Labour Process

This article explores the types of work undertaken by jazz musicians in London, categorizing their activities using two axes derived from debates over ‘creative labour’. Firstly, the extent to which different jobs offer scope for creative autonomy and, secondly, the extent to which they involve collective as opposed to individualized working relationships. It focuses on the process of
becoming established on the London ‘scene’, presenting qualitative interview data primarily with young workers seeking to build their careers. Musicians may make conscious decisions to pursue types of work which enable greater creative autonomy, but in doing so they may exacerbate fatalism about poor working conditions and undermine professional solidarity. The article also
explores how pressures towards ‘entrepreneurialism’ in other forms of music work constitute further barriers to collective contestation of working conditions. Finally, it points towards types
of music work where notions of professional economic interest have more traction.

Radical feminist analyses have always placed considerable emphasis on the crucial role played by social reproduction for the development of capitalism. Early social reproduction analyses – primarily premised on housework but also more broadly concerned with wagelessness – developed a robust critique of Marxian views that identified processes of value-generation only with the productive sphere, and de facto deployed ‘productive’ and ‘paid’ labour as synonyms.1 Some more recent approaches, by contrast, propose social reproduction as a ‘theory’ (SRT), and deploy the concept in order to focus on how labour is regenerated daily and inter-generationally through private and public institutions in contemporary contexts.2 This second set of studies seem concerned with analysing the circuits of care that reproduce the worker as connected yet distinct to those of capital and value-generation. At the same time, however, they are committed to avoiding what they consider ‘dual theories’, conceptu...

Labour Market Information Systems serves as a single window that provides all information regarding labour market and which has capability to collect, evaluate and disseminate labour market information to all the stakeholders. It contains qualitative and quantitative information and it collects, analyzes and disseminates information that assists and empowers its stakeholder for correct planning, selection and decision making related to education, career, business requirements, training programs, job search, hiring, government policy and investment strategies.

The identification of Labour Market issues critically rests on the availability of data, information and analysis. Labour Market information and analysis provide the essential basis for Employment and Labour Policy and informs the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies that are better focused and targeted in the dynamic market place.

This document reviews Jamaica’s Labour Market Information Systems and provides insights on gaps and to suggest changes needed so that the LMIS can remain useful, effective and relevant to all stakeholders.
The findings of the review shows that there is a need to strengthen the collection, analysis and publishing of labour market information and intelligence.

This book argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms. On the basis of this study, Steinhoff develops a Marxist analysis to argue that the popular theory of immaterial labour, which holds that information technologies increase the autonomy of workers from capital, tending towards a post-capitalist economy, does not adequately describe the situation of high-tech digital labour today. In the AI industry, digital labour remains firmly under the control of capital. Steinhoff argues that theories discerning therein an emergent autonomy of labour are in fact witnessing labour’s increasing automation.

Resumen En el presente trabajo nos proponemos sentar las bases teóricas para el estudio de los procesos de tercerización y  subcontratación y comenzar con la reconstrucción de la estructura organizativa del trabajo en las telecomunicaciones a partir de la identificación del proceso productivo indiferencido que contiene la totalidad de las tareas propios de la producción de servicios de telecomunicaciones. Se intentará identificar las áreas o segmentos de la organización de la producción que han sido afectados por la tercerización, ya se de modo total o parcial, de manera exclusiva o complementariamente con las actividades de la propia firma. El presente trabajo se estructura en 3 secciones que preceden a esta introducción. En la primera sección comenzaremos realizando una breve caracterización general del sector en términos económicos, luego desarrollaremos los elementos fundamentales del marco teórico que creemos acorde para la realización de la tarea propuesta, y finalmente avanzaremos en la sección siguiente con la reconstrucción del proceso de trabajo y la estructura de subcontratación identificada hasta el momento en el trabajo de campo en curso. La ponencia se cierra con unas breves reflexiones sobre la estructura fragmentada del proceso productivo en el sector y algunas indicaciones para continuar profundizando el estudio emprendido.

