Labor Theory Research Articles

Конкурентні програми реформування власності: вітчизняна наукова спадщина кінця XIX – початку XX ст.

The article is devoted to the study and coverage of property issues in the economic thought of Ukraine at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The purpose of the study is a retrospective generalization of the results of a critical and comparative analysis by domestic economists of the specified period of alternative property reform programs in the aspect of their theoretical validity and predictive expectations of socio-economic consequences. The results of a critical review by domestic scientists of the Marxist concept of property as a justification for the need for full socialization of the means of production are presented, in particular, the insufficiency of the labor theory of value for the economic justification of the ownership of the working class over the entire social product and the unsuitability of the Marxist theory of the capitalist system development for proving the historical necessity of liquidating a system based on private property. Scientific discussions surrounding various projects of land nationalization as a partial socialization of the means of production are analyzed. It was revealed that the majority of scientists refuted the accusations of private ownership of land and the landowner's right to land rent as insufficient moral justification and considered it inappropriate to carry out land nationalization in any form. The development of the concept of multifaceted forms of ownership as the basis for the effective functioning of the market economy in Ukrainian science is highlighted. The conclusion is substantiated that the development of the economic and legal foundations of a mixed economy, based on the principle of equal partnership of various forms of ownership as a guarantee of the practical realization of their best sides and improvement of the social division of labor, became an important achievement of Ukrainian economic science.

Julie von Bechtolsheim, a Political Life: Women's Work and Governance in the Age of Revolution

AbstractThis article understands how women and girls in the Grand Duchy of Saxe‐Weimar‐Eisenach negotiated core issues in the Age of Revolutions: early industrialization and political representation. The baroness Julie von Bechtolsheim (1751–1847) leveraged war, widowhood, courtly connections, and poetry to pursue a public ‘career’ as First Principal of Eisenach's Women's Association (Frauenverein) from 1814 to 1831, establishing a material link between her private estate and the political estate. The Association itself was contrived as a polity in microcosm. Accusations of Bechtolsheim's ‘despotic’ governance prompted a majority bourgeois managerial staff to establish electoral conventions. Not all women had equal claim to citizenship, however. The Association's records reveal a Romantic theory of labour that reinforced a social order built on women's work, and its ‘Industry School’ sustained a supply of female labour into the state's predominant industry, linen manufacture, as into the servant's quarters of its affluent homes.

Structure of Labor: Toward a New Theory of Community and Economic Development

Abstract In the United States, the rise in income inequality and downward intergenerational social mobility since the 1970s represent twin problems facing community and economic development today. This paper proposes a Structure of Labor theory to apply at the local and regional level to address these development challenges. The objective is to provide a simple local approach to development that maximizes upward economic mobility and enables individuals and communities to achieve their development goals in the 21st century development landscape of the United States. The proposed theory fuses free-enterprise principles with state-planned dirigiste efforts to maximize the best of both theoretical perspectives. After reviewing pertinent literature and articulating the Structure of Labor theory, the latter sections of the paper explicate its implications for community and economic development practice.

The emotional labour of teleworkers conducting online counselling during Covid‐19.

AbstractDrawing on emotional labour theory, this paper explores the barriers to emotionally complex telework, with a specific focus on the space, interface and pace of work. We examine the working lives of mental health counsellors who adapted from in‐person delivery to online delivery whilst working from home, during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Our qualitative data set comprises of semi‐structured online interviews with 31 counsellors across the United Kingdom. Findings reveal that boundary issues, increased technical interruptions, increased screen time and associated fatigue, and increased contact‐ability due to digitalisation were key barriers to conducting emotionally complex tasks and exacerbated the emotional labour of participants creating more negative outcomes. This resulted in heightened emotion management in the home space, emotional dissonance, stress and in some cases, burn‐out.

