Alessandra Mezzadri, ed, Marx in the Field, Anthem Press, London and New York, 2021. Hbk £80, E-book (PDF or EPUB) £25.
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Marx offers unrivalled resources for tracing the ‘global-local co-constitution of the socio-economic processes shaping global capitalism’ (8), in the form of an absolute commitment to empirical evidence and a thoroughly materialist conceptual framework that makes sense of it. Some enduring aspects of the underlying method were expressed, with Engels, in the opening pages of The German Ideology, in which the two depicted themselves as beginning from ‘real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity’; it followed that these premises could be ‘verified in a purely empirical way’. They amplified further that ‘definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into … definite social and political relations’, insisting again that empirical observation ‘must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production’. For good measure they added that this method of approach 'is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men and women [Menschen], not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists’. The process of ‘abstraction’ would be considerably elaborated in the Grundrisse, and Marx’s mature method and its corresponding concepts were only fully constituted with the publication of Capital, Volume 1, in 1867 (Jessop 2018), but he never wavered in his commitment to painstaking conceptual work and empirical investigation.
Marx lived to observe only the beginnings of a genuinely global capitalist world market, and could not verify empirically what its future character and implications would be. But he identified tendencies (‘immanent laws’) that would lead, under the pressure of competition between capitalists and the resulting compulsion to innovate incessantly, to the subordination, transformation and displacement of other forms of production around the world. That process continues. The remarkable expansion of the capitalist world market over the last forty years has greatly increased the size of the global proletariat, and just as importantly, transformed forms of unfree labour, and the relationship between the ‘domestic sphere’ and the market, notably as regards gender roles. But it has not done so uniformly. The ‘logic of capital’ increasingly knits the world together, but does so unevenly, in a single complex world market spread across different territories (social formations), each with their own character and balance of class forces, and mode and degree of incorporation into the world market. No two situations are the same – but all are connected, intelligible in accordance with core Marxist concepts, and amenable to empirical investigation.
There could not be a better time, then, to illustrate ‘the potential benefits of deploying Marx and Marxian concepts and methods as a guide for today’s “radical fieldworkers” – those aspiring at “doing” political economy across the world economy in practice, and committed to social and economic justice’ (1). This book treats the ‘field’ as ‘primarily methodological, rather than geographical, as it refers to the concrete processes of conceptual development of research design, of deployment and adaptation of analytical categories for field research and/or data collection and analysis’ (2). While Marx's conceptual apparatus ‘powerfully resonates with intellectuals, researchers, academics and activists worldwide’, Alessandra Mezzadri comments, the practical relevance of Marxian political economy for actual, concrete field-based research remains ‘under-theorised and not systematically analysed' (6). This book changes that. It is that rarest of edited collections – a generally excellent set of chapters which is more than the sum of its parts, for which the editor herself and the contributors can jointly take credit. It ranges from Brazil to Palestine and the Gulf States, India, rural South Africa and Uzbekistan, and from merchant capital and African coffee markets to the surrogacy industry, the nourishment of the poor, and ‘marginal’ categories in political economy. In all this variety, it never loses sight of the aspiration to be of practical utility to the radical researcher. It succeeds triumphantly. First, all the contributors keep ‘doing research’ to the fore, with the result that the book works as a ‘practical guide on how to carry out concrete, meaningful Marxist analysis in specific contemporary settings’ (2). Second, they do so in entirely undogmatic terms, both because they understand Marx’s method, with its goal of developing concepts as a prelude to returning to empirical reality in all its complexity, ‘without any mystification or speculation’, and because they are able to reflect on their own practice, and recognize too that research is a collective effort, necessarily incomplete and provisional in its findings. Third, they draw very widely on Marx’s writings, from all three volumes of Capital to political and journalistic material and late work. Fourth, they follow authors such as Banaji (2010) and Pradella (2014), who argue that Marx’s framework ‘was always meant to study the development of capitalist forces globally’, explicitly dissociating him from the ‘facile linear and modernising narratives of development’ (9) with which he is sometimes charged. Fifth, they are all attuned in different ways to tracing and seeking to make sense of varied relationships between capital and other material categories in the context of the dynamic advance of the capitalist world market. Sixth, as the separate chapters attest, they take field work very seriously, often extending research over many years. Seventh, there is a concerted effort, however complex the conceptual and theoretical terrain, to be clear and precise about the issues under investigation and the ways in which they are explored. In short, it is an immensely valuable guide to (radical) fieldwork, but it has wider significance too as a sophisticated primer on Marx’s method, with acute contemporary relevance.
