Abstract
1. Introduction
The motivation for this review essay emerged from a debate on the ubiquitous term “neoliberalism,” involving participants from varied academic and political activist backgrounds. The vigorous discussions illustrated that we not only lacked a shared interpretation of neoliberalism. There was also no consensus understanding of fundamental political-economic concepts—for example, what we meant by “capitalism.” Mutual confusion and a troubling sense of speaking different languages ensued, as we resorted to intuitive, rather than analytical, understandings. In the case of neoliberalism, this approximated to a general malaise experienced by all, attributable to protracted state withdrawal from progressive policies and the consequent dominance of private capital and market mechanisms.
Therefore, the three books reviewed here were of particular interest, as they examine issues and concepts indispensable to radical political-economic analysis and strategy: the multiple incarnations of work, paid and unpaid; the political, economic, social, and cultural manifestations of class; and the intersecting local, national, and global dimensions of inequality. Consequently, they represent resources for addressing an array of contemporary questions, from the “gig economy” to the gendered, racial, and ethnic configurations of work, wealth, and incomes.
Each book examines the strange world of today, in which rampant inequality, insecurity, and uncertainty have become widely accepted as unavoidable. In questioning this acquiescence, each author sets his analysis against a prevailing orthodoxy. For both Bruce Pietrykowski and Frank Stilwell, this is mainstream economics, while Charles Umney’s discussion primarily confronts non-Marxist interpretations of class, particularly those influenced by Bourdieu. In each case, the prevailing orthodoxy is seen as allied, overtly or by implication, with a political-economic system that privileges private capital accumulation over other political, economic, social, and environmental concerns. In combination, these books provide a valuable set of resources for examining the contemporary political-economic landscape, especially in the predominantly Anglophone nations, while affording considerable insights into how effective radical, democratic strategies might be pursued. Each book raises a series of questions and possible answers that are evaluated throughout this essay.
2. Working Futures
Bruce Pietrykowski examines the complex dimensions of work from an explicitly heterodox political economy perspective. His first orthodox target (ch. 2) is Human Capital Theory (HCT), widely adopted by mainstream economists to explain and legitimate work-related inequalities. According to HCT, differences in income may be attributed to productivity differences accruing from individuals’ acquisition of education, skills, and qualifications that increase labor’s market value. However, as Pietrykowski demonstrates, access to education, skills, and qualifications is unequally distributed, while, within a context of enduring socioeconomic inequalities, these may not even be the most important arbiters of income.
Drawing on several heterodox approaches, he encapsulates HCT’s main shortcomings: the failure to apprehend such critical factors as family background, gender, and race; a lack of clarity on relationships between education and skills; no adequate illustration of changing, contested definitions of skills; insufficient analysis of linkages between productivity and incomes; and the absence of any convincing explanation of persistent and growing income inequalities. Pietrykowski explores how diverse political economy perspectives can illuminate “the interplay of power, class, gender, and race” in workplaces and homes, revealing how even many radical political-economic analyses of economic inequality may fail to address large areas of unpaid work, particularly the highly gendered area of care work.
These observations inform Pietrykowski’s examination of the transition of large volumes of care work from unpaid domestic labor to formal employment (ch. 3). The complex intersections between gender and paid and unpaid work play out in household work, with gender inequities becoming exacerbated—counterintuitively—as women perform considerably more unpaid work than men in many dual-income households. This unpaid work often passes unseen and unrecognized, as does the emotional labor performed in the rapidly growing, highly feminized personal care sector. Therefore, as demonstrated by feminist analysis from multiple disciplines and perspectives, women’s increasing labor market participation offers no ready solution to gender inequality.
Pietrykowski (ch. 4) then explores territory with which many readers would be familiar: business strategies to increase productivity and profits—“low road,” “high road,” and “off-road,” the first two having become staple chapters of Human Resource Management textbooks. Primarily, the low road involves work discipline techniques designed to suppress wages, accompanied by the constant threat of job loss. High road approaches, in contrast, encourage commitment and loyalty through improving workers’ wages and conditions. Questioning some of the more hyperbolic employer claims, Pietrykowski illustrates how high-profile employers are often prepared to implement low-road management techniques when these can achieve low-cost, mass production with massive profits. More recently, the proliferation of off-road (or “gig economy”) work has generated extensive challenges for labor law and regulation. While its promoters may herald the “freedoms” it offers—such as choosing when to work, according to market demand—it signals an uncertain, insecure future for many workers.
