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This article addresses the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) between Mexico and Canada by examining the forms of disposability and job insecurity of Mexicans employed in Canadian agribusiness. We argue that the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has exacerbated the precarity and disposability of Mexican workers by restructuring family dynamics and care chains. This article represents a critique of the SAWP as a model of regulated labor migration, serving as a basis for analyzing the consequences of the proletarianization of the Mexican peasantry and its use as disposable labor for export.

Characterizing the contemporary world as massively entropic and pointing to the proletarianization of human beings, Bernard Stiegler claims that we need to “bifurcate”. This paper clarifies what he means by bifurcation and examines the conditions necessary for its occurrence. After explaining how Stiegler’s general organology provides a framework for his assessment of our present, the paper focuses on how humans can become capable of producing bifurcations. Emphasizing that bifurcation must occur in relation to technology, the paper identifies it as an inventive dis-closure of a current system that transforms both technology and us through the creation of knowledge. It then shows that although the problem of our time is primarily one of automatization, we must deal with it through internalization rather than disautomatization. Our very humanity is being disrupted because we are not realizing the possibilities offered by the development of technology, and this can only be achieved if we internalize technology. The process of internalizing technology is itself bifurcative and enables us to overcome our proletarianization.

In the global legal services market, China has some of the youngest law firms but also some of the largest. In the early 21st century, several Chinese law firms have grown into mega law firms, with thousands of lawyers in a large number of domestic and overseas offices. This study uses the case of Chinese law firms to develop an ecological theory of organizational growth following the Chicago school of sociology. The authors argue that firms coexist and interact in an ecology consisting of other firms in the same industry. These firms occupy different ecological positions and generate various processes of interaction with one another. In their organizational growth, four species of Chinese law firms (global generalists, elite boutiques, local coalitions, and space rentals) have engaged in a variety of ecological processes, including competition, symbiosis, accommodation, assimilation, purification, and proletarianization. By locating firms in a social space and investigating the spatial and processual patterns of their growth, this ecological theory presents not only a system of social classification but also a logic of temporal change through social interaction.

David Harvey's adaptation and redeployment of Marx's notion of ‘primitive accumulation’–under the heading of ‘accumulation by dispossession’–has reignited interest in the concept among geographers. This adaptation of the concept of primitive accumulation to different contexts than those Marx analyzed raises a variety of theoretical and practical issues. In this paper, I review recent uses and transformations of the notion of primitive accumulation that focus on its persistence within the Global North, addressing especially the political implications that attend different readings of primitive accumulation in the era of neoliberal globalization.

While doing fieldwork in the modernizing Javanese city of Solo during the late 1980s, Suzanne Brenner came upon a neighborhood that seemed like a museum of a bygone era: Laweyan, a once-thriving production center of batik textiles, had embraced modernity under Dutch colonial rule, only to fend off the modernizing forces of the Indonesian state during the late twentieth century. Focusing on this community, Brenner examines what she calls the making of the \"unmodern.\" She portrays a merchant enclave clinging to its distinctive forms of social life and highlights the unique power of women in the marketplace and the home--two domains closely linked to each other through local economies of production and exchange. Against the social, political, and economic developments of late-colonial and postcolonial Java, Brenner describes how an innovative, commercially successful lifestyle became an anachronism in Indonesian society, thereby challenging the idea that tradition invariably gives way to modernity in an evolutionary progression. Brenner's analysis centers on the importance of gender to processes of social transformation. In Laweyan, the base of economic and social power has shifted from families, in which women were the main producers of wealth and cultural value, to the Indonesian state, which has worked to reorient families toward national political agendas. How such attempts affect women's lives and the meaning of the family itself are key considerations as Brenner questions long-held assumptions about the division between \"domestic\" and \"public\" spheres in modern society.

