Proletarianization

At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian Empire’s 5.2 million Jews were in crisis. Having quintupled in number since 1800, they were substantially impoverished and crammed into Russia’s 25 westernmost provinces. Some pinned their hopes on emigration, others on being granted permission to live in the Russian interior. Some labored with hand tools in dingy workshops but most were forced to eke out a living as petty merchants and paupers. Hardly any were able to find work in Russia’s large, mechanized factories.

In this context, the young Yakov Leshchinsky, influenced in equal measure by Marx and the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha-am, embarked on a lifelong task of analyzing the fate of the Jewish people. In The Jewish Worker in Russia (1906), a combination political pamphlet, theoretical excursus and empirical analysis, he established a foundation for the ideology of the Zionist Socialist Workers Party, presaged modern sociological concepts explaining the limited proletarianization and industrialization of the Jewish working class, and gave substance to the theory by analyzing a large body of unique statistical data, mainly from official sources and a quasi-survey of Russian Jews funded by the Jewish Colonization Association. It was a landmark work that underscored the limitations of pure Marxism, Zionism, and liberalism; led eventually to the view that Jews would be best off seeking democracy, socialism, and personal and cultural autonomy in many geographical centers; and foretold the course of Leshchinsky’s own life and career as a founding father of Jewish social science, Director of YIVO’s Economics and Statistics Department, and resident of Ukraine, Switzerland, Russia, Poland, Germany, and the United States who spent his last years in Israel.

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my paper ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’, I once again reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics, but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.

This paper focuses on three decades of agrarian reform policies and the resulting peculiarity of the development trajectory in Bangladesh. I interrogate the ways in which the reforms have led to a paradoxical situation consisting of partial protelarianization in attempting to promote a market-based economy. I contend that the particular positioning of the state is central to understanding this dialectic between proletarianization and the persistence of small peasants amid a huge rush towards the formation of a capitalist market economy. I conclude that the partial nature of agrarian transformation that we now experience in Bangladesh may not be resolved in favour of a complete proletarianization of small peasants in the foreseeable future.

Ky libër analizon një trajektore të modernitetit, në mënyrë të veçantë si formatohet një shoqëri njerëzore kur shteti dhe institucionet e tij e projektojnë dhe e planifikojnë modernitetin për njerëzit dhe grupet shoqërore. Në fokus të tij është shoqëria shqiptare gjatë socializmit shtetëror apo komunizmit dhe praktikat modernizuese që shteti ndërmori gjatë periudhës në fjalë.

“Land” being an important factor, plays a crucial role in development, considered as one of the important aspects of “Urban Politics” and work as an instrument in structuring it. Land owners play a key holder as they can shape the growth and market economy of the cities.  When you analyze the land pattern, you will observe that the majority of the contemporary land in urban centers belongs to an elite group called “Urban elites” which once belonged to the farmers and small landholders and traceable chains could easily find the link to the “Political elites” in land grabbing. Land grabbing is a very popular phenomenon which uses the power of politics and acquires Public land without any regards to public interest. The “seizing of land”  and leasing it for the sake of one’s personal interest and involvement of political elites by virtue of having political power defined the phenomenon as “licensed exclusion” (Hall et al. 2011: 27) and this majorly affect the small farmers or landholders who existed at the periphery of the urban centers. This paper will study the question of land with the help of a very famous land scam of the Gurugram-Manesar Industrial Model Township. Indeed the case is still in the Supreme Court and investigation is under CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation), though we will try to analyze the situation from the lens of urban politics, and will try to understand the concept of space and the role of political elites in the creation of urban spaces.

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

Revolutionaries in the 1950s offered this prospect to the Chinese people: a highly egalitarian society, the product of land reform, collectivization and nationalization, with low but gradually rising income and welfare provisions for all, would chart a course toward mutual prosperity on foundations of socialist development. The key lay in restriction of markets and transfer of the surplus to the state for investment centered in heavy industry in the cities and collective agriculture in the countryside, eventually enabling China to overcome poverty and underdevelopment. This paper assesses the nature and impact of that low consumption socialist regime then and the subsequent strategies that have sustained low consumption for labor in city and countryside in the subsequent market and capitalist transition. We locate the discussion in relation to theories of original accumulation, proletarianization, wage stagnation, and low consumption in the emerging capitalist world economy of which China has been a part since the 1970s. We hope to add to that discussion by exploring a range of structures that have produced incomplete proletarianization and inequality during two periods of socialist transition (1950s to 1970) and capitalist transition (1970s to present).

