Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000169
T. Reifer
This article surveys the lifetime work of scholar-activist Mike Davis, and his attentiveness to the wide-ranging synthesis of the global political economy and ecology of capitalism and militarism, focusing on labor and social history, and to inequalities of race, class, gender, and nation, and struggles for diversity and inclusion, marking his distinctive style. Covering themes ranging from American exceptionalism, working-class formation, struggles for the eight-hour workday, the political economy and ecology of the Third World, and the growth of today's informal proletariat, the article underlines the author's deepest commitments to a lifetime of scholarship. These include democratic control over the means of production, and the remaking of the global system on new and enlarged, more peaceful and just socioecological foundations, now essential if humanity and other sentient beings are to survive and thrive.
{"title":"Like a Meteorite: The Life of Mike Davis","authors":"T. Reifer","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000169","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article surveys the lifetime work of scholar-activist Mike Davis, and his attentiveness to the wide-ranging synthesis of the global political economy and ecology of capitalism and militarism, focusing on labor and social history, and to inequalities of race, class, gender, and nation, and struggles for diversity and inclusion, marking his distinctive style. Covering themes ranging from American exceptionalism, working-class formation, struggles for the eight-hour workday, the political economy and ecology of the Third World, and the growth of today's informal proletariat, the article underlines the author's deepest commitments to a lifetime of scholarship. These include democratic control over the means of production, and the remaking of the global system on new and enlarged, more peaceful and just socioecological foundations, now essential if humanity and other sentient beings are to survive and thrive.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42290902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1017/S0147547923000200
Sabina Insebayeva, Serik Beyssembayev
Abstract Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the “sharing,” “gig,” or “on-demand” economy, which has been changing the relationships between customers, workers, and companies. While literature on the gig economy in the Western context abounds, few studies have focused on “digitalized” labor relations in the Central Asian context. Drawing on qualitative field research in Kazakhstan in 2016 and 2021, supplemented by quantitative data, this article contributes to debates about labor relations and the digitalized “gig” economy in a non-Western context. It provides a novel, in-depth, multisource account of the structure of platform-based business and work experiences in the digitally enabled Kazakh gig economy. Using ethnographic evidence, we offer a detailed analysis of labor conditions from the perspective of platform-based companies and gig workers, identifying resistance and “survival” strategies used to navigate and even challenge the existing system characterized by “algorithmic management” or “algorithm-based” labor relations.
{"title":"Digital Platform Employment in Kazakhstan: Can New Technologies Solve Old Problems in the Labor Market?","authors":"Sabina Insebayeva, Serik Beyssembayev","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000200","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the “sharing,” “gig,” or “on-demand” economy, which has been changing the relationships between customers, workers, and companies. While literature on the gig economy in the Western context abounds, few studies have focused on “digitalized” labor relations in the Central Asian context. Drawing on qualitative field research in Kazakhstan in 2016 and 2021, supplemented by quantitative data, this article contributes to debates about labor relations and the digitalized “gig” economy in a non-Western context. It provides a novel, in-depth, multisource account of the structure of platform-based business and work experiences in the digitally enabled Kazakh gig economy. Using ethnographic evidence, we offer a detailed analysis of labor conditions from the perspective of platform-based companies and gig workers, identifying resistance and “survival” strategies used to navigate and even challenge the existing system characterized by “algorithmic management” or “algorithm-based” labor relations.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44723420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1017/S014754792300011X
Maurizio Totaro
Abstract Following the 2014–2015 oil price crisis, service companies in Kazakhstan went through a process of industrial restructuring centered on workforce reduction and a concomitant increase of labor outsourcing. Taking the restructuring – or “optimization” – of state-owned service companies in the region of Mangystau as a starting point, this paper illustrates the heterogenous precarization effects and forms of precarity catalyzed by the process. Taking a multidimensional approach, the paper describes and analyses the effects of precarization in both socio-economic and political terms, as well as the implications for the production of differentiated laboring subjectivities. It situates the ethnographic trajectories of workers within the framework of Kazakhstan's authoritarian neoliberalism, highlighting the punitive and pastoral techniques of goverment deployed in the restructuring of the regional oil complex. In the first part, the article describes how precarization was experienced by workers as “slavery”, entailing the loss of social recognition as well as the intensification of economic exploitation and political domination, heightening their exposure to social and bodily vulnerability. The second section looks instead at the workings of a governmental agency in its effort to remake redundant workers into small business owners through the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills and the abandonment of the Soviet “dependency mindset”. The third and last section of the article concentrates on the individual trajectory of a dismissed worker joining a multi-level marketing scheme in order to cleanse himself from the bodily and social toxicity of precarized work in the oil industry.
