Capital & Class

This article reconsiders the debate over the alleged embourgeoisement of the British working classes after Second World War. ‘Bourgeois affluence and proletarian apathy’ examines why members of the New Left concluded that a ‘bourgeois’ proletariat was incapable of revolutionary activity. ‘Washing machines and proletarian persistence’ takes up the midcentury social scientific literature with an eye for the ways in which empirical research falsified key elements of that thesis. ‘Visible consumption and invisible debt’ draws attention to the ways in which both liberal advocates for and Marxist critics of embourgeoisement overemphasized spending and underemphasized debt. Finally, I close by calling attention to some of the anecdotal and empirical evidence that suggests household indebtedness perpetuates working-class dependence upon capital.

The rise of the gig economy and the prospect of increased automation has led to renewed calls for the implementation of a Universal Basic Income scheme from a variety of spokespeople on the left, including notable journalists, academics and politicians. Weeks, Mason, Srnicek and Williams and others suggest that such a re-orientation of welfare distribution would not only mitigate the effects of these tectonic changes to the nature of labour, but it might in fact facilitate a break away from neoliberal capitalism and towards a post-work condition. Building upon the work of Universal Basic Income detractors such as Pitts and Dinerstein, this article brings into question the likelihood of these claims. Universal Basic Income’s advocates speak of the freedom to be unlocked by Universal Basic Income: but the freedom to do what and for whom? The article addresses the increasing significance for the process of valorisation today of digital ‘free labour’, and thus explores the idea that Universal Basic Income might have presented itself at this current juncture less to be a vehicle to a utopian future and more to be a handmaid for capitalism as its mode of production evolves. After utilising Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror to depict a dystopian imaginary of what a Universal Basic Income-future might thus really look like, the article concludes by questioning how we might rescue the scheme as a leftist project: attending to Guattari’s insights into how to resist capitalism’s subjectivation, as well as Fuchs’ vision for an ‘alternative Internet’.

To shed light on polarized perspectives regarding the virtues or downfalls of worker cooperatives among variants of Marxists, this article focuses on Marx’s own Janus-faced analysis of worker cooperatives. Marx had great faith in the radical potential of worker cooperatives, properly organized and politically oriented, but he also was greatly critical of the tendency of cooperatives to shrink their political horizons and become isolated from broader labor movements. Although thinkers in the Marxist tradition criticize worker cooperatives when they operate as isolated circles of ‘collective capitalists’ within the existing capitalist system, Marx himself saw important potential in the cooperative movement, to the extent that it was integrated into broader campaigns for social change. Marx believed that cooperatives could help point the way to an alternative system of free and equal producers, and could prompt radical imaginings among their advocates, but only to the extent that cooperative practitioners recognized the need for class-conscious, industrial scale organizing of workers against the capitalist system. In the end, Marx did not so much focus on promoting a certain type of labor organization as being most conducive to transformation (e.g. worker cooperatives or labor unions). Rather, he focused more on the importance of class consciousness within labor organizing, and on the development of radicalized class consciousness among workers, whether through the expansion of labor unions, worker cooperatives, or any other institution of worker empowerment. It is the nature of a labor institution’s focus on developing and sustaining class consciousness, not the nature of the labor institution itself (i.e. cooperative or union), that Marx believed to most powerfully shape the radical or degenerative tendencies of local forms of labor activism.

