Historical Significance of Labor’s Increased Precariousness in Germany,the United Kingdom,and Spain

This article addresses the historical significance of the increasing precariousness of labor, even in the most advanced economies. Given the sterility of the mainstream approach, based on methodological individualism, we start from a Marxist critique of political economy, focusing on the laws that govern the process of capitalist accumulation and its contradictions. Within the framework of these laws, we analyze the tendency of labor exploitation to increase in a capitalist economy, linked to the exigencies of profitability due to the increasing difficulties of the valorization of capital. The precariousness of labor is studied around some of the main forms it adopts in three European economies: mini‐jobs in Germany, “zero‐hours contracts” in the United Kingdom, and false self‐employment, together with internship and training contracts, in Spain. Based on theoretical and empirical analysis, several conclusions are proposed to understand the extension and deepening of labor precariousness, built on the notions of overexploitation and destruction of productive forces, linked to current demands of capitalist accumulation.     

The Debate on Pension Systems: The Paradigmatic Cases of Chile and Spain

This article is focused on pension systems in the light of two case studies that are antagonistic within the capitalist economy. On the one hand, the Spanish pension scheme, based on the principle of intergenerational solidarity, was achieved by the working‐class after decades of struggle. It constitutes the backbone of the Spanish social security system, thanks to the creation and development of indirect and deferred wages. On the other hand, the Chilean pension scheme, first imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship, is based on a funded system and private management. It rejects the principle of solidarity and, therefore, it makes impossible the construction of a decent pension structure. The comparison of the Spanish and the Chilean pension systems can be expressed in just one revealing fact: while the average pension in Spain is 79 percent of the last salary earned, benefits in Chile barely reach 33 percent for male workers and 25 percent for female workers. The analysis of both cases is framed in terms of the critique of political economy, in direct opposition to the current mainstream in economics. Instead of assuming methodological individualism and a harmonious view of human societies, as orthodoxy does, the critical paradigm conceives of capitalist economy as a dialectical process determined by the existence of social classes with different and opposed interests.     

The effect of competition on product removal

Marketing Letters - The relationship between innovation and competition has been vastly studied over the past fifty years. However, one piece of the puzzle that has not been studied in...