The theory of unequal ecological exchange: a Marx-Odum dialectic

A world-system analysis of the ecological rift generated by capitalism requires as one of its elements a developed theory of the unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery. After reviewing the literature on unequal exchange (both economic and ecological) from Ricardo and Marx to the present, a new approach is provided, based on a critical appropriation of systems ecologist Howard Odum's emergy (spelled with an m) analysis. Odum's contribution offers key elements of a wider dialectical synthesis, made possible in part by his intensive studies of Marx's political-economic critique of capitalism and by Marx's own theory of metabolic rift.     

Theories of the exploited peasantry: A critical review

The object of this article is to discuss the theoretical foundations of the Neo‐Marxist argument which states that by a process of unequal exchange, the existence of the peasant economy in the agricultural sector of capitalist, less developed countries (LDCs) means that rent payments are avoided. The article begins by presenting a summary of the implications for sectoral exchange of the transformation of labour values into prices of production. In Section II the modern versions of the theory of ground rent are discussed, and Section III is a critical review of the divergent propositions concerning the peasant economy's exchange relations in the product market. The article ends by proposing an empirical approach for the study of the exchange relations of the peasant economy and of a heterogeneous agricultural sector.     

Rural industry and uneven development: The significance of gender in the Irish Linen industry

From the middle of the eighteenth century, the Irish linen industry grew on the basis of unequal relations of exchange between spinning and weaving households. This regional division of labour in turn depended on unequal relations of production between women and men within rural industrial households. The ‘proto‐industrialisation’ thesis has tended to obscure this process by focussing on the household as a bounded entity, and by failing to recognise the significance of inequalities within the household production unit. Once gender relations are made central to the thesis, it can be expanded to explain regional differences in rural industrialisation and deindustrialisation.     

YOUNG WOMEN AND HOUSEWORK

Despite much research which demonstrates the remarkable stability of the inequitable division of domestic labour within heterosexual couples, this key feminist issue is frequently neglected in the literature about contemporary young womanhood. This article begins with a review of literature about the politics of housework. Following this, young women's expectations and experiences of housework are explored through analysis of qualitative interview data in order to explore how they make sense of and respond to the resilience of the traditional sexual division of labour. Men's unequal contribution to housework is conceptualised in this article as an ‘awkward relic of modernity’ because it represents evidence of structures of male dominance at odds with widespread beliefs about progress towards sexual equality. The post-feminist environment of Western neo-liberal democracies, in which assumptions of individualised female empowerment co-exist with the continuation of manifestations of gendered inequality, provides the context against which these issues are theoretically considered.     

Gender,work and labour history: a response to carol morgan

Carol Morgan has proposed (Women's History Review, 6[3], 1997) that in future, rather than concentrating their efforts on studying gender conflict, labour historians should research men and women's mutual struggle in the workplace. She cautions those who ignore the implications of local labour markets, regional variations and change over time in order to maximise women's subordinate role at the point of production. These are important considerations. But in her critique, Morgan probably gives insufficient weight to the conclusions of earlier writers. Her case studies on cotton and chain-making have been previously well-researched and the rationale for investigating two such disparate trades is not fully developed. Morgan's arguments are also at variance with those historians who consider home and work to be separate but interconnected. The latter advocate the adoption of a household-centred labour history, analysing both the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres to investigate breadwinning patterns and union     

Obstacles to the development of a capitalist agriculture

This paper examines some of the reasons for the maintenance and persistence of family labour farms within agricultural sectors of advanced capitalist countries: some obstacles to the development of a capitalist agriculture are highlighted.

The survival of family farms has called into question Marx's theory of the transitional nature of petty commodity production; hence, Marxism is generally regarded as being unable to account for the viability of family farms. Two theories commonly advanced to explain this phenomenon are examined and found to be inadequate.

This paper suggests that a closer examination of Marx's writings reveals how the peculiar nature of the productive process in certain spheres of agriculture is incompatible with the requirements of capitalist production and, therefore, makes these spheres unattractive for capitalist penetration. Here the implications of Marx's distinction between production time and labour time for the development of a capitalist agriculture are discussed. Specifically, the non‐identity of production time and labour time characteristic of certain agricultural commodities is shown to have an adverse effect on the rate of profit, the efficient use of constant and variable capital, and the smooth functioning of the circulation and realisation process. It is concluded that the reason for the persistence of family farms is not to be found in the capacity of family labour for self‐exploitation, nor in the application of technology per se; rather the secret of this ‘anomaly’ lies in the logic and nature of capitalism itself.     

