The Making of Mozambique’s Working Class: Race, Empire and Proletarianization скачать в хорошем качестве

The Making of Mozambique’s Working Class: Race, Empire and Proletarianization

This seminar was organised on 24th April, 2025 as part of the New Political Economy Initiative's Economic Histories of the Global South Seminar Series. About the chapter: Marxist scholarship has been instrumental to the theorization of proletarianization. For Marx, the brutal historical process which transformed own-producers into wage-workers was both a source of freedom and of alienation. Inspired by emerging working-class formations in industrial Europe, he predicted that worker struggles against capital would eventually coalesce into a class not only of itself but for itself. However, the process of proletarianization in much of the colonized world was far more uneven than Marx imagined. In much of Southern Africa, for instance, racial capitalism did not require absolute dispossession. Instead, a hybrid system developed, buttressed by the interdependence between own-production and wage-labour. Over time, however, the socioeconomic basis of this hybrid system buckled, triggering a crisis of reproduction in the labour reserves, compounded by industrial stagnation in the nodes of accumulation. This chapter, which is part of a broader book project, traces the uneven and contested process of proletarianization in Mozambique, and explores the implications for working class politics in the postcolonial period. Author and speaker: Ruth Castel-Branco is a Senior Researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand. Discussants: Dhiraj Kumar Nite (Ambedkar University) ___________ Chapters 0:10 Introduction 1:29 Summary of the chapter and its main arguments by Ruth Castel-Branco 37:06 Comments by Dhiraj Nite 59:33 Response by Ruth Castel-Branco 1:03:04 Q&A ___________ Convenors: Zaen Alkazi & Sonal Raghuvanshi