Showing papers on "Capitalism published in 1982"

Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism.

Abstract: Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? \"Manufacturing Consent,\" the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. \"Manufacturing Consent\" is unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.

The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism

Abstract: The appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in the course of capitalist expansion—the “development of under-development”—has posed difficult problems for Marxist theory. There has arisen, in response, a strong tendency sharply to revise Marx’s conceptions regarding economic development. In part, this has been a healthy reaction to the Marx of the Manifesto, who envisioned a more or less direct and inevitable process of capitalist expansion: undermining old modes of production, replacing them with capitalist social productive relations and, on this basis, setting off a process of capital accumulation and economic development more or less following the pattern of the original homelands of capitalism. […].

Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The historical transformation of labor in the United States

Abstract: Preface 1. The historical transformation of labor: an overview 2. Long swings and stages of capitalism 3. Initial proletarianization: 1820s to 1890s 4. the homogenization of labor: 1870s to World War II 5. The segmentation of labor: 1920s to the present 6. A recapitulation Notes Bibliography Index.

Why has Japan succeeded

Abstract: This book, by a distinguished Japanese economist now resident in the West, offers a new interpretation of the current success of the Japanese economy. By placing the rise of Japan in the context of its historical development, Michio Morishima shows how a strongly-held national ethos has interacted with religious, social and technological ideas imported from elsewhere to produce highly distinctive cultural traits. While Professor Morishima traces the roots of modern Japan back as far as the introduction of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism from China in the sixth century, he concentrates his observations on the last 120 years during which Japan has had extensive contacts with the West. He describes the swift rise of Japan to the status of a first-rate power following the Meiji Revolution after 1867, in which Japan broke with a long history of isolationism, and which paved the way for the adoption of Western technology and the creation of a modern Western-style nation state; and a similarly meteoric rise from the devastation of the Second World War to Japan's present position. A range of factors in Japan's economic success are analysed: her characteristic dualistic social structure - corresponding to the divide between large and medium/small enterprises - the relations of government and big business, the poor reception of liberalism and individualism, and the strength of the Japanese nationalism. Throughout, Professor Morishima emphasises the importance of the role played in the creation of Japanese capitalism by ethical doctrines as transformed under Japanese conditions, especially the Japanese Confucian tradition of complete loyalty to the firm and to the state. This account, which makes clear the extent to which the economic rise of Japan is due to factors unique to its historical traditions, will be of interest to a wide general readership as well as to students of Japan and its history.

Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development:

Abstract: At the outset the person on the Clapham omnibus could be forgiven for questioning the contemporary relevance of a volume of economic analysis whose main outline was completed in the early 1900s by a practising doctor at the age of 28 . An initial attitude of scepticism could easily be transformed into one of complete dismissal if one were to take at face value Lenin's characterisation of the same doctor as `ex-"Marxist", and now a comrade-in-arms of Kautsky and one of the chief exponents of bourgeois, reformist policy in the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany" . Yet when Hilferding's project was published in German as Das Finanzkapital in 1910 its impact across the political spectrum of his contemporaries was striking. Not surprisingly political `allies' such as Kautsky and Bauer hailed Das Finanzkapital as an additional volume of Capital. But the work of political adversaries such as Bukharin's (1918) study of imperialism also owes a large intellectual debt to Hilferding . And, paradoxically, Lenin's (1917) classic, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism is Hilferding's biggest debtor . A resolution of this paradox is suggested in the next section .

The Organization of American Culture, 1700-1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality

Abstract: Nationality, argues Peter Hall, did not follow directly from the colonists' declatation of independence from England, nor from the political union of the states under the Constitution of 1789. It was, rather, the product of organizations which socialized individuals to a national outlook. These institutions were the private corportions which Americans used after 1790 to carry on their central activities of production. The book is in three parts. In the first part the social and economic development of the American colonies is considered. In New England, population growth led to the breakdown of community - and the migration of people to both the cities and the frontier. New England's merchants and professional tried to maintain community leadership in the context of capitalism and democracy and developed a remarkable dependence on pricate corporations and the eleemosynary trust, devices that enabled them to exert influence disproportionate to their numbers. Part two looks at the problem of order and authority after 1790. Tracing the role of such New England-influenced corporate institutions as colleges, religious bodies, professional societeis, and businesses, Hall shows how their promoters sought to "civilize" the increasingly diverse and dispersed American people. With Jefferson's triumph in 1800. these institutions turned to new means of engineering consent, evangelical religion, moral fegorm, and education. The third part of this volume examines the fruition a=of these corporatist efforts. The author looks at the Civil War as a problem in large-scale organization, and the pre- and post-war emergence of a national administrative elite and national institutions of business and culture. Hall concludes with an evaluation of the organizational components of nationality and a consideration of the precedent that the past sets for the creation of internationality.

