Workers in Developing Societies

Abstract

To talk about a “working class” in the developing societies of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East might initially appear premature, both in a numerical and sociological sense. It has become embedded in the popular consciousness of metropolitan societies that developing nations are “peasant” societies, locked in a rural universe and producing goods won from the soil in the “traditional” manner of generations of tillers. Few con-temporary scholars of peripheral societies would now be insensitive to the massive changes in rural lifestyles wrought by the expansion of the capitalist world system since the sixteenth century. Communal systems of land tenure have been all but totally undermined. In many countries land holdings have become consolidated, crops are produced for reasons of commerce rather than subsistence, while the processes of urbanization, migration, and industrialization are everywhere visible and accelerating rapidly. Despite these observed processes, however, there remains a curious reluctance to accept that a new working class of considerable dimensions and with a potentially great political significance has already been created in the fields, factories, and backyard slums characteristic of peripheral cities.