In his exploration of radical alternatives to capitalist workplace organization (ch. 5), Pietrykowski highlights worker cooperatives, drawing on several examples, particularly the largest and most famous: Mondragón in the Basque Country. He evaluates cooperatives’ economic performance, worker motivation and commitment, viability within competitive markets, and their potential roles within an emerging “solidarity” economy. The diverse types of paid and unpaid work that occur in local communities exemplify these solidaristic possibilities. Performed by very different people at different life stages (from children to retirees), this work extends well beyond the capitalist wage labor “tip of the iceberg.” Therefore, it can indicate how participatory, noncapitalist working arrangements might contribute to more sustainable, democratic communities.
These possibilities are illuminated further in Pietrykowski’s evaluation (ch. 6) of the historical and contemporary relationships between technology, automation, skills, and work. His overview extends from the earliest worker protests against new capitalist technologies (such as the Luddites) to current struggles over automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Just as workers during nascent capitalist industrialization defended a fairer moral economy, so effective political mobilization today demands the construction of human-centered alternatives to “laboring for someone else.” Whereas routine manual and routine cognitive jobs were historically the most vulnerable, today highly skilled workers in nonroutine employment—for example, medical professionals—may also face displacement, with robots representing a further challenge. Yet they may also reveal alternative futures beyond wage labor, as delineated by radical political economists from various perspectives. Therefore, the introduction of new technology is constantly political and never inevitable, with radical political economy occupying a potentially crucial role in constructing alternatives to emerging threats to employment from automation and AI.
In exploring these “future worlds of work,” though, Pietrykowski stresses that wage labor will not be disappearing soon. Much highly paid professional work has proved virtually immune from automation, while many service-sector jobs, such as aged care, demand people-centered skills unlikely to be automated. These latter jobs, though, remain undervalued and underpaid in most countries—a problem that may be partially remedied by a social wage that acknowledges the vital contributions of unpaid labor and the obsolescence of the male breadwinner family model. Similarly, a universal basic income (UBI), despite limitations, may initiate a societal shift beyond wage labor, detaching basic financial security from pressures to take any job. Overall, for Pietrykowski (129), reimagining the future of work requires reexamination of its purposes, beyond producing “surplus or profit for others”.
Pietrykowski provides systematic critiques of mainstream analytical approaches to contemporary work, while reflecting on the potential contribution of radical alternatives to working futures—a topic he addresses in a concise, incisive fashion that should appeal to a wide readership. His book would no doubt be an eminently readable text for economics and social science students, contributing to more interdisciplinary, pluralist educational experiences. Students who are living some of the worst incarnations of low-paid, insecure employment, might directly relate their working experiences to debates on the future of work, enhancing both their learning and political awareness.
Pietrykowski’s exploration of the possible futures represented by worker cooperatives is particularly valuable. As Ranis (2016: 43–44) has shown, the support of local communities—and occasionally governments—has often been vital to the establishment and flourishing of worker cooperatives. The extension of the management of cooperatives to include communities and even governments, may partially resolve a perennial problem of Marxist analysis: how a conflict-based politics can result in social cohesion, beyond the solidarity achieved solely through capital-labor conflicts.
Most importantly, Pietrykowski’s book establishes scope for an extensive range of debates on crucial contemporary issues that rarely feature in mainstream discussions. His discussion of possible alternatives emphatically demonstrates that work need not be confined within the parameters of private capital accumulation—although their achievement faces formidable obstacles.
3. A Strange World
The enormity of such a task is not lost on Umney, who observes that, for many people, an end to capitalism is inconceivable (1–2). Therefore, capitalism’s anti-human consequences must be laid bare if radical alternatives are to be constructed. Focusing on the political, economic, and social dimensions of class, exploitation, and inequality in the United Kingdom, Umney mounts a critical, occasionally excoriating appraisal of both sociocultural interpretations of class and mainstream electoral politics. Through an explicitly Marxist conceptualization of class as fundamentally conflictual capital-labor relations, he illustrates how the incessant, impersonal cycle of private capital accumulation (M–C–M′) subordinates people and organizations (ch. 2). Therefore, much of Umney’s purpose is to reassert this relational (rather than taxonomic) interpretation of class, both methodologically and politically.
