Harvests of shame: enduring unfree labour in the twentieth-century United States, 1933–1964

This article reframes the discussion on vulnerable and exploited agricultural labour in twentieth-century United States using the overarching category of unfree labour. In order to do so, it bridges two usually distinct historiographies by linking the phenomenon of ‘peonage’ during the New Deal, with the one of immigrant contract labour in southern Florida, under the H2 visa. Archival research on the practices at the U.S. Sugar Corporation in southern Florida illustrates this link. The article draws on Federal archives, U.S. Government proceedings, papers of political activists and legal and labour scholarship to argue: firstly, that unfree labour has been an enduring feature of agricultural labour relations at regional level during the twentieth century, through both a transmission and a transformation of practices that had their origin in the control of black emancipated labour; secondly, that the introduction of `guest workers’ under the H2 and Bracero programme meant a modernisation in the practices of unfree labour, pivoting on the lack of citizenship rights, racial discrimination, debt at home and threat of deportation; and, finally, that the failure to recognise forms of legal and economic deprivation and coercion as unfree labour has hurt the ability of the United States to enforce protection of human rights at home.     

Colonial labour,Tawdenni and ‘L’enfer du sel’: the struggle from slave to free labour in a Saharan salt mine

Abstract

Can we understand the arrival of Capitalism in Africa by tracking labour – from unfree to free, from slave to wage? The question supposes slavery to lie at its heart, yet the conversation between labour and slave studies is in early stages. The sources are problematic: the colonial ‘language of labour’ was often political rhetoric camouflaging ongoing forms of slavery. Then, there was the question of how the metropole-incorporated colonies into its economy: French West Africa’s sun and sand offered few economic resources. One was salt. The Niger Bend economy depended on Tawdenni, a desert salt mine controlled by Saharans and exploited by their slaves. In 1910, it was predicted that the French abolition of slavery would spell the end of Tawdenni: “Never will a man from the South – unless a slave – give himself to this work”; what, therefore, was to be done? The paper challenges the view that engagement with colonial capitalism necessarily led directly or even inevitably from slavery to wage labour by exploring how Tawdenni’s servile labour system responded to French colonial attempts to combine political abolition and economic sustainability.     

Sugar and unfree labour: Reflections on labour control in the dominican republic, 1870–1935

This article takes issue with theories which suppose an essential contradiction between capitalist production and unfree labour relations. Using the history of sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic as a case study, it is argued that capitalist entrepreneurs tried very hard to restrict free wage labour relations. On the Dominican sugar plantations this goal was reached by a system of differential mechanisation which brought about a rigid separation between the mass of unskilled field workers and the restricted number of (semi‐) skilled workers. This labour division could be reproduced over a long period of time because the field workers were migrant labourers from Haiti liable to strong racial discrimination within Dominican society.     

Wage labour and capitalism: a comparative and historical analysis of Eritrea and Kenya

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain the development of capitalism in Eritrea and Kenya from a labour history perspective. Indeed, the assumption in this research is that capitalism can only be explained by taking into consideration free wage labour as one of the sine qua non conditions for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, the article looks at the paradigmatic socio-economic shifts: from unfree to free labour, from free to precarious labour and from unfree to precarious labour. These are the result of the complicated relationship that exists between capital and labour. The point of departure of the analysis is the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis on the structural origins of slavery, which despite severe criticism, it has been largely remained unchallenged until the present. In Eritrea, colonised by Italy, and Kenya, colonised by England, free wage labour fully developed between the nineteenth and twentieth century. This could be considered the era of the advent of capitalism, with the advent, for a fraction of the working population, of labour relations based on wages. The precarisation of life of free wage workers is also partially analysed in this article.     

