working-class whiteness from within and without: an auto-ethnographic response to Avtar Brah's ‘the scent of memory’

Inspired by and responding to Avtar Brah's ‘The Scent of Memory’, this piece attempts to reinscribe race into an auto-ethnographic narrative where previously whiteness was unmarked. It explores the dynamics of gender, race and class through the author's personal history as a white English woman and class migrant, and through discussion of the broader political and historical context of that trajectory. The discussion includes analysis of the impact of British Conservative politician Enoch Powell's infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 on the author's white English working-class culture of origin in Wolverhampton, where Powell was a Member of Parliament. The article considers the speech's continuing ramifications in the twenty-first century and in more middle-class contexts, as evidenced by the recent evocation of the speech by historian David Starkey in discussion of the ‘riots’ of August 2011 in British cities. The personal history is reconstructed through a series of memory scenes that trace and retrace the author's experience and understanding of race and its intersections with class and gender; this is attempted in full cognisance of the constructed nature of memory, and of the performance of identity that autobiography entails. The piece draws on the work of the class migrant white French writer Annie Ernaux, with whom the author has been in dialogue since 1997.     

当前阶段我国农村劳动力永久性迁移问题

如何实现农村劳动力永久性迁移、结束"两种城市化"的对立,一直是困扰我国城乡协调发展的重要问题。结合我国当前农村劳动力非永久性迁移的状况、影响我国未来农村劳动力转移的基础因素、当前阶段我国促进劳动力永久性迁移的户籍政策效果以及政策建议等四个方面对此问题进行了研究。研究发现:随着我国经济向高质量发展转变,影响劳动力转移的基础因素发生了改变并对未来我国劳动力转移和农村劳动力永久性迁移产生了较大影响;当前我国已经开始部分放开户籍管理制度,这将对未来农村劳动力永久性迁移产生积极影响,省会城市及部分地级市、新生代农民工及在校大学生等将是主要受益者;然而,不能寄希望于通过放宽户籍制度大规模促进新增农村劳动力转移,同时要特别防止部分城市希望通过吸引外来人口来促进房地产行业发展的倾向。     

Simone Téry (1897–1967): writing the history of the present in inter-war France

Simone Téry (1897–1967), French journalist and novelist, joined the French Communist Party in the mid-1930s after visiting the Soviet Union. She worked as a correspondent for L'Humanité, Vendredi and Regards; the latter post took her to Spain during the Civil War. The resulting texts, Front de la liberté: Espagne 1937–1938 (1938) and Où l'aube se lève (1945), form the basis of my analysis of Téry's desire to write the history of the present in inter-war France. These texts, a work of reportage and a novel respectively, illustrate the relationship between the poetic, or imaginative, and the historical, or factual, in historical fiction. This relationship is particularly relevant to the literary history of 1930s France, given the highly politicized nature of literary production in the period and the resulting debates over the nature and future of the realist novel. Téry's rejection of modernism in favour of socialist realism suggests a conversion, common in left-wing writers of the period, to the notion that the modernist text is incapable of ‘containing’ history. The essay raises the question of French women writers’ relationship to committed literature in the 1930s, and demonstrates that women were active in this domain.     

Agrarian doctrines of development: Part I

Doctrines of development are understood through a distinction between intentional development and the immanent process of capitalist development. Agrarian doctrine consists of proposals, usually associated with official policy, to undertake agrarian schemes of development based on small‐farm, household production. The intention is to compensate for mass unemployment, urban poverty and the threat of rural emigration. This article gives a historical account of two cases of agrarian doctrine. The first, that of nineteenth‐century Quebec following self‐government in 1848, illustrates the intention of land colonisation schemes to prevent emigration from French Canadian territory to the United States. In the second case, that of twentieth‐century Kenya, schemes of household production were developed in the face of the emergence of mass unemployment; their promotion, especially after political independence in 1963, accompanied the development of indigenous capitalism. The social trusteeship of development is the key to understanding agrarian doctrine. The article concludes by showing why agrarian doctrine underlies the ‘decentralised despotism ‘ at the heart of Mahmood Mamdani's recent book, Citizen and Subject, and is an integral part of the historical roots of contemporary advocacy of decentralised rural development.     

