Marxism and Political Economy

Historical Materialism

Disposable time, surplus population, and the limitation of the hours of labour&quot;Further steps toward a reformation of society can never be carried out with any hope of success,&quot; wrote English Factory Inspector R. J. Saunders in 1848, &quot;unless the hours of labour be limited, and the prescribed limit strictly enforced.&quot; Eighteen years later, the Congress of the International Working Men&#x27;s Association at Geneva paraphrased Saunders in a resolution declaring, &quot;the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive.&quot; Marx cited both versions approvingly in his chapter of Capital on &quot;The Working Day&quot; (and drafted the International Association statement). As publication of the Grundrisse made clear, &quot;disposable time&quot; was a foundational category of the analysis Marx worked out between 1857 and publication of Das Kapital. (See, for example, Moishe Postone&#x27;s discussion on pages 374-376 of Time, Labor and Social Domination) &quot;The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time,&quot; Marx wrote in the Grundrisse. &quot;The relation of necessary labour time to the superfluous (such it is, initially, from the standpoint of necessary labour),&quot; he continued, &quot;changes with the different stages in the development of the productive forces.&quot; The categories of relative surplus value, socially necessary labour time, and surplus population (or the disposable industrial reserve army) are all intimately related to Marx&#x27;s appreciation of disposable time, yet inexplicably the term only appears in Capital anecdotally and not in connection with the explication of his theory of value. In the wake of the Covid pandemic, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain and Iceland have announced pilot projects to study the benefits of moving to a four-day week. Legislation for a four-day week has been introduced in the United States. A rigorous examination of Marx&#x27;s analysis of disposable time and its antecedents in the work of Charles Wentworth Dilke, author of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, and of William Godwin, whose Political Justice and The Enquirer were sources of inspiration for Dilke, would greatly help scholars and activists get to grips with the questions that arise out of promise of state regulation of the hours of work and the importance of workers&#x27; mobilization on behalf of the limitation of the hours of labour.Tom Walker, (Simon Fraser University, Canada)Theorising Residential Capitalism: Land Rent, Capital Accumulation, and Housing ProvisionThough housing has become a major locus of accumulation in an age of secular stagnation, there continues to be a lack theoretical frameworks to examine how capitalist development operates in and through residential provision. Existing approaches to housing place an excessive focus on how finance flows in and out of real estate. In the process, there is a tendency to black box crucial aspects of housing provision, such as the process of residential production or the peculiarities of land rent. To address this, this paper sketches the contours of a Marxist framework for the analysis of residential capitalist development. It starts out from the claim that residential capitalism is underpinned by an ambivalent relationship between land rent extraction and capitalist residential production. Whereas land rentierism involves a drive to monopolise scarce assets and drive up their price, the thrust of capitalist production is to increase output competitively via cost-effective production. In the housing sphere, both economic processes are locked in a dynamic tension that has contradictory ramifications, both for residential provision and for the capitalist economy at large. These contradictions result in multiple vectors of social conflict that require of constant political management to stabilise urban-social formations, which are always at risk of breakdown and restructuring. Through this prism, this framework theorises the process of capitalist housing provision, using historical examples from the nineteenth century to the current era of housing bubbles.Javier Zacares – University of Durham, UK)The New Scramble for Africa: Land Ownership, Agrarian Change and the Real Subsumption of Africa to CapitalA host of new initiatives and projects funded by the World Bank and other international development organisations seek to examine existing land systems and map land use and regulations in Africa. With the explicit purpose of constituting state-based registers of property showing the extent, value and ownership of land, these projects aim to formalise land ownership and use, and create a land market through the gradual commodification of land. While the literature on land grabbing has played a vital part in demonstrating the importance of Africa as a new agrarian frontier for food security and the consequences of these transformations on peasant communities, it has been less attentive to the broader effects of this continental transformation in land ownership for Africa as a whole. In this paper I argue that this commodification of land constitutes a new scramble for Africa that is at once different from, and in continuity with, the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference where European colonial powers divided Africa up amongst themselves. More specifically, I argue that this transition from formal to real subsumption of land under capital underpins the growing role that Africa is likely to play in global accumulation over the next decades.Sébastien Rioux (Université de Montréal, Canada)Central Banks as Hegemonic ApparatusesGiven the conceptualisation of financialization as an integral feature of neoliberal capitalism and the characterisation of the state as a major agent of finance dependent ‘system of accumulation’, central banks emerge a key component of the power relations in terms of the ‘state-finance nexus’. With the granting of their status as “independent” agencies, in accordance with the neoliberal rhetoric of reducing political discretion in economic decisions, they have been empowered to fulfil the dual tasks of price and financial stability in the context of full capital mobility across the national borders. Yet, delineated as the linchpins of the global financial system, a diversification of central bank policy goals and objectives is said to be under way. For the classic paradigm of inflation-fighting independence becomes obsolete at least for the majority of the Western capitalist countries which experience a period of deflation with very low interest rates. Furthermore, as both the ecological and the COVID-19 crises have made clear, the neoliberal model of central bank independence cannot be sustained with calls for central banks to embrace objectives such as climate change abatement, inequality and distribution. However, a duality seems to be in the making, since the IMF would still consider the independence of the central bank as a key premise, at least for the countries implementing an IMF guided stabilization programme, thus underlining its adherence to the neoliberal logjam.This paper will contend that the specific roles attributed to the Central Banks imply their constitution as a hegemonic apparatus, that is to say, as an institution that organises, mediates and confirms the hegemony of a class. By functioning as a social and ideological terrain upon which ideas, beliefs, values and practices are contested, it plays a crucial role in reproducing ‘common sense’ and maintaining its dominance as a mode of thought. By way of illustration, it will focus on the recent episode of AKP rule in Turkey where a key plank of opposition (both intellectual and party political) is based on restoring the independence of the Central Bank, thereby confirming the hegemony of neoliberal mindset so as to maintain international credibility for the economic policymaking. This becomes intriguing as it also reveals the ‘crisis of the crisis management’ since the process of neoliberal transformation in Turkey is driven forward by a series of crises over the last four decades.Galip Yalman (METU, Turkey)PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider making a donation, which would help us enormously in covering the costs of putting of this programme of events. Like all left organisations, HM has had a very tough period since the beginning of 2020 and our budgets are very stretched and bank balance is sinking all the time, with very little revenue coming in. If you can make a contribution to keep us afloat, please don’t hesitate! You can donate by selecting the &#x27;donation&#x27; ticket type at registration.Once you have registered, a link to the live session will be emailed to you on the day of the event. For any technical queries please contact historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.ukPlease consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL. www.brill.com/hima

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