A Sraffian model of Pasinetti's natural economic system

Pasinetti's (1981) natural economic system is a central idea of Pasinetti's structural economic dynamics, which explains various features of a growing economy, focusing on an evolving structure of commodity prices, an evolving structure of production, and the time pass of the wage rate and the rate of profit (Pasinetti, 1981, p.128). It exhibits three core properties: first, the sum of the growth rate of the quantity of labour and the growth rate of demand or the growth rate of labour productivity determines the rate of profit (the natural rate of profit). Second, under a ‘positive’ natural rate of profit, the quantity of labour commanded by a commodity equals the quantity of labour embodied in the commodity (a pure labour theory of value). Finally, equal rewards should be paid for equal amounts of homogenous labour (the basic principle of equal rewards). These core properties were examined, using our Sraffian discrete-time models corresponding to the three cases. The first model explains the simple case of a growing economy with no technical change and an invariant composition of demand. The second model treats the difference between the actual net product and the standard net product, assuming no technical change and an invariant composition of demand. The third model explains the occurrence of technical progress in a growing economy. The validity of three core properties of the natural economic system in Pasinetti (1981) is examined by three Sraffian models.

CONCEPTUAL BASES OF FORMATION OF COMPETENCE POTENTIAL OF LIVING LABOUR UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS

The relevance of the issue of the competence potential of living labour is due to the need for evolutionary changes in the labour potential of the workforce as a response to the transformation of embodied labour in the context of the digitalisation of the economy. The aim of the research is to substantiate the conceptual foundations for the formation of the competence potential of living labour in the new conditions of digital transformation. In order to achieve this goal, the conceptual and categorical apparatus of labour theory has been improved, the types and structure of competences, functions and tools for building competence potential have been defined. Methodology. General scientific research methods were used in the study. In particular, using the methods of induction and deduction, the genesis of the concept of "competence" is studied to determine the substantive transformations in time, using the method of comparison, the common and distinctive features of the concepts of "competence" and "competency" are identified, using the systematic method, the structural elements of the concept of "competence" are identified and the introduction of the concept of "competence potential" of living labour into the scientific apparatus of labour theory is substantiated. The obtained results of the study created the basis for substantiation of the conceptual scheme of formation of the competence potential of living labour, which consists in allocation and coordination of the structural elements of the categories "potential", "competence", "labour potential". It is concluded that the expansion of the competence potential of living labour should be carried out in areas in accordance with the types of competences, in particular, individual and academic competences, workplace competences and industry competences. It is established that: a) individual competences depend on genetic characteristics of a person and are formed in non-formal and informal education; b) the institute of micro-qualifications should become an effective tool for the development of academic and workplace competences; c) individual, academic and workplace competences are crystallised into sectoral competences, which are reflected in the sectoral qualification frameworks and determine the vector of movement of a modern specialist in professional activity. The practical value of the research results is associated with the possibility of forming and implementing a labour management policy adequate to the new economic conditions.

История экономической мысли глазами структуралиста (Часть 1. Классики и Маркс)

The paper attempts to rethink the problem of the optimal structure of the economy and economic growth in the history of thought. The concept of «post-truth» according to S. Fuller is used. A. Smith used the strategy of changing speech practices and interpreting facts against the mercantilists, and subsequently K. Marx did the same for the entire classical school. The history of thought legitimizes the economic mainstream — the dominant version of economic theory, ignoring the previous versions of rhetorical domination. The central role in the problem of determining the optimal structure of the economy is given to the old discussion about the relationship between productive and unproductive labor. Both Smith, and Ricardo, and Marx were looking for the main source of value and mechanisms for its redistribution and withdrawal in favor of certain social groups. The division into productive and non-productive types of economic activity is recognized as incorrect and discarded at modern time. Condemned by A. Smith the orientation of economic agents towards extracting rent can block economic growth in fact. As D. Ricardo shows, rent-seeking behavior can lead to the disappearance of profits and the achievement of the so-called «stationary state» under certain conditions,. The principle of comparative advantage, Ricardo discovered the principle of comparative advantage. That contradicts both «equilibrium in the long run» and the theory of labor value. This principle makes it possible to build a hierarchy of geopolitical subjects in the spirit of world-system analysis with a certain modification,. Marx ignores this principle, using «surplus value» as the basis of his concept. According his approach value is created only in the sphere of material production. This kind of research leaves the problem of the optimal structure of the economy unresolved.

