Richard Tawney: Moral Theology and the Social Order

Abstract

After noting the impressive scope of Tawney's contribution as an economic historian, labour theoretician and Christian moralist, attention is given to his three classic socialist texts: The Acquisitive Society, Equality, and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Tawney's critique of capitalism is rooted in his Christian convictions concerning the worth of each human person and also informed by his historical analysis of the evolution of capitalist social relations. His telling exposure of the transitory historical nature of so much of capitalism's vaunted absolutes has lent an authority to his contribution. Wealth, property and the mechanisms of the market are not sacrosanct, and must be subject to measures that will ensure more equitable social objectives. As a social theorist he straddled the Christian and secular humanism that formed the lifeblood of the labour movement, and this remains relevant to our more pluralist society, where agreement upon basic moral norms can help construct a social consensus that will promote a greater justice and human flourishing.     

Dewey's Materialist Philosophy of Education: A Resource for Critical Pedagogues?

This article looks at some similarities and differences between key elements of Karl Marx's critique of capital and John Dewey's philosophy of education, both substantively and methodologically. Substantively, their analyses of the relation between human beings and the natural world—what Marx calls concrete labour and Dewey generally calls action—converge. Similarly, methodologically they converge when looked at from the point of view of their analysis of the relation between earlier and later forms of life. In Marx's case, it is his comparison of the relation between capitalist society and earlier societies. In Dewey's case, it is his comparison of the relation between adult experience and childhood experience. Dewey's practical realization of his distinction of adult and childhood experience in the creation of a materialist curriculum embodied in the Dewey laboratory school in Chicago (of which Dewey was director from 1896 to 1904) also accords in many ways with Marx's theory of concrete labour. On the other hand, their analyses diverge substantively when viewed from the point of view of their critique of capitalist society; Marx united concrete labour with his concept of abstract labour to provide a basis for criticizing modern society on its own terms rather than in terms of Dewey's concept of a cultural lag. The divergence is explained by their divergent methodologies in analyzing modern capitalist society. Despite this difference, the article concludes that critical pedagogues would do well to incorporate Dewey's materialist curriculum into their own practices—with modifications.     

关于坚持与发展唯物史观的几点思考--读《〈政治经济学批判〉序言》

马克思<〈政治经济学批判〉序言>所集中表述的唯物史观基本原理,主要得之于对资本主义经济制度的研究.当代资本主义的重大发展变化,为唯物史观的发展提供了巨大的理论空间;社会经济形态演进的几个时代,大体是西欧的历史实际,将其应用于不同地区和国家历史的研究,同样为唯物史观的发展提供了理论空间;"经验的事实"和"历史环境条件",既决定了在生产力发展水平没有重大不同前提下不同地区和国家社会经济形态的不同存在,又对生产力的发展具有决定性的影响.     

The Historical Constitution of the Political Forms of Capitalism

Abstract: This article provides a general overview and critique of approaches to state theory, from the Marxist “state derivation“ debate of the 1970s, through to regulation and world‐systems perspectives, to theories which encompass imperialism. It proposes that a theory of the political forms of capitalism should have three elements: it should be based on analysis of the different historical processes by which capitalist states have been and are constituted; it should elucidate the specificities of the various political forms of capitalism; and it should explain the continuing existence of a plurality of states and imperialist relations.     

Work,Poverty and Modernity in Mayhew's London

Mayhew's understanding of work in London has not been considered a great success. His accounts of workers were sentimental and erratic and his ambivalence to political economy prevented him from fully understanding the relationship between work and poverty. As the century progressed, it was Marx and Booth who provided systematic and sustained studies of the labour question. However, as this article argues, the circulation of facts, moral judgements and guesswork that filled the pages of London Labour and the London Poor offers a fair representation of a metropolitan manufacturing economy that was characterized by uncertainty, speculation and shifting boundaries of capital and labour. In particular, Mayhew's demonization of small masters, the working poor who set up as independent producers and whom he blamed for over-competition, drew out a contradiction in contemporary understandings of capitalism: large-scale capital and well-organized labour were seen as progressive and modern but small businesses were flexible and adaptable and were for many the only hope of escaping poverty and breaking out of the ranks of labour. As such, it is Mayhew rather than Marx or Booth that best exposes the tensions between the aspirations of the working poor and the paradigms of social investigators that insisted on distinguishing capital from labour.     

