Labor Theory Research Articles

Lucky IP

Abstract A person naturally owns the fruits of their intellectual labour; so goes the labour argument for intellectual property (IP). But what should happen when a creator gets ‘lucky’—such as the photographer who is in the right place at the right time or the scientist who accidentally discovers a new drug? IP law frequently awards ownership in such cases (what we call ‘Lucky IP’). Some argue, however, that the creators in such cases do not labour sufficiently to deserve ownership, and that Lucky IP merely demonstrates that IP law is not truly concerned about labour at all. Drawing on the philosophical literature of moral luck, we argue that this analysis is misguided. Nearly all intellectual creations involve some measure of luck and, in most cases, the creators still labour sufficiently to become the natural owners of their creations. Lucky IP does not, therefore, undermine the labour theory of IP law.

Capitalist Critique of Karl Marx on Surplus Value

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was an outstanding German philosopher of political economy. His disdain and displeasure for capitalism as an economic and political system logically stems from his claim that it is unjustifiably exploitative, dehumanizing, and alienating. He conceives of it as being characterised by wage labor, and this leads to industrial disharmony between the capitalists and the laborers. This paper examines Marx’s conception of surplus value, the nature and character of labour theory of value, and alienation, which are key issues in Marxist-Leninist political philosophy. It is, particularly, a reaction to the Marxian claim that surplus value is created in the course of production. It argues that profit and extra capital are the basis for the survival of many businesses. Therefore, it concludes that what Marx refers to as surplus value actually is a return on investment that the capitalist further puts back into the business to enable the equipment, payment of wages, salaries, and delivery of welfare packages/incentives to workers in order to make a business a going concern. As a result, there is no surplus value, and it is not a valid basis for industrial disharmony between capitalists and laborers as long as the parties are bound by the employment contract negotiated in accordance with the legal regime.

Bitcoin as a digital commodity

ABSTRACT The paper demonstrates that Bitcoin is not money but rather a digital commodity that has value but no value-added. We show that both the production of and the speculation with Bitcoin draw from the existing global pool of value-added. By extending the Classical Political Economy approach and the New Interpretation of the labour theory of value to the domain of digital commodities, the paper argues that Bitcoin mining is an automated reproduction process that requires no direct (living) labour and thus creates no new value. Bitcoin, in this regard, is not ‘digital gold’. Between sectors, Bitcoin mining redistributes wealth and value-added already in existence, while Bitcoin miners with more computational power compete to appropriate the mining profits within the blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain then creates rivalry in both the ownership and the use of the digital commodity through non-legal means. Our approach can be further expanded to the larger domain of automated digital commodities that are reproducible without the expenditure of direct, living labour.

Britain’s ‘Dark Factories’: Specters of Racial Capitalism Today

Recent revelations about illegally low wages and abject working conditions in Leicester’s “dark” garment factories—endured by its vulnerable mainly global majority and migrant workforce—have once again highlighted British fashion’s benighted “other” and its reliance on cheapened and “expendable” “racialized” sweated labor. Forced to work on through the Covid pandemic to produce fast fashion for e-commerce brands, “British” fashion manufacture now reflects the wider plight of the global CMT (Cut, Make and Trim) army, who at considerable personal risk and cost, manufacture most of our fashion. Drawing on a set of theoretical innovations in Marxist and post-Marxist theory, notably Smith and Suwandi theory of labor “super-exploitation,” De Genova’s work on the disciplining of migrants through “border regimes and spectacles” and Gargi Bhattacharyya’s critical reading of Cedric Robinson’s thesis of “Racial Capitalism” (1983), this article explains how and why its specter still castes such a deep and troubling shadow over the production of fashion.

