Capital & Class

Food delivery workers from various platforms in Turkey staged protests across cities throughout October 2025. In this piece, I will examine riders’ demands and organisational strategies based on my observations of the Yemeksepeti protest in Istanbul on 24 October 2025. While their demands underscore issues of recognition and alienation alongside poor working conditions, their organisational practices blend traditional protest methods with new tools and creative actions. Finally, I focus on how the platform responds to riders.

The uncompromising nature of the humanist and structuralist currents within Marxism left its thought at an impasse, most evident in debates on the structure–agency problem. This deadlock weakened its credibility as a framework for addressing the post-1980s realities, allowing its foundational principles to be revised by some authors. I suggest, however, this impasse should be addressed within Marxist premises, an attempt vaguely initiated by Poulantzas. Contrary to much of the literature, I interpret this as Poulantzas’ sustained commitment to structuralism in State, Power, Socialism, complemented by a touch of implicit humanism. My argument unfolds by first outlining the two traditions; second, presenting the impasse; third, examining Poulantzas’ epistemological commitments across his oeuvre; and fourth, highlighting his vague rapprochement with Lukács. I conclude that an account enriched by both traditions not only ‘rescues’ Marxism from its impasse but also reinvigorates it as a framework for better explaining contemporary social realities.

This study resurrects Marx’s concept of ‘costs of consumption’ to resolve persistent theoretical impasses in the domestic labour debate. We argue that attempts to analyse ‘reproductive labour’ through production categories stem from a fundamental methodological mismatch. By systematically reconstructing Marx’s distinction between productive and individual consumption, we demonstrate that ‘reproductive labour’ corresponds to Marx’s ‘labour indispensable for family consumption’, operating within costs of consumption in individual consumption. This labour – whether performed as unpaid ‘expenditure of labour in the house’ or as marketised services requiring ‘increased expenditure of money’ – maintains its character as unproductive labour fulfilling essential ‘family functions’. The two forms of costs of consumption – labour expenditure by domestic labour and monetary expenditure through services – offer theoretical grounds for explaining the dynamic relationship between production and reproduction in social reproduction theory; a genuinely Marxian analysis of ‘reproductive labour’ requires a fundamental theoretical reorientation from production to consumption as the appropriate analytical lens.

For more than a decade, a sizable contribution to the theory of neo-republicanism has attempted to critique domination in capitalist society. Within this emergent ‘radical republicanism’, theorists have attempted to assimilate Marx’s critique of political economy by arguing that capitalist society is typified by dependency on arbitrary power —a form of domination— that is also systematic, impersonal, and structural. However, in purporting to critique capitalist domination through neo-republican means, these attempts fail to grasp the specifically capitalist character of domination. By theorizing capitalist domination as dependency on arbitrary will between individual subjects, radical republicanism regresses to a subjectivistic and decidedly liberal social theory that renders invisible Marx’s emphasis on the peculiar social and objective dimensions of capital’s compulsion for surplus labor as a form of domination. While capitalist society is unthinkable without human subjects, it cannot be understood subjectively – as the product of willful actions and decisions – because it obtains a peculiar autonomy and objectivity as a force of human-made (second) nature impelling human subjects to reproduce a form of society that is antagonistic to them. Marx’s critique of capital as a specific form of domination becomes apparent in his analysis of the ‘real subsumption of labor under capital’. This concept explains how the compulsion for surplus labor is transformed by capital into a form of ‘objective social domination’ wherein society confronts us as an alien power through a series of subject-object inversions.

This article argues that the contemporary artificial intelligence boom is best understood not as evidence of a transition to “techno-feudalism” but as a historically specific expression of monopoly-finance capitalism under conditions of chronic overaccumulation and profitability strain. Against claims that platform power, rent extraction, and digital enclosure signal a qualitative rupture in the mode of production, the analysis situates artificial intelligence investment within the surplus-absorption framework developed by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. Reconstructing Marx’s distinction between the rate and mass of profit, the article shows how artificial intelligence operates through three interrelated mechanisms: class-mediated consumption and the expanded sales effort, investment demand driven by accumulation itself rather than realized productive necessity, and disproportionate sectoral expansion concentrated within a narrow technological enclave. Artificial intelligence thus functions simultaneously as a speculative sink for overaccumulated capital and as a capital-intensive, labor-displacing technology that intensifies downward pressure on profitability. The political implication is that the likely resolution of the artificial intelligence bubble is not postcapitalist transformation but devaluation, consolidation, and intensified class power.

This article examines how workers and conventional trade unions can improve conditions in a gig economy setting by exploring couriers’ unionisation efforts at Wolt, a food delivery platform in Denmark. Typically, established trade unions have struggled to organise the gig economy. Yet, the example of a large and established Danish union, 3F’s, relationship with self-organised Wolt couriers provides an important counterexample to this trend and has implications for workers and unions alike. This rare organising relationship is analysed through an autoethnographic study that draws upon the researcher’s experience as a Wolt worker and organiser, exploring the class composition of couriers. This research proposes that the relationship between 3F and workers can be understood as semi-autonomous, bringing together an established union with self-organised workers as an initial and mutually beneficial step towards organising the sector.