Successive British governments, promulgating the deceptive notion of a class-neutral “economy that works for everyone,” have been prepared to subordinate the interests of labor to those of private capital in the service of shareholder value—for example, in whittling away union rights, such as the right to strike, while enforcing work discipline. Referring to earlier Marxist debates on the role of the state, Umney rejects any contention that governments under capitalism can be either neutral or, even more fancifully, act in the general interest of labor against capital. Consequently, he questions the possibility of electoral politics achieving radical, democratic change. Instead, he suggests that an increase in workers’ struggles for better wages and conditions—for example, through a growth in activist unionism—would constitute a more dramatic political achievement than any election result (171–72).
While New Labour under Tony Blair had disavowed any class-based agenda, the recent reemergence of class in mainstream UK politics came, perhaps surprisingly, from the ruling Conservative (Tory) Party. For Umney, though, Prime Minister Theresa May’s rhetorical 2017 general election appeal, fueled by Brexit-influenced xenophobia, to a working-class constituency backfired spectacularly. The Conservatives almost lost power to an unexpectedly resilient Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, refuting the commonly held assumption that a left-of-center party with a redistributive platform was unelectable. One of the more remarkable aspects of Corbyn Labour’s electoral performance was its strong support among younger voters. Umney, though, questions any suggestion that this indicates that age has superseded class as a major social and political division. He argues persuasively that, rather than age being an indicator of identity politics, the exposure of many young workers to insecure employment may have encouraged them toward a more radical, class-influenced political agenda (12–17).
Yet Umney also cautions against any assumption that Labour’s performance demonstrated a serious challenge to capital (chap. 9). The pro-Brexit referendum outcome had generated divisions within capital, whereby a reformist Labour was less offensive to many traditionally Right-wing voters than a Brexiting Tory government. Labour, though, did not represent a radical, systemic challenge to the “economy that works for everyone” paradigm. For Umney, minor redistribution through taxation and welfare systems does not constitute a serious challenge to capitalist power, while even Labour’s proposed nationalizations were not especially radical; indeed, publicly owned organizations (such as the National Health Service) may be adept at exercising intensified control of workers.
In response to the prospect of job-destroying automation, Umney develops a critical appraisal of UBI as a potentially radical response. While acknowledging that a UBI might enable people to have greater freedom to move between jobs and develop new skills without the threat of destitution, he draws on Lethbridge (2017) to demonstrate how UBI as a “cash handout” might reinforce capitalism, while permitting further erosion of public services. Although in several Left interpretations, UBI might be presented as offering some protections for workers—such as lessening the specter of unemployment—it would do little to moderate either capital’s control over workers or incessant cost cutting (172–74).
The irresistible upshot of Umney’s arguments is that only a direct challenge to capital by workers taking control over their own work and organizations can effect radical, long-term change. This would necessarily extend to ensuring that key institutions, including public health, education, and housing, would respond to social needs, rather than remaining subservient to private capital accumulation (175–76). He underscores the need to break “the control capital has over our economy as a whole” (179), although declining unionism and strike activity may hinder the mobilization of labor essential to the promotion of more radical political agendas.
Umney develops a highly readable, often incisive defense of a Marxist approach to class, contrasting a conceptualization of class grounded in capital-labor relations with interpretations of class (especially Bourdieu) oriented around cultural identification. Still, we may question whether a political-economic conceptualization of class defined through capital-labor relations necessarily excludes other, more culturally oriented approaches to class. For instance, Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of class conflicts as symbolic contestations (see Weininger 2005) may complement an understanding of class conflict as capital-labor struggles.
Throughout the book, Umney successfully portrays private capital accumulation as an impersonal, alien force shredding human concerns in its wake. This consistent backdrop for his discussion has evident commonalities with Pietrykowski’s depictions of struggles against capital-driven technology—and how those struggles can divert technology toward more labor-favorable ends. For example, pandemic-induced telework today can occur under varying levels of trust, from enhanced autonomy to intensified surveillance. While a great deal of analysis has been devoted to explaining fragmentation in working-class voting (as with Brexit), Umney’s comments on political divisions within business interests indicate possibilities for contesting the illusory “economy that works for everyone.” Further, his observations on the relative success of the “unelectable” Corbyn Labour Party, including the support it attracted from younger voters, suggest grounds for a pessimistic brand of optimism—a perspective embraced by Frank Stilwell, in his comprehensive political-economic analysis of inequality.
