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Heterodox economists have criticised the ahistorical character of orthodox economics, focusing on its inadequate ontological foundation. This paper adds to the ontological critique of orthodox economics by arguing that organically based atomism, Marx’s ontology specifying social relations and conditions under capitalism, explains the appearance of social atomism as a result of capitalism’s organic interdependencies. It elucidates how organically based atomism, which is composed of original accumulation and alienation, abstract-alienated labour and the exposition of the value forms, and Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, can be used to criticise the ahistorical character of orthodox economics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the rise to dominance in debates on capitalist diversity of approaches which take institutions as their starting point, rather than the wider social relations in which institutions sit and are constituted by. However, although this is part of broader trends across the social sciences over the last three decades, the self-marginalisation of critical political economy perspectives from these debates was also a factor, as was the declining dialogue between critical political economy researchers rooted in different geographical and philosophical traditions. Echoing the influence on the emergent Conference of Socialist Economists of German-language debates on the state in the 1970s, we call for renewed dialogue between researchers from different linguistic and intellectual backgrounds in the name of a renewed critique of dominant comparative capitalisms (CC) approaches. In so doing, we emphasise the range of alternative perspectives that can be offered through such dialogues and critiques, and thus the significant potential for further collaboration and advances in our understanding of capitalist diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the way in which Marx combines different historiographical approaches in order to draft the possibility for both new forms of social relationship and a new anthropology. The classic unilinear and historicist paradigm and its idea of pre-modern, pre-capitalist and pre-political social forms does not help in understanding the interaction of different temporalities and the combination of formal and real subsumptions. The representation of ongoing accumulation requires different temporalities, which conflict and intertwine with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to examine the valuable concept of left agency and interrogate it in terms of an inherent paradox not immediately apparent to many who support the role of politicised activists in the workplace. This paradox is that politicised workplace activists, particularly those belonging to revolutionary organisations, may in presenting an overtly political agenda centred on extra-workplace issues actually have weakened resistance against management’s aggressively profit-oriented agenda, particularly in the key period of the late-1970s and early 1980s. These arguments are further explored through an examination of approaches to workplace trade unionism by the Communist Party and International Socialism/Socialist Workers’ Party, thus linking the question of left agency in the workplace with the broader political agenda in terms of the practice and objectives of the explicitly Marxist organisations that can be assumed to be concerned with, and influence, the activity of their workplace-based members and representatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The crisis of 2008 is said to have brought the state back in, and its resurgence, in turn, is seen as revealing post-neoliberal tendencies. This analytical framework implies a conception of market and state as two distinct modes of social organization, and the perennial question about such a conception is whether the market has autonomy vis-à-vis the state, or the state vis-à-vis the market. Their social constitution as distinct forms of social relations is not raised. This paper argues that the capitalist state is fundamentally a liberal state. This conception entails class as the determining category of its form and content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social production has risen on the agenda of the social sciences. Yet most observers have been reluctant to confront the question of the value of these practices Instead they have mostly been characterised as 'free', 'common' or beyond value. This article argues that far from being free, social production abides to a particular value logic, an 'ethical economy' where value is related not to the input of labour time, but to the ability to give productive organization to a diffuse connectivity or, which is the same thing, to transform weak ties into affectively significant strong ones. The article concludes that progressive politics should work with this new emerging value logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is primarily concerned with the political economy of British trade union policy towards the European Community (EC) in the 1960s and 1970s. Its aim is to reassess union engagement with the EC in this period from a viewpoint informed by the now established perspective of world-order analysis in international political economy (Cox, 1981; Lipietz, 1992; Gamble & Payne, 1996; Payne, 2005). The article is specifically concerned with the re-evaluation in this light of two notable but contrasting and substantially contradictory perspectives on British unions and Europe: Dorfman (1977) and Teague (1985, 1989, later incorporated into Teague & Grahl, 1992). In its concluding section, the article briefly considers the implications of this reassessment for British union policy in relation to the contemporary EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'European social model' is a phrase often heard in European discourse. This article describes the remarkable shift in meaning that the term has experienced in the last two decades. While it was first invented to symbolise Delors's vision of a social-democratic Europe, it was then increasingly used to legitimise a predominately neoliberal integration process, before becoming a justification for the cutting back of existing welfare systems. The popularity of the European social model, however, still stems from the fact that it articulates an alternative to US-style free-market capitalism. The concept is therefore also used by left forces in order to formulate their vision of an alternative Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of pro-Islamic politics, the eastward expansion of the EU and the invasion of Iraq have increased the Western media's interest in the only Muslim member of Nato: Turkey. Popular discussion, however, has overshadowed a lack of systematic analyses for a proper understanding of major political developments in Turkey. This paper aims to debate Turkey's state of affairs from the perspective of political economy. It will be argued that Turkey's already troubled democracy is under the threat of absolute collapse, triggered by fundamentalist and fascistic tendencies, and that the current policies of the EU nurture such processes despite the EU's pro-democratic claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative industries development has been underway in the city of Stoke-on-Trent for the past fifteen years. Two urban quarters, a creative industries network, 'design-led' regeneration initiatives, and live-work spaces for craft businesses are some of the main projects undertaken in this period. In the past year, this raft of developments has been augmented by a creative industries mapping exercise, and a subsequent funding bid that seeks to draw on UK government and European structural funds in order to act on the research findings, and to put their recommendations into operation. This paper reviews this process both in terms of the political, economic, social, cultural and spatial context of the city, and in terms of broader urban agendas. It provides something of a corrective to the rather 'rose-tinted' picture often drawn of the role and significance of the creative industries for future economic and cultural well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a new cultural economy and the social configuration of autonomy. This paper tries to define the general features of a new economy in capitalism by analyzing three basic elements. It explores some of the conceptual and methodological issues raised by the emergence of the new economy. Moreover, an examination of the nature and cultural location of the artistic work is given with a criticism on orthodox economics. The precarious nature of the spaces for autonomy opened up by the new economy is discussed.

