The reverend William Schuler Harris’ Capital and Labor (1907) frames its titular subjects as locked in a perennial struggle, “dating back to the time when the Egyptians laid the lash upon their slaves”. Writing in the early twentieth century, Harris is skeptical of the “orator [who] frequently soars into ecstasies over the privileges of the American workers”, for he sees how the labor force is suffering under the “galling yoke” of trusts and monopolies. Substitute those scourges of the Gilded Age with unfettered multinational conglomerates and something similar holds true today. The author’s list of obstacles facing workers are as relevant now as they were more than a century ago: the needs of “civilized life” increase more rapidly than wages; the skilled worker remains at…
Mayday, Mayday: *Capital and Labor* (1907)
A treatise on the challenges facing workers — and potential solutions — that advocates socialism at the turn of the 20th century.
Preface | The World After Capital
Since publishing the previous version of The World After Capital, I have met with people across the political spectrum to discuss the ideas from the book. When I present these in person, I emphasize that the ideas are neither left nor right but forward (credit to Scott Santens who first used this phrase about Universal Basic Income). My writing, however, at times has alienated readers who identify as being more on the right. In this new edition, I am therefore making an extra effort to emphasize how both my diagnosis of where we are at and my suggestions for how to move forward do not map onto the existing political divides. Instead this is a new way of understanding our challenges and opportunities that can be the basis for movements and parties that are not trapped in Industrial Age ideology.
Enough Debate about the AI Jobpocalypse. We Need To Plan for the Messy Middle.
Caught between arguments of abundance and apocalypse, economist Molly Kinder explores what workers can expect in the near future — and what we can do about it.
Work is a cult, here's how to escape
Thomas Piketty's Capital: everything you need to know about the surprise bestseller
The radical economist's book Capital in the Twenty-First century has angered the right with its powerful argument about wealth, democracy and why capitalism will always create inequality, says Paul Mason
Egypt, The New Republic: Hunger strikes on the rigs, digital sweatshops & factories cleared for capital
Labor dispatch!
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
A New York Times BestsellerA Wall Street Journal BestsellerA New York Times Notable Book of 2020A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceShortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the YearA New Statesman Book to ReadFrom economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class
US Labor & Imperialism Pt. 1: the War Against Communism w/ Jeff Schuhrke
Invisible Exploitation: How Capital Extracts Value Beyond Wage Labor - Monthly Review
Eva Swidler is an environmental political economist and social historian. She teaches at Goddard College and the Curtis Institute of Music. The Marxist analysis of work under capitalism has long... READ MORE
David Graeber interview: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’
The books interview: The anarchist author, coiner of the phrase ‘We are the 99%’, talks to Stuart Jeffries about ‘bullshit jobs’, our rule-bound lives and the importance of play
Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs
A very brief summary of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
Coloniality of Skill Codification: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis of “Ideal Workers” in the “Future of Work” Policy Discourses
ABSTRACT Over the last decade, policy actors have produced a surge of “future of work” reports that reimagine workers through the dual logics of digitalization and human capital. Drawing on 25 policy documents (WEF, World Bank, OECD, EU, and major consultancies) and combining Bacchi and Goodwin's WPR approach with decolonial feminist theory, this paper demonstrates how these imaginaries construct an “ideal future worker” that reinscribes colonial hierarchies through a process we term the coloniality of skill codification . This concept describes the translation of embodied, historical, and relational differences (race, gender, caste, disability, age, and geopolitics) into ostensibly neutral, measurable skill categories that naturalize Global North standards and colonial hierarchy. Our analysis uncovers three interlocking mechanisms: (1) construction of workers as techno‐neoliberal skill bundles (relational human–machine codependency), (2) commodification of social difference (inclusion framed as extractable competitive advantage), and (3) technical‐statistical indexation (national human capital metrics that rank countries and workforce potential). This paper intervenes in the emerging field of Feminist AI by arguing that the policy discourses surrounding AI and automation in the workplace are actively constructing a new, insidious form of the “ideal worker” that rearticulates colonial‐gendered power structures.
We Found The Radical Solution That Could End Corporate Monopolies
Work in Parallel, Without Fear — Jonas Schürmann