A farewell to urban/rural bias: peripheral finance capitalism in Mexico

Based on a discussion of the structural transformation of the Mexican economy, this paper investigates the impact of financialization on agriculture’s role in capitalist development. It argues that the peripheral financialized economy is a rural–urban economy. On the one hand, agriculture and industry are bifurcated into a growing export sector and a stagnating local economy, and there are no functional ‘developmental’ links between capitalist agriculture and industry. On the other hand, the economic structures have resulted in the consolidation of a huge mass of rural–urban ‘classes of labour’. Capitalist agriculture and industry are linked through and dependent on cheap labour sustaining the export economy. I argue that the current economic formation is not due to ‘urban bias’, ‘rural bias’ or any misallocation of resources among economic sectors. Rather, it can be explained in relation to ‘finance bias’: the taking over of debt relations as the key driving force of economic activities. A major contradiction in peripheral finance capitalism arises from the financing of cheap labour through debt. This is likely to result in new financial crisis, when the contradictions between increasing levels of (private and public) debt, a stagnating domestic economy, and below-subsistence level wages become too large.     

推行院务公开实现振兴发展

吉林省图们市人民医院八年来取得了巨大变化。在医院总体经营管理中,积极推行院务公开、落实民主管理、民主监督制度、紧紧依靠职工的集体智慧,已经成为这个医院实现发展的重要原因。     

关于工会组织公信力的思考

工会组织公信力是工会组织赢得职工群众认可和社会信任的关键能力,是工会组织取得社会合法性的基础力量.当前我国工会的组织体制和运行机制还不能适应市场经济条件下维护职工合法权益的形势需要,使得工会尤其是基层企业工会作用发挥有限、部分职工和社会公众对工会工作的认可度不高,从而造成了工会组织公信力低下的状况.面对这一问题,工会组织需要调整传统的工作理念、工作模式与工作方法,主动作为,通过理念创新、组织创新、机制创新与工作创新,大力推进组织服务力建设.     

实行院务公开强化民主管理

在不断强化民主管理中,通过实行院务公开,保障职工知情权、审议权、参与权和监督权,增强职工群众的主人翁责任感,调动职工群众的积极性,起到了密切干群关系,促进党风廉政建设,提高医院两个效益的作用。     

谁需要SA8000

SA8000是20世纪90年代后再次兴起的自愿的生产守则运动中的一种,它涉及到众多的利益相关者。而每个利益相关者对SA8000都有着不同的利益追求。我们对SA8000既不可高估,也不可忽视。     

实行院务公开促进医院建设全面发展

实行院务公开,强化民主管理,是医院民主政治建设的需要,是医院建设和全面发展的需要。实行院务公开,必须强化民主管理工作、健全机制、突出重点、讲究成效。     

Command and control at work: the evolution of the rules of work on Mexican railroads, 1883–1923

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of written work rules on the railroads in Mexico from 1883 to 1923, looking at three sets of work rules from the Porfiriato and three from the Revolution. Just as foreign investors, British and American, and foreign skilled workers, mostly American, played an important role in the establishment of Mexico’s first railroad companies, these same foreign businesses brought their written rule books, necessary for the impersonal management of labor in companies with large, diverse, and a far-flung labor force like the railroads, to Mexico. The first rules are often Spanish translations of the English-language originals and paid no attention to the workers’ opinions. Through the Porfiriato, however, Mexican railroad workers unionized, in part following the pattern of the American Brotherhoods, and their unions, through labor activism and strikes, fought to transform work rules from company commands to negotiated terrain, with some success before the Revolution broke out. When the Revolution did break out, however, it radically transformed the terrain of work rules, first because railroad companies, even before they collapsed in the face of revolutionary violence, lost the support of the state that they so needed to impose their work rules, and second, because the new state that emerged from the Revolution allied with organized workers to provide them with many of their revolutionary demands: legal trade unions, mandated work benefits, and collective bargaining. Thus, newly powerful railroad unions through strikes and activism and in alliance with the new state made work rules not only negotiated terrain between companies and workers, but terrain in which workers and their unions held the upper hand. As a consequence, the work rules of 1923, where unions are powerful and impose significant benefits to workers, bear little resemblance to those of 1883, where unions are not recognized by the companies, which felt no obligation to provide any benefits at all.     

