Imperialism in the 21st century

A review of John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation and Capitalism's Final Crisis (Monthly Review Press, 2016).

Over the last forty years, global capitalism has increasingly been shaped by the core tenets of neoliberalism. The neoliberal counter-revolution emerged as a response to the return of economic crisis in the 1970s, and to the power of working class and anti-colonial movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

It was geared towards the interests of wealthy and corporate elites, at the expense of the vast majority of working class and oppressed people worldwide. The divisions between the 1% and the 99% have become ever more acute, with the most extraordinary and ostentatious wealth for a tiny elite alongside hardship, insecurity and poverty for many people.

Cuts, privatisation, deregulation, trade liberalisation and outsourcing were all components of a wider political offensive. Consequently, exploitation has intensified, inequality has grown, and democracy has been hollowed out. This involved a massive effort to defeat trade-union opposition and break the resistance and organisations of the working class. Though largely successful in those terms, this capitalist offensive has fuelled economic crisis, social polarisation and a political backlash that takes various forms.

The rise of neoliberalism happened at the same time as capitalism expanded, and entrenched itself in new territories, becoming a truly dominant global system. The end of the Cold War gave particular impetus to the neoliberal mantras of free trade and globalisation, so that neoliberal policymaking has – with concerted pressure from supra-national institutions dominated by the interests of big capital in the Global North – become globally hegemonic.

This dominance was captured by Margaret Thatcher’s line, ‘there is no alternative’ in the 1980s and, a little later, by Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of ‘the end of history’, suggesting that the upheavals of 1989-91 marked a final and conclusive victory for Western-style capitalism.

The capitalist crisis which unfolded from 2007/08 illustrated the failures of neoliberalism to resolve the deeper, long-term problems inherent in the system. Indeed, key elements of neoliberalism - like the growth of a deregulated finance sector and the increasing dependence on outsourcing - were vital factors in sharpening, deepening and prolonging that crisis. John Smith dubs this ‘capitalism’s final crisis’, both because he argues there is no plausible exit from the crisis (within the confines of capitalism) and because of the ecological dimension of capitalist crisis, which threatens the planet’s future.

Smith’s book, which compresses many years of research into a little over three hundred pages, is, first and foremost, an account of contemporary global capitalism in the wake of decades of neoliberalism. A British-based Marxist and activist, Smith has previously published very little (this is his first book) but he draws on his own extensive PhD research and on an even longer period of researching, and thinking about, the main issues. It contains a formidable array of evidence, with an assured grasp of the economic data, to support the main arguments.

Smith eloquently conveys the huge extent to which capitalism has changed as a result of neoliberal trends. The book is genuinely global in its focus, examining the main global trends and documenting the impact of a Western-dominated (and grossly unequal) system on the poorer parts of the world. It is also a savage indictment of the phenomena he describes, graphically revealing the human misery associated with the appalling working conditions - poverty pay, long hours, unsafe conditions and insecurity - dominating the lives of millions of working-class people.

Smith also develops a particular argument about global exploitation and inequality. He demonstrates with a wealth of data that the whole system has increasingly come to depend on the ‘super exploitation’ of impoverished workers in the ‘developing world’.

This exploitation generates massive surplus value for corporations based in the more developed global North. He provocatively argues that even many Marxist writers have underestimated the scale and significance of such ‘super exploitation’ for the global system, failing to give proper attention to the role of outsourcing in capitalist profitability. He offers a wealth of evidence that outsourcing, which involves corporations moving their operations to poorer countries with cheap labour to maximise profits, has grown enormously, and that neoliberal capitalism depends upon it.

It follows that not only has the working class grown globally, but also that the working class in the poorer nations has become more integral to the fortunes of global capitalism, and, therefore, more integral to the prospects for working-class struggle and emancipation. Neoliberalism’s restructuring of capitalism and recomposition of the global working class consequently has implications for anti-capitalist resistance and the challenge of re-building working-class strength. The book’s focus is largely on working-class people as the objects of social and economic transformation, but Smith clearly sees those victims of exploitation and neoliberal upheaval as the agents of social change too.

