Capital & Class

For much of the first half of 2003, world attention from Hong Kong to Geneva was captured by news of a mysterious but deadly virus, similar to pneumonia, claiming lives in places as distant as Toronto and Beijing. As accounts of the virus's growing toll became regular occurrences, by February the term ‘SARS’ (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was part of the global lexicon. By the end of 2003, there had been around 8000 infections worldwide, and over 689 deaths related to SARS. In my hometown, Toronto, 43 people died of SARS in 2003.

May 2003 saw millions of French workers take to the streets over the issue of pensions, in mobilisations that the financial press presented as a peculiarly French summer ritual (Graham, 2003). Yet a look behind the news shows that the fight over pensions marks an important phase in a fierce and protracted class struggle over the restructuring of the welfare state—a struggle occurring across Europe. Pension reform precipitated a general strike in Greece in 2001, and in 2003 it provoked the first national strike in Austria since 1950. Even staff at the European Commission staged a walkout in May 2003, to protest against cuts in pension entitlement.

This paper is positioned within theoretical perspectives that focus on welfare states as systems of power and negotiation between key social forces acting in and through the state apparatus. Despite an emerging consensus that UK welfare-state restructuring is deeply problematic, there appears to be reluctance, within the debate, to discuss viable alternatives to neoliberalism. In contrast to UK and North American strategies, Denmark has adopted a ‘welfare-through-work’ model, built around a more inclusive system of welfare reform. This article discusses its emergence, and focuses on the importance of Job Rotation as its leading-edge socio-economic strategy. It highlights recent conflicts and tensions within Job Rotation and, lastly, suggests lessons for the UK.

This survey of Marxian writing presents an analysis of the business cycle that involves both real developments, which determine the rate of profit, and financial factors, which have an impact through the availability of credit and the rate of interest. The paper also draws on the work of recent post-Keynesians, who have developed illuminating insights into how modern capitalist financial systems function. But in contrast to the impression created by some post-Keynesians, it argues that business cycles are not just a result of financial instability, and that while it might be possible to modify or ameliorate their effects, they cannot be eliminated.

This article examines Hardt and Negri's Empire in the context of the radical tradition of Italian Marxism from which it developed. It discusses the influence of previously untranslated writings by Marx on the Italian New Left, and the way this prompted a new political analysis which, in studying the interpenetration of capital and labour, treated capital as the dependent variable in the class struggle. The essay considers how faithfully this analysis is sustained in Negri's later work, and suggests that the inconsistencies apparent in Empire derive in part from the continuing influence of Marx's prescient but ambiguous text: the so-called ‘Fragment on machines’.

The New Labour Government's New Deal for Communities attempts to stitch neoliberal urban policy onto Area Based Initiatives that involve the local community. In Newcastle upon Tyne, this combination resulted in several fault-lines and considerable local conflict. The local community was not adequately represented, because there was not one. The locus of power was not in the community but in the partner agencies. Thus the most obvious community was that of community regeneration professionals in these partner agencies, who have an ideological and material interest in representing the fact that there is a community for which they act.

Johannes Agnoli's death in 2003 deprived us of one of the most important thinkers of the categorical imperative of human emancipation.