Why Unfree Labour is Not ‘So-Called’: The Fictions of Jairus Banaji

In a recent critique of the deproletarianization thesis, which links the reproduction of unfree labour mainly - but not only - in Third World agriculture to class struggle prosecuted by capitalist producers, Banaji maintains in effect that there is no such thing as unfree labour. Equating the latter with nineteenth-century liberal ideas about freedom as consent, he conceptualizes all historical working arrangements simply as ‘disguised’ wage-labour that is free, a theoretically problematic claim first made during the Indian mode of production debate. Such a view, it is argued here, ignores the fact that unfree workers get paid and also appear in the labour market, but not as sellers of their own commodity. Moreover, by abolishing the free/unfree labour distinction, and adopting instead the view that all rural workers are simply ‘disguised’ hired labourers who are contractually ‘free’, Banaji aligns himself with anti-Marxist theory in general, and neoclassical economic historiography in particular.     

Beyond Liberalism: Marxist Feminism,Migrant Sex Work,and Labour Unfreedom

In this article, I use a Marxist feminist methodology to map the organisation of migrant sex workers’ socially reproductive paid and unpaid labour in one city and country of arrival, London, UK. I argue that unfree and ‘free’ (sexual) labour exists on a continuum of capitalist relations of (re)production, which are gendered, racialised, and legal. It is within these relations that various actors implement, and migrant sex workers contest, unfree labour practices not limited to the most extreme forms. My analysis reveals that many migrant sex workers have very limited ‘freedom’. This is in stark contrast to the classical liberal claim of sex worker rights activists and academics that the vast majority of migrant sex workers are free, and therefore not coerced, exploited or trafficked. I then consider whether the emerging labour approach to trafficking could help achieve ‘freedom’ for migrant sex workers. Advocates argue that anti-trafficking efforts must, and can, be refocused on extending minimum labour and social protections to all vulnerable workers. I argue that this approach is disconnected from material interests and history. Rather, migrant sex workers, sex worker rights activists, and all migrant and citizen workers and activists globally must collectively organise against ‘labour unfreedom’ and hence for meaningful control over their labour and lives.     

Is bonded labour a bound category? ‐Reconceptualising agrarian conflict in India

This article discusses the position of ‘agrarian struggle’ within agrarian labour relations in India. It is argued that local labour relations and conflicts should be understood within the context of a wider balance of power between the concerned groups, regionally as well as locally. When examining local relations from this perspective, a number of well‐established positions on agrarian conflict can be challenged. The interrelationship between patron‐client relations on the one hand, and (what is here labelled) class‐caste struggle on the other is reassessed, and it is found that they are not mutually opposed. The categories ‘unfree’ and ‘bonded’ labour relations are also reassessed. Such relations do not seem to necessarily entail the dominance normally expected. ‘Bonded’ labour relations may, in fact, not hamper collective initiative among the landless, whereas the ‘ general political dominance of the landed groups certainly may. The article is based on fieldwork data from Uttar Pradesh.     

The calculus of profit and labour‐time in Sudanese peasant agriculture

In this article I argue that discourse on peasants and social change has tended to rest on unwarranted evolutionist assumptions embedded in oppositional models of past and present. Through an examination of recent changes in Sudanese peasant agriculture, I seek to show that these changes cannot adequately be grasped in terms of transitions from domestic to commodity production or pre‐capitalist to capitalist modes of production. Rather, these changes have been internal to capitalism and reflect changes in the dynamics of capital accumulation in Sudan and the ways in which peasants have responded to the intrusive logic of capitalist calculation.     

The dynamics of rural poverty in Latin America

The development and perpetuation of a functional dualism between the subsistence sector and the commodity‐producing sector is an objective outcome of the laws of capital accumulation in the periphery of the world capitalist system. The necessity for this dualism derives from the drive of capitalists to maximise profits and thus maintain low wages. Its possibility arises from social disarticulation whereby labour's income does not participate in expanding the market for the modern sector. Through dualism, surplus value is increased not only by the orthodox means of central economies—principally increasing the productivity of work to reduce necessary labour embodied in wage goods—but, in addition, and dramatically more effectively, by collapsing the price of agricultural labour by an amount equal to the production of use‐values by the worker's family in the subsistence plot. In this way, subsistence agriculture supplies cheap labour to commercial agriculture which, in turn, supplies cheap food to the urban sector where it sustains low wages. Socially disarticulated accumulation and functional dualism between capitalist and precapitalist modes perpetuate primitive accumulation in the modern sector based on surplus extraction from the peasant sector fundamentally via the labour market. This specific form of overexploitation of rural labour implies a particular dynamic in the use of labour and natural resources in subsistence agriculture. The pattern of rural poverty and the subjective contradictions of peripheral capitalism can thus largely be understood by identifying the antagonistic contradictions to which the subsistence economy is subject in adjusting to domination.     

