Capitalist Relations Of Production Research Articles

The De-Mediterraneanisation of the Mediterranean?

This paper uses the issue of tourism development in the Mediterranean as a prism through which to look at more general questions of socio-cultural, politico-economic, and environmental processes in the region. The paper is underpinned by a concern with space and spatial transformations (at various levels including those of the town, the countryside, and of the wider area inhabited by both). The starting point is the acceleration of coastal development, engendered, as much of this has been, by tourism. Tourism related shifts of economic gravity to coasts, particularly obvious in the case of islands, has been accompanied by the deepening and extension of more purely capitalist relations of production in the region. Ethnographic signs of this have taken a variety of forms. One has been the urban demographic and spatial transformations which have lead to a continuing rise of urban individuation and the associated further erosion of historic Mediterranean patterns of relationships within and between different sorts of urban collectivities. Another has been the continuing de-coupling of spatial and kinship boundaries. Movements of populations, particularly of young people, to the coast have increased the autonomy of individual members of kinship structures while decreasing the moral authority of elders and other representatives of kin groups as wholes. Interior landscapes have witnessed a continuing decline in the polyculture characteristic of the historic Mediterranean. Such landscapes are themselves influenced by the rise of the coastal monocrop of tourism. One of the most striking manifestations of this is the growing disrepair and degradation of terraces and dry stone walls. Finally, there is the broadening disjunction between, on the one hand, tourist imagery built on rhetorical references to the traditional Mediterranean, to be found in post-cards (of peasant farming and fishing, for example) or internet advertisements (of second homes in 'unspoilt' island bolt holes, for example) and the daily facts of the overuse and the running down of natural resources. Holding in mind aspects of the historical Mediterranean as they come to be measured against contemporary developments in the region, we are left with the question of whether the Mediterranean is being, to coin a term, de-Mediterraneanised.

Globalisation and Social Sciences in Africa

Abstract

Making a profit, making a living: commercial food farming and urban hinterlands in north-west Nigeria

AbstractThe article explores the nature and development of commercial food farming during the 1990s around Sokoto, and its reliance on a floating labour force, something which is not unique to that city but is part of Nigeria's nationwide farming boom, focused on urban and regional markets. The evidence collected from the Sokoto hinterland suggests a new buoyancy in commercial agriculture and an inflow of investment, as under the present economic and political conditions the elites and managerial classes have moved into farming as private and state contracting has proved less rewarding. Large-scale grain and fadama farming and food trading have a long history, but now they are embedded in new analytical categories which indicate a strengthening of capitalist relations of production, and there are signs that a wide spectrum of interests believe capital accumulation can be achieved in the agricultural sector. There are big profits in food fanning provided the farmer has sufficient capital to invest and can meet recurrent labour costs. In the 1990s medium-size farms, especially on irrigated lowland represent a significant shift towards capitalist agriculture, at least in the short term. The introduction of motorised pumps via the World Bank's Agricultural Development Projects marks a substantial innovation in irrigated farming, which also has a long history and has yielded food surpluses traded over a wide area. It is plain that the farmers who have benefited most from partial mechanisation and the surge in food prices are the better-off small commodity producers in the villages, often linked by descent or clientage with traditional rulers and/or politicians, together with the new urban managerial classes.

Is the 'Better Job' Still Possible Today?

The term 'better job' refers to work that permits employees to flourish, that is, situations where employees, and in particular operators, have increased autonomy, more responsibility and greater control over their time and space: in brief, firm control over the organization of their work. The 'better job' appears to be a real possibility, a compromise in our societies (despite the contradictions inherent in capitalist relations of production) in which capital might leave the workers, and employees in general, to organize their own work, in capital's own interest, in other words to increase labour productivity and productivity in general. This explains why the 'better job' has, historically, been initially developed by capital during periods of labour market tension and labour shortage, during the 1960s and 1970s, prior to becoming a demand made by the unions in the late 1970s and 1980s. Today, the partial resolution of the capital accumulation crisis through the widespread adoption of 'tightened flow' production methods runs counter to the emergence of the 'better job', including in those work sectors which otherwise seem most favourable to it.