This paper examines how neoliberal restructuring has reshaped agrarian inequality in West Bengal by altering patterns of differentiation among rural households. It addresses two questions: how neoliberal policies have altered the distribution of access to various means of production, and how these inequalities are reproduced through land ownership, operational holdings, and tenancy arrangements. The analysis combines secondary data from the Agricultural Census and the National Sample Survey Office’s Survey of Land and Livestock Holdings with primary evidence from a 2020–2021 field survey of 200 cultivator households in Bankura district. Households are classified using both acreage-based categories and Patnaik’s Labour Exploitation Criterion (E-criterion), which distinguishes economic position through labour absorption rather than land size alone. The findings show that productive resources, non-land assets, and operational control over land are increasingly concentrated among labour-hiring households, while labour-selling households rely heavily on leasing in land to sustain cultivation. Tenancy thus emerges as a key mechanism through which agrarian inequality is reproduced under contemporary conditions. The study demonstrates the analytical value of a class-based approach for understanding agrarian change in West Bengal in the neoliberal era.

UK capitalism transformed significantly from 1992 to 2020, yet national accounts have rarely been reinterpreted through Marxist categories. Unlike US data, UK data resists such analysis, despite the need for interpreting the UK economy in terms of value, surplus value creation and appropriation. Using the New Interpretation framework to reassess the UK economy, we distinguish unproductive from productive labour, using Office for National Statistics macroeconomic data and UK socio-economic micro-datasets. The UK surplus value rate is analysed through its key drivers – productivity, income distribution and working hours – while incorporating the unproductive–productive labour ratio as an additional determinant. Our findings show the production sphere remains central: the 2008 crisis emerged there before the wider economy, challenging narratives of crisis in finance, and the fall in surplus value ahead of 2020 shows the crisis predated the pandemic. UK capital responded through increased exploitation, suppressing wages, while Labour governments stressed productivity and Conservatives’ workweek extensions.

JEL classification: E11, J81, J82

This article examines the political economy of foreign tourism in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), situating it within broader debates on media representation and state strategy. While tourism is often portrayed as a major source of revenue and propaganda for Pyongyang, evidence shows it has historically generated only marginal economic returns and has never been a central policy priority. Its significance today lies instead in symbolic and diplomatic uses, with limited re-engagements sometimes deployed as bargaining tools in international relations. Recent attention has centred on travel influencers, whose highly visible content frequently reproduces the sensationalist narratives that have long dominated mainstream media. This has raised the question of whether influencers themselves contributed to the DPRK’s decision to re-close its borders after a brief opening. This article argues that while such content may have shaped perceptions abroad, it was not decisive: North Korea’s closure reflects broader political and strategic calculations rather than the actions of a handful of creators. It concludes that tourism in the DPRK is poised to develop along three intersecting paths: a growing domestic tourism sector, targeted outreach to foreign visitors and the use of tourism as a tool of symbolic state diplomacy.

This article discusses the different socio-economic legislation that the Canadian federal government introduced or passed during this inflation crisis. Its discourse is positioned in relation to existing and past social realities. Reflecting on the ontology of these laws, this article suggests that the federal government has displayed a sense of normative leadership toward citizens. Moreover, this institutional dynamic should not be perceived as a paradigm shift from its political economy of neoliberalism. That said, this study also offers few directions for future research on the significance of examining legal texts as artifacts of public governance and crisis management.

This article compares how Open Marxism and Political Marxism, respectively, mobilize the concepts of social form and of social property relations to produce critiques of the fetishized social ontology of mainstream or orthodox Marxism(s). Focusing on the works of Simon Clarke, Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, I show how these thinkers develop strikingly convergent readings of Marx’s critique of political economy as a rejection of an ontologically separate and asocial economic sphere. I then discuss how points of tension between Open Marxism and Political Marxism seem to emerge when we further specify the social ontologies of these currents. These tensions, however, appear to pertain more to differences of vocabulary than to a substantial theoretical opposition. This becomes clear once we understand how Open Marxist concepts of social form (and alienation) and Political Marxist concepts of social property relations (and exploitation) are in fact complementary. Social property relations can then be seen as an ontological elucidation of alienated social forms.

This article examines the relationship between the capitalist form of the state and the impersonal domination of capital. The critique of capital, as it is articulated in both the Open Marxist and Political Marxist traditions, highlights the importance of apprehending capitalist society’s essential determinations as historically specific forms. In Open Marxism, the capitalist state is understood as the political form of appearance of a society constituted through antagonism. Developing this view, this article argues that part of the reproduction of capital accumulation—and hence of capitalist society—consists in state intervention to reproduce the availability of labour-power by maintaining the dispossession or the double freedom of those owning nothing but their labour-power. Whereas this was accomplished through direct violence and coercion during primitive accumulation, its persistence in consolidated capitalist social relations is impersonal, objectified, and pervasive. It is the form of value, not of the state, that is the cause of workers’ compulsion to sell their labour-power. Nevertheless, struggles over the reproduction of dispossession—which is a presupposition of labour-power as a commodity, and hence of the capital relation—prompt the intervention, coercion, and violence of the capitalist state.

