B O''Laughlin
Biographic Data
| ID | 10847 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B O''Laughlin |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | O''Laughlin |
| SIGNATURE | LAUGHLIN B O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Netherlands Institute for Social Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6006-0281 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 428 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Introduction
Covid‐19 generated a crisis in capitalism, but not of capitalism. Capitalism reproduces itself in crisis and in ways that have significant but uneven impacts on the conditions and struggles of agrarian classes of labour. This article explores preliminary studies of how Covid‐19 has affected agrarian social formations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the farmers, petty commodity producers, labourers and agribusinesses who populate them. It co…
No separate spheres
Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) rejects the classical political economy distinction between productive and unproductive labor, the latter defined as all labor that does not produce surplus-value. Rather, much non-commodified labor, particularly that done in the domestic sphere, is not unproductive but necessary since it produces labor-power. Hence, SRT has proposed an alternative distinction: productive versus reproductive spheres of labor. This…
Myth of the African Family in the World of Development
All social processes were conceptualized in polar terms: the extended African family was giving way to the nuclear family; status was becoming achieved rather than ascribed; kinship ties were being dissolved by the solvent of the market. Throughout the 1970s, various writers, sociologists and economists as well as anthropologists, struggled to clarify the links between economic development and African social organization. The African Family Syste…
Consuming Bodies
Sugar produced on large estates of the Zambezi River Valley was one of Mozambique's major exports in the colonial period but production declined radically in the course of the post-independence war. Now, with the entry of multinational sugar conglomerates, cane is growing again, beginning somewhat improbably in the water-starved Incomati Valley. Using a case generally regarded as a success, the Tongaat Hulett mill-plantation complex at Xinavane, …
Pragmatism, Structural Reform and the Politics of Inequality in Global Public Health
Despite broad international agreement on the importance of addressing global health inequalities on grounds of both social justice and health security, there is little accord on how this should be done. The Debate that follows interrogates the role that capital and corporate institutions have assumed in defining and implementing global healthcare reforms. The contributors to the Debate do not agree on the legitimacy of the classic oppositions in …
Bernstein's Puzzle
To establish the significance of Henry Bernstein's theoretical work on the dynamics of agrarian class struggles in Africa, this paper discusses two important political debates in which he has been both observer and participant, and that have oriented much of the subsequent Marxist work done in Africa on agrarian change. The first was the heated discussion begun over 40 years ago around Nyerere's 'African socialism' and the failures of the ujamaa …
Trapped in the prison of the proximate
There is now agreement in HIV/AIDS prevention that biomedical and behavioural interventions do not sufficiently address the structural causes of the epidemic, but structural prevention is understood in different ways. The social drivers approach models pathways that link structural constraints to individuals at risk and then devises intervention to affect these pathways. An alternative political economy approach that begins with the bio-social wh…
Ruth First
Writing about the life of Olive Schreiner, Ruth First hoped that biography could capture the dilemmas of a white South African woman and writer at the turn of the twentieth century, caught in a world that made her, but in which she could not bear to live as it was. Ruth First too struggled her entire life against the injustices of race and class in southern Africa, but she did so with a confidence, joy and energy that Schreiner never achieved. Wr…
The Legacy of Ruth First in Development Studies
Introduction
This introduction sketches the context and dynamics of agrarian change, rural poverty and land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994, drawing attention to structural continuities and new elements in the countrysides of South Africa, and of the Southern African region in which South Africa must be located. Two key historical and theoretical reference points help focus attention on some central issues: the 'classic' model of dispossession/accum…
Land, Labour and the Production of Affliction in RuralSouthernAfrica
In the colonial vision ofSouthernAfrica, rural people were seen as both underemployed and self-sustaining even while processes of commodification dependent on the exploitation of their labour were producing spatially and racially marked inequalities of wealth and consumption and related patterns of health and affliction. Affliction sometimes reflected denial of access to formal health provisioning, but it was also produced by the conditions of la…
Land, Liberation and Compromise in Southern Africa - By Chris Alden and Ward Anseeuw
Governing Capital? Corporate Social Responsibility and the Limits of Regulation
The current concern with corporate social responsibility must be seen in the context of major shifts in the functioning of the market, the state and civil society, and of the boundaries between them, and in the ways that we envision them. Capitalism has been reconfigured as an ethical order in which transnational corporations can, indeed must, be accountable for the global well-being of citizens be they rich or poor, capitalists or workers. This …
Starter Packs
A Bigger Piece of a Very Small Pie
Feminist research has convincingly shown that an increase in household income does not necessarily lead to improvement in the well-being of all members of the household. More questionable is the policy conclusion often drawn from this research for rural Africa: redressing gender imbalance in control of productive resources will significantly reduce poverty. This contribution argues that the evidence and analysis presented by two studies repeatedl…
