Marx's Labour Theory Research Articles

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.

중국의 2022 개정 초⋅중학교 실과(기술⋅가정) 교육과정 분석

Objectives The study was analyzing the Practical Arts(Technology & Home economics) Curriculum of Elementary and Middle School in the revised national curriculum of China in 2022, hoping to get enlightenment from the Arts(Technology & Home economics) education in China. Methods The content analysis of literature study method for this study was used. Results This paper analyzes the changes of Practical Arts(Technology & Home economics) curriculum in China, the overall composition of the revised Practical Arts(Technology & Home economics) curriculum documents of Elementary and Middle School in 2022 and various parts of the text. Finally, through the comparison of Practical Arts(Technology & Home economics) Curriculum of Elementary and Middle School in 2022 between South Korea and China, the enlightenment is drawn. Conclusions First, The compilation and operation of Practical Arts(Technology & Home economics) Curriculum of Elementary and Middle School in China is centered on the hierarchy, cohesion and coherence of its nature, goal and content system. Second, the goal of Practical Arts(Technology & Home economics) Curriculum of Elementary and Middle School in China is to cultivate knowledge, skills and attitudes about labor(technology), and it also emphasizes starting from the professional and ideological levels. Thirdly, the content system of Practical Arts(Technology & Home economics) Curriculum of Elementary and Middle School in China is “daily life labor”, “productive labor” and “service labor” based on Marx's labor theory of value. Fourth, the teaching and learning methods of Practical Arts (Technology and Home economics) Curriculum of Elementary and Middle School in China are based on experience activities called “Lao Dong Zhou” and labor projects. Fifthly, the evaluation of Practical Arts(Technology & Home economics) Curriculum of Elementary and Middle School in China takes into account the development level of learners, and is carried out in grades (groups) around the core literacy of subject.

Whose Labor? Labor, Appropriation, and the Very Idea of Full Automation

Is a “fully automated” capitalism possible? According to Marx's labor theory of value (LTV) and the theory of surplus-value derived from it, a fully automated economy cannot be profitable. To refute the theory, critics have put forth various thought experiments claiming to show that a fully automated but profitable capitalist economy is conceivable. I argue that the thought experiments fail to demonstrate conceivability, because they misunderstand the role of labor in a commodity economy. In the latter, labor is a means for acquiring the property of others, and so it cannot be eliminated so long as the economy is based on the commodity form. Quite apart from issues of technical feasibility, then, the idea of a fully automated commodity economy is conceptually incoherent. The ineliminability of labor under the commodity form reflects the limits to the socialization of production this form imposes.

On the Theoretical and Methodological Validity of Karl Marx's Labour Theory of Value, Using as an Example the Critique Advanced by Eugen Bohm-Bawerk: Value as a Logical-Diaectical Category

On the Theoretical and Methodological Validity of Karl Marx's Labour Theory of Value, Using as an Example the Critique Advanced by Eugen Bohm-Bawerk: Value as a Logical-Diaectical Category

Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy by Gabriella Lukács

Reviewed by: Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy by Gabriella Lukács Nana Okura Gagné Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy. By Gabriella Lukács. Duke University Press, 2020. 248 pages. ISBN: 9781478005810 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Having gained vast knowledge of television dramas, media technologies, and young women in Japan in her previous research, Gabriella Lukács embarked on her new project to unravel "the relationships between young women and digital technologies" (p. 1). Specifically, she focuses on how young women were drawn to the creative/cultural industries and how they used digital technology such as cell phones and website platforms to promote themselves quickly. Further, she illuminates how the cultural industries—including multimedia and advertising agencies—promoted these young women and facilitated their interests and dreams, creating popular fads/booms [End Page 388] that generated profits for themselves while deceiving and failing to pay the young women for their work. Lukács shows that despite these women's desires to be visible or popular or to find or pursue meaningful careers, many of them were doing invisible work. Thus, the book argues that the development of Japan's digital economy is an exemplar of Marx's labor theory in the digital age and that this new economy used young women's invisible, affective, surplus labor—that is, labor not directly calculated in workers' remuneration. Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy is a challenging book that cuts across a range of issues, including the emergence of digital technologies, gendered career pathways, and aspirations for and exploitation by the entertainment industry. Taken as a whole, the book is not so much about amateur professionalism—how young women strive to pursue their interests to become professionalized in cultural industries—nor is it about workers in the platform economy, i.e. independent contractors using online platforms to get paid for tasks, who struggle to make ends meet in the ever-expanding digital economy.1 Rather, the book is primarily a critical textual analysis of the increasing massification, amateurization, and intensification of Japan's entertainment industry via digital technologies and young women's simultaneous attraction to and constraint by such phenomena. To be sure, men's and women's desires and pursuits in the cultural industries are not novel. As with other forms of labor in Japan, pursuing careers in the entertainment industry involves surplus labor, along with industry-specific challenges and varying degrees of affective labor or unpaid interstitial labor.2 New developments, however, such as increased widespread access to Internet technologies as a means and platform to cultivate fans, the lower age of entry into the entertainment industry and its related amateurization, and the faster turnover rate of popular fads/booms in the cultural industries, make Lukács's inquiry, theorization, and argument very timely and all the more important. The book draws from interviews with young women, editors, a software engineer, and an online platform employee—whom she discusses as part of the "techno-social assemblages" of the digital economy (p. 21). She combines these interviews with an examination of published interviews with successful women and "online diaries, blogs, novels, self-help books, and trading tutorials" (p. 24). The strength of Lukács's work is that each chapter captures the experiences of a few women, each engaged in diverse cultural industries, and skillfully connects the various agents and digital activities. The breadth of her inquiry sets her work apart from single case studies of popular media. By engaging with such a broad range of media, she sheds light on the dynamics and implications of the digitally mediated cultural industries and women's invisible labor in Japan's digital economy. Lukács starts her analysis with amateur female photographers Nagashima Yurie, Toshikawa Hiromi (known as Hiromix), and Ninagawa Mika, who jointly received the Kimura Ihei Award, a prestigious photography prize (chapter 1, "Disidentifications"). Through her interpretations of the artists' work and published interviews, Lukács challenges the discourse of gender and labor manifested by critic Iizawa Kōtarō, [End Page 389] who called their works "girly" photographs while dismissing their intellectual...

Revisiting some aspects of Marx's theoretical corpus in the light of modern economics

This research is aimed to revisiting some aspects of Marx’s theoretical corpus in the light of modern economics. First, we argue that Marx's labor theory of value is a monetary theory of production that allows for a resolution of capital measurement problem and precedes Keynes's General Theory. We then turn to reveal that Marx's monetary theory is a general theory of money from which arise a monetary theory of credit and a theory of paper money, both integrated into the theories of value and surplus value. Lastly, we discuss how Marx's foreign trade theory is integrated into his competition theory, and is not based on the unequal exchange hypothesis.

The Formation of Marxist Theory of Surplus Value

Marxist theory of surplus value is founded on the basis of Marx's labor theory of value. The theory of surplus value is based on mercantilism and the theory of surplus value of David Ricardo. Adam Smith and Owen also played a certain role in the formation of Marxist surplus value theory. Marx's analysis of the subject of labor and the process of labor is the basis of historical materialism of surplus value theory. This paper analyzes the significance of the formation of Marxist surplus value.

Notes on Intersectional Political Economy: The Long Period Method, Technical Change, and Gender

This paper presents a critique of Karl Marx's labor theory of value and his theory of falling profit rates from an intersectional political economy perspective. Specifically, I rely on social reproduction theory to propose that Marx-biased technical change disrupts the social order and leads to competition between workers. The bargaining power of workers cannot be dissociated from class struggle within the working class. I argue that technical change increases social conflict, which can counterbalance the long-run tendency of the profit rate to fall. The conclusion is that class struggle is multilayered and endogenous to the process of accumulation.