Tensions in the therapeutic relationship: emotional labour in the response to child abuse and neglect in primary healthcare

BackgroundChild abuse and neglect (child abuse) is a prevalent public health issue linked to survivors experiencing a higher risk of health issues such as obesity, heart disease and major depression. Given the significant impact of child abuse on health, general practitioners (GPs) and primary care nurses (nurses) are well-placed to respond to child abuse. However, research shows that responding to child abuse is difficult for health practitioners, especially the act of reporting child abuse. The present study aimed to understand how GPs and nurses experience the response to child abuse in primary healthcare.MethodsThis study employed qualitative methods. Twenty-six in-depth individual and group interviews were conducted with 30 GPs and nurses. The interviews were audio recorded with consent, transcribed verbatim and thematically analysed.ResultsThe participants were mostly metropolitan-based female GPs. Participants were sampled from two settings: private general practice and community health; and Doctors in Secondary Schools, a program that places GPs and nurses in high schools. Thematic analysis generated four themes: blowing trust out of the water; riding the reaction wave; opening a hornet’s nest; and battling emotions. Participants felt that, in considering child abuse, they were betraying the trust of the therapeutic relationship and thus, had to manage their patients’ reactions to preserve the therapeutic relationship. They used strategies that created shifts in perception in both themselves and their patients to help maintain the therapeutic relationship. Participants often felt that they had to compromise their professional code of ethics to fulfil their mandatory reporting obligations. Thus, they experienced internal emotional battles when responding which led to some experiencing burnout or vicarious trauma and others resilience. This complex interplay of relationship and emotional management was placed in the context of emotional labour theory. We contend that our participants undertook emotional labour across three levels: internal, organisational and systemic.ConclusionsWe conclude that the emotional labour exerted in the response to child abuse can be diminished by: developing strategies for therapeutic relationship management; undertaking an internal, organisational and systemic values assessment; and facilitating communication between health professionals and the child protection system.

The Hidden Labors of Adult Learning: Emotional, Gendered, and the Intersection

Arlie Hochschild’s theory of emotional labor (1983) has become a staple framework for understanding the tension that exists between outward emotional expression and inward emotional realities. In it, Hoschild (1983) introduces us to the idea of emotional management, the expectations that are put on us to manipulate the display of our emotions—act—in order to put the experiences of others first. Recently, however, several articles in popular media have used emotional labor to describe labor that deviates from Hochschild’s (1983) original definition. In doing so, popular discourse has highlighted a kind of labor that has historically gone unnamed in the academy. The implications of not naming this other form of labor and instead morphing Hochschild’s original definition yield many consequences if left unchecked. The purpose of this article is to step into the conversation on emotional labor, highlight the gap in language to describe the various types of labor performed by adult learners, and introduce the idea of gendered labor as a way to be better informed in serving adult learners in ongoing development.

A qualitative exploration of \u201cempathic labor\u201d in Chinese hospice nurses

BackgroundHospice nurses may devote more emotional labor during the empathy process with patients, and this empathy can be used as a form of psychological behavior of emotional labor in the hospice care model. The aim of this study was to analyze hospice nurses’ empathy characteristics in the context of emotional labor theory, and explore the impact of empathy on patient care.MethodsWe conducted semi-participant observations from three hospitals and multicenter in-depth interviews with n = 26 hospice nurses from eight cities. Interviews were transcribed, and directed content analysis was applied.ResultsTwo categories with four sub-categories were extracted from the data analysis. Category 1 described the “empathic labor” process which covers cognitive empathy (including empathic imagination, empathic consideration, and empathic perception) and affective empathy (including natural empathy, surface empathy, and deep empathy). The second category concerns the outcome of nurses’ “empathic labor” which incorporates both positive and negative effects.ConclusionsThe findings indicated that hospice nurses’ empathy process should be understood as emotional labor. Nursing managers should pay more attention to raising the ability of deep empathy with hospice nurses, and explore more sufficient active empowerment strategies to alleviate the negative impact of empathy on nurses and to strengthen nurses' deep empathy with terminal ill patients.