This paper represents a critical engagement with Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical and prescriptive exposition of the condition of existence within current Western ‘hyper-industrial’ societies. I contend that Stiegler’s oeuvre is permeated by a complicity with capitalist distinctions, practices and forms of exploitation, as he restricts agency and the possibility for social transformation to the Western middle-class. The argument is developed thus. I proceed by offering the reader, through a Stieglerian approach, an illustration of the pharmacological dimensions and aporetic effects of the digital news media upon memory, work and proletarianisation. I then identify Stiegler’s prescriptions and motivations for a deproletarianised future as being shadowed his depoliticised outlook, as he seeks to oppose consumerism, leaving capitalist and colonial social relations untouched. Finally, I highlight the ethnocentricity and classism which permeate Stiegler’s work, impeding possibilities for emancipatory politics.

Based on a detailed review of the existing literature, this article makes four arguments regarding the dispossessory effects of development projects in the neoliberal era. First, it redefines "accumulation by dispossession" as the state's transfer of lower-class people's small-scale private property or common property over land, water, and other resources to capital through extra-economic and/or economic coercion. In doing so, the paper stresses the need to clearly distinguish the state's deliberate manipulation of the market for dispossessory purposes from the centralization of capital through market competition. Second, it suggests that while the goal of expanding capitalist production shaped dispossessory practices in the era of national developmentalism, the link between production and dispossession has been less direct and relatively weaker in the neoliberal era. Hence, due to the rapid development of labor-saving technology and increasing significance of the real estate sector, capital prioritizes the land and natural resources of the lower-class people over the exploitation of their labor. Third, international development institutions like the World Bank depoliticize development in order to naturalize and legitimize dispossession. Finally, this paper points to the potentials of and challenges to possible alliances of workers' movements and popular struggles against dispossession.

This essay describes trends in the organization of work that have laid the groundwork for the adoption of interactive AI-driven instruction tools, and the technological innovations that will make intelligent tutoring systems truly competitive with human teachers. Since the origin of occupational specialization, the collection and transmission of knowledge have been tied to individual careers and job roles, specifically doctors, teachers, clergy, and lawyers, the paradigmatic knowledge professionals. But these roles have also been tied to texts and organizations that can disseminate knowledge independently from professionals. Professionals and organizations turn knowledge into texts and tools that enable lay people to access knowledge without the intermediation of professionals or organizations. In the 21st century, one emerging tool for transmitting knowledge is the intelligent tutoring system. This paper examines how technological, epistemic, and economic trends in education are supporting the routinization, proletarianization, and automation of the occupation of teaching, leading to the increasing substitution of intelligent tutoring systems for human instruction.

Some trends, such as standardized curricula and testing, both restrict teachers’ professional autonomy and facilitate the creation of pedagogical tools. Other trends reduce teachers’ ability to resist automation. The growth of adjunct teaching and paraprofessional roles in higher education allows organizations to take over and rationalize parts of the traditional teacher role. Faculty evaluations and learning outcomes assessment weaken professional claims to be the sole arbiters of instructional quality and student learning. The widespread use of intelligent tutoring systems also depends on the sophistication of software capable of performing the social-emotional and cognitive roles that educators perform. Eventually, pedagogical software will be able to interactively individualize curricula to the needs and interests of every learner, more cheaply, quickly, and accurately than any human teacher. Assessment of learning will be continuous, and certification of learning will be for specific skills instead of broad area competencies. Intelligent tutoring systems will help transition education from its medieval and industrial-era model to more accessible and flexible continuing education for employment and life enrichment.

Planning Labour draws attention to the transformation of the industrial city of Cluj in the early period of the communist takeover while appropriately placing its focus on the industrial factory as the terrain of molding not only the material foundation for the socialist economy but also workers’ subjectivities to turn them into the “New Soviet Man” (see Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain [1995]). The historical material and analysis that Cucu has compiled into six chapters bring to the forefront the peculiar nature of the socialist industrialization and modernization of Romanian cities and the nation as whole.

