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.     

Women's work,artisanal discourse,and community: a response to Sheila Blackburn

This article is a comment on Sheila Blackburn's response to the author's original essay, ‘Gender Constructions and Gender Relations in Cotton and Chain-making in England: a contested and varied terrain’, which appeared in Women's History Review (6[3], 1997). As the author repeats in this response, the apparently dominant artisanal discourse of the male chainmakers of nineteenth-century Walsall, supporting the exclusion of female labor from the trade, was undermined by conditions existing in Cradley Heath, where the community depended on that labor. Foregrounding this division regarding gender understandings, it is argued, provides a vantage point from which to gain a fuller and more accurate picture of the ways in which those understandings, as well as gender and community relations, were negotiated in one industry towards the end of the nineteenth century     

Feminism,activism and academe: a personal reflection

How the political project of feminism entered academe and how it became an educational project is the subject of this article. It is based upon personal reflection about undertaking the study for a book, Feminism, Gender and Universities: politics, passion and pedagogies. In the book, three successive generations or cohorts of feminists in academia are discussed, starting with those who are now considered ‘second-wave feminists’. In this article the notion of ‘second-wave feminism’ is examined and also how successive cohorts see feminist knowledge in relation to their own education through doctorates or wider forms of learning.     

Women in Defense of Workers: Ella Winter,the literary left,and labor journalism in California

Left-wing, middle-class journalists such as Ella Winter contributed decisively to the labor rebellion of the 1930s. In contrast to mainstream labor reporting, they practiced a form of anti-fascist, working-class journalism that consistently linked the drive for collective bargaining to a larger movement for social and economic justice. Winter and other writers such as Miriam deFord and Emily Joseph carried forward a tradition of labor defense, socialist feminism, and free speech advocacy that originated in the bohemian left of the early twentieth century. Rather than reducing women’s activism to communist intrigue or the exigencies of the economic crisis, this essay seeks out the deeper roots of women’s working-class journalism in the 1930s. It finds them in the democratic and aesthetic aspirations of the pre-Bolshevik left, even while it addresses the critical impact that the crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism had on socialist feminist writers. Functioning as mediators, organizers, and witnesses to the movement, they bridged the gap between the middle and working classes, chronicling the experiences and articulating the aspirations of a multiracial proletariat. For these writers, radical commitment and responsible social commentary seemed entirely compatible. Out of this conviction, Winter and others helped build a cross-class coalition in California. In addition, they carved out lives of social purpose that allowed them to achieve a measure of female independence and professional achievement.     

浅谈大学生社会实践长效机制的建立

大学生社会实践是高校思想政治教育的重要环节,是大学生全面成长的重要途径。在高等教育大众化阶段,要抓好大学生社会实践工作,建立与大众化高等教育相适应的社会实践的长效机制。文章详细阐述了大学生社会实践活动的重要意义,针对目前大学生社会实践面临的困难进行了分析、讨论并提出建立社会实践长效机制的原则和途径。