Tom Brass

Unfree labour as primitive accumulation

Much political economy, Marxist and non-Marxist, maintains that unfree labour is incompatible with a fully-functioning capitalism, and that employers always seek to replace unfree workers with free equivalents. In keeping with this, cases of unfree labour encountered currently are categorised as instances of primitive accumulation. Against this view, it is argued here that the centrality of class struggle to the shaping of the accumulation process leads to the opposite conclusion. Labour-power is unfree not because capitalism is in its early or ‘primitive’ stage — but rather because it is mature. The importance of this distinction is that the characterisation of unfree labour as acceptable or unacceptable to capitalism in turn affects what kind of systemic transition is on the political agenda.

A Stroll in Zuccotti Park

David Graeber Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House Publishing, New York, 2011; 534 pp: 9781933633862, US

Book review: A Contribution to the Critique of Contemporary Capitalism: Theoretical and International Perspectives, by Raju DasDasRajuA Contribution to the Critique of Contemporary Capitalism: Theoretical and International Perspectives, Nova Publishers, New York, 2014; 195 pp.: 9781631175596, US

37 (hbk) David Graeber The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, Allen Lane, London, 2013; xxi + 326pp: 9781846146633, 14.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) These two books are important, bur not in the way their author intended. Together, they reveal as clearly as need be the seductions and pitfalls awaiting those who announce that they, finally, have the answers to hitherto elusive questions about revolutionary practice--the 2011 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in Zuccotti Park --and the anarchist theory about debt and democracy that informs it. In one year, declares Graeber (2013: 149), Occupy managed to both identify the problem--a system of class power that has effectively fused finance and government--and to propose a solution: the creation of a genuinely democratic culture. These claims are unpersuasive, largely because of an approach which refuses to commit to a political and economic programme. Graeber harks back to an era of industrial capitalism, seen by him as a golden age, and about which he appears to have little to say in terms of criticism. No longer able to regard themselves as middle class, a status Graeber equates (2013: xix, 66-67, 70, 142) with a perception of the police and credit providers as being basically on your side, Americans from solidly middle-class families support OWS because they are unable to repay loans taken out to educate themselves, being either unemployed or in poorly-paid jobs. Graeber fails to note that while such mobilisation is certainly radical, it is not necessarily leftist: in the 1930s, opposition by solidly middle-class families not to capitalism bur to money power (financialization) generated support for the political right. Contrary to his belief that questioning the role of money automatically constitutes a challenge to the very nature of the economic system, therefore, implicit in much grassroots bourgeois anger at finance and the power of money is the view that, once banks are reformed, a benign/kind capitalism can be recuperated. Indeed, data provided by Graeber (2013: 93) showing that a plurality still prefer capitalism undermines his assumption that OWS support equals a desire to change the economic system. Questioning whether neoliberal financialization is actually still capitalism, Graeber (2013: 78-79) misunderstands the changes that have occurred in the world economy, as a result of which he interprets accumulation in national, not international terms. Like others (Hardt & Negri 2001; Harvey 2003), therefore, he seems to think that what we have now is no longer capitalism but some form of non-capitalist financialization. Real industrial capitalism, Graeber maintains, is now located only in the BRIC economies (China, India, Brazil). In the USA, by contrast, what we have is akin to feudalism. This misinterpretation overlooks two things. First, and most importantly, that capitalism is now global: one cannot separate European and US deindustrialization from the BRIC economies, since the latter are where European and US multinational corporations outsource production. These businesses are still capitalist enterprises, and are still part of a capitalist system that is now global in scope, in which they extract surpluses in order to accumulate. And second, within Europe and the USA, manufacturing still takes place, albeit in a different form. Production hasnt vanished so much as been decentralized and downsized: a lot of it takes place in small-scale units--sweatshops--that have replaced large-scale factories. In other words, it too has been outsourced, only nationally, not internationally. The analysis of debt--which according to Graeber (2011) informs OWS practice--is also lull of inconsistencies, not least in the claim that it has spotted developments of which no one else was aware. …

150 (hbk)

which focuses on selective groups of key workers occupying strategic positions within the global value chain, offers greater practical value, and is one of a number of contributions in this book that highlight how flexible production contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism is an extremely readable, engaging and timely collection which provides a welcome reappraisal of the continued centrality of labour in the contemporary process of globalisation. Whilst the book highlights examples of greater levels of exploitation, it remains optimistic in its belief in worker agency, whether acting collectively or individually, to exploit new strategies. At times the analysis is overly optimistic, and the conclusions a little too certain; but the book is certainly a welcome addition for anyone wishing to understand the nature of labour and work.

