Book contents
- Fronmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter One Introduction: Marx’s Field as Our Global Present
- Chapter Two Into the Field with Marx: Some Observations on Researching Class
- Chapter Three Marx’s Merchants’ Capital: Researching Agrarian Markets in Contemporary India
- Chapter Four The Ties That Divide: Marx’s Fractions of Capital and Class Analysis in/for the Global South
- Chapter Five Marx in the Sweatshop: Exploitation and Social Reproduction in a Garment Factory Called India
- Chapter Six Thinking about Capital and Class in the Gulf Arab States
- Chapter Seven Marx on the Bourse: Coffee and the Intersecting/Integrated Circuits of Capital
- Chapter Eight Learning Marx by Doing: Class Analysis in an Emerging Zone of Global Horticulture
- Chapter Nine Understanding Labour Relations and Struggles in India through Marx’s Method
- Chapter Ten Investigating Class Relations in Rural South Africa: Marx’s ‘Rich Totality of Many Determinations’
- Chapter Eleven From Marx’s ‘Double Freedom’ to ‘Degrees of Unfreedom’: Methodological Insights from the Study of Uzbekistan’s Agrarian Labour
- Chapter Twelve The Labour Process and Health through the Lens of Marx’s Historical Materialism
- Chapter Thirteen Marx and the Poor’s Nourishment: Diets in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa
- Chapter Fourteen Marx In Utero: A Workers’ Inquiry of the In/Visible Labours of Reproduction in the Surrogacy Industry
- Chapter Fifteen Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee
- Chapter Sixteen Postcolonial Marxism and the ‘Cyber-Field’ in COVID Times: On Labour Becoming ‘Working Class’
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter Eleven - From Marx’s ‘Double Freedom’ to ‘Degrees of Unfreedom’: Methodological Insights from the Study of Uzbekistan’s Agrarian Labour
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2022
- Fronmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter One Introduction: Marx’s Field as Our Global Present
- Chapter Two Into the Field with Marx: Some Observations on Researching Class
- Chapter Three Marx’s Merchants’ Capital: Researching Agrarian Markets in Contemporary India
- Chapter Four The Ties That Divide: Marx’s Fractions of Capital and Class Analysis in/for the Global South
- Chapter Five Marx in the Sweatshop: Exploitation and Social Reproduction in a Garment Factory Called India
- Chapter Six Thinking about Capital and Class in the Gulf Arab States
- Chapter Seven Marx on the Bourse: Coffee and the Intersecting/Integrated Circuits of Capital
- Chapter Eight Learning Marx by Doing: Class Analysis in an Emerging Zone of Global Horticulture
- Chapter Nine Understanding Labour Relations and Struggles in India through Marx’s Method
- Chapter Ten Investigating Class Relations in Rural South Africa: Marx’s ‘Rich Totality of Many Determinations’
- Chapter Eleven From Marx’s ‘Double Freedom’ to ‘Degrees of Unfreedom’: Methodological Insights from the Study of Uzbekistan’s Agrarian Labour
- Chapter Twelve The Labour Process and Health through the Lens of Marx’s Historical Materialism
- Chapter Thirteen Marx and the Poor’s Nourishment: Diets in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa
- Chapter Fourteen Marx In Utero: A Workers’ Inquiry of the In/Visible Labours of Reproduction in the Surrogacy Industry
- Chapter Fifteen Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee
- Chapter Sixteen Postcolonial Marxism and the ‘Cyber-Field’ in COVID Times: On Labour Becoming ‘Working Class’
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The condition of extreme labour exploitation often observable in current global capitalism is described by many studies in social sciences as ‘forced labour’. However, by depicting an ahistorical picture detached from its capitalist social forms, such definitions often reproduce shallow analyses of labour and moralistic knowledge, which conceal the structural determinants of labour exploitation. Trying to problematize the concept of labour freedom through a Marxian historical materialist perspective and drawing on mixed methods, this chapter uses the case of agrarian labour in Uzbekistan of post-Soviet independence to investigate the empirical, methodological and epistemological complexities underpinning such concept. Finally, while making explicit the policy implications the country faces to regulate and protect labour, the chapter provides some reflections on the contradictions of late capitalist accumulation in low-income countries.
Introduction
At the end of Capital, Volume I, Marx defines primitive accumulation as the starting point of the capitalistic mode of production. Primitive accumulation can play out in different ways and under different historical settings, but, as Marx sharply points out, it requires two essential conditions: workers must be ‘free’ from the means of production and ‘free’ to sell their labour power.
The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour regulations. (Marx 2011: 786)
Such double freedom makes workers obliged to sell their labour power in the market. Yet, many deviances from the double freedom characterize the contemporary capital accumulation, which shapes a continuum along various degrees of freedom (Lerche 2007). Labour is exposed to and operates through differentiated forms of unfreedom, which are contingent to institutional norms, power relations and agencies (Morgan and Olsen 2014) and which are constitutive of the unevenness of capitalist development.
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- Marx in the Field , pp. 147 - 160Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2021