This article argues that studies of counter-hegemony and resistance in International Political Economy (IPE) have often ignored the cultural dimensions of anti-globalisation. We argue that a greater understanding of the elements needed for the articulation of counter-hegemony within IPE can be achieved through an engagement with the traditions inherent in the Birmingham School, and with the elements of Situationism contained within the anti-consumerist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central theme of this article is the relationship between political economy and culture. This raises related questions of the place and valuation of subjectivity, and of immaterial cultural labour within the cultural economy. These relationships and questions have been articulated in a relatively narrow way, if at all, by contemporary debates, which have not sufficiently taken into account recent social and cultural transformations. So this article attempts to discuss how a political economy of culture might develop a broader approach towards labour, culture, and subjectivity. The objective is to identify some of the problematic, under-researched and under-illuminated issues and areas. It culminates in the speculative discussion of a 'political economy from below', inherently geared to understanding the micro-productive activities of cultural producers themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France, the parties of the Left have been in power for two thirds of the period since the beginning of the 1980s. Thus the Left has had time to express itself and to show the world its true nature, in its diversity and its internal contradictions. It inherited a serious situation, in which big state and private enterprises were facing difficulties in international markets and a prolonged economic recession which its leaders became aware of only belatedly. Moreover, the economic constraints resulting from globalisation, and the more institutional constraints arising from the European Union, obviously limited possible responses to the situation. However, could the Left not lean for support on the expectations on the 'people of the Left' who had lived through 23 years of domination by the parties of the Right? Was it inevitable that the governments of the Left would continue the liberal economic policy, favourable to capital, while clothing it in an egalitarian veil, and above all masking it with humanist discourse? What effect do these practices have on social affairs, on the workplace, on unemployment issues, on civic life, on the family etc.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between capital accumulation, crisis and class struggle has been a central theme of CSE since its foundation, indeed it has been central to Marxism since Marx and Engels first addressed the issue in The Communist Manifesto in 1848. In the wake of the East Asia crisis, and perhaps on the eve of another wave of crises of global capitalism, it is worth returning to the ideas that Marx and Engels developed in addressing the first crises of global capital.[1] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Value theory lies at the heart of Marxist political economy for three key reasons. First, it is the abstract basis on which to understand the social relations of capitalist commodity producing society. Second, it attaches complex forms, such as price and profit, to simple underlying determinants. Third, it addresses the dialectics of change and reproduction. In addition, value theory is apposite in the current renewal of interest in the economy across the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information related to the revival of economic liberalism both as a form of political economy and as a political ideology in context with Russia. Many people have regarded economic liberalism (neoliberalism) as the new hegemonic ideology, following the collapse of Communism in Russia. Neoliberalism appeared in the form of political economy as a critique of Keynesianism. The political interventions represented by Thatcherism and Reaganism in the U.S. and Great Britain have established neoliberalism as the new dominant common sense, the paradigm shaping all policies. Neoliberalism gives preference to capital as money rather than capital as production.

