We spend many waking hours preparing for work, at work, or recovering from work, and many of us live in societies that, in the words of scholar Kathi Weeks, “expect people to work for wages.” In
The transatlantic slave trade in the 1500s–1800s bound up capitalism with colonialism and racism. Slavery was progressively abolished starting in the late eighteenth century in Haiti and continued through the nineteenth century, but this did not bring an end to racial hierarchies or the entanglement between race, capitalism, and colonialism. Instead, the transition to free wage labor accompanied the rise of scientific racism, the rapid growth of industrial capitalism, and heightened rivalries among competing empires.
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Industry at Night, by Horatio C. Forjohn, c. 1940. Smithsonian American Art Museum, transfer from the General Services Administration.
Most discussions of fatigue at the turn of the twentieth century begin with neurasthenia (from a Greek term meaning nervous exhaustion), the diagnosis popularized by neurologist George M. Beard in 1869. Like other physicians at the time, Beard viewed the body as a machine powered by energy produced by the nerves. The depletion of that energy resulted in the condition he called neurasthenia. Although sufferers reported an array of vague symptoms, including irritability, weight loss, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and impotence, fatigue was the most important and rest a commonly prescribed remedy. We tend to assume we live in a time of unprecedented and overwhelming social and technological change. In the late nineteenth century, similar anxieties were provoked by the advent of telephones, telegraphs, trains, and what contemp
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One day in grade two, I was reading my class assigned reading book with my teacher, Mrs Peacock. I was still learning to speak English.
Although quite competent, I was still receiving what was known in the 1970s as special English classes. I remember reading out loud from a book describing a character, a little girl in a sari, as having olive skin and almond eyes. The little girl was Indian.
“What is olive skin?” I asked Mrs Peacock.
Mrs Peacock explained people have different colored skin. She rubbed the top of my wrist and said, “Your skin is olive too, see? My skin is white,” she said, pointing to herself.
Workers of the World: Growth, Change, and Rebellion
The working class of the twenty-first century is a class in formation, as one would expect in a world where capitalism has only recently become universal. At the same time, Marx himself reminded us long ago, in speaking of the development of classes in England where they were “most classically developed,” that “even here, though, this class articulation does not emerge in pure form.”
1 The working
class, of course, is much broader than those who are employed at any one time. Relying only on workforce figures obscures important aspects of the broader working-class life, including its reproduction. Nevertheless, those in and out of employment form the core of the working class, once seen as a male domain but today nearly half composed of women. Furthermore, both space and research limitations dictate that this article will focus on the employed and near-employed sections of this global class. With these caveats in mind, we