The end of alternatives? Capitalist transformation,rural activism and the politics of possibility in China†

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the politics of possibility for rural activism in reform era China. By periodizing rural reforms from 1990, we explore the political-economic changes that have coalesced in the reform era, and how these changes condition forms and possibilities of activism. We argue that the current modernization–urbanization drive that emerged around 2008 is foreclosing opportunities for the pro-peasant cooperative forms that New Rural Reconstruction activists imagined earlier in the decade. Instead, as the process of capitalist agrarian change deepens in the countryside, food- and farming-related activism now resembles the state’s focus on markets and consumption, to the detriment of addressing social relations of production. Without a focus on distributional politics and power, this shift has the potential to further entrench existing inequalities within and across rural and urban spaces. The contextual work undertaken in this paper is currently absent from the emerging literature on China’s agrifood transformations.     

Pitirim Sorokin’s contribution to rural sociology: Russian,European and American milestones of a scientific career

ABSTRACT

The whole of Pitirim Sorokin’s fascinating and difficult scientific life led to his fundamental works on urban–rural relationships being expressed in the terms ‘rural–urban continuum’ and ‘rurbanism’. However, only a few special studies have been devoted to different aspects of his biography and scientific interests. The legacy of Sorokin as a rural sociologist has not yet become a subject of special studies in Russian social science. This contribution considers the key stages of Sorokin’s scientific career as contributing to the development and institutionalization of rural sociology as a discipline closely connected with urban sociology.     

State marionettes,phantom organisations or genuine movements? The paradoxical emergence of rural social movements in post-socialist Russia

Of all the rural social movements in the world, those in post-socialist Russia have been considered to be among the weakest. Nevertheless, triggered by the neo-liberal reforms in the countryside, state attention to agriculture and rising land conflicts, new social movement organisations with a strong political orientation are emerging in Russia today. This sudden burst of civil activity, however, raises questions as to how genuine and independent the emerging organisations are. Our research shows that many rural movements, agricultural associations, farm unions and rural political parties lack constituency, support the status quo and/or are actually counterfeits (what we call ‘phantom movement organisations’). With this analysis, we aim to explain the nature of social movements in the post-Soviet countryside and offer an original contribution to the theory on and practice of rural social movements.     

Understanding rural resistance: contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in Brazil and situate recent struggles in Brazil within the Latin American context more broadly. We highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Latin American resistance, which include: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state–society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. We argue that by analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this collection increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context.     

Counterinsurgency for wind energy: the Bíi Hioxo wind park in Juchitán,Mexico

Sustainable development and climate change mitigation policies, Dunlap and Fairhead argue, have instigated and renewed old conflicts over land and natural resources, deploying military techniques of counterinsurgency to achieve land control. Wind energy development, a popular tool of climate change mitigation policies, has consequently generated conflict in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Istmo) region in Oaxaca, Mexico. Research is based on participant observation and 20 recorded interviews investigating the Fuerza y Energía Bíi Hioxo Wind Farm on the outskirts of Juchitán de Zaragoza. This paper details the repressive techniques employed by state, private and informal authorities against popular opposition to the construction of the Bíi Hioxo wind park on communal land. Providing background on Juchitán, social property and counterinsurgency in Southern Mexico, this paper analyzes the development of the Bíi Hioxo wind park. It further explores the emergence of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ counterinsurgency techniques used to pacify resistance against the wind park, enabling its completion next to the Lagoon Superior in October 2014. Discussing the ‘greening of counterinsurgency’, this contribution concludes that the Bíi Hioxo wind park has spawned social divisions and violent conflict, and intervened in the sensitive cultural fabric of Istmeño life.     

关于工会推进社会主义新农村建设的思考

工会要从自身的职能、定位出发,整合全社会的力量,推进农民工维权工作;要围绕致富农民这个中心,充分发挥工会组织服务农村经济建设作用;借鉴工会民主管理的经验,推行村民自治,强化农村民主政治建设。