The book is presented as a product of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), to which all the contributors are linked in one way or another, and ‘codifies some of the specific ways in which critical development studies is interpreted at SOAS, influenced by Marxian political economy yet incorporating insights from other radical traditions and focusing on practical lessons for/from field research’ (9). Mezzadri identifies three particular ways in which Marx can be brought productively into the field: by ‘showing the relevance of the Marxian research framework in practice by focusing on one or more key concepts, categories or processes highlighted by Marx in his critique of political economy and study of capitalist development’; discussing ‘how Marxian categories may appear in “disguised form” across the world economy, and how we can unveil and investigate them during fieldwork’ (6); and describing, discussing and analysing which ‘practical methods of data collection’ can guide a Marxian political economy approach to the field, again by reference to concrete cases studies’ (7).
Chapter Two, by Henry Bernstein, complements the introduction by exploring distinctive characteristics of Marx’s approach that are particularly relevant to conducting empirical research, taking researching class as an orienting theme. As already noted, Marx was not an ‘empiricist’, if by that you mean that he investigated ‘facts’ as they presented themselves to the observer without prior analytical and conceptual work. But Bernstein is rightly insistent first that you do not escape the need for detailed empirical work that respects standards of evidence by declaring yourself a Marxist, and second that Marx himself, as Capital witnesses, was voracious in pursuit of it. Serious empirical work informed but not resolved by arduous conceptual and theoretical work was above all work, and hard work at that, made all the harder because ‘things and their mutual relations are conceived not as fixed but rather as changing’ (Engels, Preface to Capital, Volume III, emphasis mine). This rules out, quite rightly, the search for invariant laws and relationships, favouring instead conjunctural analysis at the level of the individual social formation and below. Here the ‘concrete study of reality always remains; the result is not given from beginning. But a guide is needed’ (Liedman, 2018, 363, 376). Bernstein begins his chapter appropriately, quoting Marx’s warning from the Preface to the French edition of Capital, Volume I (1872) that ‘There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits’. He notes that most of Capital was ‘concerned with exploring theoretically and illustrating empirically the mechanisms and moments of capital’s “laws of motion” and with critique of the “bourgeois” political economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (20). As such, its analysis cannot be mechanically carried across to other times and places. As ‘things and their mutual relations’ are conceived as constantly changing, there can never be any question of finding a situation from another time and place that ‘fits the facts’ today, nor can that be the goal. On the other hand, the Marxist analytical framework is more relevant than ever, given the increased salience of capitalism on a global scale, and this is precisely what the remaining chapters illustrate – contemporary researchers explore theoretically and illustrate empirically the mechanisms and moments of the “laws of motion” of twenty-first century global capitalism and its changing implications for other areas of life, generating new knowledge in the process. In doing so, they implicitly or explicitly situate their particular study in the larger whole: analytically, in Marx’s theoretical analysis of the capitalist mode of production as a totality with systemic qualities, and concretely or historically in ‘the phases and mutations of capitalism on a world scale and the times and places it encompasses in all the definitive unevenness of its development’:
‘Thus, any field research selects particular concepts and categories, and their attendant issues, from the theory of the capitalist mode of production as a totality. At the same time, any field research must locate its object in a particular time and place within the histories of capitalism on a world scale. This does not assume, however, that world capitalism at any given moment determines any and every particular site and object of research within it in any direct, necessary and complete manner. Rather the nature and degree of such determination(s) are themselves an important matter of investigation’ (21).
This is good common sense, and could hardly be better put. The theoretical resource uniquely offered by the Marxist analysis/ critique of what is now global capitalism is the capacity to locate specific and unique situations consistently in a single, complex and connected global whole. As the remaining chapters give numerous and varied examples, it would make sense to read this one for an initial orientation, then return to it after reading the rest of the book. Bernstein knows his craft, and the more you become familiar with Marxist-inspired research and fieldwork, the more you will appreciate the knowledge and judgement he brings to the chapter.