Ecologically Unequal Exchange Theory as Genuine Materialism: A Response to Somerville

ABSTRACT Somerville's brief critique of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) theory illustrates how entangled traditional labour theories of value are in 19th century discourse on political economy. His incapacity to understand the point of EUE theory reflects the idealist myopia of such discourse, largely oblivious of the material metabolism of world society. For theorists genuinely committed to historical materialism, EUE theory should provide a welcome antidote to mainstream economics.

The child everyone has inside: anthropology and the labor theory of value

This paper revisits the debate on the relevance of the labor theory of value for the anthropological task. It argues that the labor theory of value can creatively inform and reformulate in critical ways a variety of social issues addressed through anthropological lenses. The argument is sustained by two main exercises: first, a critical overview of the foundations of the labor theory of value outlines the reasons why it opened new grounds for anthropological and, more generally, for social-scientific enquiries. Second, a discussion of the key points of friction between scholarship that attempts to develop an “anthropological” theory of value as an end in itself and anthropological scholarship that resorts to the (labor) theory of value to critically inform research.

Secondary emotional labor: How female nurses respond to the contradictions of caring.

Prior research suggests that caring is in tension with a financially incentivized, technologically-driven healthcare system. Nevertheless, employers, the public, and nurses expect nurses to be caring when providing care to patients and families. This article focuses on nurses' emotional labor strategies when managing emotions related to organizationally imposed interference with caring. We analyzed 27 semi-structured interviews with nurses and found that the unsuccessful performance of emotional labor spills over into the women's relationships at and outside of work. We apply Di-Cicco-Bloom and DiCicco-Bloom's concept of secondary emotional labor to examine our findings and how secondary emotional labor further develops the alienation and exploitation concepts of Hochschild's emotional labor theory. We suggest a structural change in nurses' job design that remedies contradictory caring expectations and supports their emotional labor to prioritize a climate of caring for patients.

From shipwreck to commodity exchange: Robinson Crusoe, Hegel and Marx

Robinson Crusoe is a mythic character who lives not only in the popular imaginary but through the history of political and social thought. Defoe’s protagonist lives marooned on his island, isolated and apart from society. The narrative is a perfect naturalisation of the ‘bourgeois’ world, dependent on an ontology of the self-sufficient individual. This article analyses this lineage in the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Later, Hegel used the novel to illustrate his dialectic of mastery/servitude. Challenging the atomism of the state of nature, Hegel’s theory of recognition gives an account of positive freedom, where the individual is formed in and through social interdependence. This sociality is continued by Marx, who satirises Defoe's novel in his value-form critique of political economy. The value-form provides insight into Robinson's island labour and Marx's difference with Locke's labour theory of value. For Marx, the myth of ‘natural man’ hides the domination of capitalist development and Robinson Crusoe reflects the internalisation of the abstract rationality of commodity society. However, Marx's immanent critique of the novel points to a radical idea of social life and freedom.

TRANSFORMATION OF THE "PERSONNEL COMPETITIVENESS" CATEGORY INTO THE CONDITIONS OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

The article provides a retrospective analysis of the main categories of labor theory in its development and transformation, taking into account the opinions of various researchers. The essence of the concepts of "competition", "labor force" and "workplace", "labor" and "work", "personnel" and "personnel", "productivity" and "productive force of labor", "labor resource" and "labor potential", "cost" and "value" is revealed. As a result of the analysis, the author's definitions of the concepts of "ability to work", "efficiency", "thesaurus", "communication experience" are proposed. A detailed analysis of various approaches to the interpretation of these categories allowed the author to substantiate his own scientific position on the issue under study. The author, in order to illustrate the process of transformation of the categories under consideration in the course of the development of social production from industrial to post-industrial, taking into account the current stage of the formation of the digital economy, proposed the use of the concepts of "atom" and "molecule" to characterize the processes of changing the application of human labor in the new conditions of the digital economy in comparison with the traditional labor process in an industrial society. As a result of the implementation of the author's approach, it is proposed to update the definition of the concept of "personnel competitiveness" taking into account its transformation in the digital economy.

