The essence of wealth in a capitalist economic form is reduced by political economy to the source of value—labor, thereby presenting it as a subjectivity. With the development of private ownership, labor shifts from being special to general and, upon contact with capital, becomes alienated abstract labor. Marx, through his critique of abstract labor, demonstrates from historical, social, and subjective dimensions that the subjective essence of wealth is the realization of human needs, abilities, and creativity through free and conscious labor under the conditions of the abolition of private property. This provides a solid theoretical foundation for critiquing the alienation of digital labor in digital capitalism, such as the historical continuation of abstraction, the algorithmic restructuring of labor-capital relations, and the obscuring of labor subjectivity and emotions.

Abstract: This article explores the cross-reading of Michel Foucault and Gary Becker on neoliberalism and human capital theories. Situating Becker's 2012 interview with François Ewald and Bernard Harcourt on Foucault as a fulcrum, this article's aim is to analyze Becker and Foucault's works from a series of discursive spaces: American neoliberalism's critique of labor, human capital theories' approach to the economic universe of individuals (consumption, household, time, wage), and the place of the subject in political economy texts. As the article argues, the common thread of these accounts is the redefinition of the economy as subjective (i.e., as an economy where work, the distribution of income, and social reproduction in general are approached on the basis of the individual). The article concludes with analysis of the political translations of these human capital discourses.

This article outlines Dunayevskaya’s original but underappreciated contribution to Marxism as a body of theory and practice. Focusing specifically on her Marxist-Humanist ‘ontology of struggle’ in its various dimensions, it draws out her engagement with Marx such that a new, vitalised account of social transformation is elaborated. From her critique of labour and state capitalism to her account of the dual movement between practice and theory, to her attentiveness to the ‘voices from below’ and to the ‘new passions and forces that develop in the bosom of society’, a theory is elaborated that expands the traditional Marxian dialectic to the struggles of racialised groups, women and other minorities. In so doing, it offers a basis from which to re-appraise liberatory politics, and to renew the emancipatory thrust of Marx’s writings.

In the wake of the twinned specters of authoritarianism and antidemocratic governance that the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in India have both exacerbated and facilitated, the author argues that scholarship on sex work deployed through a critique of labor will be pressed to rethink its analytic focus on the law. Instead, the author argues for a field-level focus built around both the everyday life of surviving sex work in the informal economy and the understanding that enforcement of the law regularly diverges from the letter of the law itself. Unless it accounts for prevailing epistemic conditions, new critical work on sex work as a labor strategy may afford opportunities to be taken up in support of reductive narratives of sex work, built around the trope of injury. The consequences of not addressing the conditions of the production of our critiques will be the continued erasure of sex workers as migrant workers and as economic agents. In the post-COVID-19 world, these critiques will be stressed even further, as the informal sector expands along with uneven policing, and as sex work continues to serve as a measure of security for some, against a backdrop of extreme and intensifying precarity.

Jane McAlevey makes a significant contribution in her critique of labor’s growing use of the corporate campaign to stem union decline. But in placing the blame for the strategy’s adoption on the excessive influence of Saul Alinsky’s organizing model, she misses a much more fundamental cause: the changed nature of capital.

I begin this article by discussing the recent work of academics and activists to identify the advantages and issues relating to co-operative forms of higher education, and then focus on the ‘worker co-operative’ organisational form and its applicability and suitability to the governance of and practices within higher educational institutions. Finally, I align the values and principles of worker co-ops with the critical pedagogic framework of ‘Student as Producer’. Throughout I employ the work of Karl Marx to theorise the role of labour and property in a ‘co-operative university’, drawing particularly on later Marxist writers who argue that Marx’s labour theory of value should be understood as a critique of labour under capitalism, rather than one developed from the standpoint of labour.

Research Article| January 01 2012 Honeybees and Discontented Workers: A Critique of Labor in Louisa May Alcott Sarah T. Lahey Sarah T. Lahey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2012) 44 (2): 133–156. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.44.2.0133 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sarah T. Lahey; Honeybees and Discontented Workers: A Critique of Labor in Louisa May Alcott. American Literary Realism 1 January 2012; 44 (2): 133–156. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.44.2.0133 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

<i>Nicola Masciandaro,</i> The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature<i>The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature</i>. Nicola Masciandaro . Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. xii+209.

In a university and disciplinary environment where knowledge is increasingly commodified, this paper sketches a reconstruction of the mature Marx’s analysis of capitalism. I argue that his understanding remains methodologically powerful and helps to ground sociological analyses of the present. While accepting that there are good grounds for questioning the relevance of Marx in the wake of the South African political transition and the Post‐Fordist transformation of labour, this interpretation departs significantly from how Marx has generally been interpreted by sociologists and other social scientists in the country by foregrounding the commodity as the starting point of his social critique. Indeed, I argue that ‘class’ and ‘workplaces’, long a focus of radical sociologists, are on their own inadequate to grasp Marx’s concept of capitalism. Finally, drawing on the Frankfurt School, I suggest the importance of a critique of labour and the recognition of contradiction as the starting point of an emancipatory project.

This paper argues that labor confronts a crisis in its inability to deal with various forms of attack by capital and it situates that crisis in an historical and international context. A critique of labor's strategies for dealing with this crisis is presented along with suggestions for a strategy of rebuilding a progressive labor movement.