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Notes
1. The Marxist approach to class includes in it the necessity and the possibility of the abolition of class and the world-wide establishment of democratic control over society’s resources.
2. Unless otherwise noted, references to Brass’s work are from Brass (Citation2011).
3. For Marx, workers are free when they are free from the ownership of the means of production and when they are free to choose their employer.
4. Harvey’s view about accumulation by dispossession has produced a cottage industry which includes land-grabbing studies. In my view, Harvey stresses accumulation by dispossession and its politics at the expense of “accumulation by exploitation” and its class politics proper, when both forms of accumulation and their associated politics must be seen as parts of a dialectical whole, the global capitalist class system.
5. To the extent that MNCs signify advanced capitalist operations and to the extent that sweatshops operated by MNCs use unfree labour, this fact shows that unfree labour is not incompatible with advanced capitalism.
6. Utsa Patnaik (2007, 31) says this: “the small producer in this country is one of the lowest cost producers in the world, and there is a good prospect of small production stabilising and facing international competition, provided the advantage of large scale production are reaped through producer associations” (italics in original). This means that: intellectually, the problem of development is a problem of small scale of production at the national scale and of the absence of policies against international competition, and that politically, there is no need to launch a struggle against the existence of international competition itself including by mobilising small farmers as an ally of the world working class.
7. Capital makes workers work longer hours (it also pays lower than the rate that reflects the value of labour power, although Marx assumes that capital pays labour at below). This is appropriation of absolute surplus value. Capital also appropriates surplus value through productivity-enhancing technological change making workers produce more in less time. This is relative surplus value. Both these methods can coexist, although one method may predominate over another in specific contexts.
8. Note that strictly speaking, in Marx’s theory of absolute surplus value (formal subsumption of labour), wages cover the value of labour power, on average, and that the worker is a free worker who experiences no extra-economic coercion.
9. It is widely known among Marxists that the current economic crisis has been used by major companies and their political representatives to slash workers’ wages and impose speed-up. For example, the Obama administration’s expensive bailout of the auto industry in the USA, which earned him support from many workers in the 2012 election who mistakenly think Obama and his party will protect them, was based on massive wage-cuts. The United Auto Workers union supported Obama’s demand for poverty-level wages. Wage-cuts and speed-ups with the help of unions are a part of the strategy of insourcing – bringing back jobs to the USA. Workers generally have the juridical freedom both to choose their employer and to join unions, and yet wage cuts are possible.
10. In his rather relatively-neglected Wage, Labour and Capital, Marx (1976, 27) says: while it is true that the “price of [workers’] cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages,” this statement applies to the whole “race” of labourers, for “[i]ndividual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and propagate themselves.” (see also Marx Citation1977, 747–748)
11. A capitalist must find other ways (e.g. technological change) of cheapening commodities than just paying lower wages and making workers work longer hours than average, for labourers are free to leave that capitalist for another competing capitalist. Interestingly, work in the Brenner genre happens not to be discussed by Brass.
12. The fact that Brenner under-emphasises the importance of imperialism in the development of the currently developed countries is a different matter.
13. What is being claimed here is especially true where, as just mentioned, advanced productive forces result in deskilling which allows capital to draw from the reserve army which includes unfree elements.