Дутчак О. А. Відтворення робочої сили на українських швейних фабриках у глобальних ланцюгах постачання. – Рукопис.
Дисертація на здобуття наукового ступеня кандидата соціологічних наук за спеціальністю 22.00.03 – соціальні структури та соціальні відносини. – Київський національний університет імені Тараса Шевченка, Міністерство освіти і науки України, Київ, 2019.
У дисертації розроблено теоретико-методологічний підхід до дослідження відтворення робочої сили. За результатами дослідження розроблено концептуальну схему вивчення умов, джерел та структурних чинників відтворення робочої сили в глобальних ланцюгах постачання, здійснено її емпіричну апробацію на основі аналізу відтворення робочої сили на українських швейних фабриках у глобальних ланцюгах постачання. Оцінка умов відтворення робочої сили проведена шляхом експлікації матеріальних та темпоральних ресурсів для відтворення. Ці ресурси працівники і працівниці можуть отримувати з ринкових джерел, державних джерел, соціальних мереж та шляхом самовиробництва продукції. Умови відтворення робочої сили та здатність працівників і працівниць змінювати ці умови залежать від таких структурних чинників, як особливості функціонування глобальних ланцюгів постачання, економічна динаміка на макрорівні, стан ринку праці, державна політика у сфері трудових відносин і соціального забезпечення та рівень контролю за її імплементацією, характеристики профспілок. Дослідження дає змогу верифікувати евристичний потенціал теорій відтворення робочої сили, режимів контролю праці та концепції робітничої впливовості в перемовинах, а також запропонувати удосконалення до них.
Ключові слова: відтворення робочої сили, глобальні ланцюги постачання, робітнича впливовість у перемовинах, режими контролю праці, соціально-економічна політика, ринок праці, профспілки.

Two significant social protests that took place in Poland in recent years-a massive mobilisation of women against a ban on abortion and an occupation of the Sejm building by carers of persons with disabilities-were called strikes. In this article, we analyse the Polish Women's Strike events of 2016, 2017 and 2018 and the strike of parents of persons with disabilities of 2018 from the perspective of a strike as a form of protest. What does it mean that both protests have been called strikes and what are the implications of incorporating the terminology of labour disputes by both protests? Strikes in Poland are a form of collective, institutionalized industrial action of workers in wage employment, organized only by a trade union registered in a certain workplace and its subject can be exclusively of workplace matters and not on matters that are political and beyond an employer's influence. The Polish Women's Strike and the protest of parents of persons with disabilities were not strikes de iure, however they rejected division between production (wage labour) and reproduction (non-wage labour), which gave a deeper meaning to the "refusal of work". The empowerment of this event was derived from taking over the concept of the strike and providing an inclusive space to connect different actions related to struggles for reproductive rights. We interpret this as a strategy of cooptation and occupation of typical protest actions reserved for wage labour.

Навчальний посібник містить найбільш важливі положення щодо вирішення індивідуальних спорів. На основі аналізу правової доктрини, чинного законодавства, матеріалів судової практики висвітлено правові механізми захисту трудових прав в індивідуальних трудових спорах.
Навчальний посібник призначений студентам юридичних спеціальностей вищих навчальних закладів III–IV рівнів акредитації, може бути корисним викладачам, аспірантам і практикуючим юристам, громадським та профспілковим активістам, працівникам, роботодавцям, співробітникам органів державної влади і місцевого самоврядування та усім, хто цікавиться питаннями вирішення індивідуальних трудових спорів.