Whose Dialectic? Walter Rodney, Marxism, and Africa

Drawing on Walter Rodney’s lesser-known texts and speeches alongside his How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), this essay demonstrates how Rodney applied Marx’s dialectical materialism to the study of slavery and colonialism in relation to labor in Africa and the Americas. It offers a critical response to the Brazilian theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of the “racial dialectic,” which suggests that Marxism—and particularly the universal conception of human freedom embedded in Marx’s conception of the labor theory of value, primitive accumulation, and labor-time—is incapable of addressing the socioeconomic realities of slavery and colonialism. Rodney’s oeuvre provides an expansive engagement with Marx’s methodology applied to the realities of slavery and colonialism and contemporary political struggles on the African continent and in the Americas.

A NETNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPT OF CREATIVE LABOR IN DIGITAL MEDIA THROUGH THE INTERVIEWS OF THE INFLUENCERS

With the increasing importance of cultural industries in the global economy, communication and media studies started to consider creative labor as an important concept to focus on. However, there is an ambiguity about where exactly this concept is positioned within capitalist relations. This study, in which the autonomy conditions of creative labor are discussed, examines the position of the concept of creative labor in digital capitalism in the context of critical political economy. In the study, the debates about the utopian "creative class" are critically examined and the ability of creative labor to isolate itself from the wheels of the capitalist system in the digital world is questioned. In this context, a discussion is carried out on how creative labor can be analyzed within the the thoughts of Marx, Smith and Fuchs. In this research, the concept of social media influencer, which is analyzed as a type of creative labor, has been discussed within the framework of creative labor, Fuchs' digital labor theory and Marx's labor theory of value. In light of this discussion, a netnographic analysis is made on the creative workers who take place as “influencers” in the digital media, in order to question their awareness, evaluation and comments about the position of their labor in the system. Using this analysis method, the interviews of the social media infuencers selected have been watched on Youtube and an interpretation have been made within the framework of the study questions. In the findings of the research, influencers are unaware that they are under the exploitation of the labor processes and the small group that owns the means of production.

Role Of Intellectual Property Theories in Addressing Anomalies Created By The Intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property Rights: An Analysis

Globally, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding exponentially. The issue of managing intellectual property in AI is raised by this surge. Discussions and moderating have taken place, but no resolution has been reached. The issue of whether the work created by an AI should get a special status still exists. When it comes to the control of IPR in artificial intelligence, there are a few oddities. The ownership of patents and copyrights is in doubt, and there are serious worries about the consequences of violation. With the development of technology, there is no certainty on the law, despite existing international accords and conventions. In the absence of artificial intelligence (AI), intellectual property (IP) rules have, up to this point, treated IP as a product of human cognition. The current boom in AI, which has seen the development of IP from the "intelligence" of software, has upended this base. But the non availability of law on works created by artificial intelligence the law is left far behind to deal with the anomalies created by the intersection of “Artificial intelligence and intellectual property rights”. This research paper examines the role of intellectual property theories in addressing AI anomalies, focusing on copyright, patent, and trademark laws. It analyzes utilitarianism, labour theory and personality theory, examining authorship and ownership in AI-generated works and potential conflicts between human creators and machine-generated content. In this research paper researcher(s) will- Analyse various theories of Intellectual properties to tackle the anomolities created by the intersection of IPR and AI. Criticize and suggest changes in the theories to make them helpful for emerging frameworks on AI and IPR.

Disability and the State Production of Precarity

Materialist theories of disability link disability and labor, hypothesizing that under neoliberalism, disability stigma contributes to labor market precarity. These claims have not been evaluated empirically and the mediating role of the state remains underspecified. Ethnographic fieldwork in a job training program for people with psychiatric disabilities reveals two contradictions in the welfare state treatment of disability. First, disability benefits are set at low levels, yet means-testing limits earnings, channeling people with disabilities into low-wage jobs. Second, contradictory imperatives attached to state funding incentivize placement in temporary jobs. These welfare state contradictions produce disabled workers as a precarious labor force.

Madras Kraals, animal labour and Veterinary Corps: colonising wild elephants in British South India

ABSTRACT Animals, animal labour and animal capital, were vital in developing colonial capitalism. For labour theories, working animals constituted only as tools or resources and affirmed the property rights of humans over animals by capturing, confining, breeding and training. The capitalist interactions with animals developed from the early warfare and hunting practices to the later discourses of conservation, juridical control and the commoditization of animals in the capital-intensive colonial industries. This article examines the entangled histories of wild elephants in colonial settings who were captured, tamed, and trained as working animals and sold as commodities to the capitalist timber industries. By using Jonathan Saha's conceptualization of 'undead capital', this article addresses how the wild elephants were transformed from being hunted to being protected, fed, provided for and kept healthy by veterinarians through the Kraal system only to be commoditized as working animals. However, such commoditization resulted in the subjugation of animals, the transformation of ecologies, and the fostering of new interspecies relationships between the elephants and their caretakers. The knowledge and experience of caretakers of elephants became central in colonial animal management and was perceived as a route through which colonialism created new knowledge about wild animals and the forests.

