Fifteen years after the Great Recession, the Greek economy shows slow growth following a prolonged stagnation. This article examines the causes of Greece’s economic crisis and the factors behind its tentative recovery. Our analysis highlights the pivotal role of profitability, particularly changes in the net rate of profit, in both the crisis onset and recovery. The recovery relies heavily on increased exploitation through wage cuts and inflation, alongside significant devaluation and destruction of physical capital. However, persistently low profitability, investment and capital accumulation hinder technical progress, productivity and real wage growth, preventing net profitability from reaching healthy levels. Moreover, structural weaknesses, including the absence of a capital goods sector, limit sustainable recovery. Despite some progress, the fragile recovery has revived balance of payments issues, revealing its unstable and vulnerable foundations. JEL classification: B51, E11, N14, O52.
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.