{"title":"Optimize! Oil, Labor, and Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Kazakhstan","authors":"Maurizio Totaro","doi":"10.1017/S014754792300011X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S014754792300011X","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Following the 2014–2015 oil price crisis, service companies in Kazakhstan went through a process of industrial restructuring centered on workforce reduction and a concomitant increase of labor outsourcing. Taking the restructuring – or “optimization” – of state-owned service companies in the region of Mangystau as a starting point, this paper illustrates the heterogenous precarization effects and forms of precarity catalyzed by the process. Taking a multidimensional approach, the paper describes and analyses the effects of precarization in both socio-economic and political terms, as well as the implications for the production of differentiated laboring subjectivities. It situates the ethnographic trajectories of workers within the framework of Kazakhstan's authoritarian neoliberalism, highlighting the punitive and pastoral techniques of goverment deployed in the restructuring of the regional oil complex. In the first part, the article describes how precarization was experienced by workers as “slavery”, entailing the loss of social recognition as well as the intensification of economic exploitation and political domination, heightening their exposure to social and bodily vulnerability. The second section looks instead at the workings of a governmental agency in its effort to remake redundant workers into small business owners through the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills and the abandonment of the Soviet “dependency mindset”. The third and last section of the article concentrates on the individual trajectory of a dismissed worker joining a multi-level marketing scheme in order to cleanse himself from the bodily and social toxicity of precarized work in the oil industry.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48354663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1017/S0147547923000170
Laura Tourtellotte
Abstract In 2019, near Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, five children perished in a house fire while their parents were away at night shift jobs. This widely-reported tragedy brought to light conflicting imperatives and highlighted the precarity of gendered productive and reproductive labor across Kazakhstan. This highly-publicized incident ignited a conflagration of protests by “mothers with many children” (mnogodetnye mamy, kopbala analar), the official designation for low-income women who have four or more children and are eligible for state support. This paper analyzes the mothers’ protests of 2019, and the public and official responses to these protests. It finds that, by centering motherhood and traditional gender norms in their protests, these protestors successfully linked their demands for social benefits back to historic Soviet-era protectionist and paternalist policies, thus legitimizing their demands. However, the article argues that at the same time these gendered labor norms force women, especially marginalized mothers, to engage in precarious forms of labor that neither Western-style NGOs nor limited government support are able to adequately address. The article further concludes that “mothers with many children” labor under precarious conditions and are subject to skepticism and censure, as their actions challenge idealized national scripts of proper womanhood in Kazakhstan. This research contributes to the study of labor, gender, and reproduction in Central Asia and calls for centering the study of gendered labor precarity within Central Asian studies.
{"title":"In Search of Shelter: Precarity, Protest, and Pronatalism among Laboring Women in Kazakhstan","authors":"Laura Tourtellotte","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000170","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 2019, near Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, five children perished in a house fire while their parents were away at night shift jobs. This widely-reported tragedy brought to light conflicting imperatives and highlighted the precarity of gendered productive and reproductive labor across Kazakhstan. This highly-publicized incident ignited a conflagration of protests by “mothers with many children” (mnogodetnye mamy, kopbala analar), the official designation for low-income women who have four or more children and are eligible for state support. This paper analyzes the mothers’ protests of 2019, and the public and official responses to these protests. It finds that, by centering motherhood and traditional gender norms in their protests, these protestors successfully linked their demands for social benefits back to historic Soviet-era protectionist and paternalist policies, thus legitimizing their demands. However, the article argues that at the same time these gendered labor norms force women, especially marginalized mothers, to engage in precarious forms of labor that neither Western-style NGOs nor limited government support are able to adequately address. The article further concludes that “mothers with many children” labor under precarious conditions and are subject to skepticism and censure, as their actions challenge idealized national scripts of proper womanhood in Kazakhstan. This research contributes to the study of labor, gender, and reproduction in Central Asia and calls for centering the study of gendered labor precarity within Central Asian studies.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47893747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1017/S0147547923000182
