Working Class at Large in Historical Capitalism: Global Southern Perspectives
Author: Krista Lillemets, krista_lillemets@yahoo.com
Department: Department of Political and Social Sciences
University: Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sérgio Costa
Year of completion: 2023
Language of dissertation: English
Keywords:
Labour and capitalism
, Coerced labour
, Critical theory of capitalism
, Southern knowledge
Areas of Research:
Historical and Comparative Sociology
, Social Transformations and Sociology of Development
Abstract
This thesis aims to explore and rethink critically the concept of labour, which is central to the 19th-century social science paradigm and continues organising the production of social scientific knowledge. Given that and with the focus on the Marxist political economy of labour, I will problematise the classical narratives of capitalist labour and working-class formation theoretically and epistemologically. The questions that I propose to answer are, first, whether the concept of labour, which is transformed into the norm of capitalist modernity, can take into account the social categories which do not fit into the defining one, particularly the coerced (unfree) labour (waged or not) from geographical and social peripheries as configured in historical capitalism. The second question asks whether incorporating peripheral knowledge production can contribute to the renovation of the dominant concept. It will be argued that by defining capitalism with “free” wage labour, this 19th-century paradigm, in which the Marxist political economy is rooted, is limited in taking into account the coerced (unfree) labour (waged or not) in the conceptualisation of capitalist labour and working-class formation. It does not consider the complex and multi-layered experience of labour force formation in the periphery or the core countries of capitalism. In other words, by defining capitalism with “free” wage labour, or the 19th-century urban industrial proletarian in England, orthodox Marxism has relegated modern slavery and other forms of coerced (unfree) labour (waged or not) as instances of primitive accumulation to the past. Theoretically, free labour and unfree labour are seen as antithetical and incompatible in the capitalist formation, and unfree labour has been left out of the ambit of capital. Partly, these limitations of incorporating peripheral realities in the global sociological theory-making have to do with the enduring asymmetry in the global production and circulation of knowledge. Hence, this dissertation has two main aims. Theoretically, the aim is to contribute to the renewal of the Marxist political economy of labour by critically rethinking the concepts of labour and the working class from the viewpoint of global intersected processes of expropriation, exploitation, commodification, and coercion as a common class-basis of diverse dependent and subordinated labourers. The epistemological aim implies resorting to the Brazilian historical social science as an instance of peripheral knowledge and evaluating its potential to contribute to renovating the Marxist political economy of labour and, thereby, to global sociology.
