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Automation and the Future of Work—2
Concluding his two-part analysis of technological development and global labour-market dysfunction, Aaron Benanav rebuts the automation theorists’ call for Universal Basic Income with a counter-proposal. Can we invent the future by working backwards from the world we want to build?
Automation and the Future of Work—1
First in a two-part global reappraisal of the linkages between technological advance and capitalist labour-market dysfunction. What light does automation discourse shed on dynamics within the productive economy? Rise of the robots versus industrial overcapacity to explain the worsening crisis of under-employment.
Guestworkers: A Taxonomy
A typology of Gastarbeiter programmes and their function in capitalist labour regimes, from Wilhelmine Prussia to the Gulf monarchies. Side effects of attempts to import a disposable reserve army of labour, and the tensions they provoke between capital accumulation and state legitimacy.
On Shopworking
A meditation on the peculiar relations of power between customers and retail staff, informed by direct experience. Required to enforce the logic of a system over which they have no control, shopworkers take refuge in forms of tacit resistance, distancing themselves from their ambiguous role in the circuits of modern capitalism.
Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History
Do feminism and neoliberalism share a secret affinity? Nancy Fraser on the co-option of gender politics by the ‘new spirit’ of post-Fordist capitalism, and subordination of its radical critique to a World Bank agenda. Might a neo-Keynesian shift offer prospects for socialist-feminist renewal?
Labour in the Levant
Against celebrations of the messianic potential of migrant labour, John Chalcraft presents the case of Syrian workers in Lebanon, where porous borders and hybrid identities serve to reproduce exploitative conditions. What motivations and aspirations underpin migration—and what routes might lead out of commodification’s web?
Unemployed Europe and the Struggle for Alternatives
“On 19 January, Tony Blair gave an interview to the European newspaper. He made plain his belief that ‘not just socialism but social democracy as practised in most of Europe is past its sell-by date’. The reason for this judgement is said to be that social democracy has . . .” read more
Paul T-- Investigates
“James Markham did not have many hidden powers. Only quietly manifest ones. European Director of the major construction company, Contrac, he made £60 million sound like the price of an evening newspaper. ‘If I decide that something needs doing, it gets done,’ he said, matter-of-factly. Across the expanse . . .” read more
A Labour Process to Nowhere?
“What has come to be known over the last ten years or so as ‘the labour process debate’ has been, literally, very much an academic exercise. And now its academic participants are pronouncing its end: ‘It is not perhaps an exaggeration to claim that the labour process bandwagon . . .” read more
Feminism at Work
“The most important political phenomenon of the last two decades and one that will continue to mark the politics of the next has been the development of a new feminist consciousness and a movement for women’s liberation. In Canada and Quebec, as elsewhere in the advanced capitalist world, . . .” read more
Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate
“It is nearly a decade since the first texts in the recent domestic labour debate appeared, and since then over fifty articles have been published on the subject of housework in the British and American socialist press alone. This interest in domestic labour has arisen from a wide . . .” read more
'Labour and Monopoly Capital'
“In a recent issue of nlr, Bob Rowthorn called Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital ‘one of the two most important works of Marxist political economy to have appeared in English in the last decade’. The book’s apparently untheoretical approach is deceptive. In a simple style, but . . .” read more
Domestic Labour: Reply to Critics
“The real merit of the critique made by Margaret Coulson, Branka Magaš and Hilary Wainwright of my analysis of domestic labour is that it focusses discussion about the strategic relation of women’s liberation to socialist revolution upon women’s double labour condition under capitalism. The fact that working-class women, . . .” read more
The Housewife and Her Labour Under Capitalism
“The re-emergence of a women’s movement in the late sixties brought with it a flood of radical literature on the oppression of women. The bulk of this writing was descriptive in character. While the portrayal of women’s life-circumstances was often vivid and accurate, the analysis was generally very . . .” read more
Immigration under Capitalism
“The authors of Immigrant Workers begin by observing that ‘The race relations approach has dominated research on immigration in Britain’. This approach has been mainly liberal in outlook, and frequently followed American models; ‘few British social scientists have paid any attention to . . . immigrants in the . . .” read more
The Function of Labour Immigration in Western European Capitalism
“The domination of the working masses by a small capitalist ruling class has never been based on violence alone. Capitalist rule is based on a range of mechanisms, some objective products of the economic process, others subjective phenomena arising through manipulation of attitudes. Two such mechanisms, which received . . .” read more
Immigrant Labour
“There is no Western European country where immigrant labour is a negligible force, or even a marginal quantity fluctuating with the economic conjuncture. Nowhere do immigrant workers provide simply a ‘regulator’ of employment, or merely an instrument for the bourgeoisie to increase the ‘industrial reserve army’. They comprise . . .” read more
The Toolmaker
“To be taken abruptly from school at 15 and thrust into a mammoth factory is a second weaning. Leaving a secondary school system which offers little more than a taste of the fruits of intellectual civilization before being thrust into the relative barbarity of the industrial system, ensures . . .” read more
Note on 'Work' Series
“With the present essay we are ending the series on Work which nlrinaugurated nearly four years ago. Since then we have published some 50 personal work accounts—half in the Review and the remainder in Work (Pelican Original, January 1968) and its successor Work Volume 2 which has . . .” read more
Guard Underground
“This fiftieth issue of New Left Review opens with a critique, by Perry Anderson, of the structures of bourgeois culture in Britain. The task of forging a revolutionary and internationalist political culture in this country has always been a central preoccupation of the Review. This involves attacking the . . .” read more
The Convenor
“‘To be effective, trade unionism must be militant, immediate and democratic,’ writes a shop-stewards’ convenor in this account of his job in a highly skilled Midlands aeroengine plant. A study in the workings of militant shop floor organization, his article clearly articulates both the need and the struggle . . .” read more
The Print Jungle
“‘In the jungle one has to defend oneself as best one can.’ This is the experience of a militant in the printing industry where, after a succession of take-overs, the monopoly confronts the worker with its ‘rational’ demands for modernizution and closures. From the shop floor the irrationality . . .” read more