The Anatomy of Twenty-First Century Exploitation: From Traditional Extraction of Surplus Value to Exploitation of Creative Activity

Capital of the 21st Century: From the Proletariat and Bourgeoisie to the Precariat and the Oligarchic-Bureaucratic Nomenklatura?

“…This is the case since capital in this instance does not employ the labour power, sold for a time to the capitalist, of a personally independent hired worker, but the worker's creative potential, that is, his or her most important personal qualities. These changes have been described in more detail by the author in an earlier text (Buzgalin and Kolganov, 2013); this article will therefore confine itself to drawing the conclusion that this specific characteristic of creative workers provides one of the bases for distinguishing the so-called 'creative class' -about which, as indicated earlier, more will subsequently be said.…”

“…Work on a new ‘Capital’ is also being conducted within the framework of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism; the results include, in particular, the crucially important monograph by Professor Viktor Ryazanov (2016), a series of articles developing the ideas of that book (Ryazanov, 2017), and also the two-volume work by Andrey Kolganov and the present author Global Capital , five editions of which have now been published in Russia. Some fragments of the latter have been published in English (Buzgalin and Kolganov, 2010, 2016, 2013).…”

The Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism (PSSCM): Particular Characteristics, Main Tendencies, and Its Place in the System of Marxist Studies in Post-Soviet Russia

“…The relations of exploitation involve a wide range of different forms of domination by the hegemony of capital: semi-slave forms of personal dependence; ‘classical’ forms of capitalist exploitation of industrial workers; different methods of generating and appropriating monopolistic (and imperialist, periphery-based) profit; substantially new relations of exploitation of creative activity (implying not just the appropriation of the surplus value created by the creative worker, but the exploitation of the universal creative capacity of humanity, the universal cultural wealth (see Buzgalin and Kolganov, 2013, for details). As a result of these transformations, the relations of accumulation have also changed (see Buzgalin and Kolganov, 2017, for details).…”

Universal basic income revisited: COVID-19, biopolitical trade-offs, and the expropriation of digital academic labour

“…Insofar as the exploitation of creative workers such as academics can be conceptualized in Marxist terms as the "the appropriation of intellectual rents instead of surplus value" (Buzgalin and Kolganov, 2013: 486), and since I regard Hall to be using the term relative surplus value analogically, the fact that he does not specify how this value is realized is insignificant. Based on the work of Buzgalin and Kolganov (2013), it is reasonable to believe that some of the value academics create takes the form of an intellectual rent captured by rent-seeking senior university managers. This is enough to establish that academics are exploited, which forms the main premise in the argument about academic proletarianization.…”