Franco Galdini, Maurizio Totaro, Laura Tourtellotte
The end of the Soviet Union marked a turning point in the radical reconfiguration of labor relations in the post-Soviet world, including in Central Asia. The effects of this “unmaking” of Soviet working life—to paraphrase Humphrey1—were articulated in new capital-labor relations that led to a heightened sense of financial and existential insecurity across large sections of Central Asian societies. Thirty years on, mass labor precarization in the region appears in line with broader trends in the global political economy, where, despite enduring and even significant differences between countries in the Global North and the Global South, “[c]ontingent, precarious, and temporary jobs are becoming the norm.”2
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue Precarious Labor, Capitalist Transformation, and the State: Insights from Central Asia","authors":"Franco Galdini, Maurizio Totaro, Laura Tourtellotte","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000182","url":null,"abstract":"The end of the Soviet Union marked a turning point in the radical reconfiguration of labor relations in the post-Soviet world, including in Central Asia. The effects of this “unmaking” of Soviet working life—to paraphrase Humphrey1—were articulated in new capital-labor relations that led to a heightened sense of financial and existential insecurity across large sections of Central Asian societies. Thirty years on, mass labor precarization in the region appears in line with broader trends in the global political economy, where, despite enduring and even significant differences between countries in the Global North and the Global South, “[c]ontingent, precarious, and temporary jobs are becoming the norm.”2","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45362905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-09DOI: 10.1017/S0147547923000091
J. Spence, C. Stephenson
Abstract In January 1999, the Canadian government announced their withdrawal from the Cape Breton mining industry with a settlement package for redundant miners, which was considered inadequate by miners and their families. In response, a group of women organized a community-based campaign, United Families (UF), led by two women who traveled to Ottawa to meet national politicians presenting themselves explicitly as “miners’ wives.” While the UF located their campaign within the context of family and community, as expected of miners’ wives, their principal focus was the men disadvantaged by the settlement. Here they strayed onto the terrain of the men's union. To support their case the women took photographs of miners leaving the pit at the end of a shift and organized them into an album. This became a catalyst for the disjuncture between the gendered expectations associated with female roles, and the women's efforts to represent the interests of the men. Intended as objective evidence in support of their position, the photographs carried a range of complex emotions relating to the women's campaign: They expressed the subjective meanings of the women's relationship with mining and the men photographed, as well as providing material evidence of the condition of the miners. This subjectivity was overlaid onto gendered subtexts inscribed within the history of photography in the public and domestic spheres. In campaign negotiations the women struggled to control the meaning of the photographic images and their endeavors resulted in only very minor amendments to the original settlement. The UF women's creative use of photography ultimately undermined the legitimacy of the women's negotiations. However, the photographs remain a testament to the history of mining in Cape Breton and to the emotional commitment of women to a partnership with men forged through the sexual division of labor in coal mining. This article draws upon a range of evidence and theories of gender, activism, and photographic practice to analyze the ways in which the women were disadvantaged in their campaign.
{"title":"Putting a Human Face on It: Gender and Photographic Meaning in a Canadian Women's Coal Mine Campaign","authors":"J. Spence, C. Stephenson","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000091","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In January 1999, the Canadian government announced their withdrawal from the Cape Breton mining industry with a settlement package for redundant miners, which was considered inadequate by miners and their families. In response, a group of women organized a community-based campaign, United Families (UF), led by two women who traveled to Ottawa to meet national politicians presenting themselves explicitly as “miners’ wives.” While the UF located their campaign within the context of family and community, as expected of miners’ wives, their principal focus was the men disadvantaged by the settlement. Here they strayed onto the terrain of the men's union. To support their case the women took photographs of miners leaving the pit at the end of a shift and organized them into an album. This became a catalyst for the disjuncture between the gendered expectations associated with female roles, and the women's efforts to represent the interests of the men. Intended as objective evidence in support of their position, the photographs carried a range of complex emotions relating to the women's campaign: They expressed the subjective meanings of the women's relationship with mining and the men photographed, as well as providing material evidence of the condition of the miners. This subjectivity was overlaid onto gendered subtexts inscribed within the history of photography in the public and domestic spheres. In campaign negotiations the women struggled to control the meaning of the photographic images and their endeavors resulted in only very minor amendments to the original settlement. The UF women's creative use of photography ultimately undermined the legitimacy of the women's negotiations. However, the photographs remain a testament to the history of mining in Cape Breton and to the emotional commitment of women to a partnership with men forged through the sexual division of labor in coal mining. This article draws upon a range of evidence and theories of gender, activism, and photographic practice to analyze the ways in which the women were disadvantaged in their campaign.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43470565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-18DOI: 10.1017/S014754792300008X
