Capital & Class
Capital &Class, Ahead of Print.
This article discusses automation from the point of view of the intersection between Aristotle and Marx. First, it was Aristotle’s notion of automatous – self-moving tools – that gave rise to the contemporary concept of automation. Marx’s historical materialism is important as it puts the ongoing process of automation into a historical perspective. The development of self-moving machines should free us from the slavery of hard work, yet the legal and political superstructure of capitalism means that the growth of automation produces new forms of precarious wage-slavery. Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian notion of practice is discussed vis-à-vis the Marxian notion of alienated labour. Given the conceptual structure – alienated labour (which prevents us from flourishing) versus non-alienated labour (as essential for human flourishing) – the article poses the question of whether we can apply this in our attempt to assess the ongoing process of automation.
Capital & Class
Capital &Class, Ahead of Print.
From April 2020 to December 2021, the Canadian federal government earmarked $330,000,000 through the Emergency Food Security Fund to address food insecurity during the COVID-19 global pandemic. These funds were disbursed through a handful of national and regional emergency food and food justice agencies to smaller front-line organizations for the purchase of emergency food provisions and personal protective equipment, and to hire additional workers. We theorize these dynamics within the broader processes of neoliberalization and argue that the Canadian federal government was conscripting food justice and community development organizations into its efforts to address dramatically increasing rates of food insecurity across the country through charity emergency food provisioning. Within Peck and Tickell’s stylized conceptions of the destructive (roll-back) and creative (roll-out) moments of the process of neoliberalization, we frame the crisis of COVID-19 as exposing a form of recalibration (roll-call) neoliberalism. We focus on this dynamic specifically within the context of household food insecurity in Canadian communities and argue that the federal government’s funding regime during the global pandemic effectively directed food justice organizations (and by extension, the populace in general) away from a more ambitious social change agenda towards the more acceptable strategy (in neoliberal terms) of emergency food provisioning services.
Capital & Class
Capital &Class, Ahead of Print.
Most scholars interpret Marx’s prices of production as those which achieve simple reproduction assuming profit rates are equal and all capitals turn over completely each year. The dynamics of equalization, as circulation intertwines with production over the business cycle, is absent. The traditional ‘Marxist’ equation for the profit rate likewise considers only simple reproduction. This leaves a gap in our understanding of Marx, particularly regarding the impact of turnover time on the profit rate, one of Ricardo’s original problems which Marx claimed to solve. Starting from a critique of Veronese Passarella’s and Baron’s attempt to extend the traditional equation to expanded reproduction, I develop a more general equation showing how changes in turnover times, rate of surplus value and accumulation affect the equalization process, the formation of the general profit rate and hence of prices of production. Finally, considering Moseley’s introduction to the recently published translation of a 27-page excerpt from Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1867–1868, I suggest an equation for decomposing the profit adjustment during equalization.JEL Classification: B24, B51, E11.
Capital & Class
Capital &Class, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we discuss the de-reifying role of art and its relation with humanity’s self-consciousness, as these are captured in Lukács’ aesthetic thought and, especially, in his work The Specificity of the Aesthetic. Through the discourse on both categories that traverse Lukács oeuvre (totality, reification, imputed consciousness, etc.) and exclusively aesthetic categories (typical, particular, catharsis, mimesis, etc.), we attempt to give prominence to the way in which Lukács conceives artwork’s contribution to the cultivation of humanity’s self-consciousness.
Capital & Class
Capital &Class, Ahead of Print.
Based on a case study of taxi platforms in Oslo, Norway comprised of interviews with drivers and an ethnographic fieldwork working a driver, this article explores the platformization of the Norwegian taxi industry and the drivers’ working conditions through Marx’s concept of subsumption. In Norway, taxi platforms emerged in an already formally subsumed industry. The platforms have developed a new market segment, and also introduced an additional element in the subsumption of labor, whereby the platforms exert control over the market relations (by determining number of rides, earnings, and potential exclusions) through digital technology. While the platforms’ ‘algorithmic management’ is often described as a technology that might reorganize the world of work, the analysis finds that this form of control does not radically transform the drivers’ labor processes and cannot be seen as an example of what Marx termed real subsumption. However, the platformization of the industry, wherein the platforms appropriate the social and technological conditions of production, might result in a reorganization and transformation corresponding to a real subsumption in the future. The article concludes that exploring platform work through Marx’s notion of subsumption highlights, on one hand, the relation between platforms and workers as characterized by subordination and domination and, on the other, that a detailed and critical assessment of the actual consequences of platform-based control is necessary to capture the contextual dynamics of platformization.