration' as a way of thinking through the question of state and civil society.
The book can also be read as the embryonic form of later arguments I make concern the police power.
... value over-and-above that as represented by the value of labour-power that guarantees social reproduction of the worker (and is represented by the wage). Capital is value in motion (Kay and Mott, 1982). As John Holloway has noted, "capital moves" (1995) through its constant transformations into other forms of capital (money form, state form and so on) and also through its loops into the production of itself through further production cycles. ...
A paper presented at a Guest Lecture in Sociology of Education, The Gillian Rose Room, University of Warwick, Coventry. After a brief history of Marxist educational theory, the paper indicates how education and training in contemporary society are implicated in the social production of labour-power. Labour-power is unique in capitalist society as it is the only commodity capable of increasing value over-and-above its own creation, use and maintenance. Capital’s existence and expansion is founded upon the transformation of labour-power into labour in the capitalist labour process which generates commodities that incorporate value. It is argued that, as labour-power is under the sway of the labourer’s will whilst also nurturing value, it is therefore capital’s weakest link. However, education and training in capitalism can be viewed as seeking to constitute the labourer as capital; to integrate the human into capital as human capital. Resistance to this process indicates our social condition as being schizoid: we are labour and capital. The class struggle therefore flows through our being, our mode of existence. This applies to human representatives of capital as much as those representing labour; both representations exist side-by-side within us, in varying strengths which can change, sometimes rapidly. Radical educators can be viewed as living lives that are personal expressions of the contradictory nature of human existence in capitalist society.
... Capital is value in motion (Kay and Mott, 1982). As John Holloway has noted, "capital moves" (1995) through its constant transformations into other forms of capital (money form, state form and so on) and also through its loops into the production of itself through further production cycles. ...
This paper explores Marx's brief analysis of social class at the end of 'Capital' volume III, just before 'the manuscript broke off'. It argues against reducing 'social class' to Weberian and mainstream sociological notions of stratification. An alternative is to see the labour-capital relation, a category of struggle within capitalist society, as constituting the class relation.
... The ongoing process of abstraction (Kay and Mott 1982) is not an economic problem but an eminently political one, for we seek to reaffirm human life in a world ultimately dominated by a ghost. The struggle against the expansion of indifference entailed in the value form, that is, a struggle against an invisible enemy, is mediated, and fosters new social forms of the social existence of labour and its concrete utopias. ...
This book opens up a unique intellectual space where eleven female scholar-activists explore alternative forms of theorising social reality. These’Women on the Verge’ demonstrate that a new radical subject-one that is plural, prefigurative, decolonial, ethical, ecological, communal and democratic-is in the making, but is unrecognisable with old analytical tools. Of central concern to the book is the resistance of some social scientists, many of them critical theorists, to learning about this radical subject and to interrogating the concepts, methodologies and epistemologies used to grasp it. Echoing the experiential critique of capitalist-colonial society that is taking place at the grassroots, the authors examine how to create hope, decolonise critique and denaturalise society. They also address the various dimensions of the social (re)production of life, including women in development, the commons, and nature. Finally, they discuss the dynamics of prefiguration by social movements, critiquing social movement theory in the process. This thought-provoking edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, social, Marxist and Feminist theory, postcolonial studies and politics.
... As Barker describes, 34 In Barker and Dale, 1998. 35 Barker's other major contemporary sources include Fine, 1984;Kay and Mott, 1982;andCliff, 1964. 36 Pashukanis, 1980. ...
... The ongoing process of abstraction (Kay and Mott, 1982) is not an economic problem but an eminently political one, for we seek to reaffirm human life in a world ultimately dominated by a ghost. The struggle against the expansion of indifference entailed in the value form, i.e. a struggle against an invisible enemy, is mediated, and fosters new social forms of the social existence of labour and its concrete utopias. ...