As a result of its open-door policies and 30 years of reform, China has become the \"world's factory\" and given rise to a new working class of rural migrant workers. This process has underlain a path of (semi-)proletarianization of Chinese peasant-workers: now the second generation is experiencing dagong, working for a boss, in industrialized towns and cities. What is the process of proletarianization of peasant-workers in China today? In what way does the path of proletarianization shape the new Chinese working class? Drawing on workers' narratives and our ethnographic studies in Shenzhen and Dongguan between 2005 and 2008, this study focuses on the subjective experiences of the second generation of dagongmei/zai, female migrant workers/male migrant workers, who have developed new forms of power and resistance unknown to the previous generation of workers. Did the pain and trauma experienced by the first generation of dagong subjects gradually evolve into the anger and resentment that has conditioned the labor strikes and class actions of the second generation? In short, what continuity and change can we observe in the life struggles of this new working class? Is the second generation of dagong subjects compelled to take action as a result of long-endured pain and anger? Self, anger, and collective action among the new working class propel the narrative described in this article.

Résumé : Malgré les protestations persistantes du contraire, la coercition imprègne l'expérience de travail moderne et, à de nombreux égards importants, elle est garantie par le pouvoir de l'État. Cet article décrit certaines des façons dont les interventions de longue date des États canadiens (et britanniques) continuent d'affecter les relations de travail aujourd'hui. Pour apprécier la portée de cet effet, il est nécessaire de franchir un certain nombre de frontières disciplinaires pour inclure des sujets tels que l'immigration, la déportation, la police politique, les fondements juridiques du droit du travail, l'influence continue des lois britanniques sur les pauvres et le rôle dès prisons et du travail pénitentiaire pour aider à réglementer les normes de travail. Les États ont agi pour soutenir la prolétarisation de manière globale, mais leur tendance à favoriser les projets de construction à grande échelle et « économes en maind'oeuvre » a souvent sapé l'efficacité réelle de leurs efforts de contrôle social. La politique pénitentiaire est toujours hantée par ces schémas de coercition, comme on le verra clairement vers la fin de l'article dans notre discussion sur le Centre de détention du Sud de Toronto.

Between 1990 and 2015, out of three processes observed in rural Poland – depeasantization, proletarianization and gentrification – the latter, triggering the emergence of a rural middle class, was the most dynamic. The share of the rural middle class in rural social structure increased from 13% to 28%, as a result of the processes both endogenous and exogenous to the countryside. In this analysis, the ‘new’ rural middle class has been defined by the performing the occupations that belong to the first four major groups in the Classification of Occupations and Specialties (ISCO-08). Thus distinguished, it is highly differentiated, which leads to the hypothesis of the existence not of one but several rural middle classes. The article’s aim is to demonstrate the differentiating characteristics of the rural middle class and to distinguish its types, based on co-occurring characteristics. The primary source of data for the analysis are the results of the „Social Diagnosis 2015” survey.

The vanishing of the commons is associated with not only a proletarianization of petty producers but also a change in the pattern of resource use in accordance with the demands of the world market. It is an instance of primitive accumulation of capital that is called forth by the spread of commodity production and does not occur suddenly or gratuitously. It is a feature of capitalism both at its birth and throughout its life. Commodity production as a sui generis process, not to be confused with mere production for the market, has a spontaneous character that even afflicts economies seeking to pursue socialism but caught in its grip.

Situated in the context of the land and ocean grabs in Ghana post-2007–2008 global economic crises, this article argues that the country is experiencing “primitive accumulation” without capitalist industrialization. I draw on the insights of agrarian political economy to argue that this has created cheap laborers without industrial capital to exploit. The corollary of this is the creation of additional “relative surplus population”, worsening the country's (un)employment crisis. However, this “relative surplus population” is not marginal to global capitalist accumulation and exploitation; on the contrary, it is important to them. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Ghanaian communities to document the voices of the dispossessed and semi-proletarianized about their experiences with the crisis of (re)production inflicted on them by global capitalism.