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This article interrogates Marx’s critique of political economy in the context of the global South and southern epistemologies. It first traces the contradictory roots of a non-Eurocentric conception of history within Adam Smith. Recovering Marx’s silenced sociologies of colonialism in his writings and notebooks, it then shows that Marx incorporated colonialism and imperialism into his analysis of accumulation. The antagonism between wage-labour and capital needs to be understood as a global tendency, encompassing a hierarchy of forms of exploitation and oppression. Marx’s support for the Taiping revolution (1850–1864) played a crucial, albeit often ignored, role in his theorisation. It allowed him to recognise the living potential for anti-colonial struggles and international solidarities, thus breaking with Eurocentric accounts of history. The article concludes that it is crucial to sociology’s global futures that it reconnects with the critique of political economy, and actively learns from the anti-imperialist South.

This article analyses the re-emergence of the working poor phenomenon in Western Europe. Critically engaging with comparative welfare regimes literature on in-work poverty (IWP), it argues that an international political economy (IPE) perspective is key to understanding the economic and international dimensions of IWP. By focusing on three countries belonging to different welfare regimes, namely Britain, Germany and Italy, the article examines the relationship between production restructuring, IWP trends and the nature of work, with particular attention to working-hour dynamics. It argues that the increasing IWP observed in these countries since the outbreak of the global economic crisis is linked to long-term trends in the IPE and to the growth of new competitors, mainly from emerging countries.

The link between crisis and revolution was one of the main thrusts of Marx's research. This has generally been interpreted as an attempt on Marx's part to understand how economic crises can trigger social revolution. Pradella discusses the international aspects of Marxs critique of political economy in the light of his research notebooks, his journalistic articles, and Das Kapital. I first argue that Marx's attempt to understand the defeat of the 1848 revolutions pushed him to develop an international analysis of accumulation and crisis. He also discusses why Marx understood the Civil War as the completion of the process of the United States achieving national independence.

The wave of strikes in the logistics sector since 2008 is by far the most important struggle that has developed in Italy in the wake of the global economic crisis. In this article we reflect on its potential for the renewal of the labour movement. We ground our discussion in an analysis of global production transformations and migration as a factor of working class re-composition. We show that in Italy the crisis is determining an acute process of deindustrialisation, while austerity and harshening immigration restrictions are reinforcing the deregulation and racialisation of employment relation. Deindustrialisation, however, is matched by the growth of the logistics sector and its reorganisation along the lines of Just-in-Time production, which actually strengthens workers’ bargaining power at the point of production. After describing working conditions in the sector, we present the main characteristics of logistics struggles. The mainly immigrant logistics workers have been able to exercise their power through blockades and strikes, obtaining improved agreements with some of the main logistics companies. In a context of increasingly generalised precarity, these struggles can inspire workers in other sectors and promote a process of international class re-composition.

A growing body of scholarship has addressed Hegel's analysis of the social question and of European expansionism. An equally significant literature has focused on his philosophy of history, discussing its Eurocentrism or even his racist distortions. Study of the link between Hegel's political economy and his philosophy of history reveals the centrality of labor and of historical evolution in his work. This permitted Hegel to overcome, in part, the naturalizing approach of the classical economists and to identify some contradictions of the system. As he also ended up by naturalizing it, however, Hegel promoted European expansionism on the basis of a Eurocentric vision that clashes with the universalist perspective of the Philosophy of Right.

This article examines the recent dynamics of European imperialism in Libya in the light of Marx's theory of the global reserve army of labour. It analyses the limited advance of Western imperialism in Libya in the decade before the 2011 uprisings, the interactions between local, regional and international forces during and after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention, and, finally, the evolving migratory patterns from Libya. In this light, the instability along the southern and eastern Mediterranean coastline - a product of the uprisings and the forms of political reactions they unleashed - is simultaneously a security threat and a channel of migratory movements to European capitalism.

In Western Europe (the EU15), the economic crisis erupted in 2007/08 and consequent austerity programmes are leading to a general, but uneven, worsening of labour conditions (Hermann, 2014). Unemployment levels have reached record high inter-country differences: in the second half of 2014, they ranged from 5 per cent in Germany to 6 per cent in the UK, 12 per cent in Italy and around 25 per cent in Spain and Greece (Eurostat). Between 2010 and 2012, real wages declined by more than 3 per cent in Italy and the UK, by almost 7 per cent in Portugal and Spain, and by 23 per cent in Greece (Schulten, 2013). According to the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), between 2007 and 2012, the number of the poor increased by 8.5 millions, reaching nearly 92 millions (almost one-fourth of the population). In 2012, poverty affected 9 per cent of workers (+1 percentage point greater than in 2007), increasing also both in Italy (10 per cent) and the UK (9 per cent). Trends in severe material deprivation are even more dramatic, with an increase by 125 per cent in the first five years of the crisis (from 1.9 per cent in 2007 to 4.3 per cent in 2012).