Why learn Latin? Both Latin and Capital are dying languages. How many Capital reading groups are there now? How many courses on Capital in colleges or universities? How many individuals ploughing on their own through the three volumes? Yet it was reading Capital that brought many of us into the CSE. Now that Capital & Class is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, it is worth recording that the change in the title of the journal of the CSE from the Bulletin of the CSE to Capital & Class had much to do with the influx of non-economists in to the CSE at about that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is perhaps understandable that until the fall of the Soviet Union, the study of Marxism within the discipline of international relations was restricted largely to discussion of the state ideology Marxism-Leninism. The events of 1989, and the spectacular rise of the sub-discipline of international political economy in the context of globalisation, have, somewhat paradoxically, led to a resurgence of interest in critical, open forms of Marxism. Attempts to break away from the dogmatism of Marxism-Leninism whilst avoiding the complementary error of humanistic subjectivism have, of course, a long tradition in marxist thought.[1] Consistent with the 'open', critical tradition is the work produced by, amongst others, Luxemburg, Korsch, Bloch, Rubin, Pashukanis, Rosdolsky, the Italian tradition of 'autonomist' Marxism and the work of contributors to debates on value and the state held in the early years of the Conference of Socialist Economists.[2] This paper briefly outlines the contribution the 'CSE tradition' offers to the study of international relations and the fashionable analysis of globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that interpretations of Marx's value theory which value inputs and outputs simultaneously imply that surplus-labor is not the sole source of profit — even in the absence of joint production. Contrary results, such as the Fundamental Marxian Theorem, rely crucially on restrictive and implausible conditions that are shown to be unnecessary for reproduction. In contrast, the temporal single-system interpretation conforms to the exploitation theory of profit under completely general conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the new revolution in economics. Argument that the marginalist revolution established economics as a discipline by substantially limiting its scope of application; Discussion on the colonising trend of neoclassical economics; Focus on the growing popularity of orthodox economics.

This article focuses on the way in which radical urban perspectives in geography and sociology have misinterpreted the relationships among class, capital and space in Great Britain. The argument is that the structuralist position of the old new radical geography and the postmodernist turn from it which constitutes the new radical geography. The line of this article is essentially a development of the theme identified by H. Beauregard in his cogent discussion of the relationship between the direction of modern radical geography and the absence of practice. The article concludes with an argument for active strategies of "empowerment" directed towards the working poor as a component of the social proletariat. However, things in urban and regional studies have moved on since those pieces were written, and moved on in a direction which seems not only to have absolutely ignored the points made in them, but to have exacerbated the problem by a transition. The postmodernist turn from structuralism, which in the new geography seems to be less of a turn than a writing of postmodernist pessimism and eclecticism on top of a virtually unmodified structuralism.

This article claims that the ontological theories of philosopher Roy Bhaskar can provide a philosophical basis for conceptions of ideology and false consciousness that have been put into doubt. According to Bhaskar, his critical realism also supplies guiding principles for the social sciences, which can help steer a path through various errors and misconceptions that have hampered them. Realism is not, nor does it license, either a set of substantive analyses or a set of practical policies. Rather, it provides a set of perspectives on society and on how to understand them. The importance of ontology and its primacy in theory has been a dominant theme in Bhaskar's work. Bhaskar describes his philosophy of science as transcendental realism because of the transcendental character of some of his arguments. Bhaskar identifies the failings of most other philosophies of science with the mistaken ontological assumptions they make. The objects of social science, according to Bhaskar, have ontological characteristics in common with those of the natural sciences, and some that are not shared.

The article presents a discussion on the book "Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today," by John Holloway. It cites that the aim of the book is to sharpen the Marxist views on capitalism. It presents a discussion on fetishism and fetishisation. Fetishism is the separation of doing from done, and the breaking of the collective flow of doing. The book also criticizes scientific Marxism theories which are the theories that attempt to enlist certainty on the side of socialism and predict historical change according to scientific laws.

The article presents a discussion on the book "Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today," by John Holloway. It cites that the starting point of a revolutionary criticism is negativity which is the rejection of the relations of exploitation and domination inherent in capitalist society. It states that Holloway's argument had lost its direction which led to an unexpected discussion of postmodern politics instead of revolutionary politics. It also presents several topics discussed in the book such as class reductionism, and the reduction of the capitalist state to an instrument.