NAFTAs Future? — The Logic of Puerto Rico's Export‐Led Development

East Asian industrializations and the crisis of Latin American developmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s have been at the center of disputes over the conditions leading to a socially optimal extension and intensification of capitalist production relations in the periphery. The contrast in regional styles and outcomes of development is deemed to be the key to a final adjudication between the competing analytical claims of neoclassical economists and statist currents within political economy. Neoclassical critiques of excessive Latin American tampering with markets find confirmation for neoliberal prescriptions in the open, export‐oriented East Asian regimes. That East Asian development is not a paragon of neoliberal virtue, and that relatively freer markets might not be the most important part of the story, is the crux of the enduring statist critique. Over a decade of contestation has given way to significant refinements, among them, a recognition of the importance of sequencing import‐and export‐substitution. The modicum of foresight and discipline that seems to be implied in proper sequencing has weighed in favor of the statist emphasis on the role of ‘developmental states.’ Even researchers disposed to enshrine the virtues of markets in the process of modernization, find it difficult not to concede that the East Asian record rests on more than macroeconomic stability; although they remain skeptical about the cruder claims of states successfully ‘picking winners and losers’ (Dollar and Sokoloff 1994). Perhaps the most enduring legacy of this controversy—only extreme zealots could deny this—is the mounting empirical evidence supporting the argument that economic development is an inherently discontinuous process, and reliance on the market institution leaves societies woefully unprepared to ‘negotiate’ through an unstable and asymmetrical international political economy.

Work and Volunteering: The Long Arm of the Job

The impact of work on social life is a major concern of sociologists. Marx and Durkheim both believed that jobs have consequences for workers' lives outside the workplace, and subsequent research byKohn, Wilensky, and others confirms that complex and self-directedjobs encourage social participation. We use this spillover theory to predict volunteering among respondents to the Americans' Changing Lives survey (1986-89). Occupational self-direction increases volunteering, especially among the better educated, a result of the civic skills provided. Net of self-direction, situs and occupational differences in volunteering are alsofound. Public sector workers volunteer the most. Within each sector, higher-status occupations volunteer more. The results suggest that, ifpriority is to be given to maintaining a volunteer laborpool, it would be unwise to ignore social trends limiting occupational self-direction at work or reducing the size of the public sector. Sociologists have long been concerned with the impact of work and work organizations on social life. Marx argued that capitalist relations of production, and the labor process demanded by them, have powerfil consequences for workers'

The Division of Labour, Capitalism and Socialism: An Alternative to Sayer

Sayer (1995) has argued that the division of labour has a structure that is distinct from capitalist relations of production, and, following Hayek, that it is determined most strongly by the use of knowledge by enterprises. Conscious coordination or alteration of the division of labour therefore usually result in reduced efficiency and in an authoritarian suppression of difference. In this article we argue that the division of labour in capitalism is strongly determined by conflict within and between classes, and that in the short term socialist policy can and should aim to alter it. A model of socialist economic coordination is presented which is feasible and ameliorates many of the problems of the capitalist division of labour. This model would enable the development rather than suppression of positive differences.

The political power of research methods: Knowledge regimes in U.S. labor-market policy

The topic of the state's use of social science is the site of an immense gap between theoretical expectations and fine-grained empirical work. Theoretical discussions have treated social science alternately as a rational replacement for politics or, in critical theory, as an ideology that presents particularistic policies in universalistic terms. While these approaches contain opposed philosophies of knowledge, and opposed views as to whether the state's use of social science is benign or malignant, they agree that science has or will become the logic of state intervention in the modern welfare state. On one hand, there is the tradition that begins early in the nineteenth century with Comte and the German Polizeiwissenschaften in Europe,1 is found in the work of Progressive movement social scientists in the United States,2 and in manifestos of the policy sciences in the 1950s and 1960s. This embraces science as an engine for benign and universalistic rationalization of state action.3 On the other hand, critical approaches have argued that science does not guarantee universalism in state intervention, but gives the appearance of universalism to intervention that is based above all on the principle of reproducing capitalist relations of production. These critical approaches nonetheless share the expectation of greater use of social science.4 Habermas's well-known passages on the modern state's use of science provide the most penetrating examples of this approach. Science is brought in to balance a legitimation deficit when the state's intervention itself erodes the ideology of "just exchanges" in the market, while traditional ideologies have long been "disenchanted" by capitalist rationalization. The state appropriates science to convert political or practical questions into soluble technical problems.5

Rethinking Childhood Dependency: Children's Contributions to the Domestic Economy

In industrialised countries, the growth of wage labour and capitalist relations of production have been associated with a decline in ‘child labour’. The general assumption within sociology is that children do not undertake productive labour, and that their new economic role is to attend school and prepare to become future members of the labour force. This paper presents evidence from a wider research project on children's involvement in ‘work’ and focuses on children's accounts of their contribution to domestic labour within their homes, based on an analysis of children's written descriptions of their everyday lives outside school. Data were collected from 730 children aged between 11 and 16 years in schools in Birmingham and Cambridgeshire, and in a small number of interviews and discussions with children. The paper suggests that children's labour has been rendered invisible behind dominant conceptualisations within sociology of ‘the child’ as passive and dependent, and argues that far from being mere ‘burdens’ on their families, some children may be making important contributions to household labour in the form of the routine daily tasks and child-care they undertake.