Seeing like an indigenous community: the World Bank's Agriculture for Development Report read from the perspective of postwar rural Guatemala

This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using ‘agriculture for development’ put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's framework, namely, its neglect of the non-economic forces that structure agrarian poverty, and its neglect of history.     

British labour movement solidarity in the 1913-14 Dublin Lockout

While most accounts of the Dublin Lockout of 1913–1914 consider it primarily as an event in Irish history, it was also one of the most important struggles in twentieth-century British history. It was influenced by, and was an integral part of the great ‘labour unrest’ that swept over Britain in the years 1911–1914 and had tremendous repercussions in Britain as well as Ireland. This article provides much neglected analysis of the nature, extent and dynamics of the solidarity campaign that was generated on the British mainland for the Lockout (probably the only other comparable event was the national miners’ strike of 1984–1985), the reasons why such widespread support was forthcoming and its broader implications for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of militant trade unionism in Britain during this period. It provides a comprehensive re-examination of the historical record and offers a critical analysis of existing predominant historiographical interpretations of the dispute. In the process, the article provides new insights into the potential and limits of Jim Larkin’s campaign to secure sympathetic industrial action inside the British labour movement, the refusal of the Trades Union Congress to support such an initiative and the inability of rank-and-file and socialist militants to overcome the entrenched resistance of the official union leadership.     

Agriculture and the state: An inquiry into agricultural differentiation and political alliances: The case of Turkey

The following is a study of the changes in Turkish agriculture and peasantry preceding the industrialisation of the country. This ‘stylised’ history of the Turkish economy between 1923–50 will illustrate our analysis of the dynamics of transformation and the non‐transformation of traditional agriculture. Although the discussion is specific to the historical facts of Turkish agriculture, we hope that its theoretical content will point toward a methodology for the analysis of the reciprocity between the policies of the state and class structure.     

Rural development through the construction of new,nested, markets: comparative perspectives from China,Brazil and the European Union

This article discusses and compares the rural development processes and practices currently occurring in China, Brazil and the European Union. Although these are strongly rooted in the specificities of time and space, they also share important commonalities. We argue that rural development can be viewed as an evolving set of responses to market failures. A key element of these responses is that they are unfolding through the construction of new markets: a seemingly contradictory phenomenon that has, as yet, hardly been scrutinized or theoretically elaborated. We describe these newly emerging markets as ‘nested markets’ and support our argument with a careful reconsideration of the dynamics of long-established nested markets. We then extend this analysis, firstly, by arguing that the construction of such new markets occurs through a process of social struggle and, secondly, by exploring the strength of these newly emerging constellations in relation to the hegemony exerted by food empires. Our analysis puts common-pool resources, which underlie these new, nested markets, centre stage.     

Peasants,the state and policy constraints: The political economy of rural development in peninsular Malaysia 1957–69

This article draws attention to two propositions concerning the analysis of public policy formation. First, such analysis should take account of inherent constraints that the state faces in the formulation and implementation of its economic policies. Second, policy analysis must necessarily deal with specific historical contexts within which constraints on state policy formation operate. The main purpose of this article is to apply these two propositions to a study of the rural development strategy pursued by the Alliance government in Peninsular Malaysia. A second purpose is to derive from the empirical case certain theoretical implications which can be relevant for the analysis of the role of the state in economic development.     