Proletarianisation, Agency and Changing Rural Livelihoods
In current analytical approaches to rural poverty in Southern Africa, the more we see the term 'livelihoods', the less we see the concept 'proletarianisation'. This displacement is partly a response to warranted criticism of teleological and functionalist tendencies in some Marxist work on proletarianisation, but it also reflects a troubling retreat from history, politics and class analysis in current livelihoods frameworks. This paper attempts t…
Class and the customary
This article looks at the making of the Indigenato, the set of institutions that defined the difference between settler citizen and native subject in colonial Mozambique, and considers its legacy for post-colonial politics. It argues that approaches to the democratization of local governance in rural areas today must recognize that the customary authorities were shaped by a colonial state that was bifurcated in conception but imperfectly so in pr…
Missing men? The debate over rural poverty and women-headed households in Southern Africa
Migrant labour in Southern Africa is associated historically with rural poverty and a high incidence of women-headed households. Poverty alleviation approaches to social policy ask whether in this context rural women-headed households are poorer than those headed by men. Ample research from the region shows that the answer is not always, a finding once more confirmed here in an analysis of Botswana. This case suggests, however, that the wrong que…
From Basic Needs to Safety-Nets
Through a divided glass
This article argues that if we look at rural differentiation not only as emerging class stratification but also as changing divisions of labour, expressed in the diversification of rural livelihoods, we can see that proletarianisation in Mozambique was a deeply rooted process at Independence. The Frelimo party's vision of agrarian class structure was, however, based on a dualist model of a homogeneous subsistence-oriented peasantry opposed to an …
Past and present options
There is now broad agreement on the left that Frelimo's agrarian policy was not a success in socialist terms, either economically or politically. The principal elements of the left critique have been that Frelimo's policy of concentrating investment in the state sector marginalised peasant production, and that the development of a centralised hegemonic party excluded the peasantry from the political process. External aggression is seen as having …
Imperialist culture and its practical reason
Production and Reproduction
Many Sisters . Carolyn J. Matthiasson
Marxist Approaches in Anthropology
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Class and the customary
This article looks at the making of the Indigenato, the set of institutions that defined the difference between settler citizen and native subject in colonial Mozambique, and considers its legacy for post-colonial politics. It argues that approaches to the democratization of local governance in rural areas today must recognize that the customary authorities were shaped by a colonial state that was bifurcated in conception but imperfectly so in pr…
Through a divided glass
This article argues that if we look at rural differentiation not only as emerging class stratification but also as changing divisions of labour, expressed in the diversification of rural livelihoods, we can see that proletarianisation in Mozambique was a deeply rooted process at Independence. The Frelimo party's vision of agrarian class structure was, however, based on a dualist model of a homogeneous subsistence-oriented peasantry opposed to an …
Missing men? The debate over rural poverty and women-headed households in Southern Africa
Migrant labour in Southern Africa is associated historically with rural poverty and a high incidence of women-headed households. Poverty alleviation approaches to social policy ask whether in this context rural women-headed households are poorer than those headed by men. Ample research from the region shows that the answer is not always, a finding once more confirmed here in an analysis of Botswana. This case suggests, however, that the wrong que…
Proletarianisation, Agency and Changing Rural Livelihoods
In current analytical approaches to rural poverty in Southern Africa, the more we see the term 'livelihoods', the less we see the concept 'proletarianisation'. This displacement is partly a response to warranted criticism of teleological and functionalist tendencies in some Marxist work on proletarianisation, but it also reflects a troubling retreat from history, politics and class analysis in current livelihoods frameworks. This paper attempts t…
Production and Reproduction
Marxist Approaches in Anthropology
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Introduction
This introduction sketches the context and dynamics of agrarian change, rural poverty and land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994, drawing attention to structural continuities and new elements in the countrysides of South Africa, and of the Southern African region in which South Africa must be located. Two key historical and theoretical reference points help focus attention on some central issues: the 'classic' model of dispossession/accum…
No separate spheres
Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) rejects the classical political economy distinction between productive and unproductive labor, the latter defined as all labor that does not produce surplus-value. Rather, much non-commodified labor, particularly that done in the domestic sphere, is not unproductive but necessary since it produces labor-power. Hence, SRT has proposed an alternative distinction: productive versus reproductive spheres of labor. This…
Consuming Bodies
Sugar produced on large estates of the Zambezi River Valley was one of Mozambique's major exports in the colonial period but production declined radically in the course of the post-independence war. Now, with the entry of multinational sugar conglomerates, cane is growing again, beginning somewhat improbably in the water-starved Incomati Valley. Using a case generally regarded as a success, the Tongaat Hulett mill-plantation complex at Xinavane, …