After what is in effect a double introduction, then, the field research exemplars start strongly, with Barbara Harriss-White’s focus on Marx’s discussion of merchant and commercial capital (in Capital, Vol. III) and a detailed account of forty years of face-to-face interviews and other fieldwork guided by it, conducted in India between 1973 and 2013. Marx did not focus exclusively on industrial capital, nor did he address merchant capital only as its ‘primitive’ precursor. Merchant capital is ‘a category and a process full of contradictions’ (34). So, for example, it may complement industrial capital or alternatively hinder capitalist development by dominating small-scale production, especially in agriculture – the latter being a situation common in Marx’s day and in many countries today. Harriss-White uses his rich analysis to explore the concrete micro-level universe of merchants in India, and build from there to larger studies of agricultural markets and rural commercial capital. Here ‘the mass of agricultural producers are involved in markets from which they cannot possibly withdraw under any circumstances, barring a crisis of destitution. The mechanisms of control remain money advances and the state’s protection of the power of agro-processing, which includes its support through banks for the roles of these “heterogeneous productive functions” as net contributors of money capital to the cascade of rural credit and as net recipients of the stream of marketed surplus destined for rural-urban trade’ (36). Marx’s analysis can sensitise the researcher to these and other roles, but only detailed empirical research can reveal the specific mix and how it changes over time – as Harriss-White’s three-page checklist ‘default order’ of (over 80) questions to guide fieldwork underlines, along with her injunction to ‘map settlements on foot – not forgetting upper levels of commercial buildings and interiors of yards, prior to stratifying by quarters or commercial clusters evident from maps and then moving to random sampling’ (39-40). Serious empirical research in development studies, however rewarding, is unremitting toil.
I found Chapter Four, in which Muhammed Ali Jan uses the concept of ‘fractions of capital’ to explore rural and small town Pakistani Punjab and other sites in the global South, less good a fit with the volume as a whole. Jan finds that Marx ‘was unable to define the concept of “fractions” coherently’ (51), and proposes a further development and a synthesis of Marx and Weber. He is entitled to this point of view, of course, but given that he holds it, it makes its application in research problematic. Jan might have considered further the difference between references to ‘fractions of capital’ in a restricted sense (industrial, financial, and so on), and the perfectly conventional use of the term ‘fraction’ or ‘faction’ in relation to political parties and the like; and it is certainly bold, if not reckless, to address fractions of capital without reference to the ‘Amsterdam School’ (Jessop and Overbeek, 2019). Other readers may not agree, but to me Jan attaches Marx inappropriately to a loose pluralist version of ‘fractions of capital’.
A second study focused on India, ‘Marx in the Sweatshop’ (Chapter Five), is contributed by Mezzadri herself, and shares the strengths of Harris-White. It draws on her research monograph on the sweatshop regime (Mezzadri 2017), and is equally impressive in its grounding on Marx and its commitment to research on the ground. Mezzadri identifies three ‘tropes’ of Marx’s method as crucial to understanding key features of contemporary production in labour-intensive industries – ‘the initial framing of the analysis around the commodity; the observation of different modes of labour surplus extraction; and the mapping of different processes of labour subsumption’ (64). For reasons fully addressed in The Sweatshop Regime, Bangalore’s Fordist factories are feminised, while in Delhi’s factories and workshops male migrants predominate. In peri-urban and rural Uttar Pradesh, female home-workers have significant roles. Mezzadri complements Marx with ‘insights from radical feminist literature on the co-constitution of social oppression and exploitation and the role of social reproduction in production and extraction of value’ (73), making the important point, visible also in Marx (Cammack 2020), that ‘social production’ is a differentiated complex, embracing factory, workshop, ‘home-working’ and domestic reproductive labour, and demands a gendered analysis.
In Chapter Six, Adam Hanieh turns to Marxist conceptualisations of class to illuminate the nature of capitalist accumulation in the Gulf. Consistently with the collection as a whole, he notes Marx’s commitment to starting with the ‘concrete, lived experience of people’, then offers a discussion of shared capitalist interests between Palestine and the Gulf that puts social class and class formation rather than a ‘neo-Weberian’ perspective on rents and state autonomy at the centre of the analysis. This does not preclude a specifically Marxist analysis of rents, which is not discussed, but in any case the focus on regional political economy and Gulf and extra-Gulf class formation corrects any impression that private class interests are negligible, or secondary. He then addresses migrant (Palestinian) labour, in a region where migrant workers altogether represent over 70 per cent of the workforce. Gulf capitalism reproduces itself in ways that in concrete terms are unique, but at the same time are intelligible only in the wider context of regional and global commodity and labour markets.