This is a very wide-ranging and ambitious book, but the opening chapter on the global commodity proves to be a shrewd entrance point to an exploration of several interrelated themes. The fact that today’s mass commodities rest upon super exploitation in the South – hidden from consumers’ view – is Smith’s starting point. He writes, in some detail, about three exemplary global commodities in twenty-first-century capitalism: the T-shirt, the Apple iPhone, and coffee.

Smith exposes the highly exploitative, and at times horrific, working conditions behind these commodities, for example the extremely low-paid work in dangerous conditions undertaken by mainly young, female workers in the garments sweatshops of Bangladesh. It is demonstrated beyond doubt that powerful corporations based in the North, especially the US, are the beneficiaries of this exploitation, and are responsible for the terrible conditions endured by workers. The relationship between capitalism in the ‘core countries’ and the labour done by these workers is carefully unpicked.

This vivid sketching of key commodities – chosen as exemplars, not for any exceptional reasons – brings to life what could threaten to be rather dry, economic material, humanising the economic processes under discussion. It is supported, later in the book, by analysis of labour conditions in the Global South: a very revealing interrogation of the everyday working conditions of vast numbers of workers, and how those conditions feed the profits of major corporations.

The massive increase in female workers - and their integration into the market and the acute nature of their exploitation – is an especially important element of this transformation in the working class. Smith is also astute about the role of migrant labour in contemporary capitalism, exploring how wealthier states (and their business elites) profit from migrant workers at the same time as using immigration controls to police the boundaries between the Global North and the Global South, which helps sustain inequalities.

One of Smith’s main arguments is that outsourcing is at the heart of corporate globalisation. Furthermore, he suggests that this has too often been overlooked as an absolutely central part of neoliberalism. When viewed as a global phenomenon, he argues, it becomes obvious that outsourcing has been integral to capital’s exploitation of labour in the neoliberal era. Corporations based in the North have increasingly focused on cheap Southern labour – sometimes on a huge scale – to address problems of profitability and to remain competitive.

As Smith writes:

‘Ultra-low wages are not the only factor attracting profit-hungry Western firms to newly industrializing countries … they are also attracted by the flexibility of the workers, the absence of independent unions, the relative ease with which they can be forced to submit to working days as long as those described by Marx and Engels in mid-nineteenth-century England, and the intensity with which they can work’ (p.24).

The example of Apple (and other electronic) products, which depend on a vast complex of workplaces in Shenzhen, China, and massive levels of exploitation of those who work there, is offered as a powerful case study. This kind of outsourcing is at the core of the ‘imperialism’ of the book’s title: it perpetuates a systematically unequal relationship of super-exploitation of Southern workers by Northern-based capital.

Globalisation is revealed as a process of domination, not some mutually beneficial exchange, or spur to development in newly industrial countries, as the apostles of neoliberalism like to claim. Neoliberal globalisation is in reality imperialism without colonies.

The relationship between the Global North and the Global South is fundamental to twenty-first-century imperialism. At a theoretical level, one of Smith’s main concerns is to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the concept of imperialism, as developed by Lenin and others a century ago, and the ways in which our world continues to be structured in uneven and unequal ways by the richest and most economically advanced states. The book is therefore, among other things, a useful contribution to a Marxist understanding of what it means to talk about imperialism today.

Finally, Smith argues convincingly that the roots of the capitalist crisis since 2007/08 are in global production. He bases his analysis of the crisis in ‘the two principal measures that allowed the imperialist economies to escape, for a while, the crises of the 1970s – the enormous expansion of debt and the epochal global shift of production to low-wage countries’ (p.280). These therapies became pathologies for the system. He explains why nothing, within the constraints of capitalism, can now be done to ‘prevent a protracted, calamitous global depression’ (p.313).

This doesn’t mean that book is gloomy or fatalistic. Quite the opposite: it points to the enormous potential for fresh revolts by a greatly expanded, and exploited, working class. As the author concludes:

‘The southward shift of the working class, the reinforcement of the working class in imperialist countries through migration from oppressed nations, and the influx of women into wage labour in all countries means that the working class now much more closely resembles the face of humanity, greatly strengthening its chances of prevailing in coming battles’ (p.314).

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Books and big ideas

This is the last in a series of four brief selections of my writing published on Luna17 and Counterfire this year.

These posts are all directly concerned with left-wing books, with the exception of my fairly lengthy article on revolutionary organisation. A number of them are reviews, but there's also a short introduction to chapter one of Lenin's 'The State and Revolution' and an article examining some key ideas in David Harvey's 'The Enigma of Capital'.

