Abstract This article is a short introduction to the context and history of E.V. Ilyenkov’s work, ‘Hegel and “Alienation”’. A short overview of their life, the development of their work and its reception is also provided.
Abstract Under neoliberalism, capitalist accumulation has become increasingly dependent on finance, including the financialisation of social reproduction. The centrality of finance to the reproduction of capital has been linked to both the global spread of informal and precarious forms of labour and the reconfiguration of state institutions according to the interests of finance capital. While the recomposition of capital, the working class, and the state has occurred unevenly, these processes have everywhere made the global working class more reliant on debt to ensure their own social reproduction, and these debt relations have become increasingly tied to the reproduction of finance capital. This paper demonstrates how, over the last several decades, intensified financialisation – defined as interest bearing capital ( IBC ) playing a key role in capitalist accumulation – has made both the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of the worker more dependent on finance, without displacing the pivotal role in accumulation played by value-producing wage labour.
Abstract This paper reconsiders the ‘working day’ discussion in chapter ten of Capital and how it centres two parameters in the generation and appropriation of surplus value. The first parameter is the cost of labour-power paid by the capitalist and the second is the time that the worker must yield to the capitalist: the ‘length of the working day’. The first parameter represents the amount of pay required to keep the worker alive and able to work. Marx understood it as a lower limit below which capitalism would cease to function. This paper argues that, while analytically coherent, this understanding of a lower limit runs contrary to many ways that actual historical capitalism has found to exploit the working class. Capitalism regularly exceeds this limit and, in this sense, hyper-exploits. What we find instead of a limit are racialised gradients of human value – generated and fostered by capitalism – in which there are regular and persisting areas of hyper-exploitation with devalued racialised gendered workers. Supplemented by the notion of gradients of human value, Marx’s two-parameter account with its unifying analytic of time, in particular human-time, neatly encompasses the phenomenon of hyper-exploitation and provides an incisive analysis of today’s capitalist exploitation.
Abstract This essay intervenes in contemporary debates around neoliberalism and its relationship to both authoritarianism and social democracy. It does so by reconstructing the debate on Thatcherism that took place between Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop in the 1980s. Both authors provide materialist analyses of Thatcherism that point to important continuities, at the level of both political economy and authoritarian political technique, between her hegemonic project and late-stage social democracy. I argue that this provides an antidote to the social democratic nostalgia that is the potential product of the ways that neoliberalism is frequently theorised in the contemporary literature. While both thinkers highlight these continuities, they are more obviousin Jessop’s institutional approach to hegemony than in Hall’s analysis of Thatcher’s ideology.