Capitalism,Crisis and Critique: Reassessing Régis Debray's ‘Modest Contribution’ to Understanding May 1968 in Light of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello's Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme

In 1978 Régis Debray argued that, rather than threatening to overthrow capitalism, the student and worker revolt of 1968 actually strengthened the mechanisms of capital accumulation in France. Today the historical significance of May 1968 continues to generate much debate and scholarly interest, yet Debray's controversial thesis is largely absent from contemporary accounts of May's impact on post-1968 socio-economic and political change. Adopting the theoretical framework of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello's Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, this article shows that Debray's work correctly highlights the ability of post-1968 capitalism to appropriate the critiques of May. In certain respects, Debray offered a prescient analysis of capitalism's ‘new spirit’ as later described by Boltanski and Chiapello. The article also explores some of the political and theoretical implications of a grave anti-capitalist threat being paradoxically turned into a source of capitalist strength. While highlighting the notable shortcomings in Debray's argument, particularly its deterministic approach, the article suggests that Debray's stimulating analysis of May 1968 instructively reveals the importance of understanding and explaining capitalism, crisis and critique together.     

Trade Union Internationalism in the Age of Seattle

It is widely recognised within and around the labour movement that labour (as wage work, as class identity, in the trade union form, as a partner in industrial relations, as a radical-democratic social movement, as a part of civil society) is in profound crisis. Even more is this the case for labour as an international movement at a time in which the old international capitalist order is being challenged by the new capitalist disorder. Recovery requires a critique of traditional labour internationalism, reconceptualisation, new kinds of analysis and a new dialogue and dialectic between interested parties. Presented here in turn are the following: (1) a critique of the union internationalism of the national/industrial/colonial era; (2) a reconceptualisation of unionism and labour internationalism appropriate to a globalised/networked/informatised capitalist era; (3) the millennial dialogue on labour and globalisation; and (4) the role of communication, culture and the new information and communication technology. The conclusion stresses the centrality of networking, communication and dialogue to the creation of a new labour internationalism. An extended resource list on international unionism is attached.     

Enemy of the people: Simmel,Ibsen, and the Civic legacy of Nietzschean sociology

The fall of Communism continued an ongoing weakening of Marxist ideology, which had been hegemonic among the European Left since the Great War. While the decline of Marxist thought can be justly seen negatively as the historical correlative of globalization, this decline has also produced cultural space for a re-evaluation of non-Marxist critiques of capitalist civilization. One example of a powerful non-Marxist critique of capitalist civilization is Georg Simmel's sociology of money culture. Before turning to Simmel's radical critique, this essay explains how Simmel came to be viewed as a conservative. Simmel's presumed conservatism is challenged via a re-examination of the civic implications of his Nietzschean sociology. A central question is whether Simmel's ethical individualism is conservative. This question is finally answered through an analysis of Ibsen's Enemy of the People. The choice of Ibsen is not random, for it amplifies the close ethical and historical affinity of Naturalist drama and Simmel's philosophy.     

重新认识金融资本形成和资本输出的时间

本文批评了把商业资本主义、工业资本主义和金融资本主义作为资本主义发展循序渐进的三个阶段而不是资本主义三种形态的错误认识。通过翔实的经济史资料,本文说明随着欧洲大规模跨国商业和早期银行家的出现,金融资本和资本投资就随之出现。在近代资本主义的扩张中,资本输出很早就已开始,在英国,早在19世纪20年代,资本输出额就超过了商品输出额。     

Cows and capitalism: humans,animals and machines in West German barns, 1950–80

ABSTRACT

From the beginning of the 1950s, milking machines increasingly replaced former agricultural workers in West German stables who now preferred better-paid jobs in the industrial sector. The investment necessary for the milking machines led to new ideas about economic thinking and production-optimization, which changed the interplay among human, animal and technology. Within less than two decades, cattle farming in the Federal Republic of Germany changed from an animal-lacking, devastated economic branch of manual labour to a mechanized profit-oriented industry, which produced more than was demanded. This essay challenges the prevailing historical interpretation in which the industrialization of farming has been described as one of the last stages of capitalism’s penetration of society. Central aspects of capitalism remained unfulfilled: there was neither a free market nor individual autonomy of entrepreneurs, and wage labour literally vanished within the barns. A close-up view of the practices at the place of action reveals an arbitrary mixture of efficiency and care that made the industrialization of animal farming differ from the traditional narrative of capitalistic expansion. When animals are the resources to be utilized, capitalist economic activity reaches its limits at the point where the animals’ vital processes begin to malfunction. By bringing together human-animal studies with economic history, this article offers new insights into the role of animals as living beings in history as well as into the expansion of capitalism in an economic sector that continued to operate according to its own rules.     