Capitalism, climate change and the left (March)

Lenin: Class Society and the State (April)

The case for revolutionary organisation (May)

 

Class, work and politics: Chavs by Owen Jones (July)

 

David Harvey and the changing geography of capitalism (August)

Class Dismissed: why we cannot teach or learn our way out of inequality (November)

For parts 1, 2 and 3 in this round-up see: An extraordinary year in the Arab world, Cuts, trade unions and the movement, and Polemics and analysis

* If you live in (or are ever visiting) north-east England, I strongly recommend visiting Durham's People's Bookshop, a radical bookshop which opened in June. It is, as it happens, where I bought my copies of 'Chavs' and 'The Enigma of Capital'.  

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David Harvey and the changing geography of capitalism

I finally got round to reading David Harvey’s superb ‘The Enigma of Capital’ recently. This post is a brief summary of a few key themes in a book which also covers several major topics that I barely touch on here (financialisation, debt, the history of capitalist crisis, origins of the current crisis etc).

My focus here is on Harvey’s analysis of the development of capitalism as a truly global system – and, correspondingly, the growth of a global urban working class.

Capitalism depends upon labour. It needs what Marx called ‘an industrial reserve army’ to do the work that generates profits for the capitalists. The expansion of capital requires a growing supply of workers. David Harvey observes that:

‘In the last thirty years…some 2 billion wage labourers have been added to the available global workforce, through the opening-up of China and the collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe’.

It is possible to take issue with the assumption that China and eastern Europe were previously outside capitalist relations, but it’s undeniably true that recent decades have seen market capitalism come to dominate the globe.

There is a correlation between capital expansion and population growth. Harvey writes: ‘There is, in fact, a very general relation between compound population growth and compounding capital accumulation.’ In China the rapid economic growth since 1980 has been linked to an earlier dramatic reduction in infant mortality rates, which in turn ‘resulted in a massive young labour force clamouring for employment’.

Capitalism emerged, initially in north-western Europe, in the 17th and 18th centuries. Capitalism has grown and expanded alongside a massive increase in the world’s population. Harvey writes:

‘Since around 1700, the world’s population has grown at a compound rate that, interestingly, parallels the compounding rate of capital accumulation. Global population topped 1 billion around 1810. It rose from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 2.4 billion by 1950 and to over 6 billion by 2000. Estimates now put it at 6.8 billion. Projections put it at 9 billion or so by 2050.’

The perpetual expansion of the population – as both workers and consumers – has been essential to the flourishing of capitalism. This has been complemented by the expansion of capitalist relations into new areas.

In recent decades the growing proletarianisation of rural populations in China has provided the basis for spectacular economic growth. The transformation of peasants into proletarians which happened generations ago in the West has in recent decades become a global phenomenon, in some places happening more rapidly than during the industrial revolution in western Europe.

Urbanisation has accompanied the global expansion of capitalism. Cities numbering millions of people used to be a rarity, limited to the US and Europe. That has changed enormously, especially with the rise of mega-cities in Asia. The growth of the ‘urban’ has been closely intertwined with capital accumulation and the development of a truly global working class.

Migration for work is another characteristic of this highly urbanised, expansive global capitalism. Harvey writes:

‘Captive labour forces of indentured domestic servants, migrant gangs of construction workers and agricultural labourers vie with local populations and individuals who move in search of better chances in life… diasporas of all kinds (of both business and labour) form networks that intricately weave into the spatial dynamics of capital accumulation.’

Migration is closely linked to the search for work: migration from the countryside to the cities, or from one part of the world to another. Harvey relates that ‘while the foreign-born population of the US stood at around 5% in 1970, it is over 12.5% today.’ One consequence is the ethnically diverse character of the workforce in many countries, though there has often also been a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric and prejudice.

Roughly simultaneous to these processes of global expansion and urbanisation has been ‘the mobilisation of women, who now form the backbone of the global workforce’. In more recently industrialised areas of the globe, like east Asia, women make up a huge portion of the workforce, but gender pay disparities are often (even) worse than in countries like the US and UK.

