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This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

Doctors' labour and medicines are special necessities for human survival and evolution. Since China launched the healthcare reform, the theoretical circles' discussions have not yet clarified the respective special properties of doctors' labour and medicines as goods and the internal relations between doctors' labour and medicines at the level of the theoretical basis.

Health is a prerequisite for people's all-round development, a precondition for economic and social development and the people's common aspiration. The all-round moderately prosperous society could not be achieved without people's all-round health.

The authors believe the socialist relation between doctors' labour and medicines with Chinese characteristics should be one that is people-oriented, and the corporatization of hospitals or the capitalization of doctors' labour should be avoided.

In this paper, the authors explore the particularity of doctors' labour, particularity of medicine production, circulation, consumption and the internal relations between doctors' labour and medicines by using the analytical approach of Marxist political economy while considering the special roles of doctor's labour and medicines in the reproduction of labour power and put forward the theoretical basis for the segregation of doctor's labour and medicines.

This chapter pulls together the main strands of Child Labour in Global Society, and addresses their implications for the sociological study of children’s lives, schooling and slavery.

In popular and scholarly discourses there is a tendency to emphasize the differences between the social lives of children and those of adults rather than the similarities and continuities; to misrepresent children’s social activities in comparison with those of adults; to rationalize the differential way in which children’s social activities and participation are assessed and rewarded relative to those of adults; and to fortify children’s actual and/or assumed marginal situation in modern society.

There are sociological gains to be had from emphasizing the comparable features and structural links between ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ due especially to the common participation of children and adults in productive labour.

The way in which children’s social activities are differentially assessed and rewarded is reflected in how children are denied full citizenship rights, and so are non-citizens.

In particular, children are denied the right to freely exchange their labour power on the labour market.

While viewing educational labour as forced labour does not sit well with ideas about children and childhood in modern society, doing so is consistent with the element of compulsion in for instance the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Being compulsorily required to perform educational labour is indicative of how in modern societies children are owned and in slavery, not just of the de facto kind, but also of the de jure kind.

This article aims to discuss the effects of unpaid reproductive labour on labour productivity and production. We make use of a Marxist approach, recognising in its method and categories the necessary and adequate tools in order to disclose reality. Capitalism is regarded as patriarchal, and patriarchy as a set of social relations that dominate women and women’s labour-power for the benefit of men and capital. We argue that unpaid reproductive labour involves both class and gender struggles, which affect in a contradictory manner the capitalist accumulation process. Such assertion is reached by using an analytical instrument (based on linear algebra) developed in order to observe the impact that an insufficient fulfilment of the workers’ necessities has on labour productivity and production.

The reproduction conditions of capitalism are hard to specify, the phrase itself being too abstract to be meaningful. Another way to find the specific distinguishing features of capitalist reproduction conditions is to seek the same conditions in a socialist economy. Socialists will tend to want a more comprehensive welfare state, but the lack of a welfare state will not mean that the economy is not socialist. Reproduction conditions of both types of economy would be very similar, the reproduction of labour power being achieved by a variety of arrangements either more or less harsh, or more or less comprehensive, without damaging the economy. The welfare state is seen as a desirable feature of socialism in its own right, rather than because of its economic contribution.

The sociology of childhood is fraught with problems, not least those centred on the idea, notion or concept of ‘childhood’, and in particular, the issue of how to define, distinguish and identify ‘childhood’ for sociological purposes. The study, analysis and understanding of childhood hinge upon how ‘childhood’ is defined, either explicitly or implicitly, one problem being the plethora of quite diverse approaches in both popular and sociological discourses. While there cannot be a correct definition of ‘childhood’, there can be a best definition, such as for sociological purposes, those of making sense of ‘childhood’ in particular and of social life, relationships and experience in general.

The cycle of external indebtedness of dependent countries has become a huge constraint on any strategy for radical social change.

Argentina has recently entered a new process of debt overhang and renegotiation with the International Monetary Fund and private global creditors. The dominant debate around the country's foreign debt revolves around the conditions that can guarantee the sustainability of repayment. The underlying objective is to remain in the debt system that produces and reproduces dependency.

This chapter will seek to analyze the question of debt sustainability from another point of view: Is it possible to guarantee the (financial) sustainability of the debt at the same time as guaranteeing the sustainability of life? Our argument is that by remaining in the global debt system, Argentina creates conditions that violate the requirements for the sustainability of human and nonhuman life. Drawing on a discussion from Marxist dependency theory and the traditions of Marxist feminism and environmentalism, we will discuss how the debt sustainability argument presupposes the impossibility of reproducing life. In particular, we will show how the conditions required to guarantee debt sustainability in Argentina entail the deepening of the superexploitation of the “productive” and “reproductive” labor force, and the exacerbation of extractivism, putting social reproduction in crisis.

The purpose of this second part of this special issue is to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of Soviet society. It is not possible to analyse such a society in all its complexities within the space of one study. There are, however, some economic relations which determine society's major features. We believe that commodity‐production relations in the Soviet Union are of this type.