Indépendance, Savoir Aborigène et Environnement en Nouvelle-Calédonie

In New Caledonia, indigenous knowledge was traditionally anchored in a substantive appreciation of the natural environment. Substantive, in this case, refers to the Weberian concept of substantive or value rationality characterized by a belief in the intrinsic value of an object or action. When New Caledonia was annexed by France, the imposition of capitalist relations of production through settler colonialism, mineral exploitation and ranching introduced instrumental or formal rationality characterized by conscious reasoning that an action or object is a means to a particular ends. The natural environment became a means and an instrument to carry out conscious projects for the anticipated benefit of the colonizers. At the same time, the majority of the Kanaks continued to appreciate the intrinsic value of nature because they were excluded from the capitalist sector of the New Caledonian economy, living in native reserves and continuing in subsistence activities which made light use of the environment. However, within the past twenty years an emerging Kanak elite has adopted a value of nature as a means to achieve a particular end - independence from France. Rational use of the environment is now perceived as a way to achieve a specific goal, for example, owning nickel mines to achieve economic independence. Maintaining the tension between Weberian concepts of substantive and formal rationalism, this paper traces the emergence of rationalist thought about the environment among Kanak independence leaders.

Invigilating "Our Mutual Friend": Gender and the Legitimation of Professional Authority

Examining contradictions of nineteenth-century professional authorship and gendered separation of public and private in David Copperfield, Mary Poovey argues that stabilizing and mobilizing a particular image of woman, domestic sphere, and woman's work were critical to fixing of the English writer's social and the legitimation and depoliticization of capitalist market and class (89). Since Poovey, it has become a truism to assert that professional Victorian intellectuals rely on extraeconomic authority granted domestic woman by doctrine of separate spheres in order to resolve contradictions of their place in capitalist relations of production: they may then depict themselves as policing line between public and private spheres rather than challenging it.' At end of David Copperfield, David and Agnes preside together over a Copperfield household full of children named for novel's characters. In following pages, I will argue that in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), however, relationship between professional and domestic authority is not nearly so collaborative. Instead, novel provides a model of professional expertise, as valuable yet invaluable as domestic power, yet freed from its fragility. If we trace plots that lead to emergence of novel's two normative intellectual workers-John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn-we find that novel's demystification of domestic ideology plays a key role in mystifying and legitimating professional's place in Victorian economic system. It does so by replacing domesticity's doctrine of separate spheres with a new version of that doctrine, one that makes a surprisingly unDickensian use of growing Victorian state and its institutions. Our Mutual Friend appropriates paradigmatic form of interaction between state and intellectual worker-the examination-as paradigmatic form of interaction between its characters. Invigilating at examinations of Our Mutual Friend, scrutinizing its many test takers (and givers), we find gender reemerging as crucial, not in Victorian home, but in strategies of Victorian schoolroom.

Writing Class: Workers and Modern Egyptian Colloquial Poetry (Zajal)

Writing Class: Workers and Modern Egyptian Colloquial Poetry (Zajal)

Modernité avancée et modernisation « post »-moderne : Notes théoriques d'une recherche

Michel Vakaloulis, Advanced Modernity and «r Post »-Modern Modernization : Notes on Research At the end of the twentieth century, changes in the areas of production, spatial-temporal sociability, political domination and culture represent the emergence of a period of « advanced capitalist modernity ». This period is characterized by a radicalization rather than a weakening of established orientations. Defined as a « post »-modern modernization », this transformation is most fundamentally the restructuring of the social relations of capitalist production and, consequently, the possibilities of anti-capitalist struggle.

Sugar and unfree labour: Reflections on labour control in the dominican republic, 1870–1935

This article takes issue with theories which suppose an essential contradiction between capitalist production and unfree labour relations. Using the history of sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic as a case study, it is argued that capitalist entrepreneurs tried very hard to restrict free wage labour relations. On the Dominican sugar plantations this goal was reached by a system of differential mechanisation which brought about a rigid separation between the mass of unskilled field workers and the restricted number of (semi‐) skilled workers. This labour division could be reproduced over a long period of time because the field workers were migrant labourers from Haiti liable to strong racial discrimination within Dominican society.

Classroom Methods Mirroring Workplace Values: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Feminist Pedagogy and Writing Across the Curriculum

This article argues that Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, feminist pedagogy and the methods of writing across the curriculum programs can be used in the classroom to broaden students' understanding of the possibilities of the workplace. Each of these approaches to teaching mirrors values which differ from those within capitalist relations of production and gives students practice in using them.

