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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

Shahid Amin  and
Mareel van der Linden
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The proletarians have lost their innocence. A conservative sociologist once described wage labourers as follows:

The worker is personally free, i.e. his physical and spiritual-moral powers are completely at his own disposal. […] He has no property, i.e. he has no exclusive material power over capital as a secure basis with relative permanency. […] He has neither a stock of consumer goods that enable him to live, nor permanent interests of capital. […] He lives in economic circumstances in which means of subsistence can be obtained only through economic returns. […] He is forced to offer personal capacities with an economic exchange value in return for means of subsistence.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 41 , supplement S4: “Peripheral” Labour? Studies in the History of Partial Proletarianization , December 1996 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1996

References

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8 The worker is “free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale“. Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Fowkes, Ben (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 272Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., p. 271.

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12 See the survey of these debates in Continuity and Change, 8 (1993), pp. 151–252.

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18 Marx, Capital, 1, p. 678.

19 See, for example, Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge [etc.], 1994), esp. chs 3–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar; Herstatter, Gail, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, 1986)Google Scholar; Honig, Emily, Sisters and Strangers. Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, 1986)Google Scholar; Onselen, Charles van, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1994, 2 vols (Harlow, 1982)Google Scholar; Taussig, Michael T., The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill, 1979)Google Scholar.

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21 For a splendid recapitulation of some of these experiences, seeNaipaul, V.S., “Prologue to an Autobiography”, in his Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (London, 1984), esp. pp. 62–67Google Scholar.