Emotional labor mediates the associations between self-consciousness and flow in dancers

Emotional labor has been a focal point in occupational well-being literature, but studies have long overlooked an important group of emotional laborers: performers. This research represents a pioneering effort to examine dancers’ adoption of emotional labor strategies, their antecedent of self-consciousness, and the outcome of flow experience. We explored these elements both in the traditional setting of stage dancing and in the novel context of online dance classes without on-site spectators during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results revealed that dancers employed all three common emotional labor strategies: surface acting, deep acting, and expression of naturally felt emotions, with deep acting being the most frequent. In the traditional setting, only the expression of naturally felt emotions mediated the positive effect of private self-consciousness and the negative effect of public self-consciousness on flow experience. In contrast, in the online setting, only private self-consciousness impacted flow through the mediation of deep acting and expression of naturally felt emotions. This exploratory study bridges dramaturgy-originated theories of emotional labor with empirical performing arts research, preliminarily advancing knowledge in the relevant fields of dance education, self-presentation, and flow studies.

Joan Robinson’s intelligible Marxism and The Accumulation of Capital: a generalisation of the two-sector reproduction scheme

Abstract Joan Robinson sought to make Marx’s economics intelligible to both academic colleagues and followers of Marx, in a twofold approach. First, she adopted Kalecki’s antipathy to the labour theory of value and his insights (following Rosa Luxemburg) into realisation problems in the schemes of reproduction; second, following Sraffa’s reading of Ricardo, she recognised the importance of surplus production as an alternative to neoclassical theory: both culminating in a stripped down two-sector scheme her mature work, The Accumulation of Capital. This scheme is recast here as an input–output framework, providing a generalisation that addresses some of its limitations: the need for an interface with the Kahn/Keynes employment multiplier, the absence of circulating capital inputs, and the lack of a systematic treatment of prices. Furthermore, a somewhat surprising result is the derivation of a core role for Marx’s category of surplus value in the employment multiplier derived from Robinson’s system.

A Racial Theory of Labour: Racial Capitalism from Colonial Slavery to Postcolonial Migration

Abstract A reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery in the consolidation of the global regime of capital accumulation provides a vital source of Marxian critique for our postcolonial present. The Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African men and women into human commodities. The reduction of human beings into human commodities, or ‘human capital’ – indeed, into labour and nothing but labour – which was the very essence of modern slavery, served as a necessary prerequisite for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called ‘labour in the abstract’, and requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour as such under capitalism. The production of labour in the abstract, or labour ‘in general’, depended nonetheless upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, particularly the branding of race. The term ‘Black’, which was devised to literally and figuratively brand the flesh of enslaved people, was also contrived to signify their particular sociopolitical condition of brutal degradation as the ultimate limit for the subjugation of labour. Blackness names that limit. Thus, Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism. Marx’s scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure. If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour’s subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognise the tendency for all labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection. Consequently, the labour theory of value – which has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour – must be complemented with what we might posit to be a racial theory of labour. Such an ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of capitalism is no mere scholastic exercise in the historiography of ‘primitive accumulation’, however, but rather must be re-purposed toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour. Extrapolating key insights from Marx’s corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, this essay is ultimately concerned with the ways that slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/postcolonial sociopolitical order.

The ‘Organized Anxiety’ of Labour Leader Nannie Helen Burroughs

Educator and labour leader Nannie Helen Burroughs and her colleagues at the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACW) experienced ‘organized anxiety’ during the early twentieth century as they worked to establish a comprehensive labour reform movement in the United States. Burroughs’ colleague and NACW leader Fannie Barrier Williams coined the term ‘organized anxiety’ to describe Black women’s politicized emotions that fuelled their expansive organization as they worked to build a truly democratic society. NACW members, such as Burroughs, integrated their fight for labour rights into their larger movement for women’s suffrage and civil rights. Burroughs established a school and women’s organizations to challenge ideologies and institutions that confined Black women to low-wage service work and denied them full citizenship rights. In this article, I draw from Hochschild’s emotional labour theory, which brings women’s ‘invisible’ work into view, and Williams’ organized anxiety concept to examine Burroughs’ unrecognized, yet critical work of developing and leading a labour reform movement for Black women in a country that denied their very humanity.