C. Twomey
The privatized nature of employment as a domestic servant is often inimical to collective action. Yet in the early 1960s there was significant trade union interest in the working conditions of female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya. Studies of female domestic service in Malaya (later Malaysia) and Singapore are dominated by work focusing on Chinese-born servants before the Second World War, and migrant maids associated with economic transformation from the late 1970s. If scholarship on pre-war domestic servants leans toward an emphasis on agency, then studies of maids from the 1980s tend toward experiences of abjection. What of the intervening period, during the Cold War, when rapid decolonization introduced new factors into the demography, structure, and regulation of domestic service in Malaysia and Singapore? Did this provide opportunity for greater autonomy, mimic older colonial relationships, or herald new protections for domestic servants in the modern postcolonial state? The considerable historical literature devoted to the relationship between imperial power, colonialism, and domestic service rarely extends to the persistence and dynamics of domestic service in the era of decolonization between the 1950s and the 1970s, although it does explore the increasing feminization of the occupation. This article explores a confluence of factors—the politics of anticolonialism, economic dependence, and apprehension about the privacy of the home—that cohered in a controversy in the 1960s known as the “amah strike,” when female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya threatened to walk off the job over a proposed change to their employment conditions.
{"title":"Amah Activism: Domestic Servants and Decolonization in 1960s Malaysia and Singapore","authors":"C. Twomey","doi":"10.1017/S014754792300008X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S014754792300008X","url":null,"abstract":"The privatized nature of employment as a domestic servant is often inimical to collective action. Yet in the early 1960s there was significant trade union interest in the working conditions of female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya. Studies of female domestic service in Malaya (later Malaysia) and Singapore are dominated by work focusing on Chinese-born servants before the Second World War, and migrant maids associated with economic transformation from the late 1970s. If scholarship on pre-war domestic servants leans toward an emphasis on agency, then studies of maids from the 1980s tend toward experiences of abjection. What of the intervening period, during the Cold War, when rapid decolonization introduced new factors into the demography, structure, and regulation of domestic service in Malaysia and Singapore? Did this provide opportunity for greater autonomy, mimic older colonial relationships, or herald new protections for domestic servants in the modern postcolonial state? The considerable historical literature devoted to the relationship between imperial power, colonialism, and domestic service rarely extends to the persistence and dynamics of domestic service in the era of decolonization between the 1950s and the 1970s, although it does explore the increasing feminization of the occupation. This article explores a confluence of factors—the politics of anticolonialism, economic dependence, and apprehension about the privacy of the home—that cohered in a controversy in the 1960s known as the “amah strike,” when female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya threatened to walk off the job over a proposed change to their employment conditions.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45155561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000108
Gabriel Antonio Solis, Tania L. Balderas, Iuri Bauler Pereira, Samantha R. Cooney, Cynthia Yuan Gao, David Helps, Ramona R. Malczynski, Emma B. Mincks, I. Plowright, Joseph A. Ukockis, Lauren N. Whitmer
In the Spring of 2020, the onset of the global pandemic intensified existing inequalities, but also accelerated organizing within some of the most precarious economic sectors. The neoliberal university was no exception to this general trend, and from 2020 until 2022, student workers organized for union contracts, just pandemic responses, independent arbitration for harassment and improved conditions at their workplaces. In those years, while neoliberal universities issued empty calls for “community,” and a prompt return to normalcy, student workers mobilized themselves and won unprecedented gains from their institutions, rejecting administrative pleas for the defense of the status quo. The following “Report from the Field,” details the struggle of student workers organizing from 2020 to 2022 at the University of New Mexico, the University of Michigan, New York University, and Columbia University, and offers a collectively authored reflection on the challenges, victories and future concerns of its respective movements.