Universities have historically contributed to the reproduction of capitalism. However, they have been historically conceived as a separate sphere or institution detached from the Market, thus only indirect participants of capital’s accumulation processes. Our aim in this article is precisely to contribute to acknowledge this transformation by further developing a theoretical explanation integrated to a Marxist analysis of contemporary capitalism. In particular, following Levín, we distinguish that a portion of world’s social capital has monopolized the capacity to plan and profit from innovation. The wide gap in terms of innovation capacities between individual capitals leaves those non-innovative with no better option but to subordinate and let go part of their surplus. It is in this context that we will suggest that universities integrate direct capital’s accumulation structures. To do so, we will conceptually distinguish between two sides of universities’ transformation: (1) the adoption of capital enterprises’ characteristics resulting in exchanges of their products (teaching and research results), where we will identify different degrees of bargaining power to decide the conditions of those exchanges, and (2) the transformation of academic labor, adapting itself to capitalist production processes. Considering the former, we argue that universities’ adoption of individual capitals’ features can be better understood as a differentiated process. We suggest three types of differentiated market-university, according to the different enterprises in Levín’s typology. Our concluding remarks include further research questions and nuance the general transformation of the University as an economic actor offering some clues for developing countertendencies.

In the last three decades, the interchange between Marxism and critical human–animalism has gratifyingly picked up. Scholars use Marxist categories to analyse and criticise the exploitation and oppression of animals in capitalism. But the application of Marx’s original concepts often rests on fragile analogies and judgements. To conceptualise the exploitation of animals accurately and substantiate the common class struggle for humans and animals theoretically, the present article serves to get the terminology straight with respect to four interrelated topics. First, the common charge against Marx’s theory to build on a human–animal dualism is refuted by showing that he understands the relationship between humans and animals as a historical materialist, socio-practical and dialectical differentiation. Second, based on a relational understanding of the capitalist mode of production, I argue that animals are not wage labourers, slaves or super-exploited commodities. Rather, as nature in general, they are super-exploited and despotically oppressed by the capitalist class. This capital–animal relation turns animals into private property and means of production at the hands of capital. It also has significant consequences for a value theory of animal labour. Animals, third, do not create value or surplus value and they do not produce commodities. They produce products and these as well as their labour are appropriated by capital for free. Finally, fourth, I defend the transfer of the concept of alienation to animals in general. But animal alienation has to be derived from the form of social labour as in the human case and it has to include the estrangement from body and life as well due to the special form of animal exploitation in capitalism.

In this article, I discuss the connection between discursive and social practice on the so-called ‘social’ internet. While the economic significance of platform capitalism grows, the discourse which constitutes these platforms as the substrate of the ‘social’ internet remains largely unquestioned. I will argue that economic realities are obscured by the social frames of interpretation which dominate our understanding of the internet. I will show how the internet is dominated by this naturalized discourse which I name ‘sociodigital’. Whether the internet may best be described in social terms or not is a question outside of the scope of this text. Rather, I will analyse how exploitation is veiled by this myth of the ‘social’ internet. The importance of this lies in unveiling hidden exploitation in an era where economic inequalities are increasing both rapidly and globally while simultaneously, the importance of ‘softer’ linguistic power increases. This makes discourse analysis important to reveal hidden power relations. I will argue that the users of ‘social’ media are exploited through their production of content, as this generates profits for the capitalist. This exploitation is however both veiled and increased by the discourse, which thus functions ideologically. Therefore, I will wield critical discourse analysis to unravel how the myth of the ‘social’ internet suppresses the economic consequences of exploitation.

The recent and very useful edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s economic works compiled by Peter Hudis (The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg) left out one essay: her review of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, edited by Karl Kautsky in 1905. While book reviews are nowadays a minor genre usually limited to a short length, that was not the case when Luxemburg wrote her essay: her review – published in Vorwärts, the daily of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), just before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905 – was extensive and dealt with a variety of theoretical and political issues. We offer the first critical edition in English of this work, setting it against the background of Rosa Luxemburg’s previous works and of the revisionist controversy within the SPD and the Second International, as well as contextualizing it within the framework of contemporary polemics with bourgeois economics, particularly with the German historical school and with marginalism. We also offer a comparison between the methodological issues raised by Luxemburg in her review and those raised by Rudolf Hilferding in his review of the third and last volume of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, published in 1911. We close with a brief assessment of the place of Luxemburg’s essay in the later development of her economic thought, concluding with The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913.