In 1776, Adam Smith famously described the “very trifling manufacture” of a pin factory. By dividing the production of a single pin into eighteen distinct operations—one worker drawing the wire, another straightening it, a third cutting it—a small team could produce thousands of units daily. Smith noted that a lone, unspecialised worker could scarcely make…
Category: Socio-economic embeddedness
Two volume book on the social division of labour is now published
Both volumes are now published with Palgrave-Macmillan.
Freedom in our contemporary global economy
What is freedom? It seems that this question has become very important in the age of neoliberal decline of civic society. Recently, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, the marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek discussed freedom in our age of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Zizek is as usual rather fuzzy about what exactly…
Modern Political Economics: Chapter 5
I continue to read “Modern Political Economy: Making sense of the post-2008 world” by Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi and Nicholas Theocarakis, published in 2011 by Routledge. Here I discuss Chapter 5. This chapter considers and restates Marxist theories of the classical capitalist economy. Clearly, it continues from the previous chapter. As usual in the Marxist…