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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2009
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.
1 Briefs, Goetz, “Das gewerbliche Proletariat”, in Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, Part IX (Tübingen, 1926), pp. 142–240Google Scholar, 149. The Grundriss der Sozialökonomik was the Weimar Republic's standard sociological reference work and included the original edition of Max Weber's Economy and Society.
2 “Labour History and Ideology” (1974), inHobsbawm, E.J., Worlds of Labour. Further Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1984), pp. 1–14, 4Google Scholar.
3 Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963)Google Scholar.
4 Cohen, Robin, “Workers in Developing Societies”, in Alavi, Hamza and Shanin, Teodor (eds). Sociology of “Developing Societies” (London, 1982), pp. 279–286, 279–280Google Scholar.
5 Worsley, Peter, The Three Worlds. Culture and World Development (London, 1984), pp. 194–202Google Scholar.
6 Wolf, Eric, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966)Google Scholar.
7 On the genesis of bonded labour as a general category, seePrakash, Gyan, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge [etc.], 1990), pp. 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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.
10 Roberts, B.R., “Peasants and Proletarians”, Annual Review of Sociology, 16 (1990), pp. 353–377, 354CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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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.
20 See Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Class Consciousness and the Indian Working Class: Dilemmas of Marxist Historiography”, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 28 (1988), pp. 21–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem.Rethinking Working Class History; Chandavarkar, Raj, “Industrialization in India before 1947: Conventional Approaches and Alternative Perspectives”, Modem Asian Studies, 19 (1985), pp. 623–668CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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.
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