Next, Susan Newman draws on the way in which Capital, Volume II, ‘develops Marx’s reproduction schema by examining the constant intertwining of appearance and disappearance of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital from the sphere of circulation into the sphere of production and back again’ to trace the integrated nature of production, exchange and finance in ‘economic reproduction in its totality’ (91) for the particular case of the changing social relations of production of coffee commodity chains. The focus is on the one hand on the increased salience in recent years of money owners, lenders and managers on international financial exchanges as coffee commodity chains experience ‘financialization’, and on the other on different complementary local pricing and marketing systems and their effects. Commodity chains, understood as networks of labour and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986: 159), demand an integrated analysis, and here the guiding thread is provided by the evolution of commodity derivative markets from means for farmers and traders to hedge against risk to an area of activity in its own right for coffee trading companies, and for international money managers. But Newman’s contrast between Uganda, where producers are exposed directly to international traders, and Tanzania, where a system of local auctions creates a degree of separation, makes the point elegantly that the ‘commodity chain’ is a useful abstraction, not a substitute for a detailed analysis.
In Chapter Eight, Benjamin Selwyn addresses the ‘dynamic and multistranded’ class relations in North East Brazil’s export grape sector in another exemplary study organised around an account of how a research process guided by the ‘abstraction’ of a two-class society arrived at an understanding of the necessarily more complex specific empirical reality on the ground, and particularly the ‘intertwining’ of class and gender in a context where the majority of hands were women. In brief, as grape production won export markets in the EU and UK, quality standards became more demanding, and enabled workers to win gains from employers. At the same time, though, women went from a majority to a minority of permanently contracted workers, with men encroaching on or taking over roles that were previously their exclusive preserve as farms adopted new production methods to increase worker productivity.
This account is complemented particularly well by Chapters Ten and Eleven. The first is a marvel of economy, in which five authors – Farai Mtero, Brittany Bunce, Ben Cousins, Alex Dubb and Donna Hornby – describe four different fieldwork projects bearing on different aspects of class relations in rural South Africa. The second, by Lorena Lombardozzi, looks at the use of ‘forced labour’ in Uzbekistan’s cotton agriculture. Mtero and colleagues place front and centre Marx’s statement that ‘the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure’ (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101, cited 129). All four case studies are excellent, as is the clarity with which the different facets of the research process are explained. As throughout the book, the emphasis is placed on the need for painstaking and detailed multi-method fieldwork, in a context where ‘households combine a multiplicity of income sources, including local and migrant wage labour, self-employment in petty commodity production (both agricultural and non-agricultural) and welfare payments by the state. In these contexts, class differentiation is constituted through complex relations and processes, involving many social forms, including income stratification, diversified livelihood strategies and social difference along lines of race, gender and generation’ (130). Class locations shift over time, demanding household surveys and the collection of life histories as well as wider analysis of particular sectors and agricultural projects that have their own specificity, relations with the state, and mode of integration into the wider political economy. Petty commodity production predominates, and endures, but differentiation still takes place, in the sense of an evolution towards recognizably different strata of ‘rich’ farmers (hiring labour), ‘middle’ farmers (using family labour only), and ‘poor’ peasants, compelled to sell their labour to survive. Lombardozzi’s chapter on cotton in Uzbekistan has exactly the same character, and she herself refers to the survey of farmers at the heart of her fieldwork (along with semi-structured interviews, focus groups, life histories, field notes, observations of urban life and the analysis of secondary data) as requiring a ‘disciplined, non-reducible, time investment’ (152). Hard work, in other words. The thrust of argument, again consistent with others in the book, is that nothing is gained by appealing out of context to the notion of ‘forced labour’ in supposed antithesis to ‘free labour’: ‘the only way to unpack the material reality around cotton in Uzbekistan is to move beyond simplistic discourses of modern slavery, and study labour exploitations as a connected whole within the broader contours of the complex capitalist relations of production and exchange characterizing the region’ (150).