This essay examines Andrew Ure's The Philosophy of Manufactures, published in 1835. Ure's book occupies an important place in debates on the labour process as well as
historical accounts of industrialization and the regulation of factory labour. Through a detailed reading of the text's figurative language it is argued that Ure constructs a capitalist
Utopia of the production process without labour. Among elites it is a fantasy still prominent today.
Central to Ure's book is a social fantasy of autogenesis—machines that produce without workers. In contrast to Taylorist mode that promote a fusion of worker and apparatus, I argue that Ure effects a radical separation in
which the worker is imagined as the other to the machine. Ure's text is compared to popular Utopian thought and located in contemporary medicalizations of the factory. This essay proposes that The Philosophy of Manufactures, and the factory guide books' of the 1830s more generally, worked to produce a space for technical experts such as Ure in the emerging middle-class state.
Published in Journal of Design History Vol. 14 No. 1,  2001

C’è una parte di umanità in esubero, esclusa, emarginata. Una parte che potrebbe sparire da un giorno all’altro e la cui sparizione farebbe sobbalzare solo gli indici della statistica. Una parte che non ha altro da perdere che le proprie invisibili catene.
È dunque necessario che lo scandalo del lavoro precario avvenga, per mettere in moto il pensiero critico, per innescare logiche di resistenza, per dare vita a un nuovo potere costituente.
Senza questo scandalo non si riuscirebbe a sbirciare dietro la maschera per vedere il vero volto del capitalismo selvaggio. Una potente locomotiva che corre su binari d’oro, messi in posa da schiavi senza volto.

This paper critiques the purposes to which Marx’s Fragment on Machines is put in postoperaist thought. I suggest postoperaist readings wield influence on contemporary left thinking, via postcapitalism, accelerationism and ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’. Changes in labour lead proponents to posit a crisis of measurability and an incipient communism. I use the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism to dispute this. Based on an analysis of value as a social form undergirded in antagonistic social relations, I argue the Fragment’s prognosis runs contrary to Marx’s critique of political economy when the latter is taken as a critical theory of society. This theoretical claim bears implications for contemporary left political praxis.

Futuras reformas de la legislación procesal laboral. Texto comparado de la Ley Reguladora de la Jurisdicción Social del Anteproyecto de ley de medidas de eficiencia procesal del servicio público de justicia aprobado por el Consejo de Ministros el 15 de diciembre de 2020.

The study traces the impact Sri Lanka's economic transition has had on cinnamon peelers and their industry. It anatomises how the penetration of capitalist social relations into the cinnamon industry has compartmentalised the cinnamon making process thus, contributing to the weakening of the bargaining power of the peelers.

En el presente trabajo desarrollamos algunos elementos que
consideramos fundamentales para estudiar y comprender la
racionalidad social de los procesos de tercerización y
subcontratación. Para ello, de la revisión bibliográfica
observamos las distintas manifestaciones inmediatas del
fenómeno desde una perspectiva técnica, laboral e incluso
en tanto dimensión de la organización general del trabajo
social. Una vez desarrollado estos elementos que se centran
en la observación y diagnóstico de lo que acontece en el
marco del proceso de trabajo, consideramos apropiado
avanzar con el estudio de la tercerización y el proceso
productivo en tanto proceso de valorización. Para ello,
desplegamos la dinámica de la competencia y la
consecuente diferenciación de los capitales en que surge del
proceso de valorización.
Entendemos que este doble carácter del proceso productivo
constituye el marco analítico más potente para el abordaje
de las transformaciones que queremos estudiar.

From the 1966’s « plan professionnel » to the Arcelor’s buy out by the Mittal Steel Company in 2006, the steel industry in Lorraine has been deeply restructured. From the end of the 1970s until the beginning of the 21st century, the sites closures, and the reorganization in the steel production as well as in the linked industrial activities, led to factories’ destructions and massive lay-offs. About ten thousands steelworkers lost their job. Jointly to this unprecedented deindustrialization process, the steelworker’s trade has considerably changed, especially for the ones who still worked in the same activity. Thus, in the steel industry, the workers and technicians’ vocational training and, above all, the in-service training changed. The modernization involved an adaptation of the steelworkers’ vocational training and technical culture to the technological evolutions of their industrial sector. Oral history interviews with steelworkers or with former steelworkers allow understanding the consequences of this on their trade. These interviews complete the archives and the publications specifically dedicated to the technical training also used in this article.
Keywords: vocational training – Lorraine – steel industry – steelworkers – oral history – labour process.

