Marxian theory states that productivity growth and capital accumulation inherent in the capitalist mode of production will eventually lead to it displacing all other modes of production. The article questions this premise and examines how high productivity growth can paradoxically sustain or even promote non-capitalist modes of production that coexist within the capitalist social formation. Uneven productivity growth and a lack of competition between sectors result in a shift in employment from sectors with high to those with low productivity growth. EU sectoral data show that this leads to an increase in employment in sectors where non-capitalist modes of production are more prevalent, while employment in high productivity growth capitalist sectors decreases. This underlines the fruitfulness of the concept of social formation, which enables the analysis of several coexisting modes of production and shows that the central internal laws of capitalism operate at the level of social formation.
The generative AI industry has seen exponential growth over the past 3 years. We attempt to critically analyse its political economy, through a focus on two moments: the training of models, and their deployment downstream. First, we make the case that generative AI presupposes a number of expropriative processes that enable the exploitation of wage labour in the production of models as commodities. Second, we argue that generative AI represents opportunities for capital to subsume and discipline a number of hitherto unstructured labour processes, concentrated in the sphere of circulation rather than the sphere of production, thereby feeding into crisis. Finally, we describe the mechanisms through which societal surplus is redistributed into the AI industry, concluding that the development and deployment of generative AI should be seen as consistent with the imperatives of capitalist planning, rather than as a mutation within them.
The hegemonic crisis has overshadowed the ecological crisis and the fragile political consensus surrounding it. The theory of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) reveals a connection between these two crises. The EUE approach, in its Marxist and non-reductionist versions, attempts to offer explanations for uneven development and the unequal distribution of environmental and social impacts. While Marxist theory of the EUE tends to merge the material and economic dimensions, non-reductionist theory of the EUE denies the need to complement the study of material, land, labor, and energy flows with a theory of value. This article reconsiders, on the one hand, the treatment of unequal exchange and imperialism theory by the Marxist theory of EUE and, on the other hand, the critics of labor value theory by the non-reductionist theory of EUE. In doing so, we aim to consider a third way, Marxist and pluralist, that addresses the material dimension of international trade as a substantive field and reconceptualizes value transfers in a non-substantialist sense.
Together, the global environmental crisis and the declining dynamism of the capitalist economy pose an existential problem for the future of waged work. Today, capitalism seems unable to generate sufficient and well-paying jobs or to do so without intensifying the degradation of nature. As a recent wave of post-work literature suggests, it becomes increasingly urgent to rethink the possibility of a world without work; a world where individuals do not have to over-labour for a wage just to survive. This article reconstructs the critique of work drawing on a long tradition of anti-work thinking to sketch out the contours of a plausible post-work mode of living. A post-work and post-capitalist mode of socialisation emancipates people not only from the threat of indigence that underlies the functioning of the labour market, but also from the use of direct coercion to compel work. Instead, social reproduction comes to rely on the principles of free association and voluntary activity. The critique of work I propose is simultaneously a critique of two of the fundamental institutions of capitalist modernity: the market and the state.
This paper examines competing theoretical frameworks in economics regarding causal relationships between production and circulation variables. Using three complementary methodological approaches—Error Correction Models enhanced with multivariate adaptive regression splines (ECM-MARS), Bayesian generalized linear models with AR(1) structure (BGLM-AR1), and Bayesian Structural Time Series (BSTS)—we analyze U.S. monthly economic data from January 1971 to December 2019 to determine whether production variables (capital stock, investment per worker, labor productivity) fundamentally determine circulation variables (exchange rates, interest rates, inflation) or vice versa. Our findings reveal limited but consistent evidence supporting the Marxist classical perspective: while the stringent temporal stability requirements eliminate most relationships, those that persist show production variables predicting circulation variables with greater robustness than the reverse. The ECM-MARS approach identified one stable relationship (Real Social Consumption per Worker → Federal Discount Rate, 90% support), while BGLM-AR1 found Real Net Profit → Consumer Price Index with 80% support. BSTS models failed to meet the stability criteria entirely. These results suggest that policy approaches prioritizing circulation-oriented interventions while neglecting production fundamentals may have limited efficacy, though the scarcity of stable relationships underscores the complexity of macroeconomic causal inference.
This article aims to examine how the category of labour is presented in Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). In the Marxian understanding, labour is the fundamental category of human sociability. Under capitalism, it is presented as a moment of exploitation, domination and oppression. The centrality of labour in capitalism’s historicity has been examined differently within feminist and Marxist approaches. Within feminism, the so-called dual systems theories have often dissociated oppression and exploitation, resulting in a fragmented analytical framing of the category of labour. Part of Marxism, in turn, has directed its investigations towards productive wage labour, failing to delve into an analysis of reproductive labour, especially the unpaid domestic labour. Thus, this analysis fails to see the relationship between production and social reproduction under capitalism. Based on Marx’s category of totality, SRT expands its analytical focus and examines the social reproductive work in its integrative relationship to waged productive labour. Thus, in our view, SRT provides theoretical advances by pointing towards a unitary theory of understanding the relationship between exploitation and oppression in capitalism, without resorting to factors that are external to the capital’s dynamics to explain oppression. We consider that SRT enables the development of some key issues within Marxist feminism, such as the place and function of the sexual division of labour; the analytical and Marxist framing of unpaid domestic work; the contradictory-but-necessary relationship between production and social reproduction; political struggles, among others. To demonstrate this theoretical advance, we examine the debate within feminist currents of Marxism, such as materialist feminism and autonomist feminism, to characterise their divergences. Finally, we argue that the expanded conception of labour within the Marxian reading proposed by SRT offers a more enriching and accurate Marxian reading for the political-theoretical analyses of the expressions of class struggle in the 21st century.