Such inequalities in the working class are used to suppress the interests of all workers. Harvey analyses how capitalists, and pro-capitalist politicians, have fostered divisions inside the working class:

‘All along, capitalists have sought to control labour by putting individual workers in competition with each other for the jobs on offer. To the degree that the potential labour force is gendered, racialised, ethnicised, tribalised or divided by language, political and sexual orientation and religious beliefs, so these differences emerge as fundamental to the workings of the labour market.’

There is, though, huge geographical unevenness in both population growth and capitalist expansion. As Harvey writes: ‘The more advanced centres of capital accumulation, such as much of western Europe and Japan, have slipped into negative population growth… while the rest of Asia, Latin America and Africa continue to increase.’

This refers, broadly speaking, to the divide between Old Capitalism – centred in the US and western Europe – and the New Capitalism of China, east Asia and Latin America. These are the two inter-related but distinct halves of the global capitalism.

Harvey traces the changing fortunes and recurring crises in Western economies since the 1970s, but is also highly sensitive to the differences within the global economy in any given period.

Since the 1970s the major Western economies have been afflicted by a series of crises. The crisis which developed in 2007/08, and which shapes contemporary politics for many of us, is primarily one affecting Europe and the US. While it has global ramifications, there is huge unevenness across different regions. This is against the backdrop of a general shift in the dynamics of the global system, with China and east Asia experiencing long-term growth while many advanced Western economies struggle.

Harvey writes:

‘Bilateral trade between China and Latin America increased tenfold between 2000 and 2009. Is the urbanisation of China the primary stabiliser of global capitalism? The answer has to be a partial yes. But it is also the case that real estate development has been crucial to class formation in China. This is where immense personal fortunes have been made in very short order.’

Harvey is alert to the evolving balance of economic and political power between different nation states, which principally represent the capitalist and ruling class interests located inside their borders. The end of the Cold War saw the collapse of a former superpower: the USSR. Although this appeared to leave the US dominant – the sole remaining superpower, with unrivalled hegemony – the US economy has in fact been in decline relative to a number of emerging economies, notably China.

The modern world was shaped in the era of imperialist expansion, and rivalry between the European ‘Great Powers’, from around 1870 until the aftermath of World War One. The major European powers utilised their economic strength to build empires, colonising large swathes of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and achieving global dominance. Harvey recalls: ‘Most of the world’s territorial boundaries were laid down between 1870 and 1925 and most of these were drawn by British and French imperial power alone’.

By 1945 the old European powers were in decline; a process of decolonisation rapidly developed. Rivalry between the US and USSR – each with considerable spheres of influence – dominated world politics. The US, however, was the unrivalled economic superpower, a status sustained during the long post-war boom. It shrewdly established new international economic and political institutions, at the end of the Second World War, to assert its dominance (as well as using its military superiority for the same purpose).

Harvey writes:

‘The geographical configurations of state power achieved after 1945 remained fairly stable, once decolonisation was completed. But in recent times the map of the world has changed. The United Nations originally comprised 51 states but it now boasts 192 members. A whole series of reterritorialisations began after 1989 with the break-up of the Soviet Union and the subsequent dissolution of Yugoslavia.’

The 1990s was primarily a decade of neoliberal hegemony, of unrivalled liberal capitalism, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, reinforced by the trend of market liberalisation in China. The east Asian crash of 1997-98 scuppered the illusion of unstoppable neoliberalism, though without triggering a global crisis. Since then the emergent Asian economies have recovered and have tended to sustain higher growth levels than advanced Western economies. The geography of capitalist crisis has decisively shifted back to the West.

It is still possible that the current crisis will become the first truly global slump in history, but so far the effects have been very geographically uneven with China, for example, maintaining rapid growth while the US and most of Europe stagnate. For now there remains a clear distinction between Old Capitalism and New Capitalism.

The evolving economic situation influences changes in geopolitical power relations. It isn't obvious how this will play out in the long term - or exactly what repercussions there will be in terms of political or even military conflicts - but it is apparent that the world's economic and political geography is changing profoundly.

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Links for David Harvey videos I've posted on Luna17:

Animated: Crises of capitalism
Wall Street, Wisconsin and the crisis of capitalism
The crisis deepens - what's going on?

