Whatever happened to the affluent worker? Deindustrialisation, the British sociology of class and class composition in Luton, UK

Autonomist Marxist ideas and concepts are resurgent and, with their latent spatiality, are well placed to contribute to radical geographical debates. In particular, the methodology of ‘class composition’ analysis provides a rigorous, materialist critique of transforming capitalist social relations. This paper first provides vital historical–theoretical context from the milieu of Italian Operaismo, before emphasising the value of autonomist Marxist analyses of three contemporary geographical frontiers: labour process, migration, and social reproduction. It ultimately argues that the laudable motivations of the autonomous geographies project, explored in this very journal, would be better served through an explicitly materialist autonomist geography.

This paper takes Haraway’s techno-scientific concept of the cyborg as the basis for understanding a feminist theory of class that is rooted in socially reproductive labour. Arguing that the Operaismo notion of class composition ignored reproductive labour as either a technical or political component of proletarian composition, this article claims that social reproduction in fact provides the foundation for both. Through the notion of the cyborg, this article situates class as a human and machinic con, which is at once conquered by capital’s technological methods of accumulation but also finds its modes of resistance within these same convergences. Using the GynePunk collective’s DIY reproductive health technologies as an example of class composition through cyborgic social reproduction, this article aims to develop a techno-feminist concept of class suitable to the prevailing technological conditions of our time.

This article engages literature on special economic zones and territory in global development. I suggest a focus on labour's spatial class composition as constitutive of territorial coherence provides insights into how the Savan‐Seno Special Economic Zone in Lao PDR operates as an economic border territory bridging Laos to the regional and global economies. The distanciated global connections which special economic zones aim to create are predicated on zones gaining internal coherence for capital accumulation. I suggest zones’ internal coherence depends on zone firms reworking the local class composition of labour, itself constituted by workers’ spatial practices. In the Savan‐Seno zone this occurred through immobilising a mobile labour force and taking advantage of its continuing embeddedness within a subsistence rice‐producing village economy. The argument aims to illustrate how zones producing for global markets act as territories of complex spatiality which span and connect multiple spaces of production and workers’ social reproduction.

An Honest Day’s Wage for a Dishonest Day’s Work:(Re)Productivism and Refusal Heather Berg (bio) Thirty years after publishing the pivotal “Wages Against Housework,” Silvia Federici revisited reproductive labor and its central role in the “unfinished feminist revolution”: “The concept of ‘reproductive labor’ recognizes the possibility of crucial alliances and forms of cooperation between producers and the reproduced: mothers and children, teachers and students, nurses and patients” (2008, 100). The Wages for Housework movement focused on establishing reproductive work as work and demanding a wage for it in hopes of making the family on which capital relies so uneconomical as to bring the system to its knees (Federici 1975). An additional legacy of the movement for anticapitalist feminism remains the celebration of cross-class alliances between those served and those serving. I argue that Wages for Housework is remarkable both for the militancy of its approach to reproductive labor’s organization under capital and the conservatism of its approach to the reproductive work ethic. We would be ill-equipped to resist the violence of late capitalism without a framework with which to understand unrecognized and unwaged work as work. However, the ethic of alliance positions workers precariously in relation to the blackmail of what I term the “social necessity debt,” a configuration in which workers are evaluated based on the perceived necessity of their work to the reproduction of society. This perceived value is in turn mobilized against workers as the reason they cannot refuse work. Teaching and health care are therefore valued more highly than retail work, for example, but a teacher’s or nurse’s refusing work tasks or walking out midshift is assigned an ethical debt retail workers have not as yet been asked to confront. Capital extracts ethical responsibility from workers, much like labor itself. By positing a [End Page 161] vision of community in which our interests are necessarily aligned with those of the people we serve, we enable that extraction. In this spirit, I critique what I term “(re)productivism,” an attitude toward reproductive labor that assumes that social reproduction is selfevidently good and necessary and subordinates disruptive desires and practices to its dictates. This both draws from and complicates autonomist Marxist critiques of productivism as a framework in which “the richness, spontaneity, and plurality of social practices and relations are subordinated to the instrumental and rationalist logic of productivity” (Weeks 2011, 81). That autonomists directed their critique of productivism at both capitalist and orthodox Marxist visions of social organization is key to my argument. Like socialism informed by Marxist orthodoxy, anticapitalist feminism and the Wages for Housework movement emphasize control over labor’s structure and organization rather than its ethics. Extending the push from autonomist industrial workers who “didn’t want control; they wanted out” (Cleaver 2000, 17), I am concerned with reproductive labor and its ethics, including but not only as they exist under capitalism. Nearly forty years after Wages for Housework’s inception, the problematics the movement identified with reproductive labor—the “blackmail whereby our need to give and receive affection is turned against us as a work duty,” unclear boundaries between work and nonwork, contingency, isolation, and low pay—are paradigmatic of work that reaches far outside the home (Federici 1975, 20). Marxist feminist scholars have explored the “feminization of work,” where “feminization” means both an increasing proportion of women in the labor market and the trend in which capital increasingly calls upon the affects, activities, and conditions associated with women’s reproductive labor in all forms of work (Morini 2007). Working from this latter definition of feminization, I explore the corresponding feminization of symbolic debt, whereby more and more workers get saddled with the syrupy affects that have traditionally helped capital to extract the maximum reproductive labor from women. Marxist critiques of productivism that unsettle not only the material terms of labor but also its ethics are central to efforts to disrupt the ethical economy of capitalism—an adaptive and complex system of debts and credits that pushes us to work more for less (Weeks 2011). Antiproductivism allows us to see work as a form of violence, rather than a path to selfdiscovery or a necessary...

