Labor Regime Change in the Twenty-first Century: Unfreedom, Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation

By Tom Brass

Labor Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century sets as its task to assess the validity, in light of current economic development, of the epistemology structuring different historical interpretations that see unfree labor as incompatible with capitalism. Conventional wisdom holds that—regarding the opposition between capitalism and unfreedom—an unbroken continuity links Marxism to Adam Smith, Malthus, Mill, and Max Weber. Challenging this, Brass argues that Marx accepted that, where class struggle is global, capitalist producers employ workers who are unfree.