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David Harvey on Wall Street, Wisconsin and the crisis of capitalism

I listened to this lecture earlier: David Harvey on The Enigma of Capital at MIT. If you can make time for it - 40 minutes or so (excluding the Q and A also in the video) - I strongly recommend you do likewise.

David Harvey brings his analysis right up to date, including comments on why the Wisconsin workers' revolt shouldn't surprise us. We take it for granted now, but we are blessed to have things like this online - rather than having to be at a top American university like MIT to hear it.

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Happiness, work and social relationships

Interview with Erich Fromm, which in just 5 minutes opens up so many possible discussions...



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The price tag of Pride? Capitalism and sexual liberation

Laura Harvey of Counterfire reports from San Fransisco:

'The most extravagant floats were sponsored by big banks – glittering on the streets which on any other day are the homes of people who have nothing but the items in the shopping trolley they are pushing. The bankers' crisis is hitting the US hard, where the public sector faces draconian cuts, and where the welfare system is unable to provide support for many people living below the poverty line.

As pride parades in many countries become part of the establishment, the message of system change gets replaced by one of individual expression through consumption. We are what we buy. We buy what we are.

Such an individualised model of sexual liberation will only ever deliver freedom for the few. It does not take into account the structural ways that LGBT people are oppressed differently across axes of racism, sexism and class discrimination. We should fight for a world in which we all have freedom. This bank-sponsored liberation on offer through consumption is reserved for those who can afford the price tag of pride.'

Read more HERE.

Laura's article is part of Counterfire's series of special features to co-incide with London's LGBT Pride tomorrow. See:

Sky Yarlett and Lola Sparkle, Pride: Too high a price for our protest?

Peter Sehmer, Civil Partnerships: another form of discrimination?

Dan Poulton, Cameron's Tories: new politics, old nasty

Bernard Goyer, Film review: Milk

I also recommend The Sauce's article on the politics of Pride

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Age of Apocalypse: From Four Horsemen to Jubilee

The Counterfire website has just published Neil Faulkner's 'Global crisis and anti-capitalist revolution'. It is the longest article we've yet published. It is also one of the best and most important.

Neil takes on the really big issues from a bracingly revolutionary perspective. His writing has plenty of verve and it was a pleasure to read the drafts. I recommend making time to read it in full, but meanwhile here's an extract.

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An ancient Biblical myth sees the end of the world heralded by the appearance of four horsemen – the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, representing Conquest, Slaughter, Famine, and Death.

The prospect before humanity today can seem truly apocalyptic. Late monopoly-capitalism has developed the productive forces of the global economy to an unprecedented degree. But these forces are not subject to democratic control and rational planning; they are propelled by the economic and military imperatives of competitive capital accumulation. In consequence, despite their potential to emancipate the whole of humanity from material need, they now threaten the opposite: the survival of industrial civilisation itself.

The ignorance, cupidity, and irresponsibility of our rulers in the face of this crisis are rooted in the irrationality of the system. Climate catastrophe, economic slump, and imperialist war have their roots in the madness of the market: the blind economic and military competition which propels the nation-states and mega-corporations of monopoly-capitalism.

This madness produced the First World War, the Second World War, and the horrors of Stalin’s gulags and Hitler’s extermination-camps. The history of the last century argues unequivocally that the system is deeply pathological, irrational, and destructive.

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the compound crisis of contemporary capitalism again threatens the lives of hundreds of millions and the well-being of billions of the world’s people. It is perhaps the most serious crisis in human history.

Another ancient Biblical myth was sometimes counterposed to that of the Four Horseman. In this version of the Apocalypse, the culmination was a popular Jubilee. Tax-collectors and landlords would be swept away. Slaves and serfs would be set free. The land would be restored to the people who worked it. A new Golden Age of freedom and plenty would begin.

To turn Apocalypse into Jubilee in the early 21st century, four things are required:

1. We have to understand the necessity for total system change. Only by linking different campaigns, protests, and struggles together in a general assault on the system that is at the root of humanity’s problems can we hope to solve them.

2. We have to understand the centrality of the working class to any serious strategy for system change. Only by mobilising the majority of ordinary working people can we find the power to confront and defeat corporate capital and the nation-states.

3. We have to connect the anti-capitalist protests of the activist minority with the general anti-capitalist mood of the discontented majority, so that fresh, larger, more powerful forces are drawn into protests, strikes, and demonstrations.