Queer As Subalterns

Queer As Subalterns Yün Peng (bio) QUEER MARXISM IN TWO CHINAS BY PETRUS LIU Duke University Press, 2015 In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Petrus Liu makes three related claims. First, Chinese queer Marxism is a critique of and an alternative to the "familiar intellectual paradigm" of queer theory in the United States (7). In particular, a queer Marxist critique of the latter's tendency toward neoliberal pluralism and "dematerializing" subjectivism promises to restore to queerness its radical potential (10). Second, queer Marxism presents a new definition of queerness that is both theoretically significant and practically consequential. Rather than a preexisting identity category, queerness is redefined through Marx's labor theory of value as a product of the distribution of social resources, as social norm is understood in terms of the capitalist social reproduction. Third, if bringing Marxism to bear on queerness offers a needed way out of the neoliberal impasse, this is conceivable only if we confront the Cold War thinking that automatically attributes queer rights to the liberal state as both originating in the West and developmentally more advanced. The book's theoretical framework is laid out in the first two of the five chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction and a map. The queer Marxist analysis is further developed in chapter 2, where it is fleshed out through two examples: the PRC filmmaker Cui Zi'en's queer cinema practice and the theory and practice of Taiwan's antistatist feminist and queer movements. Chapter 3 reads Chen Ruoxi's 1986 novel Paper Marriage as "an exemplary work of queer Marxism in the two Chinas" and makes a counterargument against the Foucauldian [End Page 201] histories of sexuality that attribute Chinese queer identity to the influence of "translations of Western knowledge" (88, 86–87). Chapter 4 takes on "the liberal myth of the self-fashioned bourgeoisie" and argues, through the example of Song of Dreams, a novel by the popular Taiwanese writer Xiao Sa, that "queer culture is not a product of liberal-ism's promotion of human diversity; rather, it comes into being as a social critique of the liberal fable of self-invention" (115). Chapter 5 engages the human rights discourse and proposes a queer Marxist recuperation of the human as "neither the agent of social transformation nor the subject of universal rights" but rather "ek-stasis" and grounded in Marx's understanding of the "constitutive sociality of the self" and "the moral equality of human time" in his labor theory of value (142–43, 165, 150–51). The heart of the book's argument is an analysis of queerness through Marx's labor theory of value. The first key point in this connection is that value is determined by "abstract labor, the aggregate production of commodities in society as a whole"—in other words, by the reproduction of society as a whole, which includes both economic and noneconomic factors (80). The second, related point is that capitalist reproduction necessarily depends on the reproduction of "the moral and intellectual conditions" that lie "outside the capitalist reproduction scheme" narrowly defined (81). This is the Althusserian formula that "the reproduction of capital is both the reproduction of the material forces and the reproduction of 'the social conditions of production' that include … what he calls the ideological state apparatuses" (81; original emphasis). Within this framework, queerness is understood in terms of capitalist reproduction of society "along asymmetrical lines" (82). Drawing on Marx, Liu argues that abstract labor, which reproduces society, "at once homogenizes individuals and places them into discrete identity groups and ineluctable classes" (80). Such structurally determined asymmetry explains why pluralism doesn't work: the production of a universal equivalent of value simultaneously creates distinctions and assigns stigmas. One way to look at it is that queerness is a matter of the social production of value, an instance of what Gayatri Spivak describes as the "irreducibly complicitous" relationship between "the Value-form in the general sense and in the narrow" or, in other words, between "cultural" and economic forms of value (Spivak 82; original emphasis).1 [End Page 202] Value, then, serves as a sort of index pointing to the social totality. While liberal pluralism "has...

Analysis on Neoclassic Equilibrium Theory of Price

The thesis analyzes the neoclassic price theory within the framework of value and price theory based on Marx's labor theory of value, and then illustrates the position, essence, and defects of neoclassic price theory. Moreover, it illustrates that scientific market price theory should be established on the basis of Marx's labor theory of value, which overcomes the defects of neoclassic price theory.

Class struggles in the digital frontier: audience labour theory and social media users

Recent accounts of social media have developed a powerful critical political economy analysis of social media, employing Dallas Smythe's notion of audience labour. Such analysis, which sees audiencing as a form of working producing surplus value, has been criticized for being too high and dry, employing the abstract categories of Marx's labour theory of value to analyse what regular users perceive as a fun, leisure, and empowering activity of using the web. This article concurs with the necessity of critical theory to not only offer an alternative interpretation of reality but to also point to social practices and subjects which manifest these alternative views. The article aims to couple the objective-scientific facet of audience labour theory with the subjective-lifeworld categories of media users that are the carriers of such knowledge. It does that by analysing a class-action lawsuit of Facebook users against the company concerning its Sponsored Stories advertising programme. Based on users' actions in the social network, they are mobilized as sponsors for products in ads, which appear on their friends' News Feed. An analysis of the legal case shows how users attempt to redefine their participation in social media in terms of work. Users put forth a critique of alienation (demanding that they have full control over the information they generate) and exploitation (demanding ownership over a greater share of the surplus value they produce). The article concludes that regular users are employing categories of audience labour theory in their struggle over digital value, making it a doubly suitable framework for analysing the political economy of social media, both objectively and subjectively.