Imagining a Different Future—Anarchist Equality and the Form of Labour in the Journal of Natural Justice

In the late Qing, China entered the capitalist world-system and this brought about a structural change in society. In this context, late Qing intellectuals felt a double imperative: they had to combat imperialist invasion and economic plunder and therefore they had to establish a nation-state, which presupposed capitalist development. However, on the other hand, they saw the various problems associated with capitalism, and as they were developing their narratives of identity, they needed to find conceptual resources to counter Eurocentric narratives of history. Consequently, these intellectuals harbored a desire to overcome capitalism. This desire produced various post-capitalist utopias, which we can see in Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong and Zhang Taiyan. These utopias are especially meaningful today, in an age where capitalist domination is heightened, but hope for a post-capitalist future has greatly diminished. “Equality” is a keyword with which late Qing intellectuals mapped out the future. Moreover, “equality” expresses precisely the above doubled movement: on the one hand, it constitutes the condition for the nation state, but on the other hand, it is also a concept that late Qing intellectuals used to imagine a different future. Discussions of equality directly dealt with issues of labour, women, and so on. This essay takes as its focus the Journal of Natural Justice, which was organized by the Society for the Restoration of Women’s rights organized by He Zhen, Liu Shipei and others. This journal published for less than one year, but it was one of the main journals promoting socialism and anarchism. It was also the first to directly discuss “labour,” and it proposed an ideal of equality in which “everyone has work and everyone labours.” Throughout the rest of China’s twentieth century, leftist and Marxist intellectuals continued this emphasis on labour. But capitalism presupposes that everyone is equal as a free-labourer. In this case, what is the relationship between the utopia proposed by the Journal of Natural Justice, which entails a world in which all people have work, and capitalism? This essay examines this question in hopes of shedding light on the larger trajectory of Chinese history.     

Child Trafficking: ‘Worst Form’ of Child Labour,or Worst Approach to Young Migrants?

This article presents a critique to the human trafficking discourse in relation to child migration, based on data obtained from the anti‐trafficking community in the Greater Mekong Sub‐region combined with an analysis of secondary material. It also presents a set of qualitative accounts of migration at a young age from Lao PDR and Thailand. On this basis a more theorized, grounded and nuanced perspective on child labour migration is developed. This situates child labour migration historically, embeds it within overarching processes of rural transformation and accounts for young migrants’ agency in the social process of migration, the latter shedding light on the social production of exploitation in relation to young migrants.     

Uganda: Contradictions of the IMF Programme and Perspective

This critique of the Structural Adjustment Programme in Uganda is argued at three levels. A discussion of the immediate consequences of SAP is based on empirical data on economic performance compiled by the Government of Uganda, IMF and World Bank. Second, information for a longer-term historical analysis is culled from the author's own research. Its purpose is to raise more fundamental issues of social transformation. Finally, these perspectives are reinforced through a comparative discussion using South East Asian development experience. The author argues that there are diverse paths to capitalist development, with diverse and contradictory social and political consequences. The real issue in contemporary Uganda is not one of the state or the market, but of the transformation of relations internal to both from the point of view of democratization.     

The Revolutionary Imperative

Abstract: In the last three decades in the advanced capitalist world, the idea of revolution has largely slipped from political view. The neoliberal moment seemed to smother any political possibility other than capitalism, but with that historical phase now itself fading, it may be a good time to revive the idea of revolution if for no other reason than that revolutions do happen. Certainly, the political right is concerned about the possibility of revolts resulting from the social privation resulting, in turn, from the global economic crisis. This essay attempts to explore and reanimate the notion of revolution, both historically and in the present context.     

