Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction: The Precarity Debate -- 2. Theorists of Transformation -- 3. Conceptualising Precarity and Insecurity -- 4. Is Work Being De-standardised? -- 5. Is Employment Tenure Declining? -- 6. Rethinking Labour Markets -- 7. An Epidemic of Insecurity? -- 8. Conclusions

The commodity -- The process of exchange -- Money, or the circulation of commodities -- The general formula of capital -- Contradictions in the general formula -- The sale and purchase of labour-power -- The labour process and valorisation process -- Constant capital and variable capital -- The rate of surplus-value -- The working day -- The rate and mass of surplus-value -- Cooperation -- The division of labour and manufacture -- Machinery and large-scale industry -- Absolute and relative surplus-value -- Changes of magnitude in the price of labour-power and the surplus-value -- Different formulae for the rate of surplus-value -- The transformation of the value (and respectively the price) of labour-power into wages -- Time-wages -- Piece-wages -- National difference in wages --Simple reproduction -- The transformation of surplus-value into capital -- The general law of capitalist accumulation -- The secret primitive accumulation -- The expropriation of the agricultural population from the land -- Bloody legislation against the expropriated since the end of the 15th century. The forcing down of wages by Act of Parliament -- The genesis of the capitalist farmer -- Impact of the agricultural revolution on industry. The creation of a home market for industrial capital -- The genesis of the industrial capitalist -- The historical tendency of capitalist accumulation -- The modern theory of colonisation.

pt. 1. Understanding the system. System that hides its secrets -- Marx's value -- Money makes the world go round -- Living and dead labour -- Exploitation at the heart of the system -- The anatomy of capital -- Squeezing the worker -- Productive and unproductive labour -- The reserve army of labour -- A world of alienation -- pt. 2. Dynamics of the system. The circulation of capital -- Capital's self-expansion -- Accumulate, accumulate! -- The falling rate of profit -- Counteracting influences -- Capitalism and crisis -- An ageing system -- The distribution of surplus value -- The world of finance -- Fictitious capital -- A second look at crisis -- Prices and the general rate of profit -- Politics of the crisis -- pt. 3. The changing system. The classical period -- The birth of imperialism -- The slump and state capitalism -- The long boom -- The return of crisis -- App. 1. The "reduction problem -- App 2. The "transformation problem" -- App. 3. Marx's theory of rent

This paper traces the roots of precarity as a concept emerging from French sociological discourse, then permeating through networks informed by Italian autonomism, before re-emerging in the writings of figures such as Guy Standing and Arne Kalleberg. It is shown that, despite the claims of the literature, precarity in employment is not typical in the United Kingdom. Here, temporary employment remains the exception and employment tenure remains stable. This can best be explained by radical political economy. Capital is not interested simply in engendering precarity; it is also concerned with the retention and reproduction of labor power, leading to contradictory imperatives. The resonance of the narrative of precarity, in spite of this, reflects a long retreat from class within radical theory and the insecurities present in working life.

An earlier article by Gallie, Felstead, Green and Inanc demonstrates that employee insecurity can be divided into job tenure insecurity (anxieties about the continuity of employment) and job status insecurity (anxieties about the loss of valued features of the job). Here it is argued that job tenure insecurity can be further divided into acute and generalised variants. The former tracks the level of involuntary redundancies in the UK data and is grounded in a realistic assessment of the likelihood of involuntary job loss. The latter is driven by a range of factors, including the economic cycle and the intensification of work that is also associated with rising job status insecurity, and the permeation of insecurity through new sections of the workforce. Its greatest extent was in the mid-1990s and it rose again in the years following the 2008/2009 recession.

AbstractRobert L. Smale's work looks in detail at the origins of Bolivia's labour movement in the tin mines of the early twentieth century. This provides a good starting point for an account of the rapid rise of Trotskyism in the period leading up to the national revolution of 1952, a phenomenon described in detail in S. Sándor John's book. Sándor John's work in particular is important in understanding both the strengths and limitations of the Trotskyist POR, which was not able to displace rival nationalist organisations to achieve political hegemony in the struggles of the second half of the twentieth century.