Also among these chapters (Nine) is Satoshi Miyamura’s analysis of labour relations and struggles in India. Miyamura sets himself the goal of illustrating ‘the contemporary relevance of Marx’s analysis of labour relations and struggles with reference to India’ as an alternative to the ‘methodological individualistic, reductionist and conflict-free mainstream conception of labour relations’, and challenging the ‘juridical and dualist approach to labour’. Starting from the elementary and essential point that labour relations are at base antagonistic class relations, Miyamura draws on all three volumes of Capital, and secondary literature (e.g. Campling et al. 2016) to argue that class antagonisms are not limited to the formal workplace, but cut across all social relations, so allow ‘struggles to be encountered in places and contexts beyond the conventional gaze of industrial relations and labour economics’ (121). Class intersects with gender, race, religion, caste and various other forms of social domination in direct, specific and concrete ways that shape labour relations, especially among the ‘informal’ workers who make up the majority of the labour force. So, in short, ‘struggles in practice challenge formalistic and juridical boundaries such as between ‘workmen’ and others, formal and informal, regular and irregular, productive and reproductive, among others’. As a consequence, ‘there is increasing space for workplace struggles to engage with social reproductive issues around homeplace-based relations, housing, healthcare, environment and others’, while as always, ‘ways in which productive and reproductive struggles are linked [are] contingent upon the specific history and context of mobilisation’ (125).
In Chapter Twelve, Tania Toffanin looks at gendered exploitation and adverse health outcomes in Italy in the light of Marx’s historical materialist approach to capitalist development and health depletion. The focus is primarily on Chapters 10 and 15 of Capital, Volume 1, on the working day and large-scale industry respectively. As Toffanin notes, Marx identifies all the major problems intrinsically present in homeworking: dispersion of workers; the impact of intermediaries on lowering wages; high competition between homeworkers and factory workers; miserable working conditions; and irregularity of working activity. She quotes him as saying that the modern ‘domestic industry’ he observed had ‘nothing except the name in common with old-fashioned domestic industry’, having been ‘converted into an external department of the factory’, and noting that these ‘outworkers in the domestic industries’ (166-7), grow in proportion to the size of the business as a whole. So it is surprising that she goes on to say, without providing any evidence, that he made the mistake of assuming that it was destined to play a marginal role within the growing capitalist dynamic, and failed to capture its gendered character or explain its persistence over time (168). Marx had far more to say than she acknowledges, too, about what has come to be called ‘depletion’ in relation to social reproduction (Cammack 2020, 91-4). These are comments in passing, though. In substance, she details at length the history and contemporary reality of homeworking in Italy’s fashion industry, and the varied lessons to be learned from Marx’s mapping of patterns of work and health outcomes in his period.
In the following chapter, Sara Stefano takes up the related topic of the nourishment of the poor, with reference to Marx’s analysis of nutritional and health depletion in Chapter 25 of Capital, and John Bellamy Foster’s recent essay on Marx as a food theorist (2016). As she notes, the political economy of nutrition has been rather in abeyance as medicalised and individualised approaches have proliferated; and in this context, ‘the key contribution of Marx’s perspective on the nourishment of the labouring class in Britain is that diets and nutrient intakes are depicted as manifestations of labour regimes, agrifood systems and, ultimately, of processes of capitalist accumulation’ (179). Stevano outlines her meticulous studies of Mozambique and Ghana, and identifies both the significance of hiring versus selling labour as a critical divide, and the variety of ancillary characteristics that complicate this criterion. ‘Poor households,’ she notes, ‘face both income and time constraints that limit their ability to produce, acquire and prepare food’ (181). Importantly, rural households have long been engaged in circuits of commodification and food purchase (O’Laughlin 1996), and certain categories of food, such as soft drinks and snacks, are consumed, in this case in Accra, across all wealth groups. Marx, as it happens, noticed the beginning of the same trend, driven by time constraints, with negative consequences for ‘economy and judgement in the consumption and preparation of the means of subsistence’ (Capital, Vol. I, Penguin 1990, p. 518).
What turns out to be a systematic review of aspects of social reproduction is then completed by Sigrid Vertommen’s ‘Marx in Utero’, which reflects on Georgia’s surrogacy industry. Vertommen suggests that her research ‘uncomfortably disrupts capitalist dualisms of production versus reproduction, family versus market, gift versus commodity and waged versus unwaged work’, and so it does, as she sets out to ‘use the work of Marx and his disobedient “granddaughters” to analyse and politically translate the invisibility of reproductive work in the global surrogacy industry’ (189), characterising Marx’s work on reproduction as ‘indispensable yet insufficient’ (190). I don’t agree with the terms in which the argument is made (Cammack 2020), and I’m sorry to see no reference to the pioneering work of Martha Gimenez, but I don’t wish to labour the point. The chapter does an excellent job of introducing a ‘broader political economy analysis of how surrogacy was integrated into a capitalist “bioeconomy”, structured around the global flow of reproductive tissues, technologies, workers, mediators, investors and consumers’ (192), and draws substantially and effectively on a historical materialist critique of political economy to do so.