The company town of San Leucio, created at the behest of King Ferdinand IV of Naples in the vicinity of the Royal Palace of Caserta, represents a socioeconomic experiment of great historical value. In that context, the ruler wanted to enact an Enlightenment-paternalistic code, influenced by the ideas of the Neapolitan intellectual milieu of the second half of the 18th century, which provided for substantial gender equality both in the sphere of human capital formation and on the working level within the spinning mill. Moreover, the distinction between the sexes was also abolished in the social context, eliminating male exclusivity in matters of wills, abolishing dowries, and providing a prototype survivor’s pension for widowhood. The only prerogative left to the male gender concerned the role of the head of the household, although, even in the domestic sphere, women were shown to be skillful managers of silk production. This paper, through a qualitative study of documents in the Historical Archives of the Royal Palace of Caserta, the State Archives of Caserta, and the Diocesan Archives of Caserta, proposes a reconstruction of the organizational model of work in the company town of San Leucio, highlighting the formal and substantive gender equality that emerged from daily work practices, both the official ones, that is, in the Real Fabbrica and the Real Azienda, the two core businesses of this social experiment, and in the domestic sphere, that is, in family silk production, which represented in practice the core of a labor-intensive and family pattern model untethered from the male breadwinner family model.

In an era marked by the global hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and the far right’s increasing popularity, the language of utopia has returned to scholarly and political debate, sometimes in conversation with Marxist positions. Still, the discussion hinges on whether such language propels us beyond capitalist social relations or confines itself to limited liberal ambitions. To clarify this tension, the article first revisits Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s ambivalent stance on utopianism, underscoring both their principled skepticism toward speculative blueprints and their conviction that utopia, as a communist horizon, is indispensable to revolutionary praxis. It then interrogates three authors, influenced by Marxist frameworks, who have recently renewed the debate on utopia: Erik Olin Wright’s ‘real utopias’, formulated within analytic Marxism; Michael Albert’s ‘practical utopias’, grounded in libertarian-socialist currents; and Ana Cecilia Dinerstein’s ‘concrete utopias’, who borrows Ernst Bloch’s anticipatory consciousness with autonomist Marxism. Its final aim is to ascertain not only the differences among these three perspectives but, above all, the extent to which their respective frameworks converge with a Marxist conception of utopia as articulated in classical Marxism. We undertake this examination to argue that, despite their attempts to revalidate Marxist utopianism in the present, these perspectives may nonetheless fall short of articulating a horizon that truly transcends the proclaimed end-of-history, one commensurate with the Marxian aspiration to abolish class society and build communism.

De-dollarization is a non-linear historical process characterized by the decline of dollar’s relative weight. It signifies not a replacement of the dollar by a single alternative currency, but a broader tendency toward the end of global monetary hegemony altogether. The pace and extent of de-dollarization vary significantly across different economic spheres and geographic regions. This analysis emphasizes the critical importance of adopting regional and sectoral perspectives to understand the real-world dynamics of de-dollarization while examining oil trade between China and West Asia. Although the 2018 launch of the petroyuan contract marked a major turning point in oil international invoicing practices, mainstream views often emphasize China’s restricted capital account as the primary barrier to broader use of the yuan in oil trading. In contrast, existing economic relations between China and Gulf oil producers already enable greater use of the renminbi without requiring further capital account liberalization. The main obstacles to de-dollarization are not financial, but political—stemming from the entrenched geopolitical and security ties between these oil-producing states and the United States. Paradoxically, many of these same countries are actively participating in renminbi internationalization through alternative financial channels, reflecting inherent contradictions in the current pluripolar system.

This article aims to examine how the category of labour is presented in Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). In the Marxian understanding, labour is the fundamental category of human sociability. Under capitalism, it is presented as a moment of exploitation, domination and oppression. The centrality of labour in capitalism’s historicity has been examined differently within feminist and Marxist approaches. Within feminism, the so-called dual systems theories have often dissociated oppression and exploitation, resulting in a fragmented analytical framing of the category of labour. Part of Marxism, in turn, has directed its investigations towards productive wage labour, failing to delve into an analysis of reproductive labour, especially the unpaid domestic labour. Thus, this analysis fails to see the relationship between production and social reproduction under capitalism. Based on Marx’s category of totality, SRT expands its analytical focus and examines the social reproductive work in its integrative relationship to waged productive labour. Thus, in our view, SRT provides theoretical advances by pointing towards a unitary theory of understanding the relationship between exploitation and oppression in capitalism, without resorting to factors that are external to the capital’s dynamics to explain oppression. We consider that SRT enables the development of some key issues within Marxist feminism, such as the place and function of the sexual division of labour; the analytical and Marxist framing of unpaid domestic work; the contradictory-but-necessary relationship between production and social reproduction; political struggles, among others. To demonstrate this theoretical advance, we examine the debate within feminist currents of Marxism, such as materialist feminism and autonomist feminism, to characterise their divergences. Finally, we argue that the expanded conception of labour within the Marxian reading proposed by SRT offers a more enriching and accurate Marxian reading for the political-theoretical analyses of the expressions of class struggle in the 21st century.