The Digital Metaphysics of Cognitive Capitalism: Abandoning Dialectics, the North Atlantic Left Invents a Spontaneous Communism within Capitalism

In North Atlantic left theory, the law of value “dies” because the dialectics of labor time and value, which is the ground of Marx's labor theory of value, is assumed to have lost its explanatory power in cognitive capitalism in which the time of labor is close to zero, and labor, therefore, is seen as having no central role in producing value. Value becomes immeasurable and exploitation is displaced by expropriation. These assumptions are based on an undialectical understanding of the relation of cognition and labor, in which they are regarded as binary oppositions and labor is reduced purely to “doing” as opposed to “knowing.” However, knowledge is always part of labor and “intensifies” labor according to Marx. Therefore, the same concrete labor times are translated into different abstract labor times. The abstract labor time required in immaterial production (software) is more than zero. The law of value operates as long as capitalism exists.

Vanished in gaps, vanquished in rifts: the social ecology of urban spatial change in a working class residential area, Peykan-Shahr, Tehran, Iran

The article aims to understand the forms and processes of socio-ecological changes following sociogeographical dislocation of workers in a working-class neighborhood (Peykan-Shahr) in Iran. The article integrates theories of gentrification and metabolic rift. Existing studies on urbanization in Iran refute the possibility of gentrification. This study, in contrast, by drawing attention to peculiarities of the capitalist economy in Iran, adapts the basic economic mechanisms of gentrification such as the rent/value gap and the concept of absolute rent, concluding that Peykan-Shahr is indeed in a process of gentrification. The theory of metabolic rift adds theoretical dimensions and complexity to the analysis and provides a richer understanding of the case. Grounded in Marx's labor theory of value, the analysis shows that by mediating the exploitation of labor/nature by capital through displacing workers from their houses, gentrification in Peykan-Shahr has caused a socio-ecological metabolic rift in terms of labor reproduction and deterioration of labor power.Key words: Socio-ecological metabolic rift, gentrification, absolute rent, Marxism, labor reproduction, political economy of Iran.

Contesting the Value(s) of GM Wheat on the Canadian Prairies

This article investigates the ways in which a Canadian coalition of farmers, consumers, and environmental, health, and industry organisations politicised the value of Monsanto's proposed Roundup Ready (RR) wheat in the early 2000s. Eventually pressured to withdraw its application for unconfined release of RR wheat in 2004, I argue that Monsanto's proposed RR wheat economy crossed moral boundaries for the groups involved in the coalition against RR wheat. Specifically, Monsanto's anticipated RR wheat economy violated producers' expectations about their cultural-economic livelihoods: it proposed uncertainty in the realms of exchange and use value, moved public surplus into private hands and infringed on cultural attachments to wheat. My theoretical contribution hinges on the concept of moral economy, which is conventionally understood as promoting a ‘cultural turn’ in economic explanations. Instead, I show how Marx's labour theory of value similarly pointed to the inextricability of economic values and cultural processes and their attachment to all commodities including labour.

Das Kapital: A Critique of the Labor Theory of Value

A deep probe into the specific categories of Hegelian logic that Marx employed in Das Kapital. Drawn for the most part from Minor Logic and Major Logic, these epistemological apparatuses of Hegel became the presuppositions for the methodology of Das Kapital, or the logic articulated by Hegel in ‘The Book of Essence’, in Minor Logic and Major Logic became the explanatory foundation on which Das Kapital was constructed. In addition, a definition of labor and value based upon the form-content modality of Hegel. An application of the form-content modality reveals the distinction Marx drew between labor and value, or the understanding of the Hegelian employment of these logical categories, after subjected to a Feuerbachian transformative critique, is necessary to a proper assessment of Marx's labor theory of value. The creation of Marx's method of political economy on the substructure of Hegelian logic.

Accounting and control of the labour process

Textbooks and business managers presume that accounting is the most important management control system, but modern scholars think its role and status are problematic. Most argue that although accounting is important, it is inherently subjective and is only one among many control systems. The paper uses Marx's theory of the labour process to argue that accounting is the premier control system because it provides senior managers with objective measures of the generation and realisation of surplus value that they use to hold workers accountable for the circulation of capital. Prima facie support for Marx's theory is that it gives us a theoretical foundation for textbook presentations of management accounting that resolves controversies over the allocation of overheads and the role of accounting information in decision-making and performance evaluation. The paper re-evaluates some key aspects of the ‘labour process debate’ sparked off by Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital [Braverman H. Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. London: Monthly Review Press; 1974]. It highlights misunderstandings of Marx caused by neglect of accounting. It concludes that accounting is the key to controlling modern business organisations in the interests of capital, that social scientists have too readily jettisoned Marx's labour theory of value and his theory of class.