Media studies is founded on sophisticated theoretical approaches to the communication and reception of meaning and to the political economy of media ownership, control and regulation. However, the production processes of media organisations have largely remained a theoretical "black box" (Garnham, 2011:51). In a recent debate on this subject (see Dwyer 2015b, 2016) Murdock and Golding (2016) argued that “the central challenge for theories of media production then is to move between levels of analysis and to integrate them”. As Mayer (2009:15) noted “it is this connection between the micro contexts and the macro forces . . . that is so frequently lost in the efforts to describe the current media landscape, its interconnected industries and its networks of professionals”. This chapter, therefore, tries to develop a theory showing the causal relationships between these levels – macro (economics and political economy), meso (organisation studies) and micro (production studies).

A fuller account of the theory is available here: https://www.routledge.com/Understanding-Media-Production/Dwyer/p/book/9781138238145

Inspection copies of the complete book can be ordered here: https://www.routledge.com/textbooks/evaluation/9781138238145

The economic and social consequences of technological change in capitalist societies have always been profound. For capitalists themselves, new technologies can have pervasive effects, rendering obsolete even the most profitable businesses, while simultaneously creating opportunities for early adopters. For workers reliant on the sale of their labour power, the effects are even more differentiated: new technologies create opportunities for those who can acquire necessary skills, but destitution for those whose capabilities are no longer required. Beyond the immediate economic outcomes for individuals and their communities, there are spatial, organizational, and cultural consequences that transform the fabric of society.


In his analysis of the workplaces of the first industrial revolution, Marx concludes that ‘Large-scale industry possesses in the machine system an entirely objective organization of production, which confronts the worker as a pre-existing material condition of production’, and elsewhere he defines this condition as the real subsumption of labour. A hundred years later, his analysis underpinned modern socialist studies of labour and the struggle for control in the workplace. Indeed, ever since the birth of industrial capitalism socialists have not only critically examined technology in its social context, but also looked forward to futures of work based on radically different principles. As Alfred Barratt Brown wrote in 1934, ‘We need to look at the whole world of industry with fresh eyes, to ask ourselves again what we want to produce, and how we can best employ our powers in producing it, to the end that the work and its results may alike satisfy human capacities and human needs’.


This essay is concerned to look with fresh socialist eyes at the technologies that underpin our present world of work, and how they have been shaped and applied by capital to meet the needs of capital, oriented firmly towards the subsumption of wage labour in all its concrete forms. We cannot repurpose them towards our fundamental goal as socialists to build a world based upon equality and justice for all without directly challenging and contesting the existing social order. This requires, as always, both a broad vision of a sustainable, egalitarian and democratic society, and concrete proposals that can connect to existing struggles while also prefiguring radical change.

This book emphasizes the importance of production politics, or struggles in the workplace between workers and their employers, for understanding migrant labour regimes in Asia and the Gulf. Drawing from a study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore, as well as on comparative material in the region, Bal shows that migrant labour politics are significantly influenced by the specific form of production politics as well as their variable outcomes. In contrast to contentious politics approaches, this book sheds light on the extent to which migrant labour regimes can be contested by workers and civil society groups and explains the recent rise in migrant labour unrest in the region.