Is the industrial reserve army a racist concept

treatment of a great principle,’ Belfort Bax (1895) proceeded to indicate when in his view it was legitimate to breach this principle. ‘If it could be shown that the admission of socalled destitute aliens was really serving merely as a safety-valve for Continental capitalism to get rid of an inconvenient encumbrance by extruding from their native country unemployed elements left stranded by the great industry at home; and if it could be shown that the introduction of these elements necessarily had the effect of lowering wages and the standard of Extended book reviews 621 living of British workmen, then, distasteful as it would be to us, we might admit the necessity of a law discouraging, or even prohibiting, the migration of such for a time.’ 2. Among those who recognised this was Engels, who in a letter to Schlüter, dated 30 March 1892, observed (Marx and Engels, 1934: 496–7): ‘Your great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native workers. Up to 1848 one could only speak of a permanent native working class as an exception: the small beginnings of it in the cities in the East always had still the hope of becoming farmers or bourgeois. Now a working class has developed and has also to a great extent organized itself on trade union lines ... [However,] immigrants are divided into different nationalities and understand neither one another nor, for the most part, the language of the country. And your bourgeoisie knows much better even than the Austrian Government how to play off one nationality against the other: Jews, Italians, Bohemians, etc., against Germans and Irish, and each one against the other, so that differences in the standard of life of different workers exist, I believe, in New York to an extent unheard of elsewhere. And added to this is the total indifference of a society which has grown up on a purely capitalist basis ... towards the human lives which succumb in the competitive struggle: “there will be plenty more, and more than we want, of these damned Dutchmen, Irishmen, Italians, Jews and Hungarians;” and beyond them in the background stands John Chinaman, who far surpasses them all in his ability to live on dirt.’ 3. The crux of the matter was expressed thus by Belfort Bax (1895): ‘We might do so [prohibit immigration] on the ground that even from a “labour,” much more from a socialistic point of view, it were better for their own and for our sake that these [workers] should stay at home and organize industrially and politically for the emancipation of their class rather than perpetuate and extend misery by destroying the livelihood of their brother-slaves further west. We say at least that this is a standpoint which might be taken.’

Good companions or usual suspects

Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho (eds.) The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, 2012; xiii + 419 pp: 9781848445376, 135 [pound sterling] (hbk) In a variation on an old cliche, it might be argued that every epoch gets the Marxist dictionary - written by Marxists, about Marxism, for actual/potential Marxists - that it deserves. Those published during the 1930s and 1940s (Burns 1936, 1939; Gould 1947; Selsam 1949) emphasised claims to be a science, backed up by numerous quotations from Stalin. Trotskyism was either ignored or described (Gould 1947: 96), laughably, as a counter-revolutionary organization named after Leon Trotsky, who was connected with the Russian Labour Movement for many years. By the 1980s, even Marxist dictionaries published in the USSR (Frolov 1984) no longer featured the authority of Stalin, and claims to scientificity gave way to critiques of social science discourse in capitalist nations. Sensing, perhaps, the ideological struggles ahead, Marxist dictionaries appearing at that conjuncture in Western capitalism seemed to embrace glasnost. Entries in Gorman (1985-6) included not just Giddens - neither a Marxist nor a neo-Marxist - but also Mihailo Markovic, a prominent member of the Yugoslav Praxis group who later became an exponent of Serbian nationalism. The latter is also among the contributors to the volume by Bottomore (1983). In many ways, this trajectory accompanied the shift of Marxism from the street into the university, a transition evident in the most recent volumes. Earlier dictionaries (Burns, Gould, Selsam) were clearly aimed at a wide audience: that by Burns was subtitled a very simple exposition, that anyone can understand without previous knowledge. Entries covered the basic theoretical issues, definitions were concise, and the texts themselves were usually around a hundred pages. Later volumes (Frolov, Bottomore, Gorman) were equally clearly aimed at a much narrower, largely academic, audience, a fact embodied in the increased length and the extended debate. The short dictionaries by Russell (1981) and Brewer (1984) are an exception in this regard. If Marxist dictionaries of the 1930s/40s and 1980s reflected the confidence and subsequent defensiveness of their respective epochs, then the volume reviewed here bears the marks of defeat. Former versions displayed varying degrees of combativeness towards the enemies of Marxism; the current one, by contrast, exhibits at times an overly conciliatory tone towards them (under the slippery ideological rubric of diversity). Edited by Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho, The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics consists of around sixty entries and authors. The selection of contributors is parochial, many having had--or having still--an institutional base at London University, especially SOAS, creating the impression of a (friends-of-friends) network. Not only has the number of entries proliferated, but the earlier approach which treated Marxism as an overarching theory now fragments along academic lines (Marxism and sociology, Marxism and anthropology, etc.). The result is both exclusionary and inclusionary: on the one hand, important Marxist voices (for example, James Petras) are not heard, while on the other, palpably non-Marxist views are smuggled in and endorsingly cross-referenced. Unsurprisingly, therefore, problematic or discredited interpretations, some of which are not just non-Marxist but anti-Marxist, tend to be presented unchallenged. As the following examples demonstrate, an equally predictable outcome is that crucial aspects of Marxism are diluted, misrepresented or simply missing. The new agrarian question--broadly speaking, what happens to the peasantry in a developing economy, and why--is reduced by Terry Bytes (pp. 10-15) to a debate between himself and Henry Bernstein, an agrarian populist, thereby ignoring the presence of other, more rigorously Marxist interpretations. …

Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, by Ross PerlinPerlinRossIntern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, Verso: London, 2011, xviii + 258 pp: 9781844676866£14.99 (hbk)

Ross Perlin Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, Verso: London, 2011, xviii + 258 pp: 9781844676866 14.99 [pounds sterling] (hbk) Readers of this journal need no convincing as to just how feral neoliberalism has become. Having first undermined the ability to oppose politically (anti-strike legislation, union busting, employment outsourcing, the fall of communism, the rise of New Labour) and ideologically (the promotion of vacuous celebrity, the cultural turn displacing Marxist analysis), capital then proceeded to asset-strip entire nations (privatisation, economic crisis in the euro zone). Resources that would otherwise be available for investment in education, health, infrastructure, public-sector jobs or welfare programmes were accordingly diverted to off-shore tax havens. Any pretence at media objectivity about such developments has long-since vanished, as craven interviewers privilege the opinions of the markets (bankers, oligarchs, hedge-fund managers, speculators and financiers), grovelling before multi-millionaire CEOS who advocate yet more deregulation and austerity. A feral aspect of this race to the bottom that is perhaps not as well known concerns the impact on capitalist social relations of production. That neoliberalism entails the rise of gender-specific part-time working is not disputed; less commonplace is information about other working arrangements (sweatshops, unfreedom) affecting different categories of labour (migrants, youth). For this reason alone, this empirically useful but theoretically flawed book by Ross Perlin is a welcome addition to our knowledge of the way capitalism is transforming its workforce. Interns are temporary unpaid or low-paid young workers, mostly college students, who toil for long hours under coercive forms of control (pp. 16-17, 112, 141). Perlin charts the rise of internships, as capitalist enterprises in the US and Europe increasingly replace full-time employees (permanent, unionised, well-paid) with this kind of cheap, short-term contract labour. By insisting on academic credits gained through work experience, universities and colleges fuel the endless supply of student workers (83ff., 93). From paying for a placement via tuition fees, a student is now expected to have to bid against others to get one, as companies auction their internships (145ff.). Despite a rhetoric of empowerment (acquiring skills, exercising autonomy, a step towards well-paid permanent employment), interns do no more than menial tasks, receive little or no payment, and rarely obtain full-time jobs (pp. 23-4, 29, 70, 91). The weaknesses of the book are theoretical and political: the attempt by Perlin both to account for the rise of internship, and to suggest a solution. Although exploitation and cost-cutting are acknowledged, unpaid internship tends to be analysed economically in terms of psychologistic factors (a lack of respect) or human capital (p. 126-7, 129). Perlin sees internship as a deviation from the capitalist norm, and locates remedies within capitalism itself. Internship is described variously as a system that has gone off the rails, an explosion gone haywire, an unfair advantage [that] distorts markets, the result being a manipulated marketplace (pp. xvi, 4, 62, 140). Because internships dont follow the normal dynamics of the rest of the job market, Perlin (pp. 141) observes, nothing is less natural than patterns of supply and demand in the internship marketplace. Eschewing a class-struggle approach, Perlin is baffled by the fact that, despite its origins in academia, researchers and policy-makers remain silent about internship or look the other way (pp. xiii, 29), a view that overlooks a rather obvious cause: the long history of complicity by many senior academics with similarly exploitative working arrangements (= research assistants). His solution--to restore a fair, competitive system by means of enforcing existing laws (pp. …A further problem follows from this, in that the author is very quick to dismiss both Keynesian and neoliberal solutions for the problem of low economic growth. At times, this quick dismissal grates. In his historical chapters, Shutt is on familiar critical economic ground when he describes the improvements in everyday life that postwar Keynesianism brought to millions. This is then contrasted with the spectacular failures almost from day one of the neoliberal era. Given this recent historical experience, could demand management, and a conscious political decision to make full employment the goal of macro policy, not improve lives for many today? This question becomes more important in the final chapter of the book, in which Shutt considers features of a sustainable world order. This final chapter makes familiar demands for greater democracy and transparency, as well as participation in economic decision making, as well as a change in priorities from growth to distribution. All of these might suggest a modified Keynesian approach to economic policy, with greater democratic input. Despite these criticisms, The Trouble With Capitalism remains an interesting and useful contribution to the discussion of capitalism in our time.