Karl Loewenstein,Max Lerner,and militant democracy: an appeal to ‘strong democracy’

ABSTRACT

In the 1930s Loewenstein responded to the ease with which the Nazi Party rose to power within parliamentary democracy. In America Lerner echoed Loewenstein’s call for a ‘militant democracy’, but identified a different ‘enemy within’ – rogue capitalist interests. Loewenstein’s response to populism was an ‘authoritarian democracy’, whereas Lerner wished to embrace the people in a public engagement. This paper seeks a middle path towards a conception of democracy that avoids the vicissitudes of transient majorities without yielding the ground to either transient or entrenched minorities. In its modern guise of ‘neoliberalism’, corporate capitalism has made inroads into the sensibilities of democrats, and needs to be confronted by a notion of ‘strong democracy’ expressed through the engagement of whole populations.     

Modern Slavery and Freedom: Exploring Contradictions through Labour Scandals in the Thai Fisheries

This paper examines the modern anti-slavery movement through the lens of the slavery scandal in Thailand’s fisheries sector. The slavery framing provoked a response on the part of governments, corporations and NGOs that produced improvements in working conditions. Nevertheless, we argue that while the slavery framing was effective in drawing attention and resources to solidarity groups, it provided a poor guide to action because of how it resolves complex and embodied relations of freedom and unfreedom into a simplified opposition that can be used to justify capitalism as the realm of freedom—rather than a cause of unfree labour or slavery. The Work in Fishing Convention (ILO C-188) has provided a guide for laws and regulations intended to improve working conditions in industrial fishing in Thailand and elsewhere, but it does not address slavery or human trafficking. It also frames work in fisheries as exceptional, and thus allows for working conditions that would be considered unacceptable on land. We suggest that critical scholars be cautious about working with a slavery framing, and that they might want to engage with working conditions in ways that start less with questions of unfree labour, and more with how capitalist labour practices can be constrained.     

From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post‐slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non‐citizen migrants. At the same time, state‐enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post‐slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post‐Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process.     

Ema is by Nature a Political Animal: Politics and Capitalism in César Aira's Ema,la cautiva

Where much research focuses on comic and playful elements in César Aira's work, or on the forms of Aira's literature and its relationship with Argentine or Latin American literary tradition, this paper constructs a political reading of Aira's novel Ema, la cautiva. I consider the historical circumstances of the periods in which Aira set and published his novel (immediately prior to the culminating episode in the Conquest of the Desert in 1879 and during the military government of 1976–1983 when references to the Conquest of the Desert were utilised to justify the ‘dirty war’) to argue that, although Aira's ironic mode of writing makes the development of parallels between historical periods fraught with difficulty, the novel contains a latent critique of the military government, of the dirty war and of Peronist economic policies prior to the coup of 1976. Additionally, I argue that Ema, la cautiva contains a political critique of the arguments for the capitalist system at its inception and that the novel can be read together with the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore the development of capitalism and expose the apparent freedoms gained through it as allusive and as substitutes for a new type of subjection.     

The Spaces of Capital: The Political Form of Capitalism and the Internationalization of the State1

Abstract: In the course of the neoliberal globalization offensive capital has become more international. This development has placed the question of the state on the agenda once again. The central issue here is the extent to which the existing plurality of states should be seen as a historically contingent state of affairs which might not in principle last indefinitely, or as a structural component of the capitalist mode of production. One important aspect of this issue is the question of how the relationship between the “political form” of capitalism and “institutions” is understood. More often than not, even approaches that use Marxist theory have tended to address this question in an unsatisfactory manner.     

'Old Paris Is No More': Geographies of Spectacle and Anti-Spectacle

The term 'spectacle' has played an important role in recentcritical discussions of vision and visuality. In human geography it has often been used to designate new forms of capitalist urban development associated with display and show. This paper examines aspects of the term by addressing the critique of the spectacle developed by the situationist Guy Debord. It situates his writings on the subject back into the context of his engagements with the modern city between the 1950s and 1970s, especially in Paris, where hespent much of his life. In particular, it reads these writings in terms both of his bleak view of urban change and alienation under capitalism and of the 'glimmers of light' that he found in 'the setting sun of this city.' Debord's attachment to certain urban sites within this critique of urban spectacle was often nostalgic. Yet it can also be understood as part of his concern with challenging the ways in which urban spaces were being reconstructed, and as opening up gaps or cracks for thinking about 'counter-sites' and points of political intervention.