{"title":"Against “Normalcy”: A Collective Testimony of Student Workers Organizing During the Pandemic","authors":"Gabriel Antonio Solis, Tania L. Balderas, Iuri Bauler Pereira, Samantha R. Cooney, Cynthia Yuan Gao, David Helps, Ramona R. Malczynski, Emma B. Mincks, I. Plowright, Joseph A. Ukockis, Lauren N. Whitmer","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000108","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the Spring of 2020, the onset of the global pandemic intensified existing inequalities, but also accelerated organizing within some of the most precarious economic sectors. The neoliberal university was no exception to this general trend, and from 2020 until 2022, student workers organized for union contracts, just pandemic responses, independent arbitration for harassment and improved conditions at their workplaces. In those years, while neoliberal universities issued empty calls for “community,” and a prompt return to normalcy, student workers mobilized themselves and won unprecedented gains from their institutions, rejecting administrative pleas for the defense of the status quo. The following “Report from the Field,” details the struggle of student workers organizing from 2020 to 2022 at the University of New Mexico, the University of Michigan, New York University, and Columbia University, and offers a collectively authored reflection on the challenges, victories and future concerns of its respective movements.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47102666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S0147547923000121
Franco Galdini
Abstract This article identifies decollectivization as one of the central policies through which the so-called “Uzbek model” mediated independent Uzbekistan's incorporation into the global economy as a cotton exporter. As such, it problematizes the way in which the dominant literature on transition framed the country's independent history since 1991 as a “paradox” of no transition and transformation. Since it theorizes the former as the application of privatization, liberalization, and macroeconomic stabilization, the literature cannot explain why, absent this standard reform package, Uzbekistan still underwent a momentous transformation from full employment and low migration to mass informalization of economic activity and rural outmigration. Instead, I contend, decollectivization entailed a process of mass expropriation of the rural population from the land—primitive accumulation in Marxian terminology—in order to put it to production for capital accumulation. As such, land use was shifted from the collective reproduction of the rural population during Soviet times to the rent-subsidization of capital accumulation after independence, particularly via import-substitution industrialization. The result has been the class stratification of Uzbek society, most evident in the rise of a vast relative surplus population of landless peasants struggling in the precarious informal economy, including as daily workers and labor migrants.
{"title":"Rise of the Surplus Population? Land Decollectivization, Class Stratification, and Labor Precarization in Uzbekistan","authors":"Franco Galdini","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000121","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article identifies decollectivization as one of the central policies through which the so-called “Uzbek model” mediated independent Uzbekistan's incorporation into the global economy as a cotton exporter. As such, it problematizes the way in which the dominant literature on transition framed the country's independent history since 1991 as a “paradox” of no transition and transformation. Since it theorizes the former as the application of privatization, liberalization, and macroeconomic stabilization, the literature cannot explain why, absent this standard reform package, Uzbekistan still underwent a momentous transformation from full employment and low migration to mass informalization of economic activity and rural outmigration. Instead, I contend, decollectivization entailed a process of mass expropriation of the rural population from the land—primitive accumulation in Marxian terminology—in order to put it to production for capital accumulation. As such, land use was shifted from the collective reproduction of the rural population during Soviet times to the rent-subsidization of capital accumulation after independence, particularly via import-substitution industrialization. The result has been the class stratification of Uzbek society, most evident in the rise of a vast relative surplus population of landless peasants struggling in the precarious informal economy, including as daily workers and labor migrants.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41936567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-19DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000145
Paulo Drinot
Until recently, historians, including labor historians, tended to view biography as an inferior genre of historical writing. This has started to change, as biography moves away from its narrow focus on “great men.” Historians increasingly see it as a way to explore, as Marx famously suggested, how men make their own history albeit not under circumstances of their choosing. This essay examines recent biographies of three of the most important labor leaders in Latin America: Chile's Luis Emilio Recabarren, Mexico's Vícente Lombardo Toledano, and Brazil's Lula. Although they approach the study of the interplay of the personal and the political in different ways, all three studies provide strong evidence that biography has an important role to play in sharpening our understanding of the history of labor.
{"title":"Laboring Lives: New Approaches to Biography and Labor History in Latin America","authors":"Paulo Drinot","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000145","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Until recently, historians, including labor historians, tended to view biography as an inferior genre of historical writing. This has started to change, as biography moves away from its narrow focus on “great men.” Historians increasingly see it as a way to explore, as Marx famously suggested, how men make their own history albeit not under circumstances of their choosing. This essay examines recent biographies of three of the most important labor leaders in Latin America: Chile's Luis Emilio Recabarren, Mexico's Vícente Lombardo Toledano, and Brazil's Lula. Although they approach the study of the interplay of the personal and the political in different ways, all three studies provide strong evidence that biography has an important role to play in sharpening our understanding of the history of labor.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45846195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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