Once we shift the intension of the concept of wage-labour from juridical attributes of negative ownership and contractual freedom to the actual performance of capital-positing labour, the extension of the concept – the cases that fall under it – changes as well. Once the concept of wage-labour is intensively re-defined as capital-positing labour, it becomes evident that the history and the geographical scope of wage-labour have not been well understood. This shift in the intension of the concept of wage-labour also (...) disjoins the association between capitalism and freedom. (shrink)

Theory as History brings together twelve essays by Jarius Banaji addressing the nature of modes of production, the forms of historical capitalism and the varieties of pre-capitalist modes of production. Problematic formulations concerning the relationship of social-property relations and the laws of motion of different modes of production and his notion of merchant and slave-holding capitalism undermines Banaji’s project of constructing a non-unilinear, non-Eurocentric Marxism.

In Volume I of Capital, Marx invokes the distinction between labor power and labor to explain how surplus value might arise from the circuit of capital, given that all commodities exchange at their respective labor values. Contrary to Marx's representation, however, the stipulation of price-value equivalence is neither necessary nor adequate for a coherent account of capitalist exploitation. The significance of the labor-labor power distinction is instead best understood in historically contingent strategic terms that are essentially independent of Marx's value (...) theory. Historical-strategic analysis suggests that the distinction has implications extending beyond the labor extraction problem typically emphasized in the modern literature on class struggle in production. (shrink)