Adam Smith and Ordoliberalism : On the Political Form of Market Liberty

In the context of the contemporary crisis of neoliberal political economy, the politics of austerity has reasserted the liberal utility of the state as the political authority of market freedom. This article argues that economy has no independent existence, and that instead, economy is a political practice. It examines the political economy of Adam Smith and the German ordoliberal tradition to decipher the character of the political in political economy and its transformation from Smith's liberal theory into neoliberal theology. Ordoliberalism emerged in the late 1920s at a time of a manifest crisis of political economy, and its argument was fundamental for the development of the neoliberal conception that free economy is matter of strong state authority. The conclusion argues with Marx that the state is the concentrated force of free economy

Coercion and the labour contract – revisiting Glasbrook Brothers and the political fiction of Lewis Jones

Author's draft. Final version published in International Journal of Law in Context Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012. Available online at http://journals.cambridge.org/In his tale of the struggles and privations of the mining community in the industrial south of Wales in the early decades of the 20th century, Lewis Jones, ex-miner and socialist activist, put aside the usual tools of political activism – of oratory and pamphlet propaganda – and instead turned to fiction as a means of educating and mobilising the political energy of the workforce.. In doing so, Jones represented the extent to which the law was pivotal to the social organisation delivering injustice to working people. When one turns to history and to the legal record, the contestable accounts, elisions and absences from the record speak eloquently of the extent to which selective doctrine contribute to that injustice. The resultant message resonates with debates on the relationship between society, politics and the rule of law itself

Pedagogy of hate

Written as an extended review of Peter McLaren’s 'Pedagogy of Insurrection: from Resurrection to Revolution’ published in 2015, this paper contradicts McLaren’s affirmation of political religion and the version of critical pedagogy on which it is based, claiming hate rather than Christian love as a core concept of Critical Theory. Not a personal, psychological or pathological hate, but a radical hate for what the world has become, or absolute negativity. Hate must be invoked as love-hate for the magic of dialectics to work against the holy love of McLaren’s Christian socialism. Radical hate reveals the main transcendental tenets of capitalist civilisation: God and Money, as impersonal forms of social domination that must be brought down to earth so real existence can learn, learn, learn itself. That is the educative power of the Pedagogy of Hate. Now and forever

Information is Power? Transparency and fetishism in International Relations

International actors, state and non-state, have embraced transparency as a solution to all manner of political problems. Theoretical analyses of these processes present transparency in a fetishtic manner, in which the social relations that generate transparency are misrecognized as the product of information itself. This paper will outline the theoretical problems that arise when transparency promotion is fetishized in International Relations theory. Examining the fetishism of transparency, we will note problematic conception of politics, the public sphere, and rationality they articulate. Confusing the relationship between data, information and knowledge, fetishized treatments of transparency muddy the historical dynamics responsible for the emergence of transparency as a political practice. This alters our understanding of the relationship between global governance institutions, their constituents, and the nature of knowledge production itself. Realizing the normative promise of transparency requires a reorientation of theoretical practice towards sociologically and historically sensitive approaches to the politics of knowledge

Open Education and the emancipation of academic labour

I have previously argued that open education is a liberal project with a focus on the freedom of things rather than the freedom of people (Winn, Joss. 2012. “Open Education: From the Freedom of Things to the Freedom of People.” In Towards Teaching in Public: Reshaping the Modern University, edited by Michael Neary, Howard Stevenson, and Les Bell, 133– 147. London: Continuum). Furthermore, I have argued that despite an implicit critique of private property with its emphasis on ‘the commons’, the literature on open education offers no corresponding critique of academic labour (Neary, Mike, and Joss Winn. 2012. “Open Education: Common(s), Commonism and the New Common Wealth.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 12 (4): 406–422). In this paper, I develop my critical position that an emancipatory form of education must work towards the emancipation of teachers and students from labour, the dynamic, social, creative source of value in capitalism. In making this argument, I first establish the fundamental characteristics of academic labour. I then offer a ‘form-analytic’ critique of open access, followed by a corresponding critique of its legal form. Finally, I critically discuss the potential of ‘open cooperatives’ as a transitional organisational form for the production of knowledge through which social relations become ‘transparent in their simplicity’ (Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Vol. 1. London: Penguin Classics, 172)

Russia’s Legal Transitions: Marxist Theory, Neoclassical Economics and the Rule of Law

We review the role of economic theory in shaping the process of legal change in Russia during the two transitions it experienced during the course of the twentieth century: the transition to a socialist economy organised along the lines of state ownership of the means of production in the 1920s, and the transition to a market economy which occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Despite differences in methodology and in policy implications, Marxist theory, dominant in the 1920s, and neoclassical economics, dominant in the 1990s, offered a similarly reductive account of law as subservient to wider economic forces. In both cases, the subordinate place accorded to law undermined the transition process. Although path dependence and history are frequently invoked to explain the limited development of the rule of law in Russia during the 1990s, policy choices driven by a deterministic conception of law and economics also played a role.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40803-015-0012-

The co-operative university: Labour, property and pedagogy

I begin this article by discussing the recent work of academics and activists to identify the advantages and issues relating to co-operative forms of higher education, and then focus on the ‘worker co-operative’ organisational form and its applicability and suitability to the governance of and practices within higher educational institutions. Finally, I align the values and principles of worker co-ops with the critical pedagogic framework of ‘Student as Producer’. Throughout I employ the work of Karl Marx to theorise the role of labour and property in a ‘co-operative university’, drawing particularly on later Marxist writers who argue that Marx’s labour theory of value should be understood as a critique of labour under capitalism, rather than one developed from the standpoint of labour

Institutional Solutions to Precariousness and Inequality in Labour Markets

It has become widely assumed that the standard employment relationship (SER) is in irreversible decline in industrialized societies. However, non-standard and precarious work relationships often complement the SER via labour market transitions, and are not displacing it as the focal point of labour market regulation. The co-ordination and risk management functions of the SER continue to be relevant in market economies, and the SER is adjusting to new conditions. The SER has a complex and evolving relationship to gender and to social stratification. In the European context where the SER originated and achieved its clearest legal expression, institutional solutions to precariousness and inequality are being developed, the most innovative of which avoid simple deregulation in favour of integrated policy responses involving a range of complementary regulatory mechanisms.We are grateful for funding from the Cambridge Political Economy Society TrustThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjir.1210

European economic constitution and the transformation of democracy : on class and the state of law

In the context of contemporary analyses of the Europe Union as a post-democratic form of economic governance, this article explores the (ordo)liberal character of monetary union as a regime of imposed liberty. The argument holds that rather than forcing the member states into retreat, the economic constitution of Europe strengthens their liberal foundation, securing their utility as the organised force of a mode of social reproduction founded on free labour. It develops the character of the liberal state as the political form of a free market economy with reference to Adam Smith’s classical political economy and the German ordoliberal tradition, which calls for a rule-based system of federated forms of economic governance to secure a free labour economy in conditions of mass democratic aspirations for a freedom from want. It explores the rationale of the ordoliberal distinction between the liberal character and the democratic character of the state and, in this context, assesses the meaning of liberal democracy in a post-democratic Eurozone