Capital & Class

The literature on global production networks (GPNs) and global commodity/value chains has generally conceptualised small firms as being at the bottom of the commodity chain hierarchy, and thus subordinate to larger firms. As a consequence, small firms and their employees are typically imagined to be fairly powerless to shape the structure of GPNs. By way of contrast, in this paper we argue that small firms and their employees are not lacking in the capacity to affect the way GPNs and commodity chains develop, but can in fact shape them in potentially significant ways. This recognition becomes evident if, instead of starting any analysis of small firms in GPNs with the governance structures of production networks or managerial strategies, we instead start the analysis with the organisation and control of the labour process in concrete settings, and tie this to broader understandings of uneven and combined development under capitalism.

Contemporary monetary institutions posit money as an ‘exceptional’ domain, outside of democratic sovereign authority in modern capitalist states, on the basis of the claim that without it, liberal democracy would fall apart. Labour’s distributional critique of capitalism and the state must wrestle with the possibility that money in modern capitalism is anti-democratic by definition, and that as such, any social-democratic project of radical redistribution, implicit in labour’s critique of capitalist distribution, will require not merely a different allocation of existing money, but a radically different monetary relation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the basis for a theory of imperialism that is consonant with open Marxism. The paper argues that accounts of imperialism heretofore have been contingent and focused on the appearance of imperialism, and spent little time considering its essence as a manifestation of the state’s power and desire to maintain the circuit of capital both nationally and internationally. The paper seeks to show that open Marxism is well placed to achieve this, and to move towards an idea of an open Marxist theory of imperialism.

Despite the UK trade union movement’s avowedly secular nature, its antecedents show that religious beliefs greatly influenced many early trade unionists and, in some cases, contributed to the formation of a trade union consciousness. This paper considers the way trade union leaders in the 19th and 20th centuries drew upon religious teachings of social justice to organise their fellow workers. This context provides background for understanding how today a similar ideological commitment to collectivisation and social justice may be held by workers of faith; and how the adoption of a ‘militant secularism’ by some trade unionists may result in the closing of these conceptual spaces.

Unionlearn and union learning representatives were developed by the British TUC to match workers with education and training opportunities, strengthen the economy, foster market inclusion and facilitate social mobility. Their contribution to union revitalisation was emphasised. This article questions whether, with unions confronting global crisis, this is a necessary initiative. It stemmed from TUC failure to achieve policy goals, institutional needs, consequent acceptance of a lesser role, and the availability of state finance. Claims by academics that it provides influence over state policy and contributes to revitalisation remain inadequately evidenced. Union resurgence is not immanent. The way forward is through adversarial grassroots organising and socialist education, not through retooling capital, improving members’ marketability and partnership with a hostile state.

This article considers whether industrial relations (IR) research is objective, impartial or value-free, and argues that many IR academics in Britain have tended to start from a social-democratic premise which makes them relatively more sympathetic to the interests and objectives of workers and their trade unions than to the business needs of employers and managers. Focusing attention on the partisanship of those who have made a distinctive ‘radical/critical’ contribution to IR scholarship, it advances the argument that IR can, at one and the same time, be both partisan and objective. Acknowledging the real potential dangers of bias in adopting a methodological approach that states, in the words of C. Wright Mills, ‘I have tried to be objective, but I do not claim to be detached’, it provides a defence of the potential merits of partisanship, provided it is underpinned by rigorous scholarly research.