Read more
Conventional wisdom holds that Capitalism depends on the exploitation of 'free labor.' This volume challenges those ideas.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Smithian Inheritance
2. The Marxist Inheritance
3. Semi-Feudalism and Modern Marxism
4. ‘Disguised’ Wage Labour and Modern Marxism
5. Unfreedom as Primitive Accumulation?
6. Germany and the United States: ‘Primitive’ or ‘Fully Functioning’ Accumulation?
7. ‘Medieval Working Practices’? British Agriculture and the Return of the Gangmaster
8. Citizenship and Human Rights – or Socialism?
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Tom Brass: Ph.D Phil (1982) formerly lectured in the SPS Faculty at Cambridge University and directed studies for Queens' College. He edited The Journal of Peasant Studies for almost two decades, and has published extensively on agrarian issues and rural labour relations.
Summary
Labor Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century sets as its task to assess the validity, in light of current economic development, of the epistemology structuring different historical interpretations that see unfree labor as incompatible with capitalism. Conventional wisdom holds thatregarding the opposition between capitalism and unfreedoman unbroken continuity links Marxism to Adam Smith, Malthus, Mill, and Max Weber. Challenging this, Brass argues that Marx accepted that, where class struggle is global, capitalist producers employ workers who are unfree.
Foreword
Features in Critical Sociology
Promotion targeting progressive Sociological Journals
Publicity and promotion in conjunction with the author's speaking engagements
Additional text
"Tom Brass, one of the United Kingdom's leading Marxist scholars has written a brilliant, theoretically informed, comprehensive critique of past and present, Marxist and non-Marxist writers of capitalist labor regimes and puts forth an alternative theoretical-conceptual framework ... Brass's book is a landmark study that is especially relevant to the emergence of a new genre of development studies which will return the class struggle and the ransition to socialism into the center of theory and practice."
—James Petras, Science and Society
“The volume is a timely and important contribution to the literature (especially its Marxist variant) on unfree labour, with a wealth of theoretical and empirical detail, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the issue of unfreedom in contemporary labour markets…[the] concept of ‘class struggle from above’ (by capital against labour) is hugely important in our current conjuncture, when any attempts to rein in the excesses of capital are framed as ‘class warfare’ or a ‘politics of envy’”
—Kendra Strauss, Capital and Class