This book explores the processes producing and reproducing the garment sweatshop in India. Drawing from Marxian and feminist insights, the book theorizes the sweatshop as a complex 'regime' of exploitation and oppression, jointly crafted by global, regional and local actors, and working across productive and reproductive realms. The analysis illustrates the links between the physical and social materiality of production, unveiling the distinct circuits of exploitation corresponding to different clothing items. As these circuits change across India, on the basis of regional patterns of product specialisation, so does the logic of the sweatshop, its composition, the social profile of the labouring poor engaged in garment work, and their working conditions. Through the eyes of sourcing actors, the whole country can be re-imagined as a giant department store, with different garment collections exhibited at different floors, and created through the sweat of different sets of labourers. Highlighting the great social differentiation of the garment workforce in factories, workshops and homes scattered across the Indian Subcontinent, the narrative also unveils the multiple patterns of unfreedom this workforce is subject to. These exceed narrow definitions of unfreedom mainly based on forced labour, which are becoming dominant in the debate on global labour standards and 'modern slavery'. By discussing interplays between productive and reproductive realms and processes of commodification and exploitation, on the contrary, the analysis highlights how social difference and unfreedom pre-exist the sweatshop and at the same time are also reproduced by it. It also highlights the role different actors – like global buyers, regional suppliers and retailers, and labour contractors – play in these processes. Indeed, the book depicts the sweatshop as a complex joint enterprise against the labouring poor, shaped and steered by multiple lords, and where production and circulation – of garments, processes and people – intertwine in manifold ways. It also shows how the labouring body is systematically and inexorably depleted and consumed by garment work, until it is finally ejected from the sweatshop. Finally, the book highlights how the study of India's sweatshop regime informs contemporary debates on industrial modernity, comparative advantage and cheap labour, modern slavery, and ethical consumerism. Alessandra Mezzadri teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interests focus on globalisation and processes of labour informalisation; materialist approaches to global commodity chain analysis and global industrial systems, labour standards and CSR; gender and feminist theory; and the political economy of India. She has investigated in depth the Indian garment industry over a span of ten years, and illustrated the different ways in which distinct regional sweatshops are formed and reproduced across the subcontinent.

See the book launch at SOAS here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPPyhchfRdQ

Remuneration is key to any economic sustenance both to the governments and individuals thus a means to economic growth and development for a state. This study seeks to contribute to the many ongoing debates on remuneration policies and inequalities resulting from such and make recommendations for mitigations realizing their link to labour wars. When world leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration in 2000, they pledged to create a more equitable world. Yet in many countries, the ladder of opportunity has become much harder to climb. Recognizing that there exists in Kenya huge disparities in the remuneration of public workers since independence; this has led to frequent industrial wars between the workers' unions and the government. Even though the highest paid worker and the lowest paid worker need to portray some equity in public service if the economy has to experience a robust growth and development. This has become hard to achieve in Kenya as in many economies of developing world. This study sought to; 1. Find out the origins of inequalities in public service remunerations' in Kenya, 2. Assess the effectiveness of public service remunerations' policy in Kenya, and 3. Examine the relationship between public service remunerations' policy and inequalities and labour wars in Kenya. In actualizing the article, the authors used extensively written work by other scholars while relying on relevant international and Kenya's policy instruments. In the final analysis, the paper finds that there is necessity for quality interventions unlike what has been witnessed in the Public service compensation in Kenya.