"Improved Countenance": Capitalist Relations in Mansfield Park

There is no neat division between the economic and the domestic. Not only are they connected, but their meaning, structure, and value are decidedly conditioned by one another. Yet, since it is capitalism’s nature to conceal exploitation, domesticity becomes outwardly coded as the domain of tradition, despite the productive forces of the market shaping domesticity through the process of social reproduction. Lise Vogel asks how the worker is produced in capitalism, analyzing the peculiar way women are exploited in this process. Using Vogel’s theory of labor and Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, this thesis analyzes Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as a remarkable and salient example of capitalist relations invading and determining the realm of the domestic in the early 19th-century. At the beginning of the novel, Fanny Price, the protagonist of the novel, is intimately involved in social reproduction, but when she is displaced to the extravagant halls of Mansfield Park, her uncle’s estate, she enters the commodity sphere and becomes an ideological weapon, emptied out of her original and unique value to fervently justify the ruling class's power.

Historical aspects of the formation of the conceptual apparatus of the value theory in economic science

The emergence and development of the concept of value in terms of certain historical stages of economics are investigated in this paper. It is also investigated that the concept of value is fundamental problem in economics and primary source for understanding the purpose and motives of economic entities, areas of consumption, distribution and the exchange of their resources and income. The objective of the investigation, is to assess on the basis of comparative analysis of the methodology of the main provisions and conclusions of existing concepts of value, their significance for the process of learning about the functionality and relationships of economic entities in the current economy. While investigating the conceptual positions of economists-scientists concerning the theory of value at different historical stages of its existence and development, theoretical general scientific research methods (formalization, synthesis, abstraction and logical generalization) are used. The evolution of the theory of value, from ancient times until such historical schools as mercantilism, physiocracy, English political economics, French classical bourgeois political economics, Marxism, and marginalism is considered in this paper. The study of the theory of value in economics makes it possible to determine that the main scientific paradigms prevailed in the theory of value are the labor theory of value and the theory of marginal utility. The problem of preserving the potential of traditional theories of value, and the preconditions on which they are based on, is considered. In addition, the logical and historical relationship between the concepts of value is investigated; the impact of different concepts of value on the process of the market economy relationship understanding is evaluated. The practical value of scientific work is that clearer understanding of the concept of value at the theoretical level makes it possible to solve practical problems in determining the amount of costs, their structure, and methods of calculation for businesses. It is investigated that the concept of value remains relevant in modern economics, as it is the basis for understanding such important categories as price, production costs, profits, etc., and the laws of value determine the behaviour in market economy. It is found that the value, covering all centres of the economy, determines the motives and goals of economic entities; promotes the efficient distribution and use of resources and income, sustainable growth of production, its balance; affects the whole complex of economic relations arising in the process of social reproduction of material and spiritual goods, their production, exchange, distribution and consumption.

BEYOND PRICE AND USE-VALUE

Mainstream economists have long argued that the labour theory of value cannot explain price-formation. In response, Marxists have argued that mainstream economics is fixated on abstract mathematical problems which mystify social reality and obscure the social relationships at the heart of the real economy. Marxist political economists have proposed formal solutions to the price-formation problem, but the deeper issue on which my article will focus is the way in which price signals cannot communicate the information that economic agents need to make decisions which are consistent with the life-support capacity of the natural world and the social interests of workers. While Marxists typically distinguish a socialist economy from a capitalist one on the basis of the former’s commitment to production for the sake of need-satisfaction, needs are typically defined in terms of use-values. I will argue that this identification fails to distinguish between needs as universal life-requirements and needs as means to the completion of any project whatsoever. Unless needs are defined in terms of life-requirements, then even a socialist society can continue to undermine the natural conditions of life-support and exhaust human potential in meaningless cycles of consumption.

