Market mechanisms in the local-government sector have
transformed service delivery and the management of
manual municipal labour. Low pay has traditionally been
tolerated in these services in exchange for job security;
and the relative autonomy entailed by non-profit
production methods had permitted the continuation of a
public-service ethos. But in a labour-intensive sector, the
move from democratically determined to market-led
production within ever-decreasing levels of central funding
is only possible through job loss, work intensification and
insecurity. Case study findings show how these pressures
were played out in school cleaning and grounds
maintenance in a Labour local authority.

While socialists hardly need reminding that employers
often mistreat their workers, we tend to overlook
situations in which workers mistreat other workers. This
tendency is exacerbated by discourses that urge us to
act as consumers, and to treat cheap commodities as
‘bargains’ rather than, for example, as the result of
someone else’s poor working conditions. This paper uses
arguments from political and moral economy to
illustrate some of the ways in which workers, in their
alter egos as consumers, are causally implicated in the
poor pay and conditions of other workers, and uses
Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism to explain why
we tend to overlook this.

The decline of neoliberal hegemony has by now spread
from the periphery of the imperialist chain to some of
the core capitalist countries themselves. The rise of new
political formations such as Die Linke is evidence of this.
But the defeat of the new imperialism that neoliberal
globalisation has revealed itself to be requires a shift in
the relationship of forces in the belly of the beast—in the
USA. The US left has been undecided as to which strategy
to adopt. It is therefore crucial to recollect the specific
economic, political and ideological barriers that have
historically and to this day frustrated the efforts of subaltern
third-party class politics in the USA, and which will continue
to do so, particularly given the present moment of class
fragmentation and the Christian fundamentalists’ ‘hijacking’
of the issue of class.

This paper investigates the extent to which public–private
relationships produce unbalancing e•ects in the case of
the generation and use of genomic/genetic information.
To this end, it focuses on two interconnected issues. The
first is the purported importance of genomic information,
which is used to justify public spending on its production.
The second is the problem of ownership and accessibility.
By examining the ‘balance’ rhetoric together with the
information/molecule separation, the patentability of
DNA, university–industry–government relations and the
role of extended public networks for proprietary genetic
products and technologies, it suggests that the supposed
balance between private interests and public benefits is in
fact an unbalancing act in favour of private interests under
the capitalist social formation.

This paper examines the claims made by Simon Mohun
and Roberto Veneziani in their article ‘The incoherence
of the TSSI: A reply to Kliman and Freeman’, published
in Capital & Class, no. 92. We show that they have
e•ectively conceded that simultaneist interpretations of
Marx’s theory contradict his conclusion that exploitation
(workers’ surplus labour) is the exclusive source of profit
in capitalism. We demonstrate the errors of logic in their
claim that the temporal single-system (TSS) interpretation
is incoherent. Thus the results of this debate serve to
confirm that the TSS interpretation—contrary to
simultaneist interpretations—reproduces all of Marx’s
principal disputed conclusions, and therefore constitutes
a superior interpretation of his theory of value.