In the penultimate chapter Alessandra Mezzadri discusses the figures of the ‘chief’, the ‘prisoner’, and the ‘refugee’ with Gavin Capps, Genevieve LeBaron and Paolo Novak respectively, asking whether Marx can throw light on ‘what would appear as “marginal” categories in the study of political economy, namely those that are either often (mis)represented as remnants of a precapitalist or a non-capitalist past, or inaccurately theorised in residual or exclusionary terms vis-à-vis the main working logics of global capitalism’ (203). The issue is an obvious one: although as general categories, chiefs, prisoners, and refugees predate capitalism in any form, today ‘these realities are instead contemporary, coeval to capitalism and, in fact, often fully integrated into capitalist logics’ (204). In principle, then, insofar as they are integrated into capitalist logics, a Marxist approach should have something to say, and what it can say will depend on the ‘concrete specifics’ of the case. This is precisely the line Capps takes, detailing how the BaFokeng chieftaincy in South Africa ‘did not only resolve “the native question”; it also actively managed “the labour question”’ (207). How far this may be true of other chieftaincies is of course a matter for empirical investigation. LeBaron in turn argues that in the US prison labour has been ‘a tool of social market, and racial discipline and terror, and to habituate the bodies of prisoners into the dictates of the waged labour market’ (209), with varying emphases from time to time and place to place. Paolo Novak ventures that the concept of imperialism is ‘the stronger contribution of conventional Marxist analyses to the study of refugees – and, at the same time, its weakest spot’ (212); but this judgement is put forward in relation to the proposition that all instances of refugee displacement and of refugee-related interventions are ‘the ultimate expression of the economic relationships of imperialism’. Anyone who argued this would not be following a Marxist approach or method. Refugees are not wholly integrated into capitalist logics, so the first question to ask is whether or not any such logic, imperialist or not, can be discerned in particular institutions, processes or situations.
In the final chapter, Subir Sinha analyses the impact on migrant workers of the national lockdown declared in India in March 2020, and assesses the implications of the need to rely on social media to research it, given the impossibility of face-to-face fieldwork. The resulting reflection on ‘fieldwork’ and on researching the ‘collective political subjectivity of “labour” becoming “working class”’ is sensible, but limited, as the author acknowledges, by the immediacy of the events, and the limited range of empirical material.
Overall, then, this collection does exactly what you would want an introduction to Marxist fieldwork methods to do. Many of the trends and tendencies observed in the research reported are well established, and the research methods used are tried and tested. Far from being a criticism, this is all to the good. There is actually no mystery about what makes for an effective Marxist research agenda: it must be grounded on the core concepts of the production and appropriation of surplus value, accumulation and social reproduction, and set to work in the close study, through multiple methods, of individual lives, households and wider communities in context over time. At the same time, and just as importantly, any serious research effort is ‘a fatiguing climb of the steep paths of science’. But help is at hand, and there is a very considerable body of work, much of it contemporary, from which the researcher can learn, and on which they can build. Both in the way in which it understands and portrays Marx’s method, and in the varied range of excellent research it profiles, this collection makes an exceptionally valuable starting point. No beginning researcher should be without it.
References
Banaji, Jairus. 2010. Theory as History. Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. London, Verso.
Cammack, Paul. 2020. Marx on social reproduction. Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Campling, Liam, Satoshi Miyamura, Jonathan Pattenden and Benjamin Selwyn. 2016. Class dynamics of development: A methodological note, Third World Quarterly 37, 10, 1745– 67.
Jessop, Bob. 2018. From the 1857 introduction to the 1867 preface: Reflections on Marx's method in the critique of political economy, Politeia, 8, 16, 15-37.
Jessop, Bob, and Henk Overbeek. 2019. Transnational Capital and Class Fractions: The Amsterdam School Perspective Reconsidered. London, Routledge.
Foster, John Bellamy. 2016. Marx as a Food Theorist, Monthly Review, 68, 7, 1-22.
Liedman, Sven-Eric. 2018. A World to Win. The Life and Works of Karl Marx. London, Verso.
Mezzadri, Alessandra. 2017. The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
O’Laughlin, Bridget. 1996. Through a divided glass: Dualism, class and the agrarian question in Mozambique, Journal of Peasant Studies, 23, 4, 1-39.
