Abstract
ABSTRACT The accelerating urbanization for peasant-workers and the growing labour unrest in China since the 2010s have promoted some scholars to applaud how proletarianization can lead to working-class consciousness and action. Drawing on Marxian theory of proletarianization, we question the assumptions that ‘proper proletarians’ possess more revolutionary potential than semi-proletarians, and that institutionalized collective bargaining represents a more advanced form of labour struggle. Through an ethnographic study of labour activists and workers in China, this paper investigates the dilemmas that peasant-workers have encountered in working-class formation as well as tactics for overcoming these barriers. Migrant workers’ ‘small-peasant mentality’ can be overcome not by turning them into full proletarians or relinquishing rural identity, but by educating more co-workers and getting them more experienced in collective action organization. China’s experience will provide important lessons for conceptualizing the direction and tactics of organizing informal labour for the Global South.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have