Devaluation Of Labor Research Articles

Fashion on the Frontier

In 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana Bertran Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. His camera acted both as witness to, and abettor in, this imperial project of US capitalist expansion and exploitation of South America. Although Merrill was not employed to document the transnational clothing culture of the transient frontier society that sprang up around the construction of the railroad, his commissioned photographs overflow with visual information on dress: what people wore, and how they wore it, documented in extraordinary detail. Turning to fashion offers a revised lens into how Merrill’s predominantly male subjects, who had journeyed to the Amazon from over 52 nations, used clothing to construct their identities and position themselves in relation to one another in the remote and uninviting location. Merrill’s archive provides an unusual case study for the historian to critically evaluate the colonial and neocolonial devaluation of labour upon which early-twentieth century projects of industrial modernity such as the Madeira-Mamoré railroad were predicated. Grounded in the visual analysis of fashion, this article builds upon feminist philosopher Saidiya Hartman’s revisionist method of ‘critical fabulation’, which deviates from traditional historiography in its efforts to overcome significant acts of erasure within the historical record. In bridging the visual and sensory aspects of fashion, it presents new insights into fashion’s histories as well as those of photography at its intersection with global projects of industrial capitalism.

Greenwork: The Devaluation of Labor When Caring for Nature

Urban greening initiatives frequently promise to support economic growth and to improve environmental conditions for communities with ecological science. Despite these lofty goals, much of the labor required to carry out the quotidian, mundane work of cultivating and maintaining urban nature is provided by unpaid volunteers or low-wage landscapers. Drawing on ethnographic research and 50 in-depth interviews with experts and volunteers who manage greening initiatives in Chicago, this article provides an account for why greening labor is valued in abstract symbolic terms but economically marginalized. Namely, I argue that the everyday labor of greening cities is a distinct form of devalued care work that can be referred to as greenwork. Greenwork is devalued because: (1) urban nature is affectively framed as an invaluable asset to communities, (2) greening initiatives have a stratified labor force with few professional opportunities, and (3) nature is theorized as complex and self-sustaining by experts.

Славянская община вне формаций

He article was conceived as a search for a solution to the global problem of the reboot of modern capitalism in the Slavic community. The author summarized five fundamental/enduring properties of the Slavic community: common ownership of production means (land, primarily); common labor, with the obligatory personal labor contribution of a member of the community; common faith “in verity, in the truth, in God” (according to K.S. Aksakov); sobornost “as a need for mass gatherings, meetings, co-existence of community members” (according to B.A. Rybakov); and the smoothing of differences between social estates. The author considers all these properties of the Slavic community in the context of the concept of dynamic equilibrium, when changes in some properties affect changes in others and the phenomenon as a whole. Sobornost is interpreted as a feature of a cyclic nature, periodically suppressed by oppressive factors (the reforms of Peter the Great, market reforms in the recent history of Russia), but restored on a renewed soil. Common ownership is described through the search for a harmonious relationship between personal and common property (with the condition of its preservation, without the pursuit of maximum profit) both in the land sphere and in the sphere of modern home ownership. The description of common labor and the smoothness of differences between social estates focuses on the respect for physical labor on the part of different classes of the population (on the examples of the tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great) and is opposed to the modern devaluation of labor as a primary factor of production. The dynamics of these five properties of the Slavic community is analyzed in relation to a number of empirical community phenomena: a land peasant community, an Old Believer community, a communal factory, a commune, an artel/cooperative, collective gardening, households, and apartment buildings in modern Russia. The author shares the opinion of domestic and foreign researchers about the non-formational nature of the Slavic community and concludes that these five fundamental properties of the Slavic community are capable of determining the country's perspective economic image.