4. Against the Tide
Like Umney, Frank Stilwell highlights how the massive growth of inequality has been accompanied by a seemingly paradoxical decline of analysis and strategies informed by a Marxist, political-economic understanding of class. He orients his discussion around an alliterative thematic sequence: patterns, processes, problems, policies, and prospects. In explaining the global exacerbation of wealth and income inequality, Stilwell cites a range of macro-level political-economic forces—globalization, financialization, neoliberal policies, and profit-driven technology. In conjunction with socioeconomic dimensions—including, but not restricted to, class, gender, race, location, and disability—these perpetuate and intensify inequalities.
Traditional economic indicators provide few insights into these phenomena. For example, Stilwell illustrates how GDP includes antisocial, environmentally destructive market activity, but takes no account of the unequal distribution of national incomes. While cautioning that all methods of gauging well-being contain at least some element of the arbitrary, he adopts the UN’s Human Development Index and Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index as more holistic, comprehensive ways of measuring social progress and the extent of inequality.
He evaluates three broad approaches to inequality—conservative, liberal, and radical—drawing on several contributions from the past decade, particularly Piketty’s (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, to show not only that the vast evidence of inequality cannot be ignored, but also that extensive analytical resources are available to remedy its causes. Stilwell argues convincingly for the potential benefits of greater equality, including both improved national economic performance and enhanced social well-being, outlining an array of options—including UBI and caps on executive salary packages—to stem and reverse the tide of growing inequality. In stressing that global inequality is greater than inequality within nations, Stilwell argues that development programs, as conducted by international agencies such as the IMF and World Bank, should move beyond their capital-centered assumptions—for instance, by pursuing a UBI in poorer countries. This demands concerted campaigns to reduce inequality, rather than merely alleviating the worst aspects of extreme poverty (228).
Via another alliterative sequence (ignorance, ideologies, interests, and institutions), Stilwell presents a measured summation of the impediments to attaining greater equality. For instance, widespread ignorance of the extent of inequality might be addressed by a greater focus on education, understood broadly, to redress the gaps between people’s perceptions of social mobility and the actuality of deep-seated structural inequalities. He surveys the proliferation of various interrelated sexist, racist, and nationalist ideologies, alongside the abiding myth of meritocracy. Promulgated through various media, including educational institutions increasingly dependent on private funds, these encourage widespread skepticism toward even the possibility of a less unequal world.
Many orthodox economists have contributed to this skepticism; since their priorities remain growth, markets, and individualized well-being, inequality may not even surface as a problem. Radical political economists from varying perspectives, therefore, hold the responsibility to counter this complicity through embracing real-world economics that addresses systemic injustices. Recalling the phrase “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (245), Stilwell proposes a set of “priorities for radical reform” that would systematically address inequalities between and within nations. These include increased public investment, incorporating such initiatives as universal access to public health, education, housing, transport, and child care; an unconditional basic income, to eliminate poverty while generating new, more rewarding work possibilities; progressive, broad-based taxation, designed to reduce tax evasion; coordinated planning to achieve equitable, sustainable economies; constraints on capital, including CEO salary caps; encouraging cooperatives, and extending the commons; an “international compact for a new egalitarian world order,” including assistance for public infrastructure and basic incomes, with new measures of economic performance (256).
Throughout the book, Stilwell makes a strong case for the necessity of each of these measures, as integrated elements of a systematic, social-democratic program for radical change. This emphasis on integration of different measures is particularly crucial. For example, the radical potential of a UBI (as a monetary payment) may be fatally blunted without a social wage (as universal access to public goods such as health and education). Corrosive inequalities may be entrenched if fundamental social needs, such as child care, remain sources of private capital accumulation, reinforcing market-based consumption—or if people lacking financial security are consequently compelled to take on any available “gig” or insecure employment.
