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It has been argued that there is a continued basis for Marxian discourse in the deskilling debate, given the nature of "skilled" labor in the context of the modern microelectronics-based economy. While Marxian discourse continues to emphasize manual labor in the context of an industrial paradigm, most often within the metal-mechanic industry, little has been written on the role played by information technology (IT) in control and rationalization of knowledge work since it was examined by Harry Braverman, Harley Shaiken, and Shoshana Zuboff. Meanwhile, a great deal continues to be written in the management literature on the failure of IT to deliver on its promise of increased productivity. This paper illuminates this issue of the productivity paradox of IT through extension of Marxian economic and social theory, and proposes that much of the failure in IT systems to deliver to their full productive capacity may be rooted in the contradictions of advanced capitalism. It further extends this analysis in the examination of the most recent failure of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

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This article revisits the Marxist debate on 'real abstraction' in order to evaluate the relevance of this concept to a period marked by the rise of cognitive capitalism and a proliferation of discourses on abstraction in social theory. The article touches on the interpretive debates around Marx's 1857 Introduction and tries to identify the tensions and contradictions at work in the distinctive contributions of Louis Althusser, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Roberto Finelli to thinking on the specific status of abstraction, in terms of both the methodology of Marxism and the logic and ontology of capitalism. These foundational debates are then contrasted with attempts by Paolo Virno and Lorenzo Cillario to think the contemporary figures of abstraction in terms of its politicization, on the one hand, and its operational role in the labor process, on the other.

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In this article, I derive the monetary expression of value based upon commodity money and use it to translate values and exchange values from units of labor into units of money. While this analysis has been done at the initial stage of Marx's analysis where he assumes that commodities exchange in proportion to their values, I derive the monetary expression of value at the more developed stage of Marx's analysis where commodities exchange according to prices of production. I then develop a macroeconomic measure of the monetary expression of value and link the micro- and macroeconomic determination of the monetary expression of value. In so doing I provide a conceptual basis for defining the monetary expression of value using contemporary non-commodity money.

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Theorists of antiracism commonly embrace recognition of difference as a theoretical starting point, often as a corrective to a perceived economic reductionism associated with Marxism. This article suggests that the divide between Marxism and antiracist theory informed by the politics of difference needs to be reconsidered. There is far more ground for commonality than may be assumed. Central to this is recognition of a certain "politics of difference" in Marx's work. Various types of difference, considered here as types of conflictual social relationships, are rooted in three forms of human suffering, or socially constructed human difference, that operate together. Exploitation is one such conflictual social relationship, but it is commonly seen to be the only one in a Marxist analysis; others are alienation and oppression. This article elaborates this understanding of Marxist theory and, in the process, reconsiders such concepts as "whiteness" and "privilege" in the reproduction of capitalist hegemony.

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Benjamin Gerdes & Jennifer Hayashida's "No More Strike Anywhere" presents a historical account of Swedish social democracy and contemporary neoliberalism. Like generations of Marxists before them, Gerdes & Hayashida endeavor to pose questions of history, and of how history is represented. They immerse themselves in concrete history and follow the trajectory of Ivan Krueger, the Swedish Match King. Krueger's personal story is also the history of Swedish social democracy. One version of that history, of walking into the sunshine, of caring for Sweden's own, was emblazoned on the matchboxes themselves. Gerdes and Hayashida present images of another history - of workers' strikes, colonial exploitation, monopoly capital, and the manipulation of credit markets. But, of course, it's not enough to excavate and display evidence of tragedy and scandal, demonstrating that contemporary capitalism is "the fruit of the most barbaric, brutal, and naked use of 'extra-economic' violence." It's also necessary to challenge and change our relationship to past history, to work collectively to locate cracks in existing narratives of economic and social stability, and to allow the new complexities and confusions that emerge to inform our reframing of the present.