4. We have to foster this rising anti-capitalist movement until it swells into a new world-revolutionary wave comparable with, and greater than, those of 1789, 1848, 1917, 1968, and 1989.

Another world has become an absolute historical necessity. Another world is possible. The revolution is, in this sense, an ‘actuality’.

But it is not a certainty. It has to be fought for. Its achievement depends on what all of us do. And the historical stakes have never been higher.

Wealth of UK's super-rich soars by £77 billion in one year

The wealth of Britain's richest 1000 people has grown by almost a third in just one year. Their collective wealth of £335.5 billion represents a massive increase - £77 billion - on a year ago.

The Sunday Times, publishing its annual Rich List today, acknowledges this is 'easily the largest annual increase in the 22 years that the survey has been carried out'. These riches contrast starkly with the experiences of the vast majority of people in today's recession-hit Britain.

In the current election campaign the mainstream politcal parties all agree the majority must pay - through cuts and austerity measures - for a crisis generated by a tiny minority. The Rich List exposes how the wealth of that tiny elite continues to spiral.

This is against the backdrop of astronomical growth, throughout 13 years of New Labour government, in the combined wealth of the super-rich. In 1997 the 1000 richest people had £98.99 billion. The current total is more than three times that figure.

The list includes the estimated wealth of the richest individuals. The top 20 includes a number of people from the banking and financial sectors.

Charlene and Michel de Carvalho ('inheritance, brewing, banking') have £4.4 billion. Kirsten and Jorn Rausing ('investment and banking') are a little behind, on £3.5 billion. Joe Lewis ('foreign exchange and investment') has £2.7 billion.

Elsewhere in the Top 20 are examples of staggering increases in the space of just a year. Steel magnate Lakhsmi Mittal tops the list, with a 108% increase taking the Mittal family to £22.45 billion.

There must be money in steel: Alisher Usmanov has £4.7 billion, up 213% on last year.

David and Simon Reuben ('property and internet') have seen a 121% increase take them to over £5.5 billion. Retail kings Galen and George Weston enjoy £4.5 billion, thanks to a massive 400% rise.

But even that increase is trumped by the 480% rise for Vladimir Kim and the 583% increasee for Anil Agawarl. Both of them make their money from mining.

The growth in the top 1000's riches is not an accident. It is linked to the present government's policies serving to the wealthy over more than a decade: deregulation, tax loopholes and uncollected taxes, generous incentives.

When politicans say we can't afford proper funding for public services, remember the Rich List. Remember, too, that New Labour (with support from the opposition parties) has allowed this to happen.

This is also published at Counterfire.

Them and us

It turns out the cost of the bank bailouts for the UK is £850 billion. That's £14,000for every man, woman and child in the country. At the same time the board of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) - which is now majority public-owned - is demanding bumper bonuses or they'll go off in a sulk. The bankers insist on continuing, despite the recession, to rake in massive bonuses.

Corus has announced it is slashing 1700 jobs in Teesside. This will devastate the local community, if allowed to happen. The GMB's National Secretary, Keith Hazlewood, says "What a terible contrast with 1700 losing their jobs on Teesside while the multi millionaire bankers gorge themselves at the expense of the tax payers.'

It is this contrast that highlights the chasm in British society and the insanity of our economic system: its crazy priorities, inhumanity and wastefulness. Rarely has what's wrong with capitalism been more obvious and stark, in the eyes of millions of working class people. The case for nationalising the steel industry is obvious: if they can bail out financiers, why can't the government intervene to save 1700 jobs?

Michael Moore: for socialism and bringing the troops home

Good video here from Michael Moore, whose new film 'Capitalism: A Love Story' has just premiered in the US. He's also made a welcome intervention in the public discussion about Barack Obama being awareded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Read his response HERE.

Manufacturing Consent: digging beneath the surface appearance

This is a clever and creative way of explaining how our world works: film images carefully edited to go with a commentary on capitalist economics, commodities and the experience of alienation. There are 2 parts, each just 10 minutes long, packing in the really core concepts of a Marxist critique of capitalism.

The inspiration is Michael Burawoy's 'Manufacturing Consent', not to be confused with the better-known Chomsky/Herman book of the same name. You can find Part 2 of the video, full transcripts of both videos, and suggestions for further reading HERE.