The Subsumption of Space and the Spatiality of Subsumption: Primitive Accumulation and the Transition to Capitalism in Shanghai,China

Abstract: Based on extensive interviews, this study is the first systematic attempt to map the spatio‐temporal evolution of production networks linking urban, state‐owned enterprises and rural, township and village‐owned enterprises in reform‐era China. It identifies two distinct regimes of urban‐to‐rural subcontracting patterns and conventions. The first, which developed and prospered from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐1990s, brought rural workers and the countryside into a relatively extensive relationship with urban capital, and thus represented a partial transition to capitalism. Its violent reconfiguration in the wake of a series of sectoral crises in the late 1990s led to the widespread privatisation of rural enterprises, and the emergence and consolidation of a second regime that simultaneously constituted a significant intensification of relations, the capture of the rural by the urban, and a new stage in this region's transition. This paper argues that these regimes are analogous to the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital, respectively, and that subsumption may be a more useful analytic for understanding the process of capture and transition than primitive accumulation: the latter concept alone, without reference to the dynamics of the social/spatial division of labor, risks missing other ways that exploitive connections can be constructed between places. This paper thus seeks to recast the relationship between these two concepts, and to develop a larger vocabulary in which subsumption, like primitive accumulation, is both spatial and ongoing and internal to capitalist accumulation.     

"Mr. Burk is most interested in their welfare": J.G. Burk's campaign to help the Anishinabeg of northwestern Ontario, 1923-53

Although there is a small but growing body of literature on Euro-Canadians who acted "with good intentions" towards the First Nations (Haig-Brown and Nock 2006), precious little has been written about those within the ranks of the Department of Indian Affairs who acted benevolently towards the Aboriginal peoples. James Gerry Burk, Indian agent for the Anishinabeg of the western Lake Superior region for three decades (1923-53), was one such individual. He chose to ignore the department's prevailing racist ideology in favour of nurturing the incipient desire for industry and enterprise that he saw first-hand among the Aboriginal constituents of his agency. In the process, he was compelled to overcome numerous obstacles that Indian Affairs placed in his way. As a result, Burk's career stands as a glowing testament to the indomitable spirit of one departmental official's commitment to assisting the Aboriginal peoples.     

Mirrors of the Nation: The Construction of National Character and Difference in the Historical Writings of E. G. Geijer

This article suggests that marriageable young upper-class women can be taken as indicators of the longue durée of the ancien régime mentality and the stepwise advancement of the bourgeois mentality. This is so because of factors that made such women particularly prone not to break with established conventions. Source materials in this analysis are taken from contemporary non-fiction texts in which 19th-century St Petersburg and Helsinki serve as the scenes and in which marriageable young women feature as the protagonists or objects of appraising gazes. It is suggested that the differences emerging around the mid-19th century between the two societies with regards to the habitus and education of upper-class girls and marriageable women can at least in part be explained by different institutional settings vis-à-vis land, labour and the status of the bourgeoisie.     

The “Commons” Versus the “Commodity”: Alter‐globalization,Anti‐privatization and the Human Right to Water in the Global South

Abstract: In response to the growth of private sector involvement in water supply management globally, anti‐privatization campaigns for a human right to water have emerged in recent years. Simultaneously, alter‐globalization activists have promoted alternative water governance models through North‐South red‐green alliances between organized labour, environmental groups, women's groups, and indigenous groups. In this paper, I explore these distinct (albeit overlapping) responses to water privatization. I first present a generic conceptual model of market environmentalist reforms, and explore the contribution of this framework to debates over ‘neoliberalizing nature’. This conceptual framework is applied to the case of anti‐privatization activism to elucidate the limitations of the human right to water as a conceptual counterpoint to privatization, and as an activist strategy. In contrast, I argue that alter‐globalization strategies—centred on concepts of the commons—are more conceptually coherent, and also more successful as activist strategies. The paper concludes with a reiteration of the need for greater conceptual precision in our analyses of neoliberalization, for both academics and activists.     

No Italian Stalingrads. The C.G.I.L. and the working class in the northern industrial heartlands, 1945-1955

ABSTRACT

This article challenges conventional wisdom on the northern Italian industrial heartlands during the first decade after the Second World War. For there still exists a certain mythology about the post-war proletarian north as a region that was both intensely political and united in purpose. What this article demonstrates is that the ‘industrial triangle’ of Genoa, Milan and Turin was far more divided than historians have assumed. By revisiting the manifold (wildcat) strikes, trade union demonstrations, and factory occupations of the early post-war years, it shows the industrial north to be divided along both social and geographical lines. In doing so, it sheds fresh light on the series of defeats that the main Italian trade union confederation (C.G.I.L.) suffered in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It argues that these defeats were due as much to the explicit politicization of labour struggles and their exclusive focus on the interests of skilled workers as to the hostile socio-political climate in which the C.G.I.L. had to operate.     

柴尔德与王振铎关于河南辉县琉璃阁墓中出土车制的询复信件译读

本文收录了世界著名考古学家柴尔德教授和我国著名科技史家王振铎先生进行学术交流的两封信件。参照河南辉县琉璃阁墓中出土的战国时期墓葬车马坑的考古发现,两位学者讨论了中国古代车制中有关和双辕的问题。本文作者对这两封信件涉及的内容做了相应的诠释。     

Paradigms of participation in the National Council for Culture and Arts: challenges on representation,recognition, access to creation and reception in post-dictatorship Chilean public cultural policy

The National Council for Culture and Arts (NCCA) is the public agency responsible for the implementation of cultural policies in Chile. It was created in 2003 as part of a group of public organisms designed to promote democracy in post-dictatorship Chile, and its objectives include the encouragement of citizen participation in the national culture. This paper aims to call into question the scope and limits of citizen participation in the Chilean cultural field, through a systematisation of paradigms implicitly developed by the NCCA. Those paradigms include participation on the political level, the creation of symbols, recognition of cultural manifestations and access to reception and symbolic appropriation. It identifies challenges of these paradigms regarding representation, recognition, access to creation and reception of cultural manifestations.     

20世纪30年代国民政府对鲁豫皖手工卷烟业的“整理”

20世纪30年代,鲁豫皖手工卷烟业迅速发展,增加了农民收入,繁荣了地方经济,满足了社会需求,促进了农村经济发展。但其对机制卷烟业也造成极大冲击,并严重影响国家税收。出于维护机制卷烟业正常发展和国家税收考虑,国民政府着手对三省手工卷烟业进行"整理",采取了一系列措施,但收效不甚明显;便又采取了取缔手工卷烟的措施。由于手工卷烟户的抗拒,地方政府的不配合,地方税务机关查禁无力,取缔工作难以展开。1937年抗日战争爆发,打断了国民政府对手工卷烟业的"整理"。