Strategies of technical choice in the Peruvian sugar industry, 1955–74

Despite the rapidly growing literature on agricultural mechanisation in developing countries, there are few studies which examine the evolution of technical choice on large plantations over time. This article analyses the process of selective mechanisation in sugar cane harvesting on three Peruvian plantations over a 20‐year period. Decisions regarding the choice of technique and the control of field labour are intimately connected. The concept of a strategy of technical choice is introduced to emphasise this interdependence and to provide a framework of analysis.     

The development of capitalism in the Atlantic world: England,the Americas,and West Africa, 1450–1900

Abstract

The paper traces the development of capitalism in England, the Americas, and West Africa over a long time period, 1450–1900. The developments in these major regions of the Atlantic Basin during the period were strongly interconnected and ultimately gave rise to the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy which integrated the major economies of the Atlantic world. The development of capitalism in the three specified geographical areas is analyzed in the context of the interconnected developments. Central to the historical analysis is a discussion of the contending conceptions of capitalism as a socioeconomic system. The paper shows that the original conception by Karl Marx, which identified free wage earners separated from their means of production and entrepreneurs who own those means of production as the defining elements, was generally accepted by supporters and critics for several decades; attempts to redefine began in the 1960s. The paper contends that, unlike the original Marxian conception, the new conceptions fail to capture precisely and accurately the dynamic elements which distinguish capitalism unambiguously from other forms of socioeconomic organization and do not facilitate a sharply focused historical investigation of its development over time. The employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas was critical to the development of capitalism in England and in the Americas, but the adverse effects on West Africa’s economies held back the development of markets and the market economy and, ultimately, the development of capitalism in the region.     

Structural conflict and the Farmworker: Norfolk, 1900–1920

In Britain the farm labourer has presented a severe organisational problem to the trade union organiser and the socialist agitator: a phenomenon which has been explained, conventionally, by different versions of the ‘idiocy of rural life” theory. A general orthodoxy has emerged to the effect that the farmworker is acquiescent in his bondage. In the following article this orthodoxy is questioned. It is shown that in Norfolk, between 1900 and 1920, there was a certain kind of conflict on the farm which went on beneath the apparently calm and ordered relationships of what has been categorised as a paternal and deferential society. Behind the show of deference lay a world in which conflict was potentially endemic: conflict which derived from the simple fact, clouded by much modern sociology, that the relationship between master and man was one of exploitation. Those tensions which exist in any work relationship were present and manifested themselves in struggle: over, for example, wages, hours and job definition. Such struggle was particularly likely at those times of the year (which were more numerous than is commonly realised) when withdrawal of labour could cause considerable difficulty to the farmer.     

Rethinking the urban and rural divide in Latino labor,recreation, and activism in West Michigan, 1940s–1970s

During the 1940s–1970s, Latino labor experiences could not be confined to either urban and industrial or rural and agricultural settings. Unlike large metropolises, Grand Rapids, Michigan is a mid-sized, Midwest city wherein the urban center and industrial labor opportunities are located within thirty miles of agricultural areas. I argue that Latinos in West Michigan used both rural and urban areas for labor to meet their economic and social needs. Due to the gendered realities of labor from the 1940s to the 1970s, women played an instrumental role in planning and executing the movement of their families between spaces. In turn, this community’s activism was not limited to the boundaries of urban or rural space. This research shows how Latinos etched out an economic and social survival in places wherein they are not the majority or have a plethora of resources. As the Latino diaspora spreads into areas in the southern United States, we can look to how Latinos in Grand Rapids and the Midwest lived and worked to better understand the lived experiences of twenty-first century Latinos.     

