Teemu Ruskola, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, has posted The Making of The Chinese Working Class, which is forthcoming in the New Left Review.
This essay, forthcoming in the New Left Review, is an advance excerpt from a book entitled The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: The Global Limits of Capitalism, to be published by Verso Books in 2026. The title of the essay is a deliberate nod to E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class. The English working class constituted the paradigmatic proletariat in the initial stages of industrial capitalism in the West. It provides an ideal lens for examining the emergence of another proletariat of global significance on the opposite edge of the Eurasian landmass, one that is emblematic of capitalism’s latest stage.--Dan Ernst
Thompson framed his analysis in terms of the Enclosure Movement, which expropriated peasants of their land and left them with no option but to sell their labor. In China, too, there is occurring a similar dispossession of peasantry that is sometimes described as a New Enclosure Movement. However, the two enclosure movements differ notably in their temporal and spatial scope. First, processes that took place over a period of several centuries in England are being telescoped into just three decades in China. Second, they are taking place in the opposite order: the initial commodification of industrial labor in the 1990s was accompanied by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of migrant laborers into cities even without the large-scale commodification of rural land. Why, then, dispossess a peasantry that has already submitted to capital voluntarily, i.e., under economic duress without the need to resort to forcible dislocation? This essay, and the book of which it is a part, address this question by focusing on distinctive forms of ownership of rural and urban land in China—a legal distinction that has no precedent in Chinese history, Marxian thought, or Soviet praxis.
