Capital & Class

For critical theory, the critique of capitalist society is subversive in character. It dissolves the dogmatic appearance of society as a manifestation of economic nature and rejects traditional anti-capitalist ideas about socialism as a planned labour economy. Traditional theory does not think against the grain of society. Rather, it thinks with the flow of society and in doing so, it disarms itself by looking on the bright site of a hellish world. In contrast, at its best critical theory looks into the eye of the storm to recognise the conditions of misery and to prevent the critique of capitalist conditions from becoming yet another means of capitalist reproduction.

Marxian thinking following the TSSI (temporal single system interpretation) of Marx’s work is applied to refute the allegation of a tautology in the resource-based view of the firm, paired with the provision of an explanation of how and why resources create value, where resources are synonymous with Marx’s categories of constant and variable capital. Refuting the allegation naturally leads to the Holy Grail of resource-based thinking: the question of what, conceptually, constitutes a firm’s competitive advantage within the industry context. This article achieves its objectives by tying the resource-based view into Marx’s theory of value.

A dominant strand of literature adopting an identity-oriented approach towards industrial decline and post-Fordist flexibilisation argues that we are in a ‘post-industrial’ world in which class struggles and ‘old’ labour movements have been replaced by struggles around identity. This article examines working-class politics in the city of Ahmedabad, India, in the pre- and post-liberalisation phases in order to understand whether class struggle is indeed being replaced by identity struggle. In juxtaposing Marx with E.P. Thompson, the article re-visits concepts such as class, class struggle and exploitation in order to understand them in new ways in an increasingly ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Fordist’ world.

This paper uses Canada’s corporate criminal liability legislation as an empirical exemplar with which to interrogate the limits of using the law to address the abuses of corporate power and to protect workers’ safety. The author draws from Althusser’s notion of interpellation to contemplate whether demands to discipline corporations through the law, particularly by labour/unions, misrecognise the problems of workplace safety, including that workers are routinely injured and killed in the pursuit of surplus profits. The author concludes that the problems of workplace safety ultimately demand broader strategies that challenge and transform the capitalist mode of production.

This article re-claims and invigorates the debate on ‘New Materialism’ as it is unfolding within Marxist political economy specifically. We choose this site to make our intervention in the debate because, while Marxism claims to makes visible the poor, dispossessed and those ‘left behind’ in the contemporary global capitalist economy, we discern, in contributions made thus far, a marked tendency to sideline the rich tradition of feminist historical materialist scholarship. We contend that feminist analyses are vital in elucidating the ‘gendered face’ of global financial crisis and austerity. Accordingly, after first mapping the contours of current discussion, we briefly revisit feminist critiques of Marxism; interrogate the inter-relationship between neoliberal capitalism, the gendered nature of labour markets, the ‘patriarchal’ state and social reproduction and unpaid care work; and, finally, we further develop our argument through an analysis of the gendered impacts of current austerity measures in the United Kingdom.

Many intellectuals, various social movements, as well as all manner of individuals from around the globe who are critical of the ills of global, expansionist capitalism have written, spoken out about, and called for everything from minor changes to radical changes to the existing social, political and economic order. Moreover, many of these groups and individuals have used the tools of Marx’s critique of capitalism in order to advance their positions and calls for change. While most critics of the existing social, political and economic order advance their critical examination of capitalist-spawned injustices with the hope of providing a foundation for us to explore ways to resist, disrupt and replace them, with few exceptions, usually this exploration is confined to (or at least focused on) human communities. However, in this essay, using some key concepts in Marx’s oeuvre, I examine how the global expansion of capitalism, together with its requisite increase in structures of power and domination, are responsible for the intensification of similar injustices for non-human animals, which, according to Marx’s own theoretical commitments, I argue, should also be resisted and, indeed, eradicated. On the flip side, in addition to arguing that a proper understanding of some of Marx’s most fundamental commitments requires us to fight not only for human but for non-human animal liberation, I also argue that genuine animal liberation requires the radical disruption of capitalism and that the more common, less radical animal liberation movements are insufficient for bringing about this end.