This article examines the evolution of Gaylord Wilshire's (1861-1927) political thought on imperialism through an analysis of Wilshire's Magazine between 1900 and 1915. While his pamphlet Trusts and Imperialism (1901) is recognized as one of the earliest socialist formulations on the causes of imperialism, this study shows how Wilshire continued engaging with the topic in subsequent years. It argues that his reflections on this subject developed through a broader transatlantic exchange with British radicalism. These intellectual contacts contributed to significant shifts in his political outlook, leading him to endorse militarism, advance his own scheme of an Anglo-American Imperial Federation, and later move toward revolutionary syndicalism. Wilshire's trajectory illuminates the tensions faced by pre-First World War socialists when analyzing imperialism, particularly between their commitment to internationalism and peace and the practical question of how socialism could be achieved, within a political context deeply shaped by racism, nationalism, and imperial rivalry.
The state became once again a central question in Marxist studies. This interest displays a specific engagement with the state as explanandum – as a phenomenon to be explained in itself – in contrast to an interest in the state simply as explanans , or in terms of its role and functions within neoliberal capitalism. This might be due to the urgent concern to understand whether there are any class limits to the extraordinary and radical political transformations taking place all over the world, turned upside down by Trumpism. To start problematizing the state question via proper Marxist analytical tools, this article critically revisits the differing approaches of Simon Clarke and Ellen Meiksins Wood, the prominent figures of Open Marxism and Political Marxism, respectively, to state-class relations. It identifies functionalist resolutions in Wood’s comprehension of the state within global capitalism, ultimately weakening the analytical power of her conceptions of market imperative and the detachment of the economic sphere from the political sphere. After underlining the importance of Clarke’s argument that capitalist class rule and the state need to be approached at different levels of abstraction, the article ultimately proposes that historicizing the ongoing transformations in the making in the political form of the capitalist state requires utilizing Clarke’s conception of ‘the rule of money’ and Wood’s conception of ‘the market imperative’ at the same level of abstraction. For, this is the level at which the global class constitution of both the state and civil society by capitalist relations of production can be problematised.
De-dollarization is a non-linear historical process characterized by the decline of dollar’s relative weight. It signifies not a replacement of the dollar by a single alternative currency, but a broader tendency toward the end of global monetary hegemony altogether. The pace and extent of de-dollarization vary significantly across different economic spheres and geographic regions. This analysis emphasizes the critical importance of adopting regional and sectoral perspectives to understand the real-world dynamics of de-dollarization while examining oil trade between China and West Asia. Although the 2018 launch of the petroyuan contract marked a major turning point in oil international invoicing practices, mainstream views often emphasize China’s restricted capital account as the primary barrier to broader use of the yuan in oil trading. In contrast, existing economic relations between China and Gulf oil producers already enable greater use of the renminbi without requiring further capital account liberalization. The main obstacles to de-dollarization are not financial, but political—stemming from the entrenched geopolitical and security ties between these oil-producing states and the United States. Paradoxically, many of these same countries are actively participating in renminbi internationalization through alternative financial channels, reflecting inherent contradictions in the current pluripolar system.
Neoliberalism has re-formed work within a shifting spatio-temporal fix, retrenching labor’s gains while (re)positioning violence within the organization of work. Transcending mere interpersonal conflicts, this violence is structural, manifesting through adaptive strategies including symbolic mechanisms of domination such as meritocracy and self-regulation. Long neglected yet increasingly scrutinized, this phenomenon is the focus of this article as a critical domain for stimulating rights-claiming praxis. It conducts a theoretical discussion grounded in literature and policy analysis, with particular attention to the Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (C190) of the International Labour Organization (ILO), whose scope operationally tends to foreground direct forms of violence. The article traces how normative claims can be translated into transformative practice, framing the claim to a violence-free world of work not as a static prerequisite for decency, but as a disruptive pathway for contesting power asymmetries and advancing egalitarian practices within contemporary capitalism.
This paper examines how neoliberal restructuring has reshaped agrarian inequality in West Bengal by altering patterns of differentiation among rural households. It addresses two questions: how neoliberal policies have altered the distribution of access to various means of production, and how these inequalities are reproduced through land ownership, operational holdings, and tenancy arrangements. The analysis combines secondary data from the Agricultural Census and the National Sample Survey Office’s Survey of Land and Livestock Holdings with primary evidence from a 2020–2021 field survey of 200 cultivator households in Bankura district. Households are classified using both acreage-based categories and Patnaik’s Labour Exploitation Criterion (E-criterion), which distinguishes economic position through labour absorption rather than land size alone. The findings show that productive resources, non-land assets, and operational control over land are increasingly concentrated among labour-hiring households, while labour-selling households rely heavily on leasing in land to sustain cultivation. Tenancy thus emerges as a key mechanism through which agrarian inequality is reproduced under contemporary conditions. The study demonstrates the analytical value of a class-based approach for understanding agrarian change in West Bengal in the neoliberal era.
