Of Marx and Makers: an Historical Perspective on Generative Justice

In Marxist frameworks “distributive justice” depends on extracting value through a centralized state. Many new social movements—peer to peer economy, maker activism, community agriculture, queer ecology, etc.—take the opposite approach, keeping value in its unalienated form and allowing it to freely circulate from the bottom up. Unlike Marxism, there is no general theory for bottom-up, unalienated value circulation. This paper examines the concept of “generative justice” through an historical contrast between Marx’s writings and the indigenous cultures that he drew upon. Marx erroneously concluded that while indigenous cultures had unalienated forms of production, only centralized value extraction could allow the productivity needed for a high quality of life. To the contrary, indigenous cultures now provide a robust model for the “gift economy” that underpins open source technological production, agroecology, and restorative approaches to civil rights. Expanding Marx’s concept of unalienated labor value to include unalienated ecological (nonhuman) value, as well as the domain of freedom in speech, sexual orientation, spirituality and other forms of “expressive” value, we arrive at an historically informed perspective for generative justice. 

The Worsening of the employment and work conditions and its relationship to the self-perceived health in European working population. Relevance and effects of the latest socioeconomic crisis

The recent crisis of the capitalistic economic system has altered the working conditions and occupations in the European Union. The recession situation has accelerated trends and has brought transformations that have been observed before. Changes have not looked the same way in all the countries of the Union. The social occupation norms, labour relations models and the type of global welfare provision can help underline some of these inequalities. Poor working conditions can expose workers to situations of great risk. This is one of the basic assumptions of the theoretical models and analytical studies of the approach to the psychosocial work environment. Changes in working conditions of the population seems to be important to explain in the worst health states. To observe these features in the current period of economic recession it has made a comparative study of trend through the possibilities of the European Working Conditions Survey in the 2005 and 2010 editions. It has also set different multivariate logistic regression models to explore potential partnerships with the worst conditions of employment and work. It seems that the economic crisis has intensified changes in working conditions and highlighted the effects of those conditions on the poor health of the working population. This conclusion can’t be extended for all EU countries; some differences were observed in terms of global welfare models.