Die Bedeutung der Arbeit im Werk Adornos

The reconstruction of the concept of labour in Adorno’s work forms the basis of this volume. The book’s recourse to, among others, Hegel and Marx, two decisive influences on Adorno's thinking, reveal a clear contrast through which Adorno's concept of work can be contoured particularly clearly. In the second part of the book, social work is examined against the backdrop of the considerations developed up to this point, and its proximity to the concept of integration through wage labour is elaborated. Based on this, reflections are made on what these results could mean for a concept of social work that regards itself as critical.

Slavery and Abolition in Chartist Thought and Culture, 1838–1850

In Britain between 1838 and 1858, the Chartist movement demanded the implementation of the ‘Six Points’, a parcel of parliamentary reforms centred on universal male suffrage. Despite the movement's recognized importance, little study has been made into Chartism's attitude towards slavery and abolitionism. This article will provide the first comprehensive study of this topic, from Chartism's origins in the 1830s until its decline in the decade after 1848. It will illustrate that Chartism was influenced by the radical labour component of the ‘Democratic’ coalition that supported President Andrew Jackson. This helped reinforce amongst early Chartists theories that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery, alongside a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged. By 1842, however, various changes within the movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment with Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology amongst American labour radicals profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which greatly informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the American Civil War.

Migration and human rights

The article describes the correlation between migration and human rights in the Republic of Moldova. Today migration is considered a great problem for Moldova. The country is facing poverty, lack of jobs, Moldovans are forced to go abroad, hoping to find not only a more profitable job, but also a safe living environment. The Republic of Moldova is facing a crisis of wage labour, which results from a combination of factors such as mass emigration for work, very low wages, undeclared payment, poor negotiation power of employees within enterprises, the feeling of injustice among employees. Violation of employees rights causes many workers to go abroad in search of a better place to work and live.

Self-employed surfers, universal credit and the minimally decent life

As part of its response to Covid-19 the government paused the use of the ‘Minimum Income Floor’ (MIF), which restricts the Universal Credit (UC) entitlement of the self-employed. This paper places the MIF in the wider context of conditionality in the social security system and considers a judicial review which claimed that the MIF was discriminatory. The paper focuses on how UC affects the availability of real choices for low-income citizens to limit or escape from wage labour, with two implications of the move to UC highlighted. First, the overlooked labour decommodifying aspect of tax credits, which provided a minimum income guarantee and a genuine alternative to wage labour for people who self-designated as ‘self-employed’, even if their earnings were minimal or non-existent, has been removed. Secondly, UC has in some respects improved the position of low-paid wage labourers in ‘mini-jobs’, who are not subject to conditionality once they work for the equivalent of approximately nine hours a week on the minimum wage.

Swyngedouw’s puzzle: Surplus-value production in socionature

This article engages with Swyngedouw’s puzzle, that is, how is surplus-value production under capitalism conceptualised given the entanglement of humans and non-human entities. It identifies how Swyngedouw’s socionature – a concept/way to express the oneness of human and non-human under capitalism – posed a critique to the tendency of labour-centred analysis in Marxist thought such as Neil Smith’s concept of ‘production of nature’ but did not engage with how surplus-value is produced. This article makes visible the role of non-wage-labour in surplus-value production through reference to Moore’s concept of value-relations and oikeios.

Theorising ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’: settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism

This article reconceptualises the Marxist notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, examining how settler colonialism and anti-Black racial domination structure American capitalism. The analysis intervenes in theorisations of primitive accumulation in both critiques of neoliberalism and the growing literature on racial capitalism. It shows how particular appropriations of primitive accumulation in the context of neoliberalism not only treat the concept as, ultimately, external to the core logic of capitalism, but also ignore the ways racial domination and colonisation configure capital’s violence. Simultaneously, within racial capitalism scholarship, primitive accumulation is prone to conceptual stretching, often flattening disparate forms of land and labour expropriation. In contrast, through the analytic of ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’, the author elucidates how normative wage-labour exploitation is predicated on settler colonialism and racial slavery and its afterlives. This thus adds precision to received understandings of capitalist expropriation, while also pushing the literature on racial capitalism beyond a white/Black binary.

AGRICULTURAL WORKERS’ STANDARD OF LIVING DURING CENTRAL CHILE'S AGRARIAN EXPANSION, CF. 1870-1930

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to determine trends in the wages and living standards of male agricultural labourers in Central Chile during the agrarian expansion, c. 1870-1930. We found that nominal wages increased eightfold; this is relevant because wage labour became the main rural labour regime in this period. Nominal wages rose steadily from the early 1870s until 1910, and with significant fluctuations thereafter, before plummeting with the Great Depression. Real wages also increased, but only slightly. Furthermore, during certain short periods, agricultural labourers' real wages were similar to or higher than those of low-skilled urban workers. However, the persistent gap between agricultural and non-agricultural wages was one of the causal factors of the outmigration of rural workers.