Work, Employment & Society

http://wes.sagepub.com/ Book review: Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx
Martin Upchurch Work Employment Society 2012 26: 182 DOI: 10.1177/0950017011426317 The online version of this article can be found at: http://wes.sagepub.com/content/26/1/182

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Work, employment and society 26(1)

product parties and, instead, captures a culturally distinct model of female economic empowerment. Women, mainly from the Indian middle classes, meet in someones home each month to socialize and contribute a stipulated small sum of money to the kitty. Lots are drawn to determine which woman will receive all the money in the kitty; the winner then hosts the party for the following month. The authors argue that this model, as well as the product-based party, can be vehicles for change for women through relational mechanisms that create bonding and solidarity based on mutual support. A particular kind of gendered work performance is highlighted in this stimulating book that focuses on the home as workplace. One shortcoming, however, is its failure to acknowledge that the home is increasingly the setting for a whole range of work and enterprise corporate, professional, craft and semi-skilled for both men and women. For example, e-working at home is now common in many occupations, bringing flexibility but often with ambiguous and blurred boundaries between paid work, family work and leisure, giving rise to the intensification and extension of work into what were formerly seen as private spaces for nurture and care. A stronger articulation of contemporary employment models and diverse work practices would have provided a more rounded context in which to situate the relevant empirical and theoretical debates.

Chris Harman Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx London: Bookmarks, 2009, 15 pbk, (ISBN: 9781905192533), 400 pp. Reviewed by Martin Upchurch, Middlesex University, UK

Zombie Capitalism is used by Chris Harman to describe how global capitalism is dominated by the dead over the living. Zombie banks are kept alive by state funding even though the blood running through their veins has evaporated. The fate of the banking system has now spread to the whole economic system. 21st century capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals and responding to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all around (p. 12). Given Harmans untimely death in November 2009 the book is very much a valediction, both as a statement of a particular tradition of Marxist political analysis, and as a tribute to his intellectual capacity, or as Larry Elliot of the Guardian recorded, You knew he had done the reading and done the thinking. His arguments even if you opposed them had an elegant consistency about them (Elliott, 2009). Harman writes for the newcomer to Marxist economics as well as for the academic, and concrete examples of Marxs theories are given to aid understanding. The book is written in accessible style, with an absence of equations. A chapter is included, Beyond Marx, which introduces the concept of state capitalism from the International Socialist tradition. The essence of the argument is that in the former Soviet economies the purpose of nationalised industry was to enable domestic accumulation to match that undertaken by foreign rivals so as to be able to survive successfully in economic and/or military

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competition (p. 116). This position is controversial, and has been open to critique in other reviews. However, while it is not central to the book, those interested in the debate will find Harmans re-statement of the theory invaluable. Harman then deals with the effects of imperialism and the state and constructs a contemporary analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF). Marxs original theory predicted that as capital replaced labour in the production process the ratio of capital to labour over time would increase. As labour is the source of surplus value there would then follow a tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time, simply because the amount of necessary labour was falling in proportionate terms. Most importantly, Harman relates the theory to the post-war reality of western capitalism, providing theoretical analysis of the long boom and its subsequent collapse. The permanent arms economy and the logic of imperialist competition in the Cold War era are given as the causal explanation for capitalisms golden age. However, Harman enters controversial waters when he examines TRPF at the end of the golden age. Measuring TRPF is difficult, as orthodox accounting does not recognize rates of exploitation, the organic composition of capital or surplus value. So any proposition that the TRPF has been active is open to dispute. Argument also revolves around the ability of countervailing tendencies to negate the TRPF. Proxy measurements need to be used, and here Harman answers his critics by presenting evidence in graphical and tabular form gathered from official data and the work of prominent Marxists. TRPF became a problem for capital from the late 1960s onwards, whereby the rush to accumulate was integrated into the drive for global market expansion. Globalization was both a product of, and response to, TRPF. Capital burst through borders in a great delusion (p. 255). The delusion was a belief that capitalism could continue to expand without crisis. What is pertinent in this analysis is that neoliberalism became embedded in the process of accumulation. Neo-liberalism in this model is a core feature of contemporary capitalism rather than a belligerent variant. Social democracy is only able to accommodate itself to neo-liberalism and transform itself into a form of social liberalism. The final section focuses on debates on financialization. Harman departs from mainstream left thinking by downplaying the role of financial institutions in the crisis. He acknowledges the rise of finance but argues the growth of finance was never something separate from what was happening to the core of the system, but was a product of its internationalization and the long drawn out slowdown in accumulation (p. 280). Further insights are given into the limits of capital in terms of environmental destruction and climate change. The book ends with a call to revolt and reviews, perhaps too briefly, debates on formal and informal work, restructuring and organized labour, and deficiencies of the multitude, autonomist and Third Way politics. Chris Harman abandoned his PhD in the late 1960s (under Ralph Miliband) in favour of full time political activism. In writing the book Harman was therefore conscious of the dual nature of his audience. On the one hand he was attempting to write a book on a technically difficult subject that can be understood by activists. He was also engaging with key debates on the left that require great intellectual judgement. He has managed to succeed, and the book will no doubt become a standard point of reference for those wishing to understand Marxs economics and the contemporary crisis of capitalism.

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Elliott L (2009) Chris Harman: a thinker and a polemicist. Socialist Review December. Available (consulted 31 October 2011) at: http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?article number=11064

Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V Hansen (eds) At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011, $75 hbk, (ISBN: 9780813549552), 300 pp. Reviewed by Sheree Gregory, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

The significance of individual choice in regard to work-family life has been emphasized in policy discussions in the UK, the USA and Australia. Individual choices continue to be given primacy by some scholars, in self-help texts and in the popular press. However, plentiful research now maintains that these notions are inadequate for grasping the complex patterns of activities and negotiations that go on in families and in households. Importantly, notions of individual choice tell us nothing of the often fraught relationship between the workplace and the household. In order to gain greater insight into these issues we need to look deeper. At the Heart of Work and Family, and the conceptual framework eloquently employed by scholars throughout the book, shows us how. This collection of essays presents original empirical research and arguments that challenge rhetoric and assumptions that treat work-family issues as merely an individual problem. Authors in this book utilize the sociology of emotions as a powerful scaffold on which to explore the inequities that remain prevalent in work-family life. This approach was established by Arlie Hochschild in her empirical work spanning more than three decades. Key concepts such as emotion work, feeling rules, the time bind, the second shift, gender strategies and the economy of gratitude illuminate the silences that shield the hard-to-grasp tensions and dilemmas the underside of the work-family dichotomy. This text inspires the reader to believe that if we continue to ask the hard questions and nurse the unexamined issues and painful feelings surrounding workfamily dilemmas, then problems may begin to dissolve, opening up new possibilities for change. A sociology of emotions posits that what people think is bound up with how they feel. A goal of the editors is to question and examine meaning in regard to what people think and feel, how they think they should feel, what they think others think they should feel, their connections to actions and how this affects work and intimate life. The authors and editors connect both the micro-level individual interactions with macro-structures and social forces, in ways that bring nuance, clarity, insight and new knowledge about work and family interaction. In the introductory chapter, co-editors Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V Hansen establish the value of a sociology of emotions in making visible those activities and dynamics