‘Start from the Garden’: Distribution, Livelihood Diversification and Narratives of Agrarian Decline in Papua, Indonesia

ABSTRACTScholarship that identifies ‘distribution’ as the key to inclusive governance has promoted suspicion of development agendas that foreground ‘production’. This article analyses controversy around food and cash transfers and decentralized development funding in Indonesia's contested Papua territory. Some observers and recipients allege that these instruments, which have proliferated under ‘Special Autonomy’ reforms intended to defuse the West Papuan independence movement, have caused a decline of indigenous subsistence agriculture. Papua's various distribution (and distribution‐like) mechanisms were instituted under pressure from international agencies, in response to mass unrest, and in the wake of crises that altered Papua's role in Indonesian development. In Papua's Central Highlands, food and cash distribution instruments have addressed farming shortfalls and played a role in the diversification of livelihoods — a shift that animates anxious speculation about the viability of indigenous social reproduction. Such commentary gestures to a contested development horizon featuring extractive and agrarian agendas with divergent implications for the reproduction of distinctive rural livelihoods. Laments about the harm to rural productivity caused by distribution evoke but gloss over threats of devaluation of labour, highlighting tension between popular concerns about social reproduction and scholarly anxieties about the celebration of production.

Beyond crisis? Using rent theory to understand the restructuring of publicly funded seniors' care in British Columbia, Canada.

Crises of seniors' care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been connected to processes of privatization and financialization. In this paper I argue that rent theory is important for disaggregating mechanisms, including of accumulation by dispossession, the devaluation of labour, and assetization, that underpin the process of financialization in the sector. Work on rents often divides between critical approaches, especially to land rent, and mainstream institutionalist and public choice approaches to rent-seeking. Critical rent theory is evolving beyond this divide to understand a broader range of types of rent. Yet, despite attention to the increasing importance of economic rents and forms of rentierism, labour and social reproduction are often excluded from the analysis of how rent relations arise. This paper demonstrates the problems with these exclusions. The argument is illustrated through an analysis of the restructuring of eldercare in British Columbia, Canada, in the last two decades, and employs a feminist political economy approach to examine the social production of rent relations.

Las recientes reformas europeas en materia de libertad sindical y negociación colectiva: ¿Tiene algo que decir el Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos?

En junio de 2012 la Unión Europea desembolsó 41,3 billones de Euros al gobierno español para cubrir las necesidades de liquidez de la banca. Dicho “rescate” no sólo comportó reformas relativas a la regulación del sector financiero. También trajeron las reformas laborales de 2010-2012 -que marcan un antes y un después en el modelo de Derecho Sindical en nuestro país- y que se originan en el contexto del procedimiento comunitario por déficit excesivo abierto a España. En el marco de dicho procedimiento, España debía abordar la reforma del sistema de relaciones laborales. Fue la Ley 3/2012, de 6 de julio, de medidas urgentes para la reforma del mercado laboral, la que dio cumplimiento a las condiciones impuestas por el Consejo Europeo.

Muerte en El Loreto. Ciudadanía armada y violencia política en Bolivia (1861-1862)

The «Loreto Massacre» and the subsequent process of popular justice to which its author was brought illustrate how the arming of the inhabitants of this district of La Paz combated not only the partisan abuse of power, but also the threat posed to Bolivia’s constitutional legal framework by military revolutions. In a process of «political fusion», the «people on the streets» and the people as represented by the government took armed and associative action against an attempted military coup. This process also implied the employment of political action as an instrument against the devaluation of labour and artisan production.

On Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt

L2 VERY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER is subject to misunderstanding, but perhaps none more so than those who insist on distinctions to which their age is not accustomed or which it is determined to ignore. Thus it is not surprising to discover that Hannah Arendt, whose philosophy is based on just such distinctions which we find either alien or meaningless, should be particularly vulnerable to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Two recent issues of Political Theory have included articles which have contained critical but thoughtful appreciations of Arendt's celebration of the political.' However, the authors of these articles, George Kateb and Margaret Canovan, have found quite troubling the counterpart of Arendt's glorification of the political: her denigration of all nonpolitical activities, and in particular laboring as personified in Arendt's animal laborans.2 Indeed, Kateb finds Arendt's indictment of labor so relentless and so complete that he feels compelled to defend her against the possible charge of austocratic fastidiousness.3 Canovan believes no defense is possible and finds Arendt guilty of demonstrating a haughty and distant contempt for the vulgarity of the modern world.4 I believe both Kateb and Canovan are wrong in discerning elitist tendencies in Arendt, at least to the extent they base their conviction on Arendt's alleged harsh strictures against the laboring class. They make that mistake because both of them too easily assume that Arendt's devaluation of labor and her indictment of animal laborans refer to a social category of humanity that was formerly described as the lower orders and today is