Abstract
This chapter interrogates the concept of ‘working people’. Lenin and other classical Marxists commonly used terms like labouring people, working people, or rural poor. Typically, they were used as descriptive, or, at best, as terms of political art rather than theoretical science. The inspiration in this article for the use of the term ‘working people’ comes from Walter Rodney. Building on previous work, the article relates the concept of working people to a modified definition of primitive accumulation under neo-liberalism, that is, as a process of surplus extraction by capital based on expropriation of a part of necessary consumption of the producer. It is argued that this is the material basis common to all sectors of what is here understood as working people.
Originally published in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 6 No. 1 Copyright 2017 © Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South (CARES), New Delhi. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders and the publishers, SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi.
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Notes
- 1.
We were acquainted with the ‘mode of production’ debate among Indian Marxists raging then in the pages of Economic and Political Weekly, which grappled with the issue of the relation between capital and the peasant, and the class alliances that it generated. The most prominent participant in that debate whose name I fondly remember was Utsa Patnaik. I had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with her several decades later the product of which was the publication of a small book The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry (Patnaik and Moyo 2011).
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Shivji, I.G. (2021). The Concept of ‘Working People’. In: Jha, P., Chambati, W., Ossome, L. (eds) Labour Questions in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4635-2_3
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