Relaciones Internacionales, nº 47, pp. 11-52

Este artículo vincula dos grandes acontecimientos histórico-mundiales: el auge del capitalismo tras 1492 y su crisis epocal actual, al final del Holoceno. El autor sostiene que la interminable acumulación de capital ha sido, desde el principio, posibilitada por la interminable conquista de la Tierra: la Gran Frontera. La ecología-mundo capitalista es un tipo peculiar de sociedad de clases que combina la acumulación monetaria con la apropiación excepcionalmente rápida del trabajo humano y planetario. La Gran Frontera es la zona de la Naturaleza Barata, uniendo dialéctica-mente la valorización del capital y la desvalorización ético-política de los humanos y del resto de la naturaleza, así, el racismo, el sexismo y el prometeísmo revelan ser pilares ideológicos fundamentales de la acumulación de capital. De manera crucial, la Gran Frontera ha permitido a las burguesías imperialistas avanzar en la productividad del trabajo, reducir los costes de los insumos y resolver las recurrentes crisis de sobreacumulación del capitalismo. Hoy en día, estamos asistiendo a la inversión geohistórica de la estrategia de la Naturaleza Barata del capitalismo. Se trata de la transición de la red de la vida como una dinámica de reducción de costes y aumento de la productividad a otra de maximización de costes y reducción de la productividad. La clase dominante y los economistas marxistas han entendido sus primeros signos como el “Gran Estancamiento”. Pero esto es sólo el principio; podríamos llamarlo una “crisis de señalización”. El Gran Estancamiento indica los primeros momentos de la Gran Implosión. Al igual que el cambio climático se entiende como un proceso no lineal que confunde los modelos biosféricos, la Gran Implosión es una dinámica no lineal a través de la cual las contradicciones del capitalismo en la red de la vida confunden los modelos lineales del cambio histórico. El capitalismo, frente a este panorama, es mucho más vulnerable de lo que creemos, y, sobre todo, lo es a la revuelta que el Proletariado Planetario está cociendo a fuego lento.

Agrarian structures based on small peasant property can have two opposite kinds of impact on urban wages. In the first type, stable smallholder farming bringing high returns puts upward pressure on wages. In the second type, smallholder farming that does not bring sufficient returns leads to semi-proletarianization in which workers' access to rural sources of income functions as wage subsidy and puts downward pressure on wages.This paper argues that the situation in Turkey between 1950 and 1980 fits the second type. By pointing out the factors that changed the attitude of the migrant labourers towards class struggle from relative passivity to increasing militancy, it suggests that instead of the rural ties of the emerging working class, the main reason behind the dramatic rise in urban wages in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s was the working-class struggle throughout the period.

This essay compares three texts produced in the decade of “secular stagnation” following the 2007/2008 recession, paying particular attention to Darin Bradley’s near-future dystopian novel, Chimpanzee (2014) and reading it as a “vernacular” text (Cherniavsky 2017) positioned to engender more incisive provocations than the theory of the same period. I set Chimpanzee beside Lawrence Summers’s recent renewal of the secular stagnation thesis as well as the alternative approach offered by the Endnotes collective under the heading of “the holding pattern.” I argue that, whereas Endnotes and Chimpanzee both attune us to deeper trajectories within capitalism and therefore offer sharper hermeneutics than Summers’s theory, Chimpanzee further complicates Endnotes’ prognoses by rendering emergent historical contradictions available as narrative tensions. The novel estranges the present in a critical-utopian fashion and opens up as contestable what in Endnotes appear as shrewdly diagnosed realities.

"Uncovering the grim face of Indonesian mining workers in the blockade of market fundamentalism"  [Menyingkap Wajah Muram Buruh Sektor Tambang di Indonesia dalam Blokade Fundamentalisme Pasar]

Dengan mengusung semangat politik “demokrasi yang menyejahterakan” pada periode pertama pemerintahannya (2014-2019), Jokowi kini kembali berkhidmat dalam devosi dan credo: “a rising tide lifts all boats” atau “trickle down effect” sebagai, meminjam istilah Tania Li (2012), “teknikalisasi permasalahan” dan solusi atas isu ketenagakerjaan dan kesejahteraan sebagai taruhan politik dalam periode pemerintahan kedua mendatang (2019-2024). Dalam surplus kepercayaan diri (pemerintahan) Jokowi itulah, tulisan ini akan memulai pokok kajian dengan melontarkan sebuah gugatan sebagai titik tolak dimulainya tulisan ini. Dalam blokade “proyek politik” neoliberalisme atau “fundamentalisme pasar” yang bias kepentingan kelas elit oligarkis, apakah “eksperimentasi pemenuhan kontrak politik” dengan cara “mengundang investasi seluas-luasnya demi membuka lapangan kerja sebesarbesarnya” itu akan terealisir dan benar-benar menjawab kebutuhan warga negara atas “pekerjaan” dan “kesejahteraan” dalam rentang waktu lima tahun mendatang?