Capitalism and Bonded Labour in India: Reinterpreting Recent (Re-) Interpretations

Examined here is the way the link between capitalism and bonded labour has been interpreted and reinterpreted in the debate over the past half century about rural development in India. A number of those who initially equated debt bondage with a pre-capitalist production relation, and dismissed arguments that unfree labour and accumulation were compatible, changed their minds and espoused the interpretation they had previously opposed. Among the resulting errors perpetuated by more recent entrants to this debate is a misinterpretation of Marxist theory about both relational and systemic transition. The ensuing confusion has prevented them from understanding either the genesis of the debate about the role of unfreedom in advanced capitalism, or why – in the form of deproletarianisation – bonded labour currently serves the ends of the agribusiness enterprise.     

Reconsidering the links between poverty,international labour migration,and agrarian change: critical insights from Nepal

The role of international labour migration in processes leading to the (re)production of rural poverty in the rural South continues to shape critical academic and policy debate. While many studies have established that migration provides an important pathway to rural prosperity, they insufficiently analyse the profound effects that migration and remittances have on agrarian and rural livelihoods. This article uses the case of rural Nepal, where over half of the households are involved in foreign labour migration, as a ‘window’ to understand the processes shaping how migration effects poverty. The paper analyses how migration generates outcomes across the domains of rural people's changing relationship to land and agriculture, their experience of migration, and rural labour markets to advance our arguments. First, it argues that migration leads to the commodification of land, generating changes in patterns of land uses and tenancy relations. With respect to rural people's engagement with agriculture, migration generates both processes of ‘deactivation’ and ‘repeasantization’. Second, foreign migration offers an exit from poverty for some while also creating processes of deeper impoverishment for others. Third, migration leads to structural changes in rural labour markets, reducing the supply of agrarian labour. Consequently, in contrast to the simplifying ‘narrative’ accounts of a migration pathway out of poverty, this paper concludes that the effects triggered by migration are highly contradictory, providing an exit from poverty when linked to diversification strategies, while engendering rising inequality and rural differentiation.     

The value of Peasant labour power in a prolonged transition to capitalism

Like peasant populations in many areas of the world, the Aymara of southern Peru have been subjected to a variety of social, political and economic pressures that have radically altered relations of production and exchange. However, in spite of being altered, precapitalist social relations persist in juxtaposition with increased participation in the expanding capitalist economy. By comparing the average return to labour power in subsistence production with the return associated with participation in the capitalist economy, this article highlights some of the relationships that exist between capitalist and pre‐capitalist production, and seeks to offer a partial explanation for an arrested transition to capitalism.     

‘At their perfect command'? The struggle of/(over) post‐emancipation rural labour

In a collection which refuses to recognize the presence of Marxist contributions to its subject, a number of essays in this book adhere to imperial or neoclassical economic historiographic traditions, both of which are not just problematic but also revisionist in their approach to the issue of pre‐ and post‐emancipation forms of unfree labour. Privileging empiricism, and for the most part eschewing theory, revisionism attempts to depoliticize analysis of relations such as slavery, indenture and bonded labour in colonial contexts. Symptomatic examples of this revisionist argument — as applied to rural labour in South Africa, India and the Caribbean during the latter part of the nineteenth century ‐ are examined, and the reasons for their shortcomings explored.

After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents, edited by Howard Temperley. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000. Pp.v + 300. £45. ISBN 0 7146 5022 6 (cloth).     

Partisan players: sport,working-class culture,and the labour movement in South Wales 1920–1939

This article argues against the prevalent notion that sport was insignificant to inter-war Welsh labour by showing that it was in fact a ‘vital area of interest’ for local activists associated with leftist organisations. In South Wales, numerous sporting opportunities provided by the local labour movement were taken up with notable enthusiasm by local workers. It is demonstrated that this represented a ‘vibrant attempt to forge a coherent alternative to mainstream sporting activity by fusing it with political allegiance’ and that sport became ‘an articulation of working class self-awareness … [and] a mechanism through which working class desires and visions could be expressed’.     

