Marx in the Field

257 Pages·2020·2.49 MB·English

by  Alessandra Mezzadri (editor)

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Marx in the Field
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Marx in the Field

Edited by
Alessandra Mezzadri
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Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2021
by ANTHEM PRESS
75– 76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
© 2021 Alessandra Mezzadri editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951132
ISBN- 13: 978- 1- 78527- 449- 7 (Hbk)
ISBN- 10: 1- 78527- 449- X (Hbk)
Cover image: The image is based on the original painting ‘Carlo Marx’, by artist
Francesco Ghersina, photoshopped by Valentina D’Ettorre, with pictures by
Alessandra Mezzadri, Ben Cousins, and CITU Bangalore archives.
This title is also available as an e- book.
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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements ix
Chapter One Introduction: Marx’s Field as Our Global Present 1
Alessandra Mezzadri
Chapter Two Into the Field with Marx: Some Observations on
Researching Class 17
Henry Bernstein
Chapter Three Marx’s Merchants’ Capital: Researching Agrarian Markets
in Contemporary India 31
Barbara Harriss- White
Chapter Four The Ties That Divide: Marx’s Fractions of Capital and Class
Analysis in/f or the Global South 49
Muhammad Ali Jan
Chapter Five Marx in the Sweatshop: Exploitation and Social
Reproduction in a Garment Factory Called India 63
Alessandra Mezzadri
Chapter Six Thinking about Capital and Class in the Gulf Arab States 77
Adam Hanieh
Chapter Seven Marx on the Bourse: Coffee and the Intersecting/ Integrated
Circuits of Capital 91
Susan Newman
Chapter Eight Learning Marx by Doing: Class Analysis in an Emerging
Zone of Global Horticulture 103
Benjamin Selwyn
Chapter Nine Understanding Labour Relations and Struggles in India
through Marx’s Method 117
Satoshi Miyamura
Chapter Ten Investigating Class Relations in Rural South Africa: Marx’s
‘Rich Totality of Many Determinations’ 129
Farai Mtero, Brittany Bunce, Ben Cousins, Alex Dubb and
Donna Hornby
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Chapter Eleven From Marx’s ‘Double Freedom’ to ‘Degrees of
Unfreedom’: Methodological Insights from the Study of
Uzbekistan’s Agrarian Labour 147
Lorena Lombardozzi
Chapter Twelve The Labour Process and Health through the Lens of Marx’s
Historical Materialism 161
Tania Toffanin
Chapter Thirteen Marx and the Poor’s Nourishment: Diets in Contemporary
Sub- Saharan Africa 175
Sara Stevano
Chapter Fourteen Marx In Utero: A Workers’ Inquiry of the In/ Visible
Labours of Reproduction in the Surrogacy Industry 189
Sigrid Vertommen
Chapter Fifteen Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee 203
Gavin Capps, Genevieve LeBaron and Paolo Novak in Conversation
with Alessandra Mezzadri
Chapter Sixteen Postcolonial Marxism and the ‘Cyber- Field’ in COVID
Times: On Labour Becoming ‘Working Class’ 219
Subir Sinha
Notes on Contributors 231
Index 235
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ILLUSTRATIONS

Tables
4.1 Identifying fractions within the capitalist class 56
6.1 GCC involvement in banking sectors of selected Arab countries 83
8.1 Operations and timing of the cultivation cycle according to market
destination 109
8.2 Changes in the gender division of labour in export grape production 113
10.1 Class typology for irrigation plot holders in Shiloh and Keiskammahoek 137
10.2 Summary of CPA households by asset group and production trajectory
highlighting key mechanisms of relative wealth 138
10.3 Key socioeconomic characteristics of SSG homesteads by asset group 140
10.4 Frequency of case studies by asset-wealth and cane production trajectory 141
10.5 Cross- tabulation of Ongeluksnek households’ asset group profile and
wealth groups from participatory wealth ranking 142
10.6 Comparison of Ongeluksnek households wealth stratification with overall
livelihood trajectory 143
11.1 Mixed methods to study Uzbek agrarian Labour 153
13.1 Summary of case studies, Mozambique and Ghana 180
13.2 Meat consumption in the previous month 181
13.3 Nutrition in Ghana and Greater Accra Region 182
13.4 Frequency of Fan Milk snacks consumption in the previous week, by
wealth quintile 183
Figures
8.1 São Francisco valley in Brazil 105
10.1 Schematic combination of relative wealth with differentiation trajectories 135
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project is, at once, the result of years of reflection on Marxian political economy
and its deployment during fieldwork and the intuition of a moment which crossed my
mind as I was writing a paper for the conference Karl Marx @200 held in Patna, India,
in the summer of 2018 and organized by the Asian Development Research Institute
(ADRI). Perhaps, it is due to the double nature of its gestation, based both on my long-
term experience and reflections as a fieldworker and on the intimacy of a quick moment
of epiphany, that I feel so attached to it and grateful that it is finally becoming a book.
It is also because of this dual nature that it is difficult to acknowledge all those I feel
indebted to. Indeed, I want to thank ADRI and the organizing committee of ‘Karl Marx
@200’ for their kind invitation and hospitality in Patna. I want to thank all the brilliant
contributors to this volume, for having helped in turning a sketched idea into a rigorous
and exciting intellectual enquiry. Among my colleagues, I want to thank with particular
warmth the members of the SOAS Labour, Social Movements and Development
(LSMD) research cluster. Several have contributed to this volume, but many others have
shaped and sharpened my thinking during the years. Notwithstanding the multiple intel-
lectual trajectories within the cluster, I hope the book does provide a glimpse of ‘Marx
at SOAS’ – concrete, in conversation with other intellectual traditions, and engaged
in the study of the many empirical manifestations of contemporary capitalism and
its injustices. Among my past and current students, I want to thank Lorenza Monaco,
Nithya Natarajan and Ayse Arslan, and the wonderful crowd of the Labour, Activism
and Development (LADEV) Programme (previously LSMD). I also want to acknowledge
the influence of an invited lecture on methods I delivered to students in the Doctoral
School of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Ghent, Belgium, in 2016,
where I deployed the expression ‘Marx in the Field’ for the first time; thanks to the
organizing committee, Itamar Shachar, Sigrid Vertommen (who has a chapter in this
collection), Robin Thiers and Allan Souza Queiroz.
Thanks to Jairus Banaji for guiding my thinking on Marx and the world economy for
many years. And thanks to Maria Mies and Silvia Federici – far more recent encounters
along my academic and personal journey – and to Rohini Hensman and Naila Kabeer
for inspiring and challenging me to further sharpen the feminist lens through which
I today read, adjust and transgress Marxian categories and methods. Thanks also to
Jessica Lerche for editorial support. I am grateful to Francesco Ghersina for letting me
use a modified version of his painting ‘Carlo Marx’ as book cover. The pictures from the
field used to dress ‘his’ Marx represent a textile factory in Shanghai, China (background,
my own); a garment workers’ mobilisation in India (right section of Marx’s shirt, courtesy