Mujeres y niñas entre hilos: condiciones de trabajo en la industria textil a principios del siglo XX. Una experiencia de clase generizada* Resumen: En este trabajo se abordan las experiencias de las trabajadoras textiles de principios del siglo XX, haciendo especial énfasis en las obreras de Gratry, ya que estas trabajadoras fueron protagonistas del ascenso huelguístico de 1910. En el estudio de su trabajo y organización, tratamos de identificar los mecanismos de explotación específicos de la mujer trabajadora visibilizando las condiciones de trabajo, y las diferencias de género de su experiencia situada en la fábrica textil del sur de la ciudad de buenos aires, en el barrio obrero de Pompeya. Guía esta investigación la idea en torno al patriarcado y el capitalismo como un solo sistema que explota a hombres y mujeres de manera específica, es decir en tanto tales; se busca encontrar sus mecanismos subyacentes. Nuestra hipótesis es que la especificidad de la explotación de las mujeres de la industria textil de Buenos Aires está determinada el carácter de su fuerza de trabajo, que es totalmente distinto al masculino porque hace una jornada laboral diferente, que incluye el trabajo doméstico y de ahí su especificidad y la mayor cantidad de plusvalía extraída. Este trabajo es resultado original del examen de un cuerpo variado de fuentes obreras y oficiales, nuestra metodología es el materialismo dialéctico y hemos hecho un examen culi-cuantitativo de las fuentes, en particular del Boletín del Departamento Nacional del Trabajo. Palabras clave: Relaciones de género; condiciones de trabajo; industria textil; formas de explotación trabajo femenino-trabajo infantil/niñas Abstract: This paper addresses the experiences of textile women workers of the early twentieth century, with special emphasis on the women workers of Gratry, because they were the protagonists of the 1910 strike rise. In the study of their work and organization, we try to identify the specific exploitation mechanisms of the woman worker, making visible the working conditions and the gender differences of their experience
located in the textile factory in the south of the city of Buenos Aires, in the working-class neighborhood of Pompeya. This research is guided by the idea of patriarchy and capitalism as one system that exploits men and women as such in a specific way. It seeks to find its underlying mechanisms. Our hypothesis is that the specificity of the exploitation of women in the textile industry of Buenos Aires is determined by the nature of their labor force, which is totally different from the male one because it makes a different working day, which includes domestic work and hence its specificity and the greater amount of surplus
value extracted.
This work is the original result of the examination of a varied body of workers documents and official sources, our methodology is dialectical materialism and we have made a qualitative-quantitative examination of the sources, in particular of the “Boletín del Departamento Nacional del Trabajo.”

This dissertation argues that private employment agencies have contributed to the individualization of employment with norms they have created through their practices. Employability is considered to be a panacea for unemployment, and social skills have become central for employment in the context that private employment agencies have appeared.

The cooperation of private employment agencies with institutions, the tools used, and the judgments made regarding employment by the agencies are examined in this scope.

Private employment agencies participate in a redefinition of the unemployed and the unemployable that holds employees responsible for their unemployment. A measurement of the behavioral characteristics of job seekers provided by private employment agencies determines who to exclude from the labor market affecting the job-seeking strategies of employees. Private employment agencies determine the position of a candidate in the labor market, contribute to the management of employment as an individual matter of workers, and create norms for employee character formation.

The dissertation aims to contribute to critical management studies in Turkey.

Androids, if they were to come into existence, would be the outcome of scientific and engineering ingenuity and thus be products of past living labour. Although the androids might be Turing-compatible, Voight-Kammpf cheating and Asimov-law abiding, they would be dead labour. Indeed as outcomes of a capitalist production process they would surely be commodities, objectifying a quantity of value and have particular uses for business, comfort or pleasure. In other words, androids would be very advanced machinery and Marx is quite clear that machinery cannot produce surplus value.

Drawing on John Johnston’s (2008) analysis of artificial life theory and experiments, this paper will explore whether androids or artificially intelligent robots can create surplus value. It will do so by interrogating and critiquing the key Marxist categories of labour and value. In this science-fictional quest to discover value producing androids, I will consider Marx’s problematic vitalism or whether there is something else specific to Man that is necessary for his value theory. I will consider Marx’s vitalism, and the android from the point of view of the labour process and valorization process before suggesting that under certain conditions androids can in fact produce value. These conditions have nothing to do with the peculiarity of either Man or machine, but rather with what value is and how it functions in Marx’s theoretical framework. Although Marx could be charged with vitalism, I will conclude that this aspect of his theory can be understood as referring to the life of capital and that in this context labour is negentropic to capital’s entropy. An implication of this exploration is that capitalism is alive and that it could reproduce itself without the existence of the human race.

