Introduction to the special issue of ROSE

This special issue of the Review of Social Economics is intended to demonstrate, and to partially survey, the state of Marxian theory in the social sciences. As such, the articles have been selected not just for their contribution toMarxism, but also for their representativeness of the state of play within the theory in its many dimensions. It just so happens thatmost of the scholars are also at career mid-points, or even earlier, making this special issue something of a harbinger of things to come, as this cohort of theorists matures and further develops its research program. The timing is, inmanyways, propitious. In theUnitedStatesbut alsobeyond, ideas associated with the Marxian tradition have suddenly become quite popular again, to the extent that advocacy for socialism has entered mainstream political culture. For decades, themeremention of the ‘S word’ was anathema, and anyone advocating it taken as out of touch with reality, or even suspicious. But over the past five years, as the crisis of neoliberalism continues to grow and the political establishment seems to have little to offer, calls for a revival of social democratic and socialist ideas have taken off. In this context, we are pleased that the papers in this issue engage many of the ideas that are circulating within the revitalized intellectual culture. Oneof the central issues in political economy is the dynamics of the employment relation. Whereas themainstream economic tradition views it as consensual, Marxists have maintained that it is essentially exploitative. But in order to cash out the claim, Marxists face a conceptual and a theoretical challenge. Conceptually, they need to explain what distinguishes exploitative relations, so that the normative basis for the critique of wage labor is clarified. And theoretically, they need to explicate the mechanisms that sustain the dominance of employers over wage laborers. Nicholas Vrousalis undertakes the former task, while Korkut Erturk tackles the latter. Vrousalis both builds upon, and amends, the important work of John Roemer, who developed a novel account of exploitation in the 1980′s. Roemer forcefully restated the case for