Through a case study of a rent strike against a real estate investment trust in a working-class neighbourhood in Hamilton, Ontario, this article asks how we might understand class and class struggle against financialized gentrification in a post-industrial context. While class has been central to gentrification literature, working-class experience and struggle have often been ignored or conceptualized in a way that precludes agency. New research on financialization of housing often focuses on struggles but has so far paid limited attention to class. In this article I draw on Italian operaismo (workerism) and its concept of class composition to contribute to the current debate by suggesting that financialized gentrification and struggles against it might contribute to a recomposition of the urban working class. Through a qualitative account of the 2018 East Hamilton rent strike, I analyse this struggle as two moments of class composition in the sphere of social reproduction. First, the extraction, exploitation and displacement pressure tenants experienced is analysed through the lens of technical class composition. Second, the rent strike itself is analysed as an expression of political class composition involving a confrontation of urban capital, a politicization of housing precarity, and the building of collective, autonomous power.

The affluent worker study has held sway as one of the most important works, if not the most important work in British sociology over the last decade. Its findings remain unchallenged in the literature to date. Many analyses of industrial behaviour, political behaviour, family behaviour and “community” behaviour take the findings as the starting point of their investigation. For British sociology the findings of the Affluent Worker have foundation status. This paper sets out to fault the claims of prototypicality and typicality made for the affluent workers of Luton by the study team.

Sustainable use and management of natural resources is now a well-accepted principle, but its implementation continues to elude us. This is partly because of the complex and dynamic nature of ecological systems, interdependence among elements, and the impacts that resource management actions have on the functioning of an ecosystem. Livestock grazing is the most extensive landuse in Australia, occurring in over 55% of the continent. In forested landscapes this landuse has been characterised by clearing and/or modification of landscapes through overgrazing and changes to fire regimes, followed by re-growth and increase in density of woody vegetation and associated loss in grazing productivity. Consequently, the Vegetation Management Act 1999, now in place in Queensland, requires the coexistence of conservation of biological diversity and primary production. However, a challenge exists in how to integrate the two outcomes in a sustainable manner. This paper describes a case study application of the Ecosystem Dynamics Simulator (EDS), a forest growth model, as a decision support tool for the integration of sustainable livestock production and conservation of biological diversity at Mt Armour Nature Refuge, in western Queensland. The study was initiated by a request from the landowner for advice on how to manage increasing density of woody vegetation (vegetation thickening) without compromising conservation values.The landholder had expressed concern that the vegetation thickening was impinging on livestock production and was therefore in need of thinning. Thinning of vegetation within this bioregion is regulated by the Regional Vegetation Management Code for Brigalow Belt and New England Tablelands Bioregions, Queensland Government (Code) (DNRM, 2012). Firstly, for thinning to occur, the Code requires a verified crown cover increase or presence of > 250 immature stems in a 0.25 ha area. Secondly, if thinning occurs, all mature stems should be retained, and including 75 or 125 immature stems per 0.25 ha area depending on vegetation type. Our objective was to establish: 1) whether density of immature stems met thinning criteria of the Code and; 2) what thinning intensity and fire regimes were necessary to promote a sustainable ecosystem. In examining thinning intensity, the potential risk of loss of biodiversity based on recommended retention rates was also investigated. Working in collaboration with the landholder, data were collected from the property and the landowner's tree removal preference was also recorded. The EDS was used to project long-term changes in tree species composition and diameter size class structure for the uneven-aged mixed species native forests and to explore management scenarios that included the use of alternative thinning scenarios and fire regimes. The results confirmed: 1) the vegetation on the site was dense enough to be thinned under the current Code and projection indicated thickening is likely to continue if left un-thinned; 2) that the landowner's preferred tree removal intensity was not sustainable and; 3) a thinning intensity based on long-term simulation that considered species composition and stand size structure provided the best compromise outcome. The simulation results also confirmed likely inadequacy in the Code's recommended retention rates for immature stems in the studied vegetation types. Retaining only 75 immature stems (< 20 cm dbh) appeared to be a high risk option because large trees were few, growth rates were low and sapling recruitment was intermittent and vulnerable to drought related mortality. Consequently, retention of at least 140 immature stems would provide a more resilient stand structure and species composition under the dry growth conditions at the study site. This study demonstrated the valuable role that a vegetation growth dynamics simulator can play in elucidating long-term changes in tree species composition and diameter size structure in support of sustainable environmental management.

Since the early 2000s transnational surrogacy has emerged as a new capitalist frontier founded on the intensification of the commodification of women’s reproductive labours, bodies and biologies. This has resulted in academic and policy debates on whether to outlaw surrogacy altogether or to ban commercial surrogacy in favour of altruistic forms of surrogacy. Rather than tackling surrogacy in moralising terms of ‘altruistic’ gift-giving versus ‘greedy’ money-making, in this article we draw on feminist political economy literature on social reproduction to propose an integrative reproductive labour perspective that looks at the dialectics of waged and unwaged work involved in the process of (re)producing people. Drawing on empirical research data on commercial surrogacy in Georgia, we analyse how this dialectical relation between exploitation of waged work (surrogate) and appropriation of unwaged work (mother) operates on the workfloor. We explore Maria Mies’ concept of ‘housewifization’ to argue that processes of exploitation are deepened in the Georgian surrogacy industry, partially because surrogates refrain/are refrained from identifying as workers and as such are not afforded labour rights nor considered to produce value.

In this article, we analyse the social reproduction of post‐Soviet migrant labour. Our inquiry builds on artwork by Olga Jitlina and Anna Tereshkina and by Mahpora Kiromova dealing with the effects of migration on family relations in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. We have braided the artwork with strands of social reproduction theory to examine the transnational household as a set of relationships that enables post‐Soviet and global capitalism to draw value out of unwaged work and to reproduce the differentiated (i.e. gendered and racialised) labour force. Our focus is on the tropes of family, weddings, love, and violence. The analysis of these tropes draws attention to the intersecting effects of globalised capitalism, local structures of value, the state, and patriarchy in post‐Soviet political economy. Through them we detail the fundamental co‐constitution of production and social reproduction, but also show that practices of social reproduction can be reservoirs of resistance and potential change.

Quality of life (QoL) is being considered as one of the fundamental concepts in contemporary era. It tries to assess the level of general welfare of the communities. Urban transitional neighborhoods possess specific situation and as a result present distinctive QoL. The major objective of this study is to identify and measure the QoL dimensions in urban transitional neighborhoods using both objective and subjective indices pertaining to Darvazeshemiran neighborhood of Tehran. In order to accomplish this and gather needed data, 244 questionnaires were distributed among Darvazeshemiran’s residents. This study suggests that there exists low level of QoL in the study area. That is 64.3 % of the residents were dissatisfied with the prevailing level of QoL. This in turn is associated with the transitional nature of this neighborhood. The residents were strongly dissatisfied with regard to the environmental qualification as opposed to accessibility status. Furthermore, this study identified five objective factors respectively regarding QoL. There exists low correlation between subjective and objective dimensions. That demands simultaneous consideration of both objective and subjective dimensions. It is argued that individual treatments of each could not accurately represent the QoL of residents.

We defined objective (car needs for daily activities) and subjective dimension (other aspects to a car than mobility) of car dependence. We develop an integrated survey design that allows to collect typical weekly travel behavior and sociodemographic data, as well as psychological constructs. To define differing types of car dependence we used the data from an international survey undertaken in Berlin (Germany), San Francisco (USA) and Shanghai (China). We identified dissonances between individuals based on subjective and objective dimensions. The findings also showed that respondents from San Francisco were more objectively dependent on cars than respondents from Berlin or Shanghai.