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This article attempts to single out key sources, avoiding any unilateral attribution, for the concept of hegemony as developed by Antonio Gramsci throughout the entire course of his prison writings. Among these sources one may point to the well-established (albeit usually ignored) use of the term by Italian socialists when Gramsci was a young journalist. Later, when he was a member of the Comintern Executive in Moscow (1922-3), the term circulated freely among leading Bolsheviks (Lenin included), as Bukharin confirms explicitly, and shortly afterward began to appear in Gramsci's letters and other writings. Major inputs, as seen from the Prison Notebooks, also stem from Benedetto Croce and from various aspects of Machiavelli, including language. Gramsci's university linguistics studies also proved important, with the questions of linguistic substrata (which foreshadow later sociolinguistic notions) and the dialect/national language relation being crucial. Overriding all, however, is Gramsci's reading of the concrete situation.

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One of the major critical issues of debate in Africa is the question of revitalizing African cultures. In South Africa, this has been given the name of African renaissance, and it is perceived as a continental ideology. However, debates are mired in essentialisms that have obscured rather than clarified the potentially unifying effect of the notion in Africa. In this article we contribute to the critical debate on the meanings of African renaissance, using the writings of Amilcar Cabral. He, more than most African theorists, has suggested that we need to move beyond rarefied jargon when discussing African renaissances and dwell instead on the concrete levels of African people's lived experiences. We argue that, as discourses of continental renewal or rebirth, African renaissances should be figured in the plural and that, for them to have root in the lives of the African masses, the conceptualizations of African renaissances should reflect the cultural, economic, and political aspirations of African people.

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It is contended that the connection between ethics and politics in Karl Marx's later writings is essentially aporic. Rather than interpret Capital as a study of capitalist economics and a paradigm for establishing proletarian politics, it is asserted that Marx's three volumes address the downfall of class politics during the mid-19th century. The need to perceive theories of labor as distinct from theories of class consciousness and political organization is articulated. Marx's critique of commodity fetishism and the dynamics of capitalist exchange in Capital's first two volumes are reviewed. It is subsequently claimed that Marx's understanding of labor power as variable capital both negates the possibility of a working-class alliance and invalidates laborer-centered theories of proletarian politics. It is concluded that contemporary Marxist thought must reconsider the connection between socialism and capitalism in order to better understand the ethical-political relationship in Marx's thought. 32 References. J. W. Parker

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Comments on Marxism and cyber-capitalism as they inform Hardt and Negri's Empire (2000), which is suggested as an updating of the Communist Manifesto for the postmodern age, with globalization subsuming Marx's industrial capitalism but maintaining the same self-destructive mechanisms. The book also revises the conventional Leftist suspicion of globalization and nostalgia for the welfare state. Its limitations derive chiefly from the reliance on theoretical Deleuzean language at the expense of concreteness, and the absence of practical, viable modes of achieving the emancipatory goals that the authors exhort. Because Hardt and Negri's emulation of Marx falls short of revising his explanation of how the mechanisms for revolutionary change will come about, a reconsideration of Lenin, as a reinventor of Marxism despite his ultimate failure, is proposed. 2 References. K. Coddon.

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Marx's conception of communism is interpreted as a theory of politics and historical transformation in which social actors are moved by a drive to freedom. In this view communism is a process of freedom expansion. By focusing on widely defined consumption choices, the extent of an individual's freedom is identified in the opportunity set delimited by his budget and time constraints. Social goods, i.e., those provided without rivalry and without exclusion, are allocated on the basis of the criterion ""to each according to his needs"" and, if they are financed by nonregressive taxation, also on the basis of the criterion ""from each according to his abilities."" Thus a process of growth of social goods supply turns out to be a process of construction of communism and, since social goods remove some budget constraints to choice options, a process of expansion of individual freedom. Social goods are mostly provided by the state to allow people to fully enjoy constitutional liberties and social rights, but their provision is strongly affected by the evolution of class struggle. In fact the privileged classes tend to oppose a process that raises their tax burden, whilst the unprivileged ones tend to favor a development that extends their freedom. Since the majority of citizens in all capitalist systems have an income which is lower than the mean, communism tends to grow with the strength of democratic movements.

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