The Ambiguities of Protest in South Africa: Rural Politics and the Press during the 1920s

The 1920s were a time of ferment in South Africa, and the African nationalist press played an important role in communicating the issues and events of this decade to their audiences. The images of reality projected by these newspapers and magazines were necessarily contradictory, but they differed substantially from those projected by the established white press a crucial distinction, since African experiences were rarely represented in these publications. The African nationalist press represented the African petty bourgeoisie in South Africa, but as a number of scholars have noted, class boundaries in African society were neither rigid nor clearly defined. The petty bourgeoisie was fragmenting downward at an accelerated pace after Union in 1910, and alliances were frequent between class fractions that might otherwise have been differentially placed in the social relations of capitalist production.1 As discrimination and oppression at all levels intensified, more and more Africans in occupational categories that were on the fringes of the lower middle class descended into the ranks of the proletariat. Salaried white-collar workers fared little better: wage scales were so low that the more educated had little opportunity to emulate the lifestyles of their white counterparts. Hence it is not surprising that especially in periods of hegemonic crisis alienated fractions of the African petty bourgeoisie would find common cause with unorganized industrial workers and peasants in openly defying the status quo. Such a crisis occurred in the years immediately following World War I. Soaring food prices, low wages, and job discrimination temporarily galvanized African workers, especially on the Witwatersrand, where a wave of wildcat strikes and boycotts appeared to threaten civil order. Nationalists within the South African Native National Congress (renamed the African National Congress in 1923) were divided over the most appropriate response to take towards industrial strife, and mobilizing workers briefly radicalized African politics in the Transvaal. In the countryside, fluctuating grain prices, prolonged drought, and plant and animal diseases posed an immediate threat to food and

Perspectives on the Crisis of Political Thought: Labor and Society

The essays in this issue are a response to an apparent contradiction. How can we explain the disjunction between rapid, spectacular technological and economic change, and the continued reception of ideological patterns derived from nineteenthcentury originals? Has theory been unable to reform itself, let alone to encapsulate and direct the processes of social transformation? Indeed, the repetitive and imitative character of much of contemporary political theory seems to herald an end but not an actualization of philosophy. But its very stagnancy may hold the key to its relation to concrete social life. Behind the dazzling dance of phenomenal forms, fundamental historical structures of social relationships and social activity persist. It is here that the deep experiential basis for ideological currents of distant origin reproduces itself. The central issue is the tenacity of capitalism, whose apologists and critics in many respects occupy essentially the same terrain as they did at the height of the Industrial Revolution. For all the newness of the present moment, for all its unprecedented dangers and opportunities, for all its frenetic technical development, the persistence of capitalist relations of production is the ground from which liberal and Marxist reflections continue to spring. The current world market invites comparison with Plato's analogy of the cave, where a surface flurry of activity conceals an underlying fixity of structures. In the cave of advanced capitalism this stagnation is not a permanent and unchangeable structure of being, but a historical and social product. It ensues from the blockage of real transformative dynamics in society whose causes require the most urgent and probing investigation. In itself, political theory is powerless to shake the foundation of such a world. But if capitalism persists, it persists in a crisis-ridden form which constantly reproduces its basic contradictions in new and unstable configurations. These, in turn, open a limited range of new perspectives for social thought. The structural dislocations entailed in the globalization of production, the specific traits assumed by cyclical fluctuations, and shifts in models of accumulation do not directly signify the emergence of qualitatively new forms of social life, but evince the contradictory logic of advanced capitalism. In these conditions of persistence and change, however, new forms of struggle and new social movements arise along the basic line of cleavage between labor and capital. They project possibilities of transformation beyond the

Locality and Small Firms: Some Reflections from the Franco-British Project, “Industrial Systems, Technical Change and Locality”

Research carried out as part of the Franco-British project “Industrial Systems, Technical Change and Locality” has highlighted weaknesses in current work on locality. In particular, it has been found that examination of the role of small and medium sized firms, recognition of the role of cooperation in capitalist relations of production, and identification of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ notions of locality all help to produce a more robust understanding of social and economic change at the restricted scale of the locality.

Radicalism, Marxism and medicine.

This article presents a critique of recent radical interpretations of medicine and provides an alternative explanation of such interpretations. It analyzes 1) the articulation of medical practices, knowledge, and institutions within specific modes of production and social formations; 2) the dual functions of medicine within capitalist relations of production; 3) the reproduction of power within medicine; and 4) the meaning of capitalist, socialist, and communist medicine. The political practice derived from these analyses is also elaborated.

Flexible Futures: Work, Place and Politics in the Region of Limburg (Belgium)

This contribution is aimed at exploring the socio‐spatial dynamics of technological change and innovation under capitalist relations of production with special emphasis on these current shifts and transformations in the organisation and functioning of the global space‐economy.