Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy

This article interrogates the concept of ‘working people’. Lenin and other classical Marxists commonly used terms like labouring people, working people, or rural poor. Typically, they were used as descriptive, or, at best, as terms of political art rather than theoretical science. The inspiration in this article for the use of the term ‘working people’ comes from Walter Rodney. Building on previous work, the article relates the concept of working people to a modified definition of primitive accumulation under neo-liberalism, that is, as a process of surplus extraction by capital based on expropriation of a part of necessary consumption of the producer. It is argued that this is the material basis common to all sectors of what is here understood as working people.

The recurrent crises of financial capitalism that has erupted within core countries have resulted in a double cost-transfer to countries in the Global South in conditions where the South suffers from political upheaval, economic down turns and social unrest. Encountering the challenges of global financialization and de-industrialization, the Global South needs to strengthen national sovereignty over common resources and enhance its capability of reorganizing the labour force, in order to protect the livelihood of the majority. Other than the usual approach of providing more urban jobs, an alternative more socially and culturally beneficial to society in the long term is to enhance local resilience against globalization and reactivate rural communities to promote jobs as well as reincorporate young people. Though the Chinese government’s central policy of ‘New Socialist Countryside’ attempts to absorb the crises of overproduction and unemployment through large scale domestic investment in basic infrastructure and social welfare in rural areas, it does not necessarily strengthen local resilience. Local resilience evolves through initiatives from below for social transformation through self-organization, popular participation, reciprocity and ecological practices.

This article critically reviews the contemporary global production network (GPN) analyses from the perspective of Marxian political economy. ¹ The GPN analyses focus on rents created at various nodes of the production network, and it ignores the fact that returns from interventions at specific stages in the value chain are not independent of the entire process of surplus creation and realization. Rents from innovation depend on the movement of the average capital in the particular industry and the way political economy of institutions allow certain ‘scarcities’ remain protected while others being drawn into the realm of competition. The article also argues that the GPN analyses hardly explain the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of firms within such networks. It is argued that the dynamics is primarily governed by the relative position of individual capital and its technical composition with reference to the capital that assumes average levels of technology in that industry at a particular point of time.

China became the world’s largest market for industrial robots in 2013. The robotic revolution gained pace and occurred after the 2008 financial crisis as many export-oriented firms coped with dwindling orders, rising labour costs and growing concerns over occupational safety. Unlike workers in the Global North who experienced automation in the 1960s and 1970s against a backdrop of strong union activism, whether semi-proletarian peasant-workers in China ultimately enjoy the ‘beneficial’ effects of industrial upgrading is questionable. However, very little social science research has investigated how automation, in light of the negative consequences of unemployment and deskilling, can continue to be advanced. Drawing on Beverley Silver’s concept of workers’ power, this article explores how workers’ marketplace and workplace bargaining power interfaces with technological change. The Chinese case may offer important lessons to those in the under-technologized South seeking to conceptualize strategies for social change in the context of industrial upgrading.

This essay examines the changing nature of farm wage labour in the context of the extensive redistributive land reform since 2000. Using field research from two districts in Zimbabwe with contrasting agro-ecology and socio-economic patterns, it shows that agrarian wage labour is not the preserve of large-scale capitalist farms (LSCFs), which it is usually associated with. The new agrarian structure dominated by the peasantry not only employs an expanded base of unpaid family labourers, but also employs ‘informal’ wage labour whose character and conditions of employment are qualitatively different from the full and part-time labour of the past. Yet, there is continuation of the super-exploitation of agrarian wage labourers that is reflected by the payment of poor wages and differing degrees of the institution of the residential labour tenancy in both the old and new farm compounds. Landlessness and/or land shortage continues to be a key characteristic of farm wage labourers as in the past suggesting the persistence of the labour reserve dynamic.

This article reviews the recent growth period in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries up to the current crisis, to provide an assessment of trends observed in the world of labour. Our assessment includes demographic trends, the employment structure, trends in unemployment and wages and the trajectory of social, racial and gender inequalities. We argue that the LAC region has undergone significant structural changes due to shifting positions in the international division of labour. The rural exodus has persisted, but also the industrialization patterns of the past have given way to renewed emphasis on primary goods exports, as well as new specialization patterns which favour low paying jobs in services or industries of the ‘maquila’ type. The informal, or low productivity, sector has also expanded. The economic boom of the 2000s had some positive distributional effects, but made limited inroads into the established racial and gender hierarchies, which found expression in persisting super-exploitation and extreme levels of violence and mass incarceration.

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Rana P. Behal (Eds.), The Vernacularization of Labour Politics. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2016, 950 INR, pp. 348, ISBN: 9789382381822.

Deni Irineu Alfaro Rubbo (2016), Párias da terra: o MST e a mundialização da luta camponesa [Pariahs of the Earth: The MST and the Globalization of the Peasant Struggle]. São Paulo: Alameda, p. 323, R$ 52 (Brazil) USD 48.16.