Organisations face one of the most critical challenges of the 21 st century. These challenges focus on the moral dilemma typified by digital platforms, and their lack of regard for the ethical and moral considerations by obfuscating national regulatory frameworks guiding labour rights and protection. As technological advances create a renewed conundrum on how businesses should be regulated, a renewed principles-based approach must be set to enhance responsible corporate action. It also raises further arguments of the need for more regulations to address regulatory gaps guiding employment rights in the UK.

Corporate practices, as demonstrated by those of Deliveroo and Uber, correspond a deeply entrenched axiom of organisational life-a sharp reinforcement of profit maximisation, aggravated by excess dispersion of ownership. Labour Process Theory, a central tenet of Marxist literature, typify these changes, providing a conceptualised view on the ways it denigrates the value of human capital and free thought.
Indicative of this change is the coercive use of technological management strategies, shifting the locus of power away from the labour workforce brought by the current capitalist order. By using empirical evidence, the study contributes to the existing literature by offering an insight into the commodification of the labour workforce mediated by digital platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo. With a focus on managerial control, this paper argues that this form of capital-labour relationship brings damaging consequences on worker rights, and the principles guiding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

Using Critical Discourse Analysis to examine discourse qualitatively, the study finds that the capitalist pressure to commodify labour results in damaging social impacts such as inequality and social insecurity with a potential to create social upheaval. Ameliorating such damaging consequences rests on governmental enforcement of stricter regulations that encourage responsible corporate action and supporting moves towards greater collective bargaining.

(English version follows) L’ajustement structurel au Cameroun a frappé durement l’agro-industrie. Au sein de la filière coton, il a provoqué la crise du modèle mis en place dans les dernières années de la colonisation. L’article revient sur la manière dont la Sodecoton a pu faire face à cette crise, en réduisant une part significative de ses coûts par une sollicitation accrue du travail des cotonculteurs. Ce processus, dénommé « professionnalisation » et accompagné d’un discours pro-paysan, a permis le redéploiement de la capacité de contrôle de la société monopoliste sur les villages, via des mécanismes nouveaux que l’on se propose d’analyser. / Structural adjustment in Cameroon hit the agro-industrial sector harshly. In the monopolistic cotton industry, it challenged the pattern built during the late colonization period. This article analyzes how SODECOTON tried to manage this crisis, by transferring a large part of its costs to the cotton growers. This process— called “professionalization” — enabled, under the cover of a pro-peasant rhetoric, the redeployment of the control capacity of the monopolistic firm via new mechanisms, which are at the center of the inquiry.

Social class remains a fundamental presence in British life in the twenty-first century. It is woven into the very fabric of social and political discourse, undiminished by the end of mass industry; unaugmented despite the ascendancy of 'ordinary working people' and other substitute phrases. Absent from this landscape, however, is any compelling Marxist expression or analysis of class.

In Class Matters, Charles Umney brings Marxist analysis out of the 19th century textiles mill, and into the call centres, office blocks and fast food chains of modern Britain. He shows how core Marxist concepts are vital to understanding increasing pay inequality, decreasing job security, increasing routinisation and managerial control of the labour process.

Providing a critical analysis of competing perspectives, Umney argues that class must be understood as a dynamic and exploitative process integral to capitalism - rather than a descriptive categorisation - in order for us to better understand the gains capital has made at the expense of labour over the last four decades.

According to the main theories on the knowledge-based economy (KBE), the recent transformations of capitalism are at the origin of a general societal change. Managerial theories consider KBE to be a series of win-win mechanisms that simultaneously favour firms, workers and consumers. The cognitive capitalism theory perceives in the development of cognitive capitalism signs of the formation of a post-capitalist economy. This paper discusses the main features of these two theoretical orientations and identifies some core ambivalences in KBE. The relationship between market and society in KBE is marked by a dialectical process. The former incorporates mechanisms of potential economic valorisation generated by informal social relationships. To this end, it must internalise actors, practices and cultures that are partially in conflict with it, given that it must make ever greater efforts to bring the overall process back within the ownership regime. One thus witnesses a reduction of the barriers between firms and society, that can simultaneously engender a more subtle dominance of the former over the latter, or the growth of autonomy, self-organisation and peer cooperation among social actors. This second possibility relies entirely upon politics and collective action.

