Comic · Brill Academic Pub

Beyond Marx

Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-first Century

Capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx anticipated, and the working class has, until now, hardly lived up to his hopes. The Marxian concept of class rests on exclusion. Only the 'pure' doubly-free wage-workers are able to create value; from a strategic perspective, all other parts of the world's working populations are secondary. But global labour history suggests, that slaves and other unfree workers are an essential component of the capitalist economy. What might a critique of the political economy of labour look like that critically reviews the experiences of the past five hundred years while moving beyond Eurocentrism? In this volume twenty-two authors offer their thoughts on this question, both from a historical and theoretical perspective.