Pradella, Lucia. 2014. Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings. London, Routledge.
Marx lived to observe only the beginnings of a genuinely global capitalist world market, and could not verify empirically what its future character and implications would be. But he identified tendencies (‘immanent laws’) that would lead, under the pressure of competition between capitalists and the resulting compulsion to innovate incessantly, to the subordination, transformation and displacement of other forms of production around the world. That process continues. The remarkable expansion of the capitalist world market over the last forty years has greatly increased the size of the global proletariat, and just as importantly, transformed forms of unfree labour, and the relationship between the ‘domestic sphere’ and the market, notably as regards gender roles. But it has not done so uniformly. The ‘logic of capital’ increasingly knits the world together, but does so unevenly, in a single complex world market spread across different territories (social formations), each with their own character and balance of class forces, and mode and degree of incorporation into the world market. No two situations are the same – but all are connected, intelligible in accordance with core Marxist concepts, and amenable to empirical investigation.
There could not be a better time, then, to illustrate ‘the potential benefits of deploying Marx and Marxian concepts and methods as a guide for today’s “radical fieldworkers” – those aspiring at “doing” political economy across the world economy in practice, and committed to social and economic justice’ (1). This book treats the ‘field’ as ‘primarily methodological, rather than geographical, as it refers to the concrete processes of conceptual development of research design, of deployment and adaptation of analytical categories for field research and/or data collection and analysis’ (2). While Marx's conceptual apparatus ‘powerfully resonates with intellectuals, researchers, academics and activists worldwide’, Alessandra Mezzadri comments, the practical relevance of Marxian political economy for actual, concrete field-based research remains ‘under-theorised and not systematically analysed' (6). This book changes that. It is that rarest of edited collections – a generally excellent set of chapters which is more than the sum of its parts, for which the editor herself and the contributors can jointly take credit. It ranges from Brazil to Palestine and the Gulf States, India, rural South Africa and Uzbekistan, and from merchant capital and African coffee markets to the surrogacy industry, the nourishment of the poor, and ‘marginal’ categories in political economy. In all this variety, it never loses sight of the aspiration to be of practical utility to the radical researcher. It succeeds triumphantly. First, all the contributors keep ‘doing research’ to the fore, with the result that the book works as a ‘practical guide on how to carry out concrete, meaningful Marxist analysis in specific contemporary settings’ (2). Second, they do so in entirely undogmatic terms, both because they understand Marx’s method, with its goal of developing concepts as a prelude to returning to empirical reality in all its complexity, ‘without any mystification or speculation’, and because they are able to reflect on their own practice, and recognize too that research is a collective effort, necessarily incomplete and provisional in its findings. Third, they draw very widely on Marx’s writings, from all three volumes of Capital to political and journalistic material and late work. Fourth, they follow authors such as Banaji (2010) and Pradella (2014), who argue that Marx’s framework ‘was always meant to study the development of capitalist forces globally’, explicitly dissociating him from the ‘facile linear and modernising narratives of development’ (9) with which he is sometimes charged. Fifth, they are all attuned in different ways to tracing and seeking to make sense of varied relationships between capital and other material categories in the context of the dynamic advance of the capitalist world market. Sixth, as the separate chapters attest, they take field work very seriously, often extending research over many years. Seventh, there is a concerted effort, however complex the conceptual and theoretical terrain, to be clear and precise about the issues under investigation and the ways in which they are explored. In short, it is an immensely valuable guide to (radical) fieldwork, but it has wider significance too as a sophisticated primer on Marx’s method, with acute contemporary relevance.
The book is presented as a product of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), to which all the contributors are linked in one way or another, and ‘codifies some of the specific ways in which critical development studies is interpreted at SOAS, influenced by Marxian political economy yet incorporating insights from other radical traditions and focusing on practical lessons for/from field research’ (9). Mezzadri identifies three particular ways in which Marx can be brought productively into the field: by ‘showing the relevance of the Marxian research framework in practice by focusing on one or more key concepts, categories or processes highlighted by Marx in his critique of political economy and study of capitalist development’; discussing ‘how Marxian categories may appear in “disguised form” across the world economy, and how we can unveil and investigate them during fieldwork’ (6); and describing, discussing and analysing which ‘practical methods of data collection’ can guide a Marxian political economy approach to the field, again by reference to concrete cases studies’ (7).