A Bigger Piece of a Very Small Pie
Feminist research has convincingly shown that an increase in household income does not necessarily lead to improvement in the well-being of all members of the household. More questionable is the policy conclusion often drawn from this research for rural Africa: redressing gender imbalance in control of productive resources will significantly reduce poverty. This contribution argues that the evidence and analysis presented by two studies repeatedl…
Land, Labour and the Production of Affliction in RuralSouthernAfrica
In the colonial vision ofSouthernAfrica, rural people were seen as both underemployed and self-sustaining even while processes of commodification dependent on the exploitation of their labour were producing spatially and racially marked inequalities of wealth and consumption and related patterns of health and affliction. Affliction sometimes reflected denial of access to formal health provisioning, but it was also produced by the conditions of la…
Governing Capital? Corporate Social Responsibility and the Limits of Regulation
The current concern with corporate social responsibility must be seen in the context of major shifts in the functioning of the market, the state and civil society, and of the boundaries between them, and in the ways that we envision them. Capitalism has been reconfigured as an ethical order in which transnational corporations can, indeed must, be accountable for the global well-being of citizens be they rich or poor, capitalists or workers. This …
Past and present options
There is now broad agreement on the left that Frelimo's agrarian policy was not a success in socialist terms, either economically or politically. The principal elements of the left critique have been that Frelimo's policy of concentrating investment in the state sector marginalised peasant production, and that the development of a centralised hegemonic party excluded the peasantry from the political process. External aggression is seen as having …
From Basic Needs to Safety-Nets
Bernstein's Puzzle
To establish the significance of Henry Bernstein's theoretical work on the dynamics of agrarian class struggles in Africa, this paper discusses two important political debates in which he has been both observer and participant, and that have oriented much of the subsequent Marxist work done in Africa on agrarian change. The first was the heated discussion begun over 40 years ago around Nyerere's 'African socialism' and the failures of the ujamaa …
Pragmatism, Structural Reform and the Politics of Inequality in Global Public Health
Despite broad international agreement on the importance of addressing global health inequalities on grounds of both social justice and health security, there is little accord on how this should be done. The Debate that follows interrogates the role that capital and corporate institutions have assumed in defining and implementing global healthcare reforms. The contributors to the Debate do not agree on the legitimacy of the classic oppositions in …
Trapped in the prison of the proximate
There is now agreement in HIV/AIDS prevention that biomedical and behavioural interventions do not sufficiently address the structural causes of the epidemic, but structural prevention is understood in different ways. The social drivers approach models pathways that link structural constraints to individuals at risk and then devises intervention to affect these pathways. An alternative political economy approach that begins with the bio-social wh…
Ruth First
Writing about the life of Olive Schreiner, Ruth First hoped that biography could capture the dilemmas of a white South African woman and writer at the turn of the twentieth century, caught in a world that made her, but in which she could not bear to live as it was. Ruth First too struggled her entire life against the injustices of race and class in southern Africa, but she did so with a confidence, joy and energy that Schreiner never achieved. Wr…
The Legacy of Ruth First in Development Studies
Stone Age Economics.Marshall Sahlins
Marxist Approaches in Anthropology
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Many Sisters . Carolyn J. Matthiasson
Production and Reproduction
Imperialist culture and its practical reason
Past and present options
There is now broad agreement on the left that Frelimo's agrarian policy was not a success in socialist terms, either economically or politically. The principal elements of the left critique have been that Frelimo's policy of concentrating investment in the state sector marginalised peasant production, and that the development of a centralised hegemonic party excluded the peasantry from the political process. External aggression is seen as having …
From Basic Needs to Safety-Nets
Through a divided glass
This article argues that if we look at rural differentiation not only as emerging class stratification but also as changing divisions of labour, expressed in the diversification of rural livelihoods, we can see that proletarianisation in Mozambique was a deeply rooted process at Independence. The Frelimo party's vision of agrarian class structure was, however, based on a dualist model of a homogeneous subsistence-oriented peasantry opposed to an …
Missing men? The debate over rural poverty and women-headed households in Southern Africa
Migrant labour in Southern Africa is associated historically with rural poverty and a high incidence of women-headed households. Poverty alleviation approaches to social policy ask whether in this context rural women-headed households are poorer than those headed by men. Ample research from the region shows that the answer is not always, a finding once more confirmed here in an analysis of Botswana. This case suggests, however, that the wrong que…
Class and the customary
This article looks at the making of the Indigenato, the set of institutions that defined the difference between settler citizen and native subject in colonial Mozambique, and considers its legacy for post-colonial politics. It argues that approaches to the democratization of local governance in rural areas today must recognize that the customary authorities were shaped by a colonial state that was bifurcated in conception but imperfectly so in pr…