Dinerstein argues that the form of utopia today is not abstract but ‘concrete’. Concrete utopias are ‘denaturalising’ capitalist-colonial society as they are negating the given and creating alternative practices at the grass roots. Dinerstein suggests that Marx’s critique of political economy constitutes the most unforgiving critique of capitalist society. Yet, in order to grasp concrete utopias, Marx’s critique should be read ‘in the key of hope’, that is through the lenses of Bloch’s principle of hope. Like this, Marx’s critique becomes a prefigurative critique of political economy that recognises the process of shaping concrete utopia as a critique of the value form from within the process of the self-expansion of value. In the final section, Dinerstein enquiries about the adequacy of the term concrete utopia to understand indigenous struggles for self-determination. She offers the notion of ‘subsumption by exclusion’ to argue for a particular form of subordination of indigenous peoples in capital. They ‘appear’ outside but in fact constitute a threat to the expansion of value. Both kinds of concrete utopia navigate the open veins of capital.
... The substance of this social universe is value (Neary, 2000a-b andNeary and Rikowski, 2000;Rikowski, 2000). Capital is value in motion (Kay and Mott, 1982). Value is not a "thing". ...
A paper prepared for the Praxix & Pedagogy Research Seminar, The Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM), Dublin, Ireland, 25th May 2011
Produzido orginalmente na língua inglesa, este artigo faz parte de uma coleção que visa compilar o debate dos anos 1960–1970 sobre o Estado na teoria marxista em pleno auge das lutas político-sociais no pós-segunda guerra, e ainda, na derrocada do Estado Social Capitalista (Welfare State). Com um valor histórico-científico ímpar, trata-se de uma das raridades acadêmicas que expõe com muita precisão as origens do debate da derivação do Estado. O texto discorre sobre os argumentos intensamente discutidos pelo Grupo de Economistas Socialistas na Inglaterra sobre o Estado entre os marxistas e revela como esta discussão foi abrindo espaço para o avanço do debate derivacionista. Em que pese o fato de que este debate ficou “em aberto” naquele período, sua precisão metodológica, hoje, demonstra a força do método marxiano em antever tendências, sendo essencial para compreensão da relação orgânica entre Estado e Capital.
This chapter builds on a key insight of Lefebvre’s: that the state is inextricably intertwined in the spatial structures of capitalism and that, in a very important respect, abstract space is also the space of the state. It will be argued that Ireland’s depiction of the state in TUIP reveals the way in which the post-World War II Australian state intervened in the constitution and organisation of space, particularly through the vehicle of law. Key episodes around land use planning, industrial regulation and the links between Puroil and state personnel demonstrate that the state simultaneously provides the conditions for the creation of abstract space at the same time that it responds to the issues it generates. Additionally, Ireland reveals the traditional distinction between the economic and political levels of capitalism to be an effect of ideology. This is particularly the case in the Australian context, a reality Ireland demonstrates through his placing of convictism at the centre of the spaces and places of TUIP. Through narratively linking the oppression of the convict to the exploitation of the industrial worker, Ireland illustrates the unity of the economic and the political in the fabric of abstract space.
In: El trabajo en debate. Una investigación sobre la teoría y la realidad del trabajo capitalista Compiladores: Ana C. Dinerstein, Michael Neary | Ediciones Herramienta, Buenos Aires, 2009 | 304 páginas | ISBN 978-987-1505-09-8
Universities in the UK are increasingly adopting corporate governance structures, a consumerist model of teaching and learning, and have the most expensive tuition fees in the world (McGettigan, 2013; OECD, 2015). This article discusses collaborative research that aimed to develop and define a conceptual framework of knowledge production grounded in co-operative values and principles. The main findings are outlined relating to the key themes of our research: knowledge, democracy, bureaucracy, livelihood, and solidarity. We consider how these five ‘catalytic principles’ relate to three identified routes to co-operative higher education (conversion, dissolution, or creation) and argue that such work must be grounded in an adequate critique of labour and property, i.e. the capital relation. We identify both the possible opportunities that the latest higher education reform in the UK affords the co-operative movement as well as the issues that arise from a more marketised and financialised approach to the production of knowledge (HEFCE, 2015). Finally, we suggest ways that the co-operative movement might respond with democratic alternatives that go beyond the distinction of public and private education.