While the book’s primary focus is the potential contribution of political economic-economic analysis to eliminating inequality, both its intended audience—from students across the social sciences to political activists—and Stilwell’s openness to interdisciplinary approaches enhance its purpose and scope. His emphasis on the role of education, interpreted in a societal sense extending beyond formal institutions, is particularly valuable, indicating ways in which to address the huge gap between perceptions of a competitive, meritocratic society and everyday inequality, exploitation, and discrimination.
Addressing systemic inequality requires engaging present and future workers in pluralist, interdisciplinary debates on issues, from progressive taxation to labor rights, that remain absent from most orthodox economics agendas. Stilwell also ensures that the global dimensions of work and inequality are consistently present. This reinforces a point that has become generally acknowledged during the pandemic: that we cannot address inequality within solely national or even multinational, regional settings. Unfortunately, inequality is far less widely recognized as a global crisis, illustrating the need for campaigns that are both diverse and inclusive, yet integrated, from local to global levels.
5. Conclusion
Each of these three books captures the sense that we presently occupy a disturbingly strange world, in which the pursuit of radical, progressive change constitutes a daunting but nonetheless far from quixotic endeavor. Together, they demonstrate the necessity of maintaining core concepts and purposes at the forefront of radical political-economic engagement. A broadly Marxist understanding of class as inherently conflictual capital-labor relations is also fundamental to the methodology each author adopts. This is accompanied, though, by valuable insights into how class conflict might be integrated within an inclusive radical-democratic politics.
There is a remarkable commonality in the issues each book addresses—and, to a considerable extent, in the conclusions they reach. They inspire readers to consider issues, such as the future of work, that they may not have previously encountered. Openness to pluralist, interdisciplinary approaches may be especially valuable in this regard. For instance, the prevailing narrative of social mobility within a meritocratic society, perpetuated through such orthodox theories as HCT, is both ubiquitous and deeply entrenched. The notion of competitive, rational, goal-oriented individuals investing in their own futures, through acquiring more education, training, and skills, has obvious parallels with Foucault’s (2008) “entrepreneur of the self.”
Political-economic analysis might draw on the Foucault-influenced cultural studies literature, to demonstrate how the entrepreneurial subject emerges through complex socioeconomic processes, rather than being solely attributable to individual psychologies, choices, and decisions. Radical political economy’s role in shifting the parameters of political debate requires addressing fundamental conceptual and strategic questions such as this, in the knowledge that the issues raised are indissolubly interconnected.
Yet there are also evident differences in the three books on the purposes of political-economic analysis and action—between, on one hand, the broadly radical social-democratic goals articulated by Pietrykowski and Stilwell and, on the other, Umney’s projected “end to capitalism.” For example, the kinds of progressive taxation and social welfare reforms proposed by Stilwell are viewed as of minor significance by Umney. The common ground occupied by Pietrykowski and Stilwell is unsurprising, given that both situate their arguments in opposition to the orthodoxy of mainstream economics. Umney’s opposition to Bourdieusian-inspired sociology is of a different, perhaps less definitive, character: Bourdieu, as indicated by his critiques of neoliberalism (e.g., Bourdieu 1998), could scarcely be aligned with economic orthodoxy. There may, then, be possibilities for integrating a political-economic conceptualization of class defined through capital-labor relations with other, more culturally oriented approaches to class.
Overall, these books delineate a remarkable continuity from the Luddites to contemporary debates around the future of waged and unwaged work. They underscore both the necessity of historical memory and how new technologies frequently emerge through political-economic contestation. As Pietrykowski observes, wage labor is not disappearing any time soon, but we also need to think and act imaginatively outside its boundaries. Consequently, key political-economic questions include not only how to improve the quality of work, pay, and conditions but also to enhance the social value of unwaged work (as with the “solidarity” economy initiatives he explores). Much of the pragmatic challenge for radical political economy, then, may be to identify the boundaries between what should and should not be a sphere of wage labor. For example, can a viable public health or education system be constructed and maintained without wage labor? Of course, such questions require contextualization within their social, cultural, and political-economic settings. As demonstrated in the discussion above, the impacts of policy initiatives—for example, UBI as an avenue to reduced inequality—can vary dramatically across communities and nations, demanding analyses and strategies appropriate to specific contexts.