Proletarianisation, Agency and Changing Rural Livelihoods
In current analytical approaches to rural poverty in Southern Africa, the more we see the term 'livelihoods', the less we see the concept 'proletarianisation'. This displacement is partly a response to warranted criticism of teleological and functionalist tendencies in some Marxist work on proletarianisation, but it also reflects a troubling retreat from history, politics and class analysis in current livelihoods frameworks. This paper attempts t…
A Bigger Piece of a Very Small Pie
Feminist research has convincingly shown that an increase in household income does not necessarily lead to improvement in the well-being of all members of the household. More questionable is the policy conclusion often drawn from this research for rural Africa: redressing gender imbalance in control of productive resources will significantly reduce poverty. This contribution argues that the evidence and analysis presented by two studies repeatedl…
Governing Capital? Corporate Social Responsibility and the Limits of Regulation
The current concern with corporate social responsibility must be seen in the context of major shifts in the functioning of the market, the state and civil society, and of the boundaries between them, and in the ways that we envision them. Capitalism has been reconfigured as an ethical order in which transnational corporations can, indeed must, be accountable for the global well-being of citizens be they rich or poor, capitalists or workers. This …
Starter Packs
Land, Liberation and Compromise in Southern Africa - By Chris Alden and Ward Anseeuw
The Legacy of Ruth First in Development Studies
Introduction
This introduction sketches the context and dynamics of agrarian change, rural poverty and land reform since the end of apartheid in 1994, drawing attention to structural continuities and new elements in the countrysides of South Africa, and of the Southern African region in which South Africa must be located. Two key historical and theoretical reference points help focus attention on some central issues: the 'classic' model of dispossession/accum…
Land, Labour and the Production of Affliction in RuralSouthernAfrica
In the colonial vision ofSouthernAfrica, rural people were seen as both underemployed and self-sustaining even while processes of commodification dependent on the exploitation of their labour were producing spatially and racially marked inequalities of wealth and consumption and related patterns of health and affliction. Affliction sometimes reflected denial of access to formal health provisioning, but it was also produced by the conditions of la…
Ruth First
Writing about the life of Olive Schreiner, Ruth First hoped that biography could capture the dilemmas of a white South African woman and writer at the turn of the twentieth century, caught in a world that made her, but in which she could not bear to live as it was. Ruth First too struggled her entire life against the injustices of race and class in southern Africa, but she did so with a confidence, joy and energy that Schreiner never achieved. Wr…
Trapped in the prison of the proximate
There is now agreement in HIV/AIDS prevention that biomedical and behavioural interventions do not sufficiently address the structural causes of the epidemic, but structural prevention is understood in different ways. The social drivers approach models pathways that link structural constraints to individuals at risk and then devises intervention to affect these pathways. An alternative political economy approach that begins with the bio-social wh…
Pragmatism, Structural Reform and the Politics of Inequality in Global Public Health
Despite broad international agreement on the importance of addressing global health inequalities on grounds of both social justice and health security, there is little accord on how this should be done. The Debate that follows interrogates the role that capital and corporate institutions have assumed in defining and implementing global healthcare reforms. The contributors to the Debate do not agree on the legitimacy of the classic oppositions in …
Bernstein's Puzzle
To establish the significance of Henry Bernstein's theoretical work on the dynamics of agrarian class struggles in Africa, this paper discusses two important political debates in which he has been both observer and participant, and that have oriented much of the subsequent Marxist work done in Africa on agrarian change. The first was the heated discussion begun over 40 years ago around Nyerere's 'African socialism' and the failures of the ujamaa …
Consuming Bodies
Sugar produced on large estates of the Zambezi River Valley was one of Mozambique's major exports in the colonial period but production declined radically in the course of the post-independence war. Now, with the entry of multinational sugar conglomerates, cane is growing again, beginning somewhat improbably in the water-starved Incomati Valley. Using a case generally regarded as a success, the Tongaat Hulett mill-plantation complex at Xinavane, …
Myth of the African Family in the World of Development
All social processes were conceptualized in polar terms: the extended African family was giving way to the nuclear family; status was becoming achieved rather than ascribed; kinship ties were being dissolved by the solvent of the market. Throughout the 1970s, various writers, sociologists and economists as well as anthropologists, struggled to clarify the links between economic development and African social organization. The African Family Syste…
Introduction
Covid‐19 generated a crisis in capitalism, but not of capitalism. Capitalism reproduces itself in crisis and in ways that have significant but uneven impacts on the conditions and struggles of agrarian classes of labour. This article explores preliminary studies of how Covid‐19 has affected agrarian social formations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the farmers, petty commodity producers, labourers and agribusinesses who populate them. It co…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Economics (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (8 works) · Political economy (8 works) · African history and culture studies (7 works) · Development economics (7 works) · Economic growth (7 works)