span class="fontstyle0">The outsourcing relationship model in the globalization of the labor market based on Pancasila is still reaping controversy among workers and employers. The issue of outsourcing employment relationships in the globalization era of the labor market is a common need among workers, employers and governments. In the implementation of this outsourced employment relationships lead to inconsistency in the element of the employment relationship itself, because workers get orders from employers, whereas employment agreements are made between workers and the Worker Service Company. This inconsistency leads to industrial disputes between outsourced workers and employers. The concept of outsourcing work relations in the era of labor market globalization is a product of liberalism adopted by the Indonesian people when entrepreneurs feel overwhelmed by high labor costs and obliges to provide severance pay, rewards of employment and compensation as regulated in Law Number 13 2003. The implementation of work relations between workers, employers and the government must be in accordance with the souls contained in the precepts of Pancasila, meaning that all forms of behavior of all subjects involved in the process must be based on the noble values of Pancasila as a whole. Outsourcing employment relationship model in the era of labor market globalization based on Pancasila has not run as expected, there are still many problems in the unfinished work of outsourcing industry. The outsourcing work relationship based on Pancasila should make employers and workers no longer across but have the same goal to achieve profit.</span
This paper assesses the introduction of Core HR technologies in British higher education. The work of Adorno and Horkheimer is adopted as a starting point for understanding Core HR technologies as manifestations of instrumental rationality without losing sight of their political ambivalence and the scope for resistance. With the work of Sergio Bologna, Harry Braverman and Hugo Radice, it is then argued that Core HR technologies in universities are part of an effort that enlists employees’ legitimate concerns and frustrations over stifling bureaucracy and absent or incompetent line management. This is uncharacteristically done to project a managerial epistemology through the enhancement of workers’ control over technology rather than the other way around. It is argued that, in this way, education workers risk becoming the instruments of senior management’s surveillance of line managers. The paper ends with critical reflections on trade unions in education and concludes that their reluctance to move away from an organising model premised on the defence of academic privilege and academics’ refusal to sacrifice their careers to the benefit of collective governance are closing off some of the most promising avenues of progressive change.
The concept of depoliticisation is an important analytical tool in the study of British politics, although there remains a disproportionate focus on ‘successful’ examples of the strategy. This article provides an account of the failure of the Industrial Relations Act, focusing specifically on the National Industrial Relations Court. By presenting the Act as an attempt to insulate government by relying on the ‘majesty of the law’ as a disciplinary tool, this article argues that contradictions associated with the Rule of Law supporting capitalist social relations made the court an inappropriate vehicle for governing at arm’s-length in this context. The article explores how the lines of judicial independence became blurred, undermining perceptions of governmental disengagement. This resulted in the court becoming the most controversial aspect of the 1970–1974 Conservative government’s reforms. The analysis demonstrates how the interplay between formal rules and informal norms associated with ‘depoliticised institutions’ can produce unexpected outcomes and undermine a governing strategy. Contrary to intentions, the rules-based strategy embodied in the Act was anything but predictable and fuelled its untimely demise.
