Workers played a key role in the October 2000 revolution in Serbia that overthrew Miloševič and his Socialist Party regime. Since then, the trade union movement has begun to consolidate itself into three separate union federations, each with its own distinct orientation. Serbia’s economic problems have persisted, leading to heavy dependence on privatisation, foreign direct investment and loans and grants from international financial institutions. This environment has both constrained and shaped the strategies
of the unions. This labour experience is difficult to compare with those of advanced western democracies, and is still conditioned by legacies from the past.

‘Flexibility’ is a key feature of the government’s modernisation agenda. The government does not define the kind of flexibility it aims to promote in its modernisation agenda; but data indicates that numerical flexibility, in the form of temporary work, is already a characteristic of public-sector employment, particularly in local government. This paper reports on research data that highlights the way numerical flexibility undermines other key aspects of public-service delivery and the modernisation agenda, such as equal opportunities and recruitment and retention. It argues that the poorer terms and conditions of temporary workers provide additional support for trade union claims of the existence of a ‘two-tier workforce’ in local government.

There are currently two main accounts of labour markets: the mainstream labour market (MLM) account, which avoids serious analysis of social structures; and a rather unsystematic socioeconomic account, which recognises that labour markets are
embedded in social structures, but remains ambiguous vis-à-vis the nature of this embedding. Augmenting the latter with a critical-realist approach serves to reduce that ambiguity, and allows us to break completely with the idea that there are phenomena called ‘labour markets’ that are embedded in other phenomena called ‘social structures’— and to move, instead, towards the realisation that labour markets just are, or are exhausted by, the very social structures that constitute them.

In this paper, we explore Marxism and critical realism by addressing Ben Fine’s Addressing the Critical and the Real in Critical Realism. We outline and address Fine’s main arguments—that critical realism is insufficiently critical, and that it is insufficiently realistic—before turning to analyse the relation between critical realism and Marxism. Taking Fine’s argument as a starting point gives us the opportunity to clearly define the parameters of the Cambridgebased critique of mainstream economics, and to highlight some of the problems particular to that critique. It also provides an opportunity to interrogate the significance of the formation of discursive boundaries for the way we challenge conceptual
credentials and claims.

While accepting the contribution that critical realism has made in exposing the methodological weaknesses of mainstream economics, this rejoinder to Nielsen and Morgan reasserts the need for critical realism to go much further. In particular, it highlights the need for critical realism’s explicit confrontation with—and critique of—economic theory, and the need for it to construct a political economy rooted in the categories of contemporary capitalism. The paper again calls on those who espouse critical realism to undertake the important work of developing a careful exposition of the meanings of structure, relation and tendency, etc., their interrelationships and their historical and social scope and variability—and to provide an explicit account of where critical realism diverges from Marxism and Marxist political economy.

This article suggests that the radical historiography of global monetary standards has failed to provide a class-based interpretation, instead offering a radicalised power politics that seeks to explain their rise and fall as being a by-product of the competitive struggle for hegemony by capitalist states. The author proposes an alternative reading, which locates the contradictory and antagonistic class relation between capital and labour as the central dynamic force accounting for the rise and fall of global monetary standards, from the classical gold standard to the collapse of Bretton Woods.

Most radical and working-class organisations and movements are now largely marginalised and fragmented. The literature they disseminated and introduced to young people in the past is disappearing, and their voices are being drowned out by the babble of the mass media. New forms of radicalism that respond to this new situation are appearing, and one of these is the Marxists Internet Archive (mia). The mia brings together people of widely diverging views behind the common goal of creating and maintaining the world’s largest digital library of Marxist works.