History and Criticism of the Labor Theory of Value in English Political Economy

History and Criticism of the Labor Theory of Value in English Political Economy

Author: Albert Conser Whitaker

Publisher: Columbia University Studies in the Social Sciences, 50

Published: 1904

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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A history of the labor theory of value through an analysis of the works of several prominent figures in the field. Authors discussed include Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, McCulloch, James Mill, Torrens, Senior, John Stuart Mill, and Cairns.


Capital Moves

Capital Moves

Author: Jefferson Cowie

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1501723561

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Find a pool of cheap, pliable workers and give them jobs—and soon they cease to be as cheap or as pliable. What is an employer to do then? Why, find another poor community desperate for work. This route—one taken time and again by major American manufacturers—is vividly chronicled in this fascinating account of RCA's half century-long search for desirable sources of labor. Capital Moves introduces us to the people most affected by the migration of industry and, most importantly, recounts how they came to fight against the idea that they were simply "cheap labor." Jefferson Cowie tells the dramatic story of four communities, each irrevocably transformed by the opening of an industrial plant. From the manufacturer's first factory in Camden, New Jersey, where it employed large numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants, RCA moved to rural Indiana in 1940, hiring Americans of Scotch-Irish descent for its plant in Bloomington. Then, in the volatile 1960s, the company relocated to Memphis where African Americans made up the core of the labor pool. Finally, the company landed in northern Mexico in the 1970s—a region rapidly becoming one of the most industrialized on the continent.


Global Histories of Work

Global Histories of Work

Author: Andreas Eckert

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-09-12

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 3110434466

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Global Histories of Work is the first title in the new series "Work in Global and Historical Perspective". This collection of selected articles written by leading scholars in different disciplines provides both an introduction and numerous insights into themes, debates and methods of Global Labour History as they have been developed over the last years. The contributions to the volume discuss crucial historiographical developments; present different professions that have gained new attention in the context of an emerging Global Labour History; critically engage the boundaries of "free" labour and the ambiguities contained in this concept; and take up and historicize current debates about "informal labour". Global Histories of Work will familiarize readers with a burgeoning fi eld of high academic, social, and political relevance.


Tea War

Tea War

Author: Andrew B. Liu

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0300252331

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A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries “Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F. Day, Occidental College Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.


Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989

Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989

Author: Marsha Siefert

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9633863384

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Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentious relationship between politics and labor policy, dealing with diverse topics including workers’ safety and risks; labor rights and protests; working women’s politics and professions; migrant workers and social welfare; attempts to control workers’ behavior and stem unemployment; and cases of incomplete, compromised, or even abandoned processes of proletarianization. Workers are presented as active agents in resisting and supporting changes in labor policies, in choosing allegiances, and in defining the very nature of work.


Making the Empire Work

Making the Empire Work

Author: Daniel E. Bender

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-07-17

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1479871257

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Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common—they all have labor histories. This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself. Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.


Stayin' Alive

Stayin' Alive

Author: Jefferson R. Cowie

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2011-03

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1459604237

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An epic account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the '70s, Stayin' Alive is a wide-ranging cultural and political history that presents the decade in a whole new light. Jefferson Cowie's edgy and incisive book - part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film, and TV lore - makes new sense of the '70s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from the optimism of New Deal America to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present. Stayin' Alive takes us from the factory floors of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit to the Washington of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Cowie connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the '60s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan. He also makes unexpected connections between the secrets of the Nixon White House and the failings of the George McGovern campaign, between radicalism and the blue-collar backlash, and between the earthy twang of Merle Haggard's country music and the falsetto highs of Saturday Night Fever. Cowie captures nothing less than the defining characteristics of a new era. Stayin' Alive is a book that will forever define a misunderstood decade.


A History of America in Ten Strikes

A History of America in Ten Strikes

Author: Erik Loomis

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1620971623

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Recommended by The Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs, Bustle, In These Times An “entertaining, tough-minded, and strenuously argued” (The Nation) account of ten moments when workers fought to change the balance of power in America “A brilliantly recounted American history through the prism of major labor struggles, with critically important lessons for those who seek a better future for working people and the world.” —Noam Chomsky Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers' strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix). From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment. For example, we often think that Lincoln ended slavery by proclaiming the slaves emancipated, but Loomis shows that they freed themselves during the Civil War by simply withdrawing their labor. He shows how the hopes and aspirations of a generation were made into demands at a GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. And he takes us to the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century where the radical organizers known as the Wobblies made their biggest inroads against the power of bosses. But there were also moments when the movement was crushed by corporations and the government; Loomis helps us understand the present perilous condition of American workers and draws lessons from both the victories and defeats of the past. In crystalline narratives, labor historian Erik Loomis lifts the curtain on workers' struggles, giving us a fresh perspective on American history from the boots up. Strikes include: Lowell Mill Girls Strike (Massachusetts, 1830–40) Slaves on Strike (The Confederacy, 1861–65) The Eight-Hour Day Strikes (Chicago, 1886) The Anthracite Strike (Pennsylvania, 1902) The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts, 1912) The Flint Sit-Down Strike (Michigan, 1937) The Oakland General Strike (California, 1946) Lordstown (Ohio, 1972) Air Traffic Controllers (1981) Justice for Janitors (Los Angeles, 1990)


Gendering Labor History

Gendering Labor History

Author: Alice Kessler-Harris

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0252073932

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The role of gender in the history of the working class world


Labor's Mind

Labor's Mind

Author: Tobias Higbie

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2018-12-30

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0252051092

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Business leaders, conservative ideologues, and even some radicals of the early twentieth century dismissed working people's intellect as stunted, twisted, or altogether missing. They compared workers toiling in America's sprawling factories to animals, children, and robots. Working people regularly defied these expectations, cultivating the knowledge of experience and embracing a vibrant subculture of self-education and reading. Labor's Mind uses diaries and personal correspondence, labor college records, and a range of print and visual media to recover this social history of the working-class mind. As Higbie shows, networks of working-class learners and their middle-class allies formed nothing less than a shadow labor movement. Dispersed across the industrial landscape, this movement helped bridge conflicts within radical and progressive politics even as it trained workers for the transformative new unionism of the 1930s. Revelatory and sympathetic, Labor's Mind reclaims a forgotten chapter in working-class intellectual life while mapping present-day possibilities for labor, higher education, and digitally enabled self-study.