Penyajian gagasan akan terpilah ke dalam lima sub bahasan berikut: pertama, pembongkaran terhadap mitos “demokrasi yang menyejahterakan”; kedua, tilikan historis singkat tentang rekam jejak penyesuaian neoliberal sebagai proyek politik kelas atas di Indonesia, sejak era Orde Baru hingga era reformasi. Ketiga, ilustrasi singkat tentang salah satu register “proyek politik kelas atas” di sektor tambang bernama “Kawasan Industri Morowali” (KIM) yang merepresentasikan praktik neo-extractivism. Paparan dilanjutkan dengan menyajikan hasil investigasi lapangan tentang pergulatan hidup dan penghidupan buruh sektor tambang di KIM. Keempat, sajian daftar catatan dan posisi kritis yang dirangkum dari sebaran gagasan dalam empat sub bahasan terdahulu.

A pdf is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu .  Consumption is a fundamental process in capitalism comparable to wage labor production.  It is most usefully studied through tracking material provisioning of everyday life ("reproduction").  To do this, the methods of systematic material culture documentation, with a historical dimension, is described in detail.  This enables two key inquiries: how household material technologies are introduced and transformed over time (how people become consumers of extra-local goods); and the paths by which material provisioning (material goods and supply flows) arrive at households.  These goods are not just "possessed" as in typical consumption studies; they are objects of (mostly unpaid) reproductive labor, a neglected domain of activity.  Households are also internally unequal and divided, and relations of power of generation and gender are linked to material culture and various kinds of labor.  A fundamental concept is consumer proletarianization, in which people (or regional networks) lose control of the means of consumption (material culture provisioning) and must use cash incomes to purchase the inputs required for survival.  This in turn connects to a key typological contrast with respect to household economies between flow-through households (money inputs and purchases) and flow-conserving households (peasant economies).  The chapter has a large volume of detailed documentation of material culture and related economics.

This essay responds to "Money as Art: The Form, the Material, and Capital" by the Marxist economist Costas Lapavitsas with reference to the triple manifestation of crisis in the United States during the spring months of 2020. By triangulating the role of money in the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing mass unemployment, and the historical nationwide revolt in response to the police murder of George Floyd predicated on a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, Nicholas Huber makes a three-part claim. First, that acceptance of the Marxist theory of fetishism forecloses the possibility of conceiving of capitalist money as art in the sense developed by Lapavitsas, insofar as the latter tends toward transhistorical concepts of both art and money. Following from this, any aesthetic function of money in the capitalist mode of production is inseparable from its total social function; that is, capitalist money is at once an economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic mediation unlike any other. Finally, Huber draws on Louis Marin's typology of the frame in correspondence with Erik Olin Wright's integrated class analytic framework to argue that the question of whether money is art or not leads us to a dead end. Huber suggests that a crisis such as the one unfolding in 2020 raises instead the more challenging question of what social system must come into being, such that a theory of capitalist money as art becomes intelligible.

Details the way liberalization changes in United States Telecommunication Policy (1996 Act) brought about the emergence of proletarianization, namely the global flow of unregulated digital content.  Explores and redefines the theory of proletarianization through the flow of previously regulated cultural content. Includes case studies on terrorism and internet pornography.

Marx'ın sermayeye dayalı üretim analizi, sermayenin sonsuz birikme ve sınırsız emek gücüne ulaşma kapasitesini varsayar. Proleterleştirilebilir nufusun sınırlarına ulaşılmış bir dünya, bizim bildiğimiz kapitalizmin temel bir varsayımının ortadan kalkması anlamına gelir. Emeğin meta formunun, ya da değer üreten tek emek formunun emek gücü olduğunu varsayarsak, sermayenin ulaşabileceği emek gücünün nufus bakımından sınırına gelinmek üzere olması (/ hali hazırda gelinmiş oluşu) üretilebilir değer kitlesinin sabitlenmesi demektir.

The end of capitalism requires the revolutionary agency of the working-class. Traditionally, this agency was forged at the front-line of production: in the factories, on the assembly lines, down the mines. But what happens when the workplace no longer generates the skills and habits of militant political actors? One prominent argument, articulated by Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey amongst others, is that the relevant actors will be forged within the urban environment. Drawing on Georg Simmel's 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', I argue that high-density, urban living fosters subjectivities, from which members of the working-class are not obviously spared. In particular, the blasé outlook and social reserve that are erected as defence mechanisms against city living, work against the cultivation of the sociability, skills and habits that are a necessary part of any radical political agency. With this in mind, more attention needs to be paid to the quality of specific urban environments, the challenges they pose and the potentials they offer, as a way of following the proletariat out of the factory and onto the streets. * "What men call love is very meager, very restricted and very feeble, compared to this ineffable orgy, to this holy prostitution of the soul that abandons itself entirely, poetry and charity included, to the unexpectant arrival, to the passing stranger." Charles Baudelaire, Crowds Understanding the development of revolutionary agency is a central part of Marxism. Without the midwifery of an epochal revolutionary agent, economic development would have stalled long ago. And, though it is hardly mainstream thought that capitalism will, can or must be transcended, there is at least a growing sense that if we cannot establish something else soon, disaster on a planetary scale looms large (Streeck 2016, 5). For a revolution to be initiated and brought about, the conditions that will bring about