Surveying the agrarian question (part 1): unearthing foundations,exploring diversity

This two-part article surveys the origin, development, and current meaning of the ‘agrarian question’. Part one of the survey explores the history of the agrarian question, elaborating its origin in the work of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin, and its development in the work of Preobrazhensky, Dobb, Brenner, and others. Part two of the survey identifies seven current variants of the agrarian question and critically interrogates these variants in order to understand whether, and if so, how, the location of small-scale petty commodity food and farm production within contemporary capitalism has been reconfigured during the era of neoliberal globalisation. Together, the two parts of the survey argue that the agrarian question continues to offer a rigorously flexible framework by which to undertake a historically-informed and country-specific analysis of the material conditions governing rural production, reproduction, and the process of agrarian accumulation or its lack thereof, a process that can now be located within the law of value and market imperatives that operate on a world scale.     

Prosperity in crisis and the longue durée in Africa

ABSTRACT

Understanding the evolution and tenacity of particular ways of envisaging economic growth and development for Africa requires a form of analytical history that examines how conceptual structures function over the longue durée. Such an approach is more than simply empirical analysis through time or a set of abstractions based on the self-understandings of historical agents. It involves the development of a hypothetical analytic structure which through its own forms of transformation eventually comes to play a role in shaping the lived world of participants, including researchers, policymakers and ordinary citizens. This article uses research from Kenya and Zambia to demonstrate how a long-running – but temporally and spatially variable – focus on agricultural productivity has shaped the character of rural life in Africa, and why it has consistently failed to deliver enlarged forms of prosperity based on quality of life and ecological well-being.     

linking radical traditions and the contemporary Dalit women’s movement: an intergenerational lens

Anti-caste movements in India have a long history. Cultural heritage became and remains a site of political contestation by excluded communities searching for identity and equality, and gender remains at the core of their engagements. The meanings underlying the more homogenous term of ‘Dalit’ used today are part of a historical process of self-definition. Moreover, diverse Dalit countercultures suggest varied social domains in which Dalit communities are located. South Asian historiographies have been critiqued as denying histories and historical agency to Dalits. Yet Dalit studies have developed epistemologies, bringing articulations and ideas from the margins to the centre of writings on history, leading to debates around caste that have transformed notions of politics. This paper draws from one such trajectory through a nonlinear narrative, juxtaposing the intergenerational contexts of engagements: my mother Dakshayani’s political and life experiences, as narrated in her autobiography (1912–1978), and my own experience in the Dalit women’s and other movements in the 1980s and 1990s. While my experience saw the onset of liberalisation and the emergence and growth of ‘new social movements’, the context of Dakshayani’s narrations is the Pulaya (agrestic slave caste) community in the early 1900s in Cochin, a community in the process of transforming itself. Both narratives highlight how radical traditions within the Dalit women’s movement over time have consciously and critically addressed anti-caste movements, social reform, the state, peoples’ movements and the nation within a conceptual framework of equality, liberty and non-discrimination.     

The combined and uneven development of working-class capacities in Turkey, 1960–2016

ABSTRACT

How have Turkey’s working-class capacities been evolving since the 1960s? What have been the peculiarities of Turkey’s import-substitutionalist model and later integration into the neoliberal economic landscape, as they pertain to the transformation of the Turkish working class? Our aim here is two-fold: (i) to contribute to a systematic understanding of the historical development of Turkey’s working class; and (ii) to develop a new conceptual lens for class-capacity analysis from a combined and uneven development perspective. By class capacities, we refer to the ability of the working class to develop an awareness of its long-term interests and organize to struggle for these collective interests. We employ theory-guided process tracing as the main methodological guideline to study the historical development of Turkey’s working-class capacities.     

A communist perspective on development strategy for rural India

This article examines the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s strategy for ‘developing’ rural India. The term ‘development strategy’ is, of course, not one that the CPI(M) itself uses to characterise its plans for maturing the revolution in India's countryside. As a matter of fact, its use in the title of this paper is intended primarily to emphasise the point that ‘development’ can mean many different things. It is not the intention of this paper to endorse or deny either the merits of the CPI(M)'s purposes or the sincerity of its revolutionary intent. The limited purpose is to portray, and attempt to understand, Us positions. While differences with these positions are duly recorded, the critique is intended to be ‘immanent’, rather than ‘transcendental’, that is, is intended to be a critique from within the given frame of reference, rather than a critique of its ‘validity’.     