Теория роста на основе трудовой теории стоимости

Even though there has been accumulated a substantial amount of evidence on the disparities in different countries’ rates of economic growth, the question as to the roots of these disparities still remains open for debate. Historically, one of the first formalized models of economic growth was the two-sector scheme of expanded reproduction proposed by Karl Marx in the second volume of Das Kapital. The source of growth in this scheme was surplus value while the prices were determined by the cost of labour. In the following periods, however, the labour theory somewhat receded to the background in the studies of economic growth. This article seeks to address the task of formulating a theory of economic growth by drawing on the labour theory of value. To this end, three models are considered: a model with constant population and no technological progress; a model with endogenous population growth; and a model with endogenous economic growth and technical progress. These models can be used to explain the dynamics of economic growth and in some cases to predict the future growth rates. The model with endogenous population growth describes the development of the global economy between 1850 and 1970. The model with endogenous economic growth demonstrates that fundamental research is the source of long-term economic growth. The model with constant population and no technological progress shows the downward trend in the profit rate. The proposed methodological framework based on these three models can be used to predict further trajectories of growth for the Russian and Japanese economies.

Reconstructing the Interpretation Framework of Marxist Political Economy on Modern Market Economy

Marxist political economy is still an important theoretical basis for analyzing the development law of modern socialist market economy. The basic production methods and distribution methods of the modern socialist market economy, as well as the main characteristics of property in the modern socialist market economy, can basically be explained by the basic concepts and principles of Marxist political economy in accordance with logical laws and historical experience. Based on the Marxist labor value theory, it absorbs the scientific connotation of the Marxist supply and demand value theory, and can reasonably explain various value concepts and price phenomena in the modern market. This paper attempts to reconstruct the interpretation framework of Marxist labor political economy theory on modern market value through research, and analyzes the historical development conditions of Marxist labor attention value political economy theory and the mathematical model of classic labor value theory. Qualitative analysis method and systematic scientific method are used to study and analyze the development of my country's market economy. The results show that since 2012, the scale of state-owned and state-controlled industrial enterprises has increased year by year. However, due to the gradual improvement of China's economic system, while developing the state-owned economy, vigorously supporting and guiding the collective and non-public economy, etc., the proportion has steadily continued to decline.

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...

Opportunities for the use of the labor theory of value in a post-industrial society

Opportunities for the use of the labor theory of value in a post-industrial society

The Home of the Dispossessed

The objects that people interact with on a daily basis speak to and of these people who acquire, display, and handle them—the relationship is one of exchange. People living among household objects come to care for their things, identify with them, and think of them as a constituent part of themselves. A meaningful problem arises, however, when people who have deep connections to the objects that populate their lived spaces are not those who possess the legal rights of ownership. These individuals and groups—usually excluded from the realm of property ownership along lines of gender, race, and ethnicity—live on an axis of property precarity, persistently subject to the anxieties as well as the realities of dispossession. This Article’s launching point to explore these dispossessions is Henry James’ novel, The Spoils of Poynton, which involves a dispute about the settlement of a father’s estate and describes the battle between mother and son over the furnishings of the family home, Poynton. On a descriptive level, The Spoils of Poynton is a novel about a wife’s dispossession and the gendered nature of inheritance. The novel is also, however, about the exclusions built into property theories of labor and personhood. Accordingly, this Article explicates tactics of dispossession inherent in traditional theories of property ownership, explores the legal claims made to property ownership by those who have been dispossessed, and analyzes the ways in which the meaning of property for these individuals and communities is reconstituted within the political imaginary. The novel therefore tells the story not only of a property conflict between mother and son but also of how individuals who straddle the fragile boundary between personhood and objecthood both experience property as liminal fragments of the rightsholder they could have been and perform their property ownership as a political declaration. In this way, the novel tells the story of what it is like to live in the home of the dispossessed.