The Principle of Commodity Utility and Its Equations

"Das Kapital" points out that commodities have two attributes of value and use value at the same time, and describe both qualitatively rather than quantitatively. The utility of commodities fundamentally comes from the functional attributes of natural things, and must rely on the use value of commodities to play its role. People's behavior of buying goods is based on the evaluation of the utility of goods when making the decision to buy goods. The process of evaluating the utility of a commodity when making a decision to buy it is essentially a process of comparing their labor efforts and obtaining happiness in their heart. The equation of utility is: U= (1 / P) (Pm / W); the unit of measurement is named "Om" (symbol in Sanskrit ॐ), is the reciprocal of the monetary unit "Tarrant" (symbol Ω). Commodity utility theory of value and commodity labor theory of value are unified through the utility equation.

Возможно ли изменить ценообразование на арктическую рыбу?

The purpose of the article is to show the necessity of reducing wholesale domestic prices for Arctic fish and to propose economic methods for solving this problem. The relevance is associated with an un-reasonable increase in wholesale prices, which are the basis of retail prices, resulting in a decrease in the consumption of local fish. The increase in wholesale prices of fisheries in 2014-2015 and in the subsequent period is analyzed. The fundamentals of the world doctrines of cost and value are given, and the absence of factors to justify the increase in wholesale prices on the basis of the labor theory of value is shown. The data on the unreasonably close relationship between wholesale prices for fish in the domestic market of Russia and the exchange prices at which fish products exported to the European Union countries are presented. The possibility of reducing wholesale domestic prices by increasing the supply of fish to the domestic market of Russia in order to achieve the threshold values of the figures indicated in the Doctrine of Food Security is shown. In order to replace exchange foreign prices used in the domestic market of Russia, the need to develop a methodology for determining wholesale prices for the main types of Arctic fish, primarily currency-intensive ones, is substantiated.

The Chaplin Vaccine: Immunization and Taylorism in Viktor Shklovsky's Theory and Fiction

Abstract: The article examines early-Soviet figurations of cinema as a vaccine capable of inoculating workers with corporeal efficiency. Within this cultural fantasy, Charlie Chaplin was appropriated by the Soviet avant-garde to play an unlikely role of an expert in the theory and practice of labor. Tracing the cultural contexts of Chaplin's cameo in Iprit (1925), a science-fiction novel by Viktor Shklovsky and Vsevolod Ivanov, this article shows that the search for immunity from labor exhaustion opens wider vistas of the history of labor that run through the biocapital of slavery into the Soviet adoption of Taylorist practices of bodily standardization.

Play Labor from the Perspective of Marx's Alienated Labor

The play labor under Marx's alienated labor vision refers to the play as the purpose of the labor, this kind of labor is affected by consumer culture, street sports activities, electronic games and so on. This article through the analysis of Marx's alienated labor theory, and from the daily life of the selection of electronic games this case to explain the alienation mechanism behind the play labor, pointing out the new situation of players being exploited by capital. This paper analyzes Marx's alienated labor theory and makes an in-depth analysis of "play labor from the perspective of Marx's alienated labor". Through the analysis, it can be seen that play labor is a special form of alienated labor which is influenced by consumer culture, street sports activities and electronic games. It not only makes people feel "invisibly enslaved", but also affects the way of behavior and thinking in People's Daily life. In the current social environment, people are used to accepting the fast-food culture, lack of judgment and self-control, it is easy to become a free worker in the game industry chain under the cover of the casual meaning of online games. With the deep integration and development of platform capitalism and information capitalism, digital media technology has gradually erased the boundaries between reality and virtual, leisure and labor. Scholars have attributed this behavior of participating in online games for the purpose of entertainment and leisure and generating a large amount of surplus value for game companies to a new form of digital labor -- play labor.