The Influence of Perception on Maternal Sensitivity in Foster Care

This study examined the association between perceptions of children's care needs and maternal sensitivity with 76 dyads in foster care. Foster mothers were more sensitive to typically developing children perceived as requiring easier care and were less sensitive to children with developmental delays. Adopting foster mothers were sensitive with children requiring complex care. Older children were perceived to need more care and to be delayed in development. Nearly half of the sample were perceived to be developmentally delayed. Foster mothers were less sensitive to children with multiple placements. Perceptions of caregiving needs can influence the quality of interactions.     

sexual freedom and the promise of revolution: Emma Goldman’s passion

This article explores the contributions to a history of sexuality, capitalism and revolution made when we consider the work of anarchist thinker and activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940). I suggest that Goldman's centring of sexual freedom at the heart of revolutionary vision and practice is part of a long tradition of sexual politics, one which struggles to make sense of how productive and reproductive labour come together, and to identify the difference between sexual freedom and capitalist opportunity. Goldman's concern with the significance of kinship in holding together capitalism, militarism and religion, as well as sexual feeling's capacity to disrupt those relationships, echoes across more than a century to resonate with Marxist, feminist and queer scholars' engagements with similar issues. But where contemporary scholars often tend to retain the opposition between culture and society, representation and the real, making it difficult to produce a materialist analysis of sexuality as transformative rather than always already overdetermined, Goldman's energetic insistence on sexual connectivity as freeing provides an important vantage point. Not only does Goldman consistently situate sexuality in a broad political context of the sexual division of labour, the institutions of marriage and the church, consumerism, patriotism and productive (as well as reproductive) labour, she frames sexual freedom as both the basis of new relationships between men and women, and as a model for a new political future.     

The International Labour Organization and the Struggle against Forced Labour from 1919 to the Present

Since its foundation in 1919 the International Labour Organization (ILO) has regarded the worldwide eradication of forced labour as one of its basic aims. This article looks at the ILO's role both as a forum for public discourse on the historically shifting boundaries that separated free labour from coercion, and as an independent actor in the struggle against forced labour throughout the twentieth century. Examining the ILO's efforts in three distinct phases (the inter-war period, the Cold War years and the age of decolonization/postcolonial nation-building) will also shed light and contribute to the discussion on the influence of international organizations in the making of the modern world.     

Labour Left Out: Canada's Failure to Protect and Promote Collective Bargaining as a Human Right,by Roy J. Adams

The international labour movement's campaign to fortify the International Labour Organization's (ILO's) core labour standards by way of a World Trade Organization (WTO) social clause failed in the 1990s. Many purported beneficiaries of such a clause conceived of the proposal as a proverbial ‘terrorist’ rather than a ‘freedom fighter’. Reappraising debates in India and the USA, this paper understands the failure in terms of discursive struggles played out both within national contexts, and in the transnational domain. It is argued that previous attempts at unpacking the debate have employed too simplistic discursive schema and paid insufficient attention to its transnational dynamics. The international union movement can only advance the ILO–WTO linkage idea by acknowledging, coming to terms with and addressing the concerns of a pervasive counter-hegemonic discourse.     

Problematizing multiculturalism: Respect,tolerance and the limits to tolerance

The complexities of multiculturalism are discussed and it is argued that multiculturalism has to be critically defined and scrutinized in terms of respect, tolerance and the limits to tolerance. While avoiding the pitfalls of “Eurocentrism”, it is nonetheless important to recognize that there exist culturally or religiously defined beliefs, customs and practices that run counter to the basic values of society, to gender equality, and which violate women's human rights. The discussion focuses on possible conflict areas pertaining to marriage and family life, tradition‐based unequal authority systems between women and men and violence against women. The aim is to identify areas where conflicts may arise between, on the one hand, respect for women's human rights and, on the other, respect for the cultural identity of immigrant groups. The paper also suggests ways of addressing and handling this type of conflict.     

Redefining institutional identity: the YWCA challenge to extraterritoriality in China, 1925–30

This article explores how the May 30th, 1925 Incident forced American Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) Secretaries in China to rethink their relationship with imperialism and governmental power and to redefine, in collaboration with Chinese YWCA Secretaries, the Chinese National YWCA's institutional mission. It examines the American YWCA Secretaries’ efforts to challenge extraterritorial privileges granting foreign nationals immunity from Chinese laws, among a host of other ‘unequal,’ that is, non-reciprocal rights and prerogatives, claimed by the foreign governments and based on treaties signed with the Chinese Government. It restores the American YWCA Secretaries' voices to the historical narrative of the Western response to the May 30th Incident and reveals their agency and subjectivity. Although American YWCA Secretaries failed to achieve the goal that they defined for themselves when the May 30th Incident occurred – to reorder state-to-state relations between the USA and China on a more equitable, just and ‘moral’ basis – they nonetheless achieved some success in injecting their moral discourse into the US China policy debate. Moreover, their response to May 30th produced a significant feminist achievement: they dismantled the unequal and imperialist power relations within their own organization.     

The Impersonal Strategy: Re-visiting Virginia Woolf's Position in The Common Reader Essays

The concept of impersonality as a writer's strategy has been exposed to misinterpretations that either fail to exhaust its full meaning and deposit an unequal amount of attention on all components of the term or, in the worst case, tend to distort its true elements. In relation to Virginia Woolf's criticism, in particular, it is a critical commonplace that the author employed an impersonal position in order not to fully materialise her feminist vision, but to shy away from explicitly expressing her feminist convictions and openly supporting women's rights. Indicative of this is the criticism that suggests disapproval of Woolf's reluctance to side with her own gender and declare the power of female personality.

