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Wage work, it is said, is disappearing in the "new" age of capital, to rising alarm across the world. Rather than the means by which humans transform nature to their purposes everywhere, Postone insisted, labor is a "form of mediation" peculiar to capitalism.[25] Plainly put, the latter is a I historical i formation in which wage work is "the primary constituter of the social world."[26] Marx's own critique of proletarian toil, added Postone, aimed I not i at its melioration, but at its total overcoming. Here everyday economic life necessitated a labile mix of subsistence and petty commodity production, "putting out" and occasional contract work, migrant employment, and "penny capitalism" in the informal sector - often implicating creative credit management and the "phatic labor" that "produces communicative channels" from which value could be garnered.[60] These were, and are, social ecologies in which material deficit imposes on individuals and families, especially women, an onus for diversified survival strategies - which perforce often include, in addition to informal enterprise, taking the lowest-paid, most insecure sweatshop jobs available. Wage labor remains at the ontological core of capitalism: of species being under its political theology; of its conception of time and value; of the unstable ratio of creation and destruction on which its expansion and financialization depends - even, Moishe Postone insisted, as wage work appears anachronistic, terminally endangered, at its historical "end", giving way to ever more abstract forms of wealth accumulation I sans i persons. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses feminist theories of political economy and economic development, focusing particularly on notions of the new middle class in India. The authors assert that the idea of a new middle class is both a political and popular culture construct and they track its origins and development in both colonial and post-colonial India. Other subjects explored include national identity, women's social roles and status, the social impact of globalization, modernity, and the political activity of the middle class.

The article explores connections between technology and the formation of postcolonial national identity in Indonesia during a period of industrialization between the years 1950 and 1975. Particular attention is paid to the building of a steel plant in Cilegon, West Java as an example of the various narratives of national identity that were employed to justify its construction and exemplified visions of industrialization. It is argued that technology and national identity were used as mutually reinforcing roles to define Indonesia's geographic and political place in the world. The politics surrounding the opening of the Trikora steel plant is examined. The difficulties of constructing the Krakatau Steel plant are presented.

In the past twenty years the entire field of development has come under critical academic and activist scrutiny. In the field, the structural adjustment crisis of the early 1980s forced development theorists to reassess the wisdom of basing development programs solely on economic theory. This special issue of "Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society," is the result of efforts to create new sites from which to think about development issues, actual spaces/places across the globe where new development practices are unfolding: primary, under-graduate, and graduate classrooms, biology laboratories and professional ethics committees.

There has been a resuscitation of the view that the state can play an important role in the industrialization process. But, for states to be successful in fostering development, they need a considerable degree of internal cohesiveness, which is generally supplied by the presence of a robust, Weberian bureaucratic corps. This article argues that, while internal cohesiveness is indeed critical, bureaucratic rule following can produce results in the opposite direction, depending on the interagency relations that obtain within the state. The effect of interagency relations is demonstrated through an examination of India and Korea. Both have worked to foster industrialization, and both are endowed with relatively healthy bureaucracies. However, the Indian state was paralyzed and fragmented, while its Korean counterpart did secure the requisite internal coherence. Not only did the culture of rule following fail to generate a cohesive state in India, but it, in fact, worked against such an outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on the effects of acculturation on agricultural intensification, scholars that have been debating the effects of markets on indigenous people's use of natural resources as part of a larger discourse on the economic development which the income affects the environment. Moreover, hypotheses was raised, with the empirical evidence from the four Amerindian societies in the rain forest of Honduras (Tawabka) and Bolivia (Mojeno, Yuracare, Chimane) examining the role of markets in the loss of old-growth rain forest.

The authors comment on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." They present queries about the models presented focusing on the Yang's sources of theoretical inspiration and not her use of them. They question whether Bataille's vision of capitalism is not itself caught in capitalism's self-mythologization as a desacralized and productivist space and worry about the slippage between the linguistic and the biological notion of hybridity.

The author comments on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." He states that religious practice and the ritual expenditure on spectacular performances of sacrifice and destruction are not activities usually associated with rapid regional economic development. He asserts that the paper did not unfold stories of religious squandering, general sacrifice, indulgent consumption and tomb building into the dominant narrative of global capitalist penetration. What Yang aimed to confront in her search for new conceptual vocabularies is the lingering influence of economic determinism.