This paper examines the actions that millions of “new poor” Argentines took when confronted with impoverishment during the country’s economic crisis in 2002.  Drawing upon World Bank and Latinobarómetro data, it explores how their distinct understandings of citizenship, possession of certain human, social and financial capitals and aspects of their middle-class identity shaped the very specific forms of resistance that they adopted compared to the structural poor.  It provides insights into why some citizens perceived their hardship as a political problem, formed collective grievances and manifested their resistance through protest, while others located its causes in their own deficiencies so confined their responses to individual self-improvement strategies.  It also finds that differences in personal biographies, experiences of poverty and the diachronic spaces available to protest influenced individuals’ choice of action.  The paper concludes by reflecting upon the implications of these findings for future research into how middle-class citizens resist pauperization.

This study investigates the changing positions of social classes and status groups during the capitalist transformation of agriculture in Turkish Çukurova region throughout the last century from the perspective of Yaşar Kemal's literary works. The paper opens with a methodological discussion on the use of literary works in historical and sociological studies. It stresses three points regarding the agrarian change in Çukurova. Firstly, the lower classes' resistance to the capitalist agrarian transformation had a wide scope spanning from the Luddite-type machine-breaking to land and labor struggles. Secondly, proletarianized villagers viewed wage work as a temporary rather than a permanent condition, which would help them accumulate funds and engage with small and medium scale farming. Finally, transformations of classes and status groups were closely related. While the previous generations of landlords remained loyal to pre-capitalist social norms, failed to adapt to capitalist transformation and thereby declined, new generations started to rise, embracing profit maximization as the main goal.

Abstract This article discusses the Soviet conceptualization of labor and its importance for state building and modernization in the USSR. The article helps to explicate the ways in which labor migration was an integral part of the socialist development project in regions such as Tajikistan. Through the case study of the Nurek Dam, it considers the processes by which the Soviet proletariat was produced through work, mobility, and socialization. It ultimately presents an argument about the mutual constitution of the Soviet state and Soviet citizens, whose labor embodied the state’s idealized ‘mobile proletariat.’ Finally, it also outlines what the development of the ‘mobile proletariat’ and other ideals of labor came to mean for groups of peripheral subjects in the USSR – as well as what such boundaries may say about the limits of the Soviet modernization project in practice.

El desarrollo del capitalismo en el sector agropecuario uruguayo en los últimos treinta años modificó de modo irreversible un sector que permaneció prácticamente estancado durante las primeras ocho décadas del siglo XX. Entre otros, destaca el cambio en la composición interna de los trabajadores del sector, actualizando y renovando el debate sobre la proletarización en el campo. Este trabajo no aborda este fenómeno solo desde la transición del productor familiar de mercancías al asalariado, sino que se propone entender la proletarización como un cambio de composición dentro de los trabajadores agropecuarios que consolida relaciones de asalariamiento que progresivamente diluye las diferencias entre los obreros agrarios y no agrarios (o rurales y urbanos en términos clásicos). Entre las señas de identidad más relevantes de esta transformación se encuentra el mayor peso relativo del trabajo asalariado por sobre el familiar registrado en el censo agropecuario de 2011,  la generalización...

This article discusses the Soviet conceptualization of labor and its
importance for state building and modernization in the USSR. The
article helps to explicate the ways in which labor migration was an
integral part of the socialist development project in regions such as
Tajikistan. Through the case study of the Nurek Dam, it considers the
processes by which the Soviet proletariat was produced through work,
mobility, and socialization. It ultimately presents an argument about
the mutual constitution of the Soviet state and Soviet citizens, whose
labor embodied the state’s idealized ‘mobile proletariat.’ Finally, it also
outlines what the development of the ‘mobile proletariat’ and other
ideals of labor came to mean for groups of peripheral subjects in the
USSR – as well as what such boundaries may say about the limits of
the Soviet modernization project in practice.

Sharp controversy still exists over whether the Russian proletariat on the eve of the 1917 revolution comprised an urbanized, class-conscious community or a mass of semi-urbanized peasants rebelling against an alien industrial regime. We use published and archival data (church marriage records, county council statistics, and St. Petersburg worker blacklists) to argue against the "peasant"school. Specifically, we demonstrate the existence