The aim here is to challenge such critical views, separate the discussion of impersonality from its association with that of androgyny, and re-visit the issue of Woolf's employment of the impersonal strategy. I examine two of Woolf's essays on nineteenth-century women writers included in her first volume of The Common Reader and offer an analysis from both a gender-oriented and a genderless angle. Woolf's strong affinity with female conditions of oppression, her modernist convictions, her need to compromise with the male-dominated context of the time and her concurrent urge to co-operate with the common reader of an unspecified sex for the sake of artistic creation reveal more complex reasons behind her intentions than those examined by critics so far.     

The peasant mode of production in the work of A. V. Chayanov

Is there a peasant mode of production? Chayanov's work can be construed as a theory of the peasant mode of production at the level of the labour process. This labour process is analysed in terms of the forces of production, the relationship between the peasant and the means of production, and that between the peasant and the product. When subjected to an historical critique, from the point of view of the formation and decomposition of the peasantry, Chayanov's theory of a peasant mode of production yields to the idea of peasantry as a specific combination of structures.     

Women's right to work: The interplay of state,market and women's agency

This article addresses questions central to the conception of women's citizenship: Do women have the same right to wage work as men have? That is, do women have the same access to and chances to keep jobs as men? Is women's right to employment perceived as an individual right, disconnected from men's traditional prerogative to hold jobs as breadwinners? Women's right to work is conceptualized as a complex structural and ideological construct, shaped by the interplay of the labour market, welfare state and women's agency. The empirical analysis takes one of the Scandinavian welfare states, Norway, as its main case. The study concludes that women's individual right to work was significantly strengthened from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.     

Housework,Wages and Money

Abstract

According to a range of authors and popular commentators, the post-Fordist socioeconomic order has produced a new category of female labourer, the ‘female principal breadwinner’. This article opens out this category of worker to critical scrutiny. We suggest that while the very idea of the female principal breadwinner is open to all manner of existing lines of feminist critique, beyond this it forces a confrontation with a number of issues vital to feminist analyses of transformations to women's labour—both waged and unwaged—in contemporary financialised post-Fordism. We pursue two issues in particular. First, transformations to the labour of social reproduction—including transformations to the measurement and valuation of domestic labour—and second, the financialisation (and shifting capacities) of wages specifically and money more generally. We suggest that if transformations to women's labour are to be fully grasped and understood feminist theory must renew and rethink its analyses of domestic labour, wages and money.     

Performance Anxieties

Drawing on the narratives of 23 un(der)employed trans women residing in Ontario, British Columbia, Canada and Washington State in the USA, this article explores the connections between affect, gender and labour in post-Fordist society. Post-Fordism is characterised in part by the putting to work of immaterial labour. Workers' whole personalities are harnessed to produce value for capital through evoking feelings of satisfaction, security and contentment amongst consumers. While women's employment rates have increased dramatically within post-Fordism, I argue that trans women's experiences of marginalisation within and expulsion from the workplace points to the narrow parameters of femininity deemed capable of producing such positive feelings. Trans women's visible, audible and behavioural cues of gender alterity lend insight into criteria that position some women employable and others disposable.     

‘it was better during the war’: narratives of everyday violence in a Palestinian refugee camp

The distinction between what is commonly regarded as the routine of impoverishment and what is acknowledged and remarked upon as violence is increasingly being questioned in scholarship and public policy circles. Interrogating the distinction between routine and remarkable not only reveals the habits and relationships constituting everyday life as the site of violence, but also foregrounds questions of gender. Given that the everyday is shaped by a given community's norms regarding the gendered division of labour that produces and reproduces the conditions of the everyday, in what ways is violence as well as its experience gendered? This article examines this question in the particular context of Palestinian camp refugees’ lived experience of forced displacement in Lebanon. It explores the ways in which the violence used against Palestinian camp refugees draws on norms regarding masculinity and femininity shared by the refugees as well as their Lebanese oppressors. It also examines the ways in which Palestinian camp refugees’ everyday experience of impoverishment as well as the acknowledged violence of forced displacement, subjection to Lebanese military intelligence control, and participation in the armed struggle for national liberation are constituted by and constitutive of unequal subject positions of gender, class and citizenship.     

The new left and labor: The early years (1960–1963)

This article analyses the labour history of Italy's recruitment of workers for settlement in the Italian colony of Eritrea. The quest for full employment, both in Italy and within its nascent colonial ‘empire’, was the main driving force behind Italian colonialism in general. Italy's labour policy, which started to take shape in the 1890s, was never linear. Unlike the previous liberal Governments, the Fascist regime's policy was far more determined to use its colonies as places to settle the Italian peasant masses (the same that were migrating to the Americas for a better life, a trend which Fascist Italy considered humiliating to the mother country). In keeping with its vision of the colonies as a means to attain full employment, Fascist ideology characterised the Italian colonial empire as an ‘empire of labour’. In fact, the reality of the labour situation that Italian workers found themselves in after settling in Italy's African colonies would soon show the fallacy underlying Fascist colonial ideology.     

the <Emphasis Type="Italic">conditions</Emphasis> of politics: low-caste women's political agency in contemporary north Indian society

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for women's activities. I illustrate how it is often the supposedly ‘oppressive’ household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists’ political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values.