Wage labor in historical perspective: a study of the de-proletarianization of the African working class in Zimbabwe, 1960–2010

Abstract

This paper traces the rise and fall of wage labor in Zimbabwe between c.1960 and 2010. Building on Giovanni Arrighi’s seminal study, ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective: a study of the proletarianization of the African peasantry in Rhodesia’, we argue that the 1950s were the highpoint of African wage labor participation in the Southern Rhodesian/Zimbabwean economy. From that point, the percentage of wage labor as part of the economically active population fell consistently until the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy from the late 1990s onward, when it shrunk emphatically. This process is observable elsewhere in southern Africa over the second half of the twentieth century. Writing in the 1960s when the Southern Rhodesian economy was diversifying and absorbing large numbers of African workers from within and beyond the country’s borders, Arrighi overstated the stability and longevity of the proletariat. From that point, though, combined internal and external forces resulted initially in the stagnation of secondary and primary industry and commerce, and latterly in their contraction. The ensuing processes of de-proletarianization, falling wages, and heightened livelihood precarity have been the norm for an ever-increasing proportion of the African working class up to the present.     

The appearance of women's politics in the correspondence pages of Aberdeen newspapers, 1900–14

A newspaper's ‘Letters to the Editor’ column represents its readership in a unique way and can provide a useful ‘thermometer’ with which to measure the extent of critical debate and discussion a particular issue generated in a locality. In this article, the letters of women to the editor of the Aberdeen Daily Journal, 1900 to 1914, are analysed to discover the type of political issues with which these women concerned themselves. It is argued that the women must have felt particularly strongly about such issues since they were prepared to take their arguments outside their social circle and to identify themselves as politically active in the pages of their daily newspaper. Political issues dealt with include local government, the suffrage question and government legislation. While much of the evidence used comes from the letters of active suffragists who were usually members of national suffrage associations, it is argued that the period showed an expansion in the type of woman interested in politics, and the corresponding urge to write to the newspapers. This is evidenced in the number of women who firmly stated that they were not suffragists, but became politicised enough to write to the newspaper complaining about the Insurance Act in 1912.     

Class relations and capitalist development: Subsumption in the Colombian coffee industry, 1928–92

The concept of subsumption had a short life within Marxist analysis of family farming because analysts using the concept failed to appreciate the centrality of class relations in Marx's analysis of capitalist development. I argue that the concept of subsumption is best understood as a theorisation of the subtle cultural and historical processes through which labour is incorporated into capitalist development projects. I reinforce this theoretical discussion with an analysis of capitalist development in the Colombian coffee industry. This case demonstrates that capitalist development is as much project as process, as much the reformation of cultural identity as the restructuring of relations of production.     

The involvement of the men and religion forward movement in the cause of labor justice,Atlanta, Georgia, 1912–1916∗

The radical ideologies and socialist overtones of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) made them an easy target for industrialists as nationalistic and patriotic propaganda flooded the pages of American newspapers during World War I. The war in Europe marked the beginning of the end for the rapid growth and labor organizing power of the IWW, especially in the northwestern United States where WWI was used as a means for state governments and regional industrialists to devise methods meant to damage the union beyond repair. After America’s declaration of war, the Washington State Council of Defense was formed in response to the nation’s demand for mobilization of its citizens for increased production of war materiel and to operate the state’s wartime propaganda machine. With an abundance of natural resources, Washington had a profound impact on national war production output. Although it possessed several important extractive industries, it was Washington’s quality grain, especially in the southeast portion of the state known as the Palouse, which made it a boon for agricultural industrialists. With wheat prices fixed at the highest in the nation’s history, Palouse farmers became wealthy as a result of WWI, while the area’s thousands of migrant laborers suffered from low wages and pitiful job conditions. A general strike issued during the 1917 harvest by the IWW’s most influential branch – the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (AWIU) frightened area farmers, prompting the Defense Council to begin a systematic replacement of AWIU harvest hands via the organization of thousands of women, children, and retirees. Through appeals to patriotism and anti-labor rhetoric, the Defense Council and local reactionaries effectively circumvented union labor with its labor replacement campaign throughout the remainder of WWI, and without the use of violence so common to labor conflicts in Washington State. The IWW/AWIU in the Palouse never fully recovered from the onslaught, thus adding to the union’s near collapse in the aftermath of WWI.