Labour in the “post-industrial” society alienates bodies’ political capacities; the embodied character of alienation renders the labour process and the sphere of reproduction as critical spaces for anticapitalist politics. The labour process of these emergent forms of labour is a political space in which bodies’ potential for praxis directly collides with the domination of value. The capacities and potentialities of bodies to engage in praxis – the properties of bodies with which humans express their Being as political Being – has become the social form of the domination of labour by capital. The social-fixing of indeterminate labour-power links and decouples the inner relations between power, consumption, reproduction, value, and subjectivity that constitute the emerging politics of alienation. My jumping-off points to these relations are concepts that purportedly describe “new” and “hegemonic” forms of labour in the post-industrial economy: ‘aesthetic labour’, ‘emotional labour’ and the triadic conception of ‘affective/immaterial/biopolitical labour’. I resolve the one-sidedness of these abstractions – their contending characterisations of the labour process, its relations, and their representations of the politics of emergent forms of labour – with an empirically-informed dialectical reconfiguration of the concept of body work. The factors of alienated body work are reciprocally related across productive and reproductive spheres and therein they bind articulations of capitalist politics together with the production of political subjectivities. This form of the organisation of labour creates a contradictory inner connection between the politics of production and modes of reproduction. This deepening connection between spheres of production and reproduction results in the potential for a capitalistic transformation of the body, foreclosing on the subversive potential of indeterminate labour-power, and simultaneously brings embodied political capacities into direct confrontation with the logic of value at the very centre of production.

First, I'm going to talk about why machine learning is a different type of automation from previous forms. Then I will show how the labour of producing machine learning tech is being automated and briefly discuss the relations of workers towards it. I will argue that AutoML complicates critical theorizations of automation from two Marxian schools of thought: labour process theory and post-operaismo. Finally, I will suggest that AutoML indicates the need for a conceptual shift from automation to autonomization.

Global Value Chain (GVC) analysis is part and parcel of mainstream
development discourse and policy. Supplier firms are encouraged, with
state support, to ‘link-up’ with trans-national lead firms. Such
arrangements, it is argued, will reduce poverty and contribute to
meaningful socio-economic development. This portrayal of global
political economic relations represents a ‘problem-solving’
interpretation of reality. This article proposes an alternative analytical
approach rooted in ‘critical theory’ which reformulates the GVC
approach to better investigate and explain the reproduction of global
poverty, inequality and divergent forms of national development. It
suggests re-labelling GVC as Global Poverty Chain (GPC) analysis. GPC’s
are examined in the textiles, food, and high-tech sectors. The article
details how workers in these chains are systematically paid less than
their subsistence costs, how trans-national corporations use their global
monopoly power to capture the lion’s share of value created within
these chains, and how these relations generate processes of
immiserating growth. The article concludes by considering how to
extend GPC analysis.

“Coolie” is a generic category for the “unskilled” manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for “mobilized-immobilized” labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated “coolies” in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the “production” of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and “producing” coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.

This article locates the emergence of new thinking on the left around work, age and assets within the lineage of 'class composition' analysis arising from the autonomist movement in mid-twentiethcentury Italy. With reference to contemporary debates around electoral and political strategy within the Labour Party, the article critically appraises the potential applicability of this extra-parliamentary 'militant methodology' for the present-day identification of ontologically and epistemologically privileged class actors and political subjects in a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. Noting the resemblance of such approaches to the orthodox Marxist 'gravedigger thesis', which reads off from economic relations the existence of agents of social transformation, the article argues that this analytical and strategic framing represents a flawed approach for Labour and the wider left. Other approaches are needed to successfully navigate the pluralist construction of consent through coalitionbuilding and compromise on which parliamentary politics rests.