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 longterm trends in the IPE and to the growth of new competitors, mainly from emerging countries.

This article analyses the origins of the methodological nationalism that characterizes the new developmental economics by examining Friedrich List's work. It argues that the international sphere had a primary importance in political economy from the sixteenth century onwards, and that classical political economists elaborated, although contradictorily, elements of a theory of uneven and combined development. List reinforced a vision of development as non-antagonistic, invoking extra-economic factors in order to present late industrialization as beneficial for the nation as a whole. Affirming the centrality of labour, Marx's critique of List offers deep insights into the political economy of development.

This article aims at contributing to current debates on tbe 'new imperialism' by presenting the main results of a reading of Marx's Capital in light of his vmtings on colonialism, which were unknown in the early Marxist debate on imperialism. It aims to prove that, in his main work, Marx does not analyse a national economy or -correspondingly -an abstract model of capitalist society, but a world-polarising and ever-expanding system. This abstraction allows the identification of the laws of development of capitalism and its antagonisms, and reflects the tendency of the capital of the dominant states, by making permanent recourse also to methods of so-called 'primitive accumulation', to expand and increase the exploitation ofworkers worldviide, and, at the same time, the cooperation between them. What, for Marx, was later deñned as imperialism is the concrete form of the process of'globalisation' of the capital of the dominant states. With the development of his analysis, Marx became increasingly aware of the economic and political consequences of imperialism. In his activity within the First Intemational, with regard to the question of Irish independence, he affirmed the fundamental importance of building a real solidarity between class struggles in imperialist countries and anti-colonial resistance in colonised and dependent countries. His examination of imperialism and internationalist perspective were downplayed, denied, if not completely reversed in the interpretation and systématisation of his thought by reformist leaders within the Second International. In their attempt to react against this tendency and develop an analysis and a political strategy adequate to the new phase of generalised imperialist expansion, increased inter-imperialist rivalries and rising anti-colonial resistance, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin reaffirmed the centrality of the critique of imperialism at the economic and at the political levels. Even if they were partially unaware of this, they thus developed and expanded on some aspects already present in Marx's work.Keywords capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, internationalism, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA^) * I am gratefijl to the participants of the IIPPE Second International Workshop in Procida, where I presented an initial version of this paper, and to Alex Anievas, Alex Callinicos, Adam Hanieh, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Abelardo Marina Flores and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper. I especially thank John Smith for tbis valuable help with the various versions of this article, and for our discussions on the question of imperialism and the law ofvalue. 65 Koninklijkf Brill NV, lx;idi;n, 2(113 HOI: l(l.im:VI.SH»2()BX.|2;S4i;«)() ii8