Minimum incomes legitimate a boundary between capital and labour, profits and needs, in the contest over value. This thesis asks how minimum income setting has changed since the 1970s. It finds answers in the documentation of rationales by state agencies in national wage cases, policy and inquiries into income support, financial regulation and the Financial Services Royal Commission. The minimum wage as a family wage was overturned, on the basis of two partly linked factors, employer pursuit of reduced labour costs, and the growing proportion of mothers in paid work at non-standard hours. A previously strong union movement in response to unemployment crises, laid down its power to defend the minimum wage. The minimum wage safety net from 1996 became a minimum wage for a single person, requiring the state through income support to underwrite the cost of raising children in low waged households, but without compromising current labour supply. The household rather than the wage earner became the object of both public policy and financial capital's search for value. Finance's invention of income surplus assessment for contracting home loan repayments placed new pressures on household time and consumption, reinforcing the labour supply imperative. It also posed a novel threat to financial system stability, and placed the setting of minimum living standards as a boundary not just between labour as employee and employer capital, but also between labour as household and financial capital. The state's position on meeting needs through minimum incomes requires trade-offs that historically were dominated by social and industrial order, and which have more recently been refined as economic policy for labour supply and particularly financial stability. Minimum incomes are linked to labour's dual position as a cost of production and a critical source of financial flows. This new terrain for valuing labour sharpens the contradictions to be managed by public policy that accepts profitability as the underlying imperative, seeking stability of flows in both labour markets and money markets. It also poses challenges for labour to reshape itself as a conscious agent able to assert its needs over profitability, and to challenge the hold of capital over livelihoods.
Mark Neocleous offers a contemporary understanding of the modern state through the unusual medium of its body, mind and personality, and through the space it occupies in the social world. It's a work that not only draws upon our existing imagination of the state, but also feeds it." Professor Robert Fine • What is the connection between Ronald Reagan's bottom and the King's head? • Why are weather maps profoundly ideological? • How do corporations get away with murder? • Who are the scum of the earth? This book explores such questions through a critique of the statist political imaginary. Unpicking this imaginary while also avoiding traditional approaches to state power, the book examines the way that the state has been imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home. Around these themes and through an engagement with the work of a diverse range of writers, Mark Neocleous weaves a set of arguments concerning the three icons of the political imagination-the political collective, the sovereign agency and the enemy figure. From these arguments he draws telling connections between the role of the state in fabricating order, the social and juridical power of capital, and the relation between fascism and bourgeois ideology.
This paper reports on research carried out for The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, 'The Current State of the Horological Industry in Britain Today'. In particular, it focuses on the education, training and recruitment of horologists in ten horological industry sectors. There is also analysis on how the UK horological industry is globalised and resorts to the utilisation of 'value chains'.
This paper is a critical engagement with Peter McLaren’s book Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution. The paper focusses on a number of key themes in the book: the historical Jesus; the dialectic of love and hate; cognition and consciousness; and the relationship between capitalist abstraction and revolutionary theory. The conclusion is that McLaren is right about many things, not least the need for a revolutionary theory and action that supports the abolition of capitalism through value-form theory and radical love. But the extent to which McLaren’s work is based on critical rage pedagogy, it is an understatement. His radical love needs a radical hate, not a physical, psychological or pathological hate, but a hate for what the world has become. Radical hate is the critical concept on which negative dialectics is based.
In recent years, the public sphere, which represents a realm in civil society where people can debate and discuss a range of issues and common concerns important to them, has become a key area for research in the humanities and social sciences. Arguably, however, Marxist theory has yet to advance a theoretical account of the most abstract and simple ideological properties of the capitalist public sphere as these appear under universal commodity relationships. The paper therefore tentatively seeks to develop such an account. Specifically, the paper theoretically derives a peculiar public sphere under capitalism, which is mediated between at least two commodity owners who also possess distinctive personalities driven by desires to own commodities. The paper then explains in more detail how the social form of this public sphere develops through other elements of commodity relations and their contradictions.
The closing months of 1993 saw the conclusion of two agreements heralded by liberals as setting the world economy on a new and sound footing. The United States’ ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in November was capped in December 1993 when the Director-General of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) brought down the gavel on the Uruguay Round, which had been formally launched in September 1986. Amid the popping of champagne corks the Financial Timesdeclared that the agreements would provide, ‘powerful underpinning for the world economy, fresh impetus to competition, and fresh hope for those developing and former communist countries that have been opening up to international commerce’.1 By the opening months of 1994 this liberal triumphalism looked somewhat premature in the face of the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas (see Chapter 7; and Cleaver, 1994) and tension in Europe occasioned by persistent economic stagnation and disputes over the enlargement of the European Union.
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