From collectives to markets: Restructured agriculture‐industry linkages in rural China: Some micro‐level evidence

The article attempts to put together micro‐evidence for constructing an initial sketch of the emergent structure of linkages between agriculture and rural industry. It focuses mainly on three aspects : (i) the transfer of land from peasants to industrial and other enterprises, (ii) mechanisms and practices for absorbing peasant labour into the rural non‐farm sector, especially in the form of wage labour, and (iii) the forms and relative dimensions of various direct and indirect financial flows between rural enterprises and the agricultural sector. The article also offers some observations concerning the likely implications of the restructuring of rural economic relationships for rural (and agricultural) accumulation, for the efficiency of resource use, for equity and welfare in the rural sector, and for social processes in the countryside. The article provides a comparative perspective, whereby the post‐reform forms, pattern and nature of rural agriculture‐industry linkages are set against the lapsed context of the rural people's commune.     

Social motherhood and the sexual communion of labour in British Social Science, 1850-1950

This article explores the way in which women both accepted and subverted the sexual division of labour in middle-class social science between 1850 and 1950. For women facing a mid-nineteenth century crisis in femininity, the kind of social science embodied in the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1857-86), offered a promising pathway into the public sphere. This article examines how women helped to develop the two key conceptions of the sexual communion of labour and of social motherhood, conceptions which structured their role in social science well into the twentieth century. However useful these concepts proved in their negotiations with middle-class men for public space, the contradictions in their practice of social motherhood posed real problems for the creation of sisterhood with working-class women     

The autobiographical you: letters in the gendered politics of the labour movement

In this article, I consider the importance of epistolary narratives in the interface of autobiography and politics. In doing this, I read the letters of Fannia Mary Cohn, a Jewish immigrant worker, trade union activist and ardent labour organizer in the garment industry in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. Cohn was a prolific writer and political activist and left a rich body of labour literature, but never wrote an autobiography or a diary or journal. It is in her letters to her comrades and friends in the labour movement that short autobiographical stories erupt and it is on such stories across her correspondence that this article focuses. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt's theorization of narratives in their interrelation with politics and history. Drawing on a rich body of feminist literature around the relational self, what I argue is that an Arendtian reading of epistolary narratives is a useful analytical tool in understanding gendered politics in the diverse histories of the labour movement.     

The Brazilian quilombo: ‘race’, community and land in space and time

More than a century after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, the term ‘quilombo’ continues to evolve new meanings, not all of them associated with its common definition as a runaway slave community. In this article, I discuss the significance of quilombo in its diverse social, political and historical contexts, demonstrating how changes in the uses and meanings of the term reveal broader trans-historical, juridical, political and metaphorical processes. I argue that quilombola communities should not be conceptualized as a racial category, but rather as a system of social organization and a right. Specifically, I show how the term quilombola is currently a way actors identify with Afro-descendants in order to achieve political recognition. I also describe how contemporary practices involving quilombos reveal historical tensions over land conflicts between historically marginalized rural black communities, private interests and governmental authority. I draw on evidence from field research in southern Brazil to illustrate my understanding of how quilombos work.     

Agricultural growth and the structure of ‘casual’ labour‐hiring in rural West Bengal

There are two main arguments in this article. First, if wages and employment are to be used as indicators of changing levels of rural poverty they need to be complemented by micro and meso level studies of how increases or declines in wages and employment are distributed among individuals and households. Secondly, if the nature of the relationship between employer and labourer is to be understood, aggregates such as ‘casual’ labour need to be unravelled. Evidence from a study of two small localities in rural West Bengal between 1991 and 1993 suggests that the poorest workers receive the lowest remuneration across a range of informal contracts, including daily time‐rate, piece rate, seasonal beck‐and‐call and migrant labour arrangements. Levels of remuneration are also determined by locally specific ideologies of gender and social rank and by party politics.