Managing change in Vietnamese state-owned enterprises: What is the best strategy?

Reforming the state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector has been the key goal of the economic renewal (Doi moi) program in Vietnam. However, the distinctive challenge facing Vietnamese SOEs is how to change management practices founded within the context of traditional socialist ideology. Specifically, the dilemma is how to introduce more innovative and entrepreneurial management approaches while retaining Marx's labor theory of value as the underlying ideology. Although the need for economic renewal is widely accepted, at this stage of the reform, individual commitment to the traditional model of management still has strong political and social justification at the ideological level. This paper argues that the fundamental job of managing change is shifting individual commitment away from the traditional model to a new ideological model more consistent with the economic development needs of the country. Theoretically, the heterogeneity of commitment to the traditional model suggests there are people who would pioneer the change and people who would be less open to the change. One consequence of the labor theory of value is that people who are less open to the change hold positions of power. As a result, the conventional approach to managing change, which suggests that change champions articulate a clear vision and goals and then sell people based on the vision, may not work. As an alternative, an incremental approach to change using behavior commitment is proposed.

Rethinking the Normative Content of Critical Theory: Marx, Habermas, and Beyond

This thesis criticizes Marx's labour theory of value in terms of Habermas's critique of subject-centred thinking, before going on to criticize Habermas's subject-centred approach to the economic system in terms of an intersubjectively re-formulated conception of labour, for while Habermas restores normative content to the principle of self-constitution he restricts it to communicative action. This places the economic system (and its bureaucratic state apparatus) beyond the normative content of modernity. Drawing upon Honneth's writings on struggles for recognition, the thesis seeks to re-normatize labour on the basis of worker's own struggles to re-normatize the economic system. The first half of the thesis explores the tensions that arise from Marx's attempt to locate his critique of capitalism in a subject-centred conception of self-constitution. Although Marx seeks to historicize the categories of political economy (in line with capitalist exchange relations), he also seeks to preserve a transhistorical conception of labour as the subject of self-objectification (as the standpoint from which to criticize capitalism). However, this leaves Marx vulnerable to his own historical critique of political economy. It is then argued that it is only possible to redeem the latter by re-grounding critical theory in the labour movement's social and historical struggles to oppose capital. This requires a re-formulation of Marx's labour theory of value. In place of Marx's notion that 'value' is an expression of self-objectifying labour we substitute Simmel's intersubjective approach to money-value. Marx's account of value is then understood as arising from the diremption of intersubjectivity into an 'objective' economic system and its 'subjective' agents. This generates a bifurcation of selfconstitution with the intersubjective form of normative social-constitution, on the one side, and the dirempted objective and subjective forms of economic-constitution on the other. The second half of the thesis critically analyzes Habermas' s contention that modern sociality is divided into a normative lifeworld and a non-normative system. This takes the form of an empirical critique of Habermas' s restriction of normativity to communicative action, and a theoretical critique of his restriction of the charge of reification to the economic system's encroachment upon the latter. In keeping with the theory of discourse ethics, it is argued that Habermas cannot legitimately withdraw normative content from labour and claim universal scope for the former. Consequently, not only is the economic system's capacity to suppress the normativity of labour invalid from the standpoint of 'practical reason', but so is Habermas's attempt to legitimate the system on the basis of 'functional reason'. The thesis draws on Honneth's work to extend the realm of intersubjectivity into the economy on the basis of the struggles of the labour movement to sublate its diremption of self-regulating system and self-interested actors. We conclude by arguing that trade unions and the welfare state may be understood to comprise normative vehicles for subjecting 'market-value' to an intersubjectively accountable form of 'social-value'.

The nature of surplus value in the "new solution"

The "new solution" to the transformation problem in Marx's labor theory of value rests on treating two aspects differently than in the traditional formulation: net value is used instead of gross value to avoid double counting, and the division of new value into variable capital and surplus value is determined at the point of production by the wages paid to the workers, instead of by the bundle of goods they subsequently select with their consumption decision. Campbell [Review of Radical Political Economics 29 (3) (1997) 59] developed a simple but formal presentation of the first of these issues. This paper addresses as the other crucial issue in the new solution approach, the issue of determining variable capital and surplus value. The role of the money wage in the process is highlighted. Comparison to the treatment of these issues in the traditional formulation is included for the purpose of better understanding the nature of the new solution.

That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier

That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier