Class Antagonism Research Articles

Interview with Werner Bonefeld: Open Marxism and the Critique of Society

Werner Bonefeld is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK, and Adjunct Professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia). He has published on topics as varied as the development of the British state during the 1980s and 1990s, Europe’s monetary union, ordoliberalism, and Marx’s critique of political economy. A ground-breaking critical theorist, Bonefeld’s contribution to an ‘open’ Marxism developed a rigorous critique of capitalist social relations without omitting the significant themes of lived experience and class antagonism. The following interview marks the publication of a recent monograph titled A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation. Bonefeld discusses his reading of Frankfurt School critical theory and its relation to heterodox and open Marxist social theory with Alex Alvarez Taylor, whose research focuses on early critical theory.

Aristotle Meets Augustine in Fourteenth-Century Liège: Religious Violence in the Chronicon of Jean Hocsem

As William Cavanaugh has remarked, the scholarly notion of religion “should often be surrounded by scare quotes. Its flexibility and occasional nebulousness make evaluating its role in conceiving of, effecting, and justifying violence even more difficult. At the same time, it sticks around and remains a vital category of contemporary analysis. What if getting behind the Wars of Religion—the period to which Cavanaugh traces the emergence of his “myth of religious violence”—could plant the seeds for a new paradigm in understanding the relationship between religion and violence? In this article, I analyze the Chronicon of Jean Hocsem, a fourteenth-century canon from Liège. Untranslated into English and rarely written about, Hocsem’s text offers an unexpectedly political perspective on this question. Combining insights from Augustine’s City of God as well as Aristotle’s Politics and basing his ideas on his own experience of nearly constant conflict, Hocsem develops the idea that class antagonisms and human frailty make violence—especially political violence—inevitable. He takes this approach within a polity ruled by a prince-bishop, though one he would not have thought of as “religious”. Hocsem’s solutions are thus avowedly political. His pessimism about such questions leads to an emphasis on mitigating violence through the institution of proper socio-political structures. This reading of Hocsem and his politicizing of the question of violence opens new possibilities for scholars, further calling into question any easy relationship between the modern categories of “religion” and violence.

Back to Marx: reflections on the feminist crisis at the crossroads of neoliberalism and neoconservatism

Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation. The historical foundation of women’s issues can be traced back to class oppression, which stems from the primacy of material production over reproductive labor. In this context, gender oppression becomes an instrument that perpetuates class oppression. Only by interpreting women’s bodily autonomy and power from the perspective of material life and class reproduction, and by uniting various social forces against capitalism with practical actions, can feminism regain its vitality. Although the current global women’s movement is full of internal divisions, contradictions, and struggles, there is still hope for achieving unity. When the day comes, history will confirm that true gender equality is not merely the promotion of individual choice for a few, but the emancipation of all, and Marxism will be recorded once again in the history of human liberation. To accomplish this grand objective, the vital step is to end the marginalization of Marxist Feminism.

The rise of military capital in Pakistan: Military neoliberalism, authoritarianism and urbanization

This article develops the concept of military neoliberalism that allows us to trace the historical development of Pakistani military capital with the expansion of market-led reforms and its mode of operation in the urban domain. Military neoliberalism signifies the double role of the military; firstly, using authoritarianism, the military has extended neoliberal reforms in collaboration with local and foreign capitalist classes over the decades. Secondly, the military has expanded its reach and operations in the economy at a large scale, transitioning into a sovereign capitalist power that operates independently from the rest of the state apparatuses and utilizes its powers for economic, political, and territorial objectives. Such dynamics are leading to new class transformations and producing seismic shifts within the state apparatuses because, along with a revitalized capitalist class, a class of military capitalists has emerged in different sectors of the economy, most prominently in industrial production, urban real estate, and infrastructure development. The category of sovereign capitalist power gestures towards the twin dynamics; firstly, the military can use violence for its strategic political and economic goals. Secondly, the military can operate above the law for the advantage of military capital. As a result, the increasing militarization of the economy, and the corporatization of the military, have produced a new system of socioeconomic and political control that relies upon repeated interventions of the military in politics to resolve class antagonisms, strengthen the power of local capital, and intensify the reach of global financial capital in different markets of Pakistan.

The Architecture of Social Reform: Housing, Tradition, and German Modernism

Architecture and housing are embedded in their social, cultural, and political context. Historical treatises on the idealized notions of family, household, and community uncover the continuous and complex interplay between the printed and the built. The Architecture of Social Reform: Housing, Tradition and German Modernism by Isabel Rousset examines the productive dialogue between social policy and architecture by analyzing a variety of sources ranging from historic publications over floor plans and master plans to drawings of interiors and photographs. The author, focusing on the era of Social Reform following the revolution in 1948, explores the discursive processes that shaped concepts of German housing in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author investigates several nineteenth-century publications on the ideals of housing and town planning that formed German modernism. The book starts with an in-depth analysis of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s traditionalist and conservative approach to social reform, which this Bavarian folklorist and proto-sociologist had based on the studies of geography, family, and society. According to Rousset, Riehl’s notion of building from the inside out and his ideas on the ideal household based on the self-enclosed, detached house decisively influenced early modernist architecture in Germany. In the second chapter, the author assesses the concept of interiorization of dwellings by studying floor plans and interpreting the tenement versus suburban settlement debate. The cultural mission of the German middle class is expressed through the design of the dwelling. In the third chapter, Rousset explores the linkages between the principles of modern city planning (Städtebau) and the medieval archetypes as well as urban planning and housing. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the concept of “Sachlichkeit” (objectivity). The author describes how architects, Paul Schulze-Naumburg, Paul Mebes, and Hermann Muthesius, translated this idea into the principles of straightforward housing design. Photography (of extant housing facades) was crucial to the promotion of ‘the culture of the visible’. In this chapter, the author also analyses the use of publications in popularizing principles of simplistic design that amalgamate tradition with modernity. In conclusion, Rousset highlights the continuity of concepts between the nineteenth-century traditionalist architects and town planners with CIAM and Modernist avant-garde. The author closes with a pledge to reconsider the productive alliance between social reform and architecture to resolve class antagonisms and reenact communities by focusing on the ‘good, modest and traditional housing’ (p. 197). The chapters of the book are self-contained and can be read separately.

Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe

Reviewed by: Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe Robert Jackson Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought. Edited by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 242. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6356-2; cloth, $95.00, 978-1-4696-6355-5.) There is a lot to like in this collection. The contributors are prominent scholars of southern history and literature who represent two generations of thoughtful, dedicated work. Many of the individual essays have particular strengths: Stephen Berry’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe is beautifully written and—rare in an academic piece of this sort—rather dramatic in the telling. Essays by John Grammer and Scott Romine on New Journalism and Reconstruction-era literary revisionism, respectively, are excellent models of the case-study method. Another highlight is Michael Kreyling’s essay, which contrasts the writ-erly approaches of Tony Judt and Michael O’Brien, a pair of eminent British-born historians who passed away in recent years (Judt in 2010, O’Brien in 2015). Kreyling examines their distinct methods on the way to lauding O’Brien’s Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (2 vols.; Chapel Hill, 2004) for its difficult balancing act between the rigors of an overarching interpretive frame and the frequently rebellious “subtleties of individuality” (p. 219). An eminent literary scholar himself, Kreyling takes the occasion to meditate on the challenges of reconciling the immensity of the past with the historian’s inescapable fate—“the process by which history becomes writing and inevitably writing becomes history” (p. 203). This is an apt conclusion to a volume whose debt to Michael O’Brien is significant. The editors dedicate the collection to O’Brien, and, indeed, a respectful invocation of O’Brien’s scholarship is a frequent, if not quite compulsory, gesture across the essays. The contributors are divided evenly between history and literature, and they speak to the two disciplines in overlapping ways that mirror much of O’Brien’s own methodology. Southern intellectual history here seems largely contained in these two disciplines; this is a rich, battle-tested interdisciplinary matrix, to be sure, but there does not seem to be much awareness of other disciplines—sociology, performing arts, religious studies, the pure and applied sciences, to name several in increasing scales of magnitude—and what they might contribute to this shared scholarly project. The vision of southern intellectual history that emerges in these pages instead relies most fundamentally on the worlds of print culture and publishing. Two essays, by Beth Barton Schweiger and Jonathan Daniel Wells, address book history. Others deal with individual authors and their publishing contexts: Berry on Poe’s tortured relationship to the reputation-imparting Charles Dickens; Timothy J. Williams on Edwin Wiley Fuller and his audience of Lost [End Page 131] Cause enthusiasts; Grammer on Willie Morris’s cultivation of the “Wrecking Crew,” a southern cohort at Harper’s Magazine at the end of the 1960s; and Romine on Edward A. Pollard’s almost comical search for authentic southern identities that would meet the needs of his imagined readership. “The constant in Pollard’s writing,” Romine concludes wryly, “is a conception of ‘all true southerners,’ even if the true southerner in question never survived the next publication cycle” (p. 176). Indeed, even Michael T. Bernath’s essay on the complex situation of northerners who worked as schoolteachers in the South near the beginning of the Civil War, and whose mere presence frequently whipped up violent conflicts based more on local class antagonism than regional or racial identification, emphasizes this point. Bernath characterizes such figures as “public intellectuals” (although his discussion of their actual thoughts and ideas is minimal); and he concludes that the contest of ideas that played out in local newspapers in response to their presence “shows the central role that print played in antebellum southern life” (pp. 49–50). Another remarkable aspect of this volume is the almost complete absence of Black or other nonwhite subjects. Many, perhaps most, of the essays address slavery, segregation, and racism itself...

The Contemporary Value of the Class Struggle Thought in the Communist Manifesto

The class phenomenon of human society has existed for a long time. Scholars of all dynasties have discovered and explained the phenomenon, but there is no complete theory to change the phenomenon. Marx and Engels created scientific theories to guide the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeois regime and establish the communist regime. Marx's thought on class struggle is the deep logic to expose the demise of capitalism, the basis for a complete break with revisionism, and the magic weapon and fundamental adherence of the proletarian struggle. In today's world, class antagonism is increasingly serious, and the capitalist oppression of the proletariat is more cruel but more hidden. Therefore, Marx's thought of class struggle needs to increase its spread and influence, and play a greater role and value.

Hauntologies of Fiction: Reading Roth at the End of History

Hauntologies of FictionReading Roth at the End of History Andy Connolly (bio) It has been over thirty years since francis fukuyama proclaimed that the Cold War victory of western democratic capitalism over communism culminated in an end to class-based ideological conflict as the motor of "History." Drawing upon an interpretation of Hegel's belief "that the evolution of human societies […] would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings" (xii), Fukuyama looked to the imminent spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism into heretofore closed-off reaches of the globe as a sign that the long Enlightenment project toward human progress had begun to adopt its peak, finalized form. As a major governing assumption of our neoliberal age, the Fukuyamist belief that we have reached the "end of history" looks to free market capitalism's limitless capacity to enhance individual potential and promote human freedom, while at the same time short-circuiting any serious discussions about the limiting structural conditions of class and poverty, not to mention the influences that other powerful factors such as gender and race have in the uneven shaping of capitalist social relations. Over the past number of decades, what has given particular impetus to this myth of a post-historical, classless society has been the capitulation of effective forms of social, political, and cultural dissent to the neoliberal assertion that "there is no alternative" (assigned the acronym TINA by political commentators) to market-based definitions of democracy and the social good. As such, the radical liberalization of the post-Cold War period has been shaped by a monocular stridency, which forecloses not only on the major social struggles of the past but also on the lessons that such history may present for understanding the present and potentially altering the future. In terms of our historical horizons, then, the end of history has locked us into a kind of endless, monotonous present, from which there appears no relief or interruption. It has taken some time to understand the lasting impact of my early life experience as one of Fukuyama's children. Then again, coming of age at the end of history proves deceptive in such ways, diminishing one's sense of historicity since there's apparently no more epic battles of "History" to live by or suffer from. The significance of history [End Page 50] in such an age is subject to all kinds of denial and delay. Like the repressed, history at the end of history often comes in the shape of uncanny and monstrous returns. No longer the meaty source of experience and identity that it once was, or at least appeared to be, it can take a spectral quality, like a haunting trauma whose presence is yet to be made properly known, but which lurks in wait for us, eager to disrupt our naïve sense of having broken from the past. Over the years, Philip Roth's fiction has helped shape my understanding of the peculiar "hauntological" functioning of history at the end of history. This sense of how the seemingly dead past haunts both the present and the future is not only revelatory in terms of events that have shaped my own "dwarf drama" (Anatomy 106), but also in relation to my understanding of what Roth has to tell us about history and memory. Roth's historical imagination, with its various presentiments of the "unforeseen" (Plot 113), proves highly informative when it comes to thinking about the complex issues of memory and futurity that shape our present times. Such considerations of how history functions as a spectral presence in Roth's work continues to shape my scholarship. I My early adulthood in the mid-90s was colored by a number of local phenomena that reflected the larger post-Cold War experience of a liberalized and rapidly integrating world, disencumbered of the previous two centuries of modernity, made replete with class antagonism, revolution, nationalism, colonialism, and international conflicts. During this period, many young Irish people like myself, particularly within the southern Republic of Ireland, began to experience, in ways that seemed quite sudden, a welcome breach from the drab...

Defense security and sustainable development in Africa: Emerging challenges and response

The endemic nature of insecurity in Africa stands out as one which is disastrous, thereby making African a shadow of itself. This study examines defense security and sustainable development in emerging democracies of Sub-Saharan Africa. Methodologically, Crosssectional descriptive survey design was adopted in the study, while primary and secondary sources of data were relied upon, interview and focus group discussion (FGD) were used as primary instruments of data collections. The social contract theory is adopted as the framework of analysis. Finding of this study revealed that bad governance has perpetuated class antagonism which breeds dissatisfaction amongst people in a bid to seek equality and justice in the distribution of power and economic resources. This process conceives conflict and the result for which many take to demand for rights which are unmet, hence unleashed terror to secure inalienable rights, access to power and economy. An analysis on Sustainable Development in this study, does reveal that denial and lack of access and opportunities are fundamental premises under which devastations of an economy can ensue and hence the entrenchment of the reign of terror. This process, as applicable in Africa, did also permeate the preponderance of reserved armies of unemployed under the guise of mendicant friars that further heightened the predominance of the terrorist regime in Africa amidst destruction of lives and economy. A way out of this is to create mechanism to open up more equitable access to power and economic opportunities which could lead to full capacity utilization of people’s potentials and subsequently empower them with incomes and improved living conditions. This requires both commitment and diplomacy of the government and to undertake under the banner of collective responsibility and good governance.

International Trade and Imperial Precursors: The Evolution of a New Nigerian Economy in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Capitalism has perpetuated class antagonism which breeds dissatisfaction amongst people in a bid to seek equality and justice in the distribution of power and economic resources. This study analyses International Trade and Imperial Precursors into the New Nigerian Economy in the 19th and 20th Century. Using data generated from secondary sources and descriptive analysis, it has been realized that the Nigerian economic elite play negative role in the economic dependency processes of the country. Finding also reveals that, Government policies in Nigeria are foreign oriented in nature, therefore, favoring foreign western economies at the detriment of Nigerian interest. The study conclude that there is a need to channel our energies to producing for internal needs and consumptions but these calls for a change in the values of principle of the indigenes, there are far too many acts of indiscipline and self–indulgence on the part of the generality of our people in all the starter of our society.

Sacred Socialism

Sacred Socialism

Воєнно-економічні цикли у контексті цивілізаційного розвитку

The article substantiates that wars are an inevitable component of civilizational development, during which periods of peaceful development and periods of the intensification of military violence alternate, appearing in the form of large-scale military conflicts affecting the form of resolution of the contradictions of social evolution. All historical forms of the most developed civilizations are social organisms based on class antagonism. Class inequality and exploitation, characteristic of civilizations that reached the empire level of development in the pre-capitalist era, and under the conditions of the capitalist world-system as a contender for the role of global hegemon, encourage them to perform external military expansion in order to acquire colonies and establish in them a system of exploitation. Military technologies have acquired the greatest lethality under the conditions of capitalism, while the military economy is an important component of the capitalist economy. However, already in the agrarian society, there were military-economic cycles, in particular those associated with cycles of power, which were expressed in the synchronicity of the emergence, strengthening, and decline of ruling dynasties in China and steppe empires in Mongolia, as well as the cycles of xenocratic state characteristic of the medieval Maghreb. The cyclicity of wars is clearly visible in long-term cycles that determine the dynamics of the capitalist world-system, such as Kondratiev cycles, long cycles of world politics, and cycles of hegemony. The military-economic cycles in historical retrospect and in modern conditions are conditioned by the struggle for resources that allow social units or complex social organisms, who win in the struggle for military-political leadership to dominate, creating political-economic systems of domination-exploitation, which allows the hegemonic civilization for some time to develop successfully. Each historical form of domination based political-economic system contained the prerequisites for the next war for regional or global leadership in the form of deep socio-economic, political and civilizational contradictions.

‘The primitive accumulation of capital and memory’: Mnemonic wars as national reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia

The article elaborates on Marx’s concept of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital by extending it to the field of memory and introducing a new concept of the ‘primitive accumulation of memory’. The article argues that this concept gives us an innovative path to understand the relationship between memory and capital. To arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the break-up of Yugoslavia and its thoroughly revised memoryscape, this text combines a politicoeconomic analysis with the evaluation of memory-related ideological shifts that are in fact perceived as long-term mnemonic wars in (post-)Yugoslavia. The article analyses how nationalism and memory revisionism are internally linked to capitalist accumulation. More specifically, the article will observe how an ethnocentric mnemonic war sought to openly negate the socialist and anti-fascist past. Indeed, the creation of an anti-communist, and at times anti-antifascist, orientation was integral to the imagining of new nation-states. Juxtaposed to this creative and generative current of memory revisionism, the primitive accumulation of capital in post-Yugoslavia began with the ‘deaccumulation’ of social infrastructure and wealth, and with the dispossession of working people. The bigger the dispossession, the larger the nationalist accumulation of memory and displacement of class antagonism. Finally, the article discusses what at first glance seems to be a pacifying discourse of ‘national reconciliation’, which stoked a thorough revision of the public memory of World War II. This revision reconciled fascist collaborationists and anti-fascist Partisans, and it helped to challenge Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist consensus, while also framing the ethnic wars of the 1990s.

Parasite and the Ideological Barriers to Emancipatory Politics

In this essay, my contention is two-fold. One, Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite (2019) is not simply about class inequality but more importantly addresses the question “what is (not) to be done?”. To appreciate this point, we have to investigate it alongside Bong’s previous films, especially Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017). Although these three films possess vastly different storylines, they all wrestle with this burning political question from different angles: seizure of state power and revolution (Snowpiercer), “folk politics” (Okja), and neoliberal privatization of social problems (Parasite). They all implicitly demand for better or more concrete visions of systemic transformation. Two, class antagonism in Parasite appears more muted than in many anti-capitalist flicks. I claim that this helps to place in the foreground the ideological barriers to the development of the poor’s class consciousness and solidarity, thereby buttressing the status quo. Ideology not only fools us but also seduces us with enjoyment. As such, an intellectual critique of ideology is necessary but insufficient and must be supplemented by an affective one. On the one hand, from the perspective of critical theory, the underclass acts against its own self-interest because it is duped or distracted by bourgeois tolerance and neoliberal entrepreneurial culture. On the other hand, from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, the more obstinate problem seems to be their (capitalist) modes of enjoyment. Parasite’s distinctive contribution is in highlighting “enjoyment as a political factor”; that is, how capitalism also produces enjoyment to sustain itself.

Postcapitalism: From Consumer Individualism to Expressive Individualism?

It is proposed to consider the transition to postcapitalism not as the struggle of the oppressed for a more just and equal society without class antagonisms but as a process of gradual displacement of consumer individualism by expressive individualism. Within the framework of this perspective, postcapitalism is not a fundamentally new socioeconomic system built on the ruins of capitalism but a set of social relations developing with the gradual deactualization of materialistic values for a significant part of the population (material wealth, money, etc.) and the growing importance of postmaterialistic values (self-realization, the search for the true self, etc.). In this sense, many phenomena associated with modern identity politics can be attributed to postcapitalism. Nevertheless, this article criticizes the perception of identity politics as a set of strategies and ways of fighting for equality and justice, presented as an approximation to the ideals of socialism or communism (the so-called overcoming of “systemic oppression”). Today, the struggle for diverse identities testifies to the triumph of individualism, as well as a new round of the “war of all against all” and the destruction of the common lifeworld.

Freedom As and Against Democracy

Freedom As and Against Democracy

The dialectics of capital: learning from Gran Chaco

The critical impact of humans on the biosphere has led scientists to coin the term Anthropocene. The global environmental changes associated with it are happening under the aegis of capitalism. A transition towards sustainability requires a critical scrutiny of capitalism. The social–ecological system (SES) approach conceptualises the relationship between the socio-economic subsystem and the biosphere. However, in its various operationalisations it either treats the former as a black box or it fails to capture dynamic aspects. We address these limits and develop a Dialectical Socio-Ecological System (D-SES) framework, which combines process ecology with historical materialism, to describe the emergence and persistence of capitalist dynamics. We draw on data collected through fieldwork and desk research and deploy our framework to study capital-intensive agriculture in the Chaco Salteño, an important agricultural frontier in South America, obtaining some general insights. We open up the socio-economic subsystem and break it down into a lower-level material/economic sphere and an upper-level cultural/institutional sphere. Capitalist dynamics emerge out of the peculiar relationships occurring both within and between these spheres. This configuration shows the typical signs of autocatalysis. It attracts resources and capital to expand itself (centripetality). It becomes more complex and organised over time, fine-tuning production modes, cultures, and institutions (directionality). It is subject to the laws of competition and profit maximisation, which emerge independently from the individual actors and processes making up the system (autonomy). Finally, it engenders frictions, reflecting class antagonism between the direct producers and the appropriators of wealth. These frictions can become leverage points for a system’s transformation.

Signs of the Inhuman: Hauntings and Lost Futures in Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s <em>La Compañía</em>

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as tools for climate justice and remediation. Taking the example of the critically acclaimed book La compañía (2019), by Mexico’s Verónica Gerber Bicecci, this article deploys a material analysis to evaluate the political implications of its strategy of appropriation of previously existing materials, the periodization it chooses and its haunting significance in Mexican history, and the expression of the inhuman nature it bestows on its working-class characters. The article ends with a series of observations towards a further theorization of the inhuman as an epochal figure evoked in this and other works of eco fiction.

The Production of Everyday Space for Workers: The New Village Movement in China, 1919–1936

Abstract The idea of a “new village” first emerged in the years 1919–20 and was widely discussed by Chinese intellectuals, who advocated for its humanitarian and social justice purposes and its goal of constructing a new society. This article focuses on the new village movement in China from 1919 to 1936, which was imagined and materialized by intellectuals, social reformers, and the Nationalist state in response to crises of capital accumulation, displacement of labor, and urbanization. New villages emerged as a worldwide sociopolitical response to exploitation and class antagonism—the worst effects of capital accumulation and the alienation of labor, under which the creation of everyday spaces for labor reproduction provided the key to constructing a new type of community for social transformation among migrant workers. Whereas the state and capital attempt to “pulverize” new villages into a manageable, calculable, and abstract grid, diverse social forces simultaneously attempt to create, defend, or extend spaces of social reproduction, everyday life, and grassroots control. Thus, the new village's anti-capitalism combined an eminently modern criticism of capitalism with the conservative recovery of an ideal rural community, in an attempt to overcome social inequality and the urban exploitation of the rural caused by capital accumulation.

Political economy perspectives and their relevance for contemporary housing studies

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of political economy scholarship stressing the class antagonisms that undergird housing systems. Despite differences, these contributions focus on housing as a component of a nation’s economy and the role of political institutions as managers of that system. Our goal is to help assess the value of emerging discussions that focus on the centrality of housing assets to ideas of class and the structuring of social opportunity. We identify four key elements of such approaches: first, a concern with changes within capitalism since the GFC; second, an interest in the continued role of the State; third, the ideological position of housing and tenure; and, finally, a concern with the class-tenure antagonisms that feature in many urban settings. We argue that while an emerging body of work now examines the role of housing assets in shaping class-based fissures there remains a need to consider the policy histories affecting the shifting position of particular tenures.