The political economy of West African agriculture

Abstract: West Africa's agriculture has, for 150 years, been heavily geared toward export, yet the region is one of the world's poorest. Keith Hart examines this question, focusing particularly on how this situation has affected the indigenous peoples of West Africa. Commerce has grown impressively, but productivity remains low and capital accumulation is retarded. The reasons exist primarily in internal conditions shaping social institutions. Before, during, and since colonialism, the particular problems of these preindustrial states have shaped agricultural development more than the pressure supposedly emanating from the 'world system' of international capitalism. This book, following the classical economists as well as Marx and Lenin, argues for the necessity of rapid capitalist penetration into West African agriculture. The book is also a readable introduction to the history and ethnography of the region as a whole.

Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960

Abstract: Maps Tables Figures Preface 1. Slavery, colonialism and economic growth, 1640-1960 2. The Dahomean economy, 1640-1890 3. Struggles with the gods: economic life in the 1880s 4. Production, 1890-1914 5. Demand, 1890-1914 6. Exchange, 1890-1914 7. The alien state, 1890-1914 8. Social struggles for economic ends, 1890-1914 9. The mechanism of accumulation 10. Capitalism and colonialism, 1915-60 11. The Dahomean national movement 12. Epilogue Notes Appendices Bibliography Index.

In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber's Protestant Ethic Thesis

Abstract: Provides a critical commentary on Max Weber's thesis about the relationship between ascetic Protestantism and the rise of modern capitalism and on the debate which the thesis generated. Marshall argues that Weber's thesis is best understood in the context of his intellectual environment.

Dynamics of Global Crisis

Abstract: Preeminent theoreticians of the world economy set out their understanding of the long-term dynamics of global capitalism.

Law and Economics: An Institutional Perspective

Abstract: The study of law and economics has as its goal the identification of the instrumental variables and the fundamental issues and processes in the operation of legal institutions of economic significance. This has been an interest of classical political economy since its inception. The contemporary institutional approach has its roots in the work of such economists as Henry Carter Adams on economics and jurisprudence [1], Richard T. Ely on the role of property and contract in the distribution of wealth [2], and John R. Commons on the legal foundations of capitalism [3]. It can also be found in work of such legal scholars as Walton Hamilton [4], Karl Llewellyn [5], Jerome Frank [6], and Roscoe Pound. [7] These scholars constitute a tradition focusing on the interrelation between the processes of the state and the economy, rather than simply an application of economics to law.

Socialist States in the World-System

Abstract: What is the role of socialist states in the capitalist world economy? How do the dynamics of capitalism distort and limit national economic planning as an instrument of socialism? Answers to such questions, based on the world-system perspective, are propounded and attacked in original essays. Histories of particular states, including the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Jamaica and Eastern Europe, are also examined.

The organic crisis of British capitalism and race: the experience of the seventies

Abstract: Chapter 1 of the "Empire Strikes Back" examines the place of "race" and racism in the political transformation of Britain at the end of the 1970s, and argues that Britain has entered a long-term political and economic crisis which has brought new urgency to the politics of race and nation. The authors argue that the British state is very far from its popular image as a liberal democracy, and all our notions of culture, nation and class are based on deeply racist structures.

Urban Policy Under Capitalism

Abstract: Urban Policy Under Capitalism breaks with both orthodox Marxism and liberal urban analysis to study urban development as a function of the capitalist mode of production. For them the search for optimal urban policy is ideologically mystifying -- the demands of efficient capital accumulation, of different business interests, and of social welfare clash to produce urban policy. Their work takes a genuinely comparative perspective, researching conditions in many parts of the world to identify common trends. 'This volume is a collection of essays containing stimulating thought and refreshing approach to the understanding of state activities affecting the use of urban space and built environment. Studies like this bunch of essays would give a fillip to the serious pursuit of the urban theme in the context of functioning of modern capitalism.' -- Nagarlok, Vol 15 No 2, June 1983

Labour and Interaction

Abstract: Labour and interaction: innocuous-sounding terms, but ones around which Habermas has consolidated some of the main themes in his work. It makes sense to see most of Habermas’s work as concerned with what he has come to call the ‘reconstruction of historical materialism’ — a critical reformulation of the dominant concerns of Marx’s writings, both on the level of philosophy or ‘meta-theory’ and on the level of the development of industrial capitalism since Marx’s day. Habermas uses ‘reconstruction’ in a very deliberate way, as he makes clear. He is not interested, as he says, in reviving or ‘restoring’ traditional Marxist ideas: his preoccupation with Marx is not a scholastic or dogmatic one. As a tradition of thought which is very much alive, Marxism has no need for renewal. Rather, it is in need of a wholesale overhaul. ‘Reconstruction’, Habermas argues, ‘signifies taking a theory apart and putting it back together again in a new form in order to attain more fully the goal it has set for itself.’1