Mimesis,metaphor and representation: holding out an olive branch to the emergent schreiner canon [1]

There are complex and interesting representational issues and interpretational practices involved in claiming to ‘know past lives’ and these have particular resonance in feminist terms. These ideas are examined in relation to a particular case study, of the feminist writer and theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), although the discussion contributes to the ‘women's history and post-structuralism’ debate by eschewing taking up an abstract ‘position’ in favour of examining these ideas through a grounded historical example. A range of representations of Schreiner is discussed, including a photograph which her estranged husband contemporaneously had ‘touched up’ before sending it to some of her friends just after her death, and presentday representations of Schreiner in the emergent feminist canon of claimed knowledge about her. The ideas of mimesis and alterity are used both in relation to photographic representation and also in relation to the use of metaphor to stand for perceived facets of Schreiner's character. Representational issues are fundamental and ought not to be excised from feminist discussion; at the same time, the past and its ‘irreducible things that happened’ must also be taken seriously.     

The adventure of capital with nature: from the metabolic rift to the value theory of nature

This paper suggests that the concept of metabolic rift situated in ‘the labor theory of value’ is not an adequate theoretical tool to historically explore capitalist development as a socio-ecological process and socio-historical domination of ecology. It situates the concept of nature in Marx’s critique of political economy and the concept of the metabolic rift in relation to his theory of value. Then, it explores two distinctive historical approaches to the relationship between ecology and capitalist development within the world-historical studies, i.e. the world-ecology perspective and the uneven ecological exchange perspective, in relation to their theoretical and epistemological premises. How they operationalize or recast Marx’s theory of value in understanding this relationship opens a realm to rethink the value theory in relation to nature and the socio-ecological nature of capitalist relations of production. Based on this, it proposes to reconsider the value theory as a value theory of nature in order to recognize the historical specificity of socio-ecological relations, and their historical transformation and alienation, as an integral constituent of the historical narrative of capitalist development.     

The silencing of Simone de Beauvoir guess what's missing from the second sex

Inadequate, inaccurate English translations of works by feminist scholars can slow the advancement of international research in women's studies. We must begin to subject translations to the same critical attention we have focused on those sexist authoring and publishing practices that have defined women's interests as tangential to scholarly research.Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, one of the most widely known, classic essays on women's experience and a cornerstone of contemporary feminist theory, is available in only one English translation from the French. In that 1952 translation by a professor of zoology, Howard M. Parshley, over 10 per cent of the material in the original French edition has been deleted, including fully one-half of a chapter and the names of seventy-eight women in history. These unindicated deletions seriously undermine the integrity of Beauvoir's analysis of such important topics as the American and European nineteenth-century suffrage movements, and the development of socialist feminism in France.Compounding the confusion created by the deletions, are mistranslations of key philosophical terms. The phrase, ‘for-itself’, for example, which identifies a distinctive concept from Sartrean existentialism, has been rendered into English as its technical opposite, ‘in-itself’. These mistranslations obscure the philosophical context of Beauvoir's work and give the mistaken impression to the English reader that Beauvoir is a sloppy writer, and thinker.     

Socialist emulation in China: worker heroes yesterday and today

Chinese labour heroes represent an idiosyncratic expression of a broader twentieth-century phenomenon of promoting worker emulation through the hailing of model labourers. Taken from a comparative perspective, the Chinese practice can be seen not only as modelled on an earlier Soviet development, but also a broader need felt in totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and 1940s that workers needed to be ‘remoralised’ through the establishment of cults of workers and work. Recently revived in the People's Republic of China in the form of patriotic movies and television shows, the main historical development of the Chinese articulation of this broader historical labour phenomenon is assessed in light of recent studies of Soviet and National Socialist attempts to heroise labour.     

activist-mothers maybe,sisters surely? Black British feminism,absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.