This article presents a new approach to index development, extending the methods used by Townsend, Mack and Lansley and Hallerod to measure deprivation in the developed world. The index combines three 'objective' dimensions of deprivation (i.e. monetary, consumption and work-related), and weighs them according to subjective perceptions regarding which items are more critical to deprivation. A particular application of factor analysis to determining deprivation measures and their corresponding weights leads to a more sophisticated and theoretically robust index than those used previously. The index draws on data from interviews with both partners of 17 households randomly sampled from a Turkish squatter settlement. The article contends that the methodological and substantive advantages of this approach are relevant to both developing and developed contexts.

Therfor, the study aims at examining (i) the factors which cause transgender has deviant behavior, (ii) the adaptation process of transgender in Makassar city, (iii) the adaptation pattern of organized transgender that has potential in social reproduction. The type of this study is qualitative research with descriptive. The site of the study was in Manggala subdistrict of Makassar city. The informants of the study consisted of transgender, parents of transgender, public, and government with the total of 10 people. Data was collected by employing interview, observation, and documentation. Data was analyzed by conduction data reduction, data presentation, and verivication or conclusion. The result of the study indicates that the adaptation of transgender in Makassar city of Manggala subdistrict is through occupation or their profession. They cover their deviant behavior and the society can accept their existence.

This is an analytical exploratory research; its object is family health needs on child development apprehended by the dialectics between objective and subjective dimensions. Object interpretation was grounded on the theoretical background of Health Promotion, underpinned by the concept of empowerment. Objectives: 1. To characterize the potential for social development in health districts of Curitiba City/ Brazil. 2. To characterize social inclusion of families with children under 5 years of age in the coverage area of the Health Primary Unit. 3. To apprehend the perceived health needs by families and representatives of social agencies on child development. 4. To analyze data based on the theoretical background of Health Promotion. Methodology: This study was carried out in the city of Curitiba, at Bairro Novo Health District. Qualitative-quantitative techniques were used. Research subjects were members of families with children until 5 years of age, residents in the coverage area of the Health Unit and representatives of socialization agencies working with families in that area. In the objective dimension, secondary data were obtained at Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE) – Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics – from the census of 2000, in order to characterize social inequalities among Health Districts, using the construct of Social Inclusion Indicator and Home Quality Indicator. Data were clustered according to the census sectors that entail each Health District. Families’ characterization was undertaken by means of a semi-structured interview with 49 families, entailing information on social inclusion. In the subjective dimension, data were obtained by means of a focal group undertaken with 21 families and by means of semi-structured interviews with 12 representatives of socialization agencies: Family protection council, Primary Health Care Unit, “Pastoral da Crianca (community-based organization run by the Catholic Church to provide help to mothers and children), day-care center and pre-school. Data were analyzed by means of the dialectic-hermeneutic method. Results: The municipality presented a Social Inclusion Indicator of 3.66; SII in Bairro Novo was 3.23, below municipality average. Families’ characterization unveiled the social inequalities existent in the area. Data analysis disclosed families’ health needs, showing differences in their apprehension as well as in their fulfillment. Contradictions were found in the practices of socialization agencies, subjects’ control and autonomy, based on families’ normative view. Families’ idealized view hinders the realization of their “actual” needs, hampering the elaboration of social projects which really meet their needs. Families perceive themselves as refuge spots, able to protect their children from societal violence. The realization of families’ health needs foster the possibility of designing intervention projects in Nursing Collective Health in order to strengthen family autonomy, bringing about family-centered care, committed to an emancipating, horizontal, dialogic action. However, it deems necessary to stress the power of public policies in order to strengthen families, broadening families’ chances to promote child development so that they do not become – through their omission – a factor of vulnerability to children’s health.

Class Rules challenges the popular myth that high schools are the Great Equalizers. In his groundbreaking study, Cookson demonstrates that adolescents undergo different class rites of passage depending on the social-class composition of the high school they attend. Drawing on stories of schools and individual students, the author shows that where a student goes to high school is a major influence on his or her social class trajectory. Class Rules is a penetrating, original examination of the role education plays in blocking upward mobility for many children. It offers a compelling vision of an equitable system of schools based on the full democratic rights of students. Book features: provides a fresh, dynamic way of understanding educational inequality and social reproduction, offers a breakthrough social/psychological theory of how adolescents acquire class consciousness, compares the cultures and curricula of five American high schools focusing on the class composition of their students.