'Labour' tag archive

Moritz Altenried, The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 217pp., £76.00 hb., £22.00 pb., 978 0 22681 549 7 hb., 978 0 22681 548 0 pb. Since the beginning of spring 2022, many countries have witnessed the return to supposedly ‘normal’ rhythms of life after the closures and […]

Dario Gentili, The Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of Government, trans. Stefania Porcelli in collaboration with Clara Pope (London and New York: Verso, 2021). 136pp., £12.99 pb., 978-1-78873-380-9 This is the new English translation of a book first published in Italian in 2018. In a world that is still struggling with the […]

In November 2021, over 140 Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers signed a letter asking the German government to oppose developments in autonomous weapons systems. With this they attempted to draw distinctions between beneficial and destructive AI: ‘Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no […]

Martina Tazzioli: I would like to start with a general question about your work: how does your theorisation of basic income connect with your reflections on precarity and on the emergence of ‘the precariat’ as a class? 1 Guy Standing: Well, I’ve been working on both subjects for many years. When we set up BIEN, […]

The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric. Bruno Latour, for instance, imagines that when we speak about what is ‘critical’, we have in mind a fully negative project, a practice of debunking […]

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, […]

Johan F. Hartle: I want to discuss the possibilities of Critical Theory that you and Alexander Kluge develop in your collective project. To that end, I would like to ask you to reconstruct a few points from your biography. Let’s start off by having you describe your path to the Institute for Social Research in […]

Human reproduction in the form of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and nurturing of infants and children has been at the core of Marxist feminist understandings of reproductive labour. When this labour is overtly commercialised, as in the case of surrogacy, it brings together biological processes of gestational and social processes of nurture and parenting into market […]

As the articles contained in this issue of Radical Philosophy indicate, ‘social reproduction’ is today more than ever at the centre of feminist debates. Yet the same articles also express a legitimate concern that recent theorisations obfuscate the political significance of this concept and its ability to describe the changes that have taken place in […]

Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society: The Future of Work, Volume 1, trans, Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 341pp., £55.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 1 50950 630 9 hb., 978 1 50950 631 6 pb. Despairing over the conditions of living and working in Foxconn’s ‘factory city’ in China, a total of 14 workers leapt to their […]

Humanism and Nature John O’Neill Those who aim to construct links between Marxism and the green movement often look to Marx’ s early work on alienation as a source for a green Marxism. I There is an immediate apparent problem with any such attempt to marry the early Marx and the greens, viz. that Marx’s […]

The Early Marx on Needs Andrew Chitty Following the first widespread dissemination of Marx’ s early writings, his treatment of human needs was often taken as the basis for a critique of the ‘false needs’ created by capitalism and its consumer culture. 1 ‘True needs’ for meaningful social interaction were counterposed to the ‘false needs’ […]

Gorz on Work and Liberation Sean Sayers Work is and always has been a central human activity; but only in the last decade has it become a major political issue. It has taken the re-emergence of mass unemployment to make it so. Right up until the war, the view that mass unemployment is intolerable in […]

The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom Andrew Collier The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means oflife and (2) as the matter, the object and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, […]

Reification, Class and ‘New Social Movements’ Paul Browne All significant social movements of the last thirty years have started outside the organised class interests and institutions. The peace movement, the ecology movement, the women’s movement, solidarity with the third world, human rights agencies, campaigns against poverty and homelessness, campaigns against cultural poverty and distortion: all […]

Labour and Labour-Power fan Hunt Marx claimed that his principal theoretical achievements were the distinctions he drew between ‘concrete labour’ and ‘abstract labour’, and between ‘labour’ and ‘labour-power’. These distinctions have been the focus of subsequent interpretation and criticism of Marx’ s theory of the capitalist mode of production. In this paper I shall argue […]

Marx’s “Social Revolution” and the Division of Labour Istvan Meszaros Marx was well aware of the burden of class de terminations which tend to subsume the individuals under their own logic; from his early writings to the Grundrisse and Capital he never stopped defining the task of emancipation as belonging to the social individual. Equally, […]

Debate on Market Socialism Alec Nove Beyond the Market? comments on Boris Frankel The editors have asked me to comment on Frankel’s Beyond the State?, since Frankel devotes several pages to a criticism of the sort of arguments which I advanced in my Economics of Feasible Socialism and in some other works. The key issue […]

Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Negativity Chris Arthur In 1844 a turning point occurs in Marx’s philosophical development: for the first time he makes labour the central category of his social ontology (1) position of importance it was never to lose. Productive activity, and its alienation, are thematized in that most extraordinary document containing the results […]

Personality and the Dialectic of Labour and PropertyLocke, Hegel, Marx. Chris Arthur Introduction One of the earliest objections to communism claims that ‘the complete abolition of private property’ makes no sense because people have an inalienable property in their own individuality, which comprises all those features that are peculiar to the person who has them […]

PRISON TaLK: an interview with Miehel Foueault Introduction This interview dates from June 1975 when Michel Foucault published Surveiller et Punir (Surveillance and punishment), subtitled: Naissance ‘de la Prison (Birth of the Prison). This book can be seen as forming a trilogy with Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation (1961) and Birth of the Clinic (1963); each […]