LABOUR-POWER ONCE MORE

 LABOUR-POWER ONCE MORE

Labour-Power Once More

PREFACE

This was my first attempt at getting one of my articles published. It failed. The referees and editors at Radical Philosophy rejected it. It was lost for many years. Then, in 2011, while sorting out some papers from old box files not looked at in decades, I came across it. Indeed, there were three copies of the article – at various stages in the writing process! One copy seemed more advanced than others as it rectified problems and issues thrown up by the other two copies. However, it was not the final copy: there were notes in the margins regarding changes to be made.

Thus, what we have here is a reconstruction of this third copy that includes the changes as suggested by the marginal comments. I do not expect to find the final copy, but then I did not expect to find these three drafts 20 years after the article disappeared! It definitely won’t emerge on some old floppy disk: the article was originally written on an Amstrad PCW 9512 dedicated word processor, with floppy disks smaller than the standard floppy disks, and a daisywheel printer. These disks, along with my Amstrad PCW 9512 went to Newham’s Jenkins Lane Reuse and Recycling Centre 20 odd years ago. You can still buy the Amstrad PCW 9512, with daisy-wheel printer, on e-Bay though!

I have decided to present this paper here as it has some material, especially on the subjective aspect of labour-power, that does not appear elsewhere in my work. In addition, for me it was a transitional article between Rikowski (1990) and my later work on labour-power (Rikowski, 2000, 2002 and 2024). I hope readers find it useful.

You can see ‘Labour-Power Once More’ at ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/414016573_Labour-Power_Once_More and at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/173605281/Labour_Power_Once_More