Proletarianisation, Agency and Changing Rural Livelihoods
Forced Labour and Resistance in Colonial Mozambique
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4603545 |
|---|---|
| Authors | B O''Laughlin (0000-0001-6006-0281, Institute for International Social Research, corresponding author), Bridget O''Laughlin, Bridget O'Laughlin |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 511-530 |
| Publication date | 2002-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0305707022000006495 |
| OpenAlex | W1972200099 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 57 |
| References cited | 21 |
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 to detach the concepts of livelihoods and agency from the micro-economic language of possessive individualism and strategic gaming and to reclaim them for a Marxist terrain of class struggle. It shows that the multiplicity and variation in rural livelihoods in Mozambique today are the outcome of a historical process of proletarianisation grounded in violent and repressive regimes of forced labour during the colonial period. Forced labour - and resistance to it - shaped the ways in which labour and agricultural commodity markets worked and developed. Qualitative shifts in the organisation of rural livelihoods resulted from processes of commoditisation that made proletarianisation, although contingent, also irreversible. The struggles of Mozambicans against forced labour and forced cropping enmeshed them in a world where both means of production and labour-power were commodities to be bought and sold. If we become so absorbed in documenting the complexity of multiple livelihoods and individual creativity that we can no longer see broad patterns of class struggle in historical change, then the concept of livelihoods is an ideological mask rather than a useful analytical tool
Agency (philosophy · Capitalism · Geography · Ideology · Livelihood · Marxist philosophy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Law
The Sustainable Rural Livelihoods Approach
Labour Migration
Resettlement as climate change adaptation
“Plantation Memories”, Anastácia, Dandara, and Zumbi, the Slave Ship São José, and the Farms of São Tomé, Or Slavery, Colonialism, and Racism in the Work of Women Artists
Semiproletarização generalizada na África
Forced Labor and Colonial Development in Africa
Administration, Economy, and Society in the Portuguese African Empire (1900–1975)
Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe
Resilience without development' in a remote rural West African community
Ganyu casual labour, famine and HIV/Aids in rural Malawi
Visões de Marracuene. Propaganda, cultura popular, turismo e o terreno colonial em Moçambique
Causes and Consequences of Displacement Decision-making in Banhine National Park, Mozambique
Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa
The rhino horn trade and radical inequality as environmental conflict
Breaking Canons
Overcoming ‘small peasant mentality’
Integrating reflexivity into livelihoods research
Dynamics of climatic and anthropogenic stressors in risking island- char livelihoods
Classes of working women in Mozambique
The workplace at the bottom of global supply chains as a site of reproduction of colonial relations
The Reformed Agrarian Structure and Changing Dynamics of Rural Labour Migration in Zimbabwe
Coffee and the agrarian questions in Laos and Rwanda
Flexibility in return, reconstruction and livelihoods in displaced villages in Casamance, Senegal
Large-scale land acquisitions aggravate the feminization of poverty
Rural wage employment in Africa
African Peasants and Revolution’ revisited
Contradictions to decent African jobs under energy transition-related extractivism
Class, politics and dynamic accumulation processes around the Sino-Mozambican rice project in the lower Limpopo, 2005–2014
The expansion of capitalist agricultural production and social reproduction of rural labour
Work in agro-industry and the social reproduction of labour in Mozambique
The Ecology and Economic Practices of the Isukha and Idakho Communities in Colonial Period 1895-1963
An anatomy of colonial states and fiscal regimes in Portuguese Africa
Violence, Science, and Cotton in Colonial-Fascist Mozambique (1934-1974)
How and why large scale agricultural land investments do not create long-term employment benefits
The Double Pincer of Migration
Speaking’ through songs? African Black women, colonial violence and resistance among Cokwe people in rural Angola
Colonial State Formation Without Integration
Child labour, Africa’s colonial system, and coercion
Colonial Administration, Public Accounts and Fiscal Extraction
Analysing land conflicts in times of global crises
Effective livelihood adaptation to climate change disturbance
Writing a Global History of Convict Labour
Racialization and “Southern” Identities of Resistance
From Theory to the Field and Back Again
From home to farm
Changing Forms of Wage Labour in Zimbabwe's New Agrarian Structure
Land, Gender, and Class Relations in Ghana's Cassava Frontier
Lifting the blinkers
Flooding, resettlement, and change in livelihoods
Fluid Institutions of Access
The social reproduction of agrarian change
Reproductive binds
Potatoes, Petty Commodity Producers and Livelihoods
Gender, Generation and the Experiences of Farm Dwellers Resettled in the Ciskei Bantustan, South Africa, ca 1960-1976
Women's struggles to access and control land and livelihoods after fast track land reform in Mwenezi District, Zimbabwe
Changing agrarian relations after redistributive land reform in Zimbabwe
Migrant workers into contract farmers
Essays on the Political Economy of Africa
The Roots of rural poverty in Central and Southern Africa
Work, culture, and identity
Peasants, traders, and wives
Cotton is the mother of poverty
Primitive Rebels, Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Roll, Jordan, roll
Social Capital Versus Social Theory
Cotton is the Mother of Poverty - Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938 - 1961, by Allen Isaacman. Portsmouth, NH
Poverty and Famines
The people in African resistance
What's missing from ‘What's missing’? A reply to C. Cramer and N. Pontara, ‘Rural poverty and poverty alleviation in Mozambique
A reply to Pitcher
Revolutionary Socialist Development in the Third World
Privatization and Economic Strategy in Mozambique
Class and the customary
Violence and social change in a border economy
Rural poverty and poverty alleviation in Mozambique
Labour Emigration among the Moçambique Thonga
Agricultural marketing and socialist accumulation
| Unique citing works | 57 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,85 |
| Citation span | 2006 - 2026 (21) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 56 |