Late 18th- and 19th-century laissez-faire ideology approved/disapproved of a wide range of social and economic categories: landownership, free/unfree labor-power, class formation and struggle, industrial production, and the state. Much of this discourse is shared by a variant of Marxism, the semi-feudal thesis, an influential participant in Third World development debates from the 1960s onwards. Currently, however, another variant of Marxist theory departs from the way both laissez-faire and the semi feudal thesis interpret the role of free/unfree labor-power in the course of class struggle. For exponents of both laissez-faire ideology and of the semi-feudal thesis, conflict is to eliminate unfree labor, a struggle waged by actual/potential capitalists solely against a backward landlord class in the name of future accumulation. As envisaged by the alternative Marxist variant, nowadays class struggle is undertaken by capitalists to retain unfree labor, thereby preventing the emergence/consolidation of a free worker and a possible socialist transition.
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