Chapter Two, by Henry Bernstein, complements the introduction by exploring distinctive characteristics of Marx’s approach that are particularly relevant to conducting empirical research, taking researching class as an orienting theme. As already noted, Marx was not an ‘empiricist’, if by that you mean that he investigated ‘facts’ as they presented themselves to the observer without prior analytical and conceptual work. But Bernstein is rightly insistent first that you do not escape the need for detailed empirical work that respects standards of evidence by declaring yourself a Marxist, and second that Marx himself, as Capital witnesses, was voracious in pursuit of it. Serious empirical work informed but not resolved by arduous conceptual and theoretical work was above all work, and hard work at that, made all the harder because ‘things and their mutual relations are conceived not as fixed but rather as changing’ (Engels, Preface to Capital, Volume III, emphasis mine). This rules out, quite rightly, the search for invariant laws and relationships, favouring instead conjunctural analysis at the level of the individual social formation and below. Here the ‘concrete study of reality always remains; the result is not given from beginning. But a guide is needed’ (Liedman, 2018, 363, 376). Bernstein begins his chapter appropriately, quoting Marx’s warning from the Preface to the French edition of Capital, Volume I (1872) that ‘There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits’. He notes that most of Capital was ‘concerned with exploring theoretically and illustrating empirically the mechanisms and moments of capital’s “laws of motion” and with critique of the “bourgeois” political economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (20). As such, its analysis cannot be mechanically carried across to other times and places. As ‘things and their mutual relations’ are conceived as constantly changing, there can never be any question of finding a situation from another time and place that ‘fits the facts’ today, nor can that be the goal. On the other hand, the Marxist analytical framework is more relevant than ever, given the increased salience of capitalism on a global scale, and this is precisely what the remaining chapters illustrate – contemporary researchers explore theoretically and illustrate empirically the mechanisms and moments of the “laws of motion” of twenty-first century global capitalism and its changing implications for other areas of life, generating new knowledge in the process. In doing so, they implicitly or explicitly situate their particular study in the larger whole: analytically, in Marx’s theoretical analysis of the capitalist mode of production as a totality with systemic qualities, and concretely or historically in ‘the phases and mutations of capitalism on a world scale and the times and places it encompasses in all the definitive unevenness of its development’:
‘Thus, any field research selects particular concepts and categories, and their attendant issues, from the theory of the capitalist mode of production as a totality. At the same time, any field research must locate its object in a particular time and place within the histories of capitalism on a world scale. This does not assume, however, that world capitalism at any given moment determines any and every particular site and object of research within it in any direct, necessary and complete manner. Rather the nature and degree of such determination(s) are themselves an important matter of investigation’ (21).
This is good common sense, and could hardly be better put. The theoretical resource uniquely offered by the Marxist analysis/ critique of what is now global capitalism is the capacity to locate specific and unique situations consistently in a single, complex and connected global whole. As the remaining chapters give numerous and varied examples, it would make sense to read this one for an initial orientation, then return to it after reading the rest of the book. Bernstein knows his craft, and the more you become familiar with Marxist-inspired research and fieldwork, the more you will appreciate the knowledge and judgement he brings to the chapter.
After what is in effect a double introduction, then, the field research exemplars start strongly, with Barbara Harriss-White’s focus on Marx’s discussion of merchant and commercial capital (in Capital, Vol. III) and a detailed account of forty years of face-to-face interviews and other fieldwork guided by it, conducted in India between 1973 and 2013. Marx did not focus exclusively on industrial capital, nor did he address merchant capital only as its ‘primitive’ precursor. Merchant capital is ‘a category and a process full of contradictions’ (34). So, for example, it may complement industrial capital or alternatively hinder capitalist development by dominating small-scale production, especially in agriculture – the latter being a situation common in Marx’s day and in many countries today. Harriss-White uses his rich analysis to explore the concrete micro-level universe of merchants in India, and build from there to larger studies of agricultural markets and rural commercial capital. Here ‘the mass of agricultural producers are involved in markets from which they cannot possibly withdraw under any circumstances, barring a crisis of destitution. The mechanisms of control remain money advances and the state’s protection of the power of agro-processing, which includes its support through banks for the roles of these “heterogeneous productive functions” as net contributors of money capital to the cascade of rural credit and as net recipients of the stream of marketed surplus destined for rural-urban trade’ (36). Marx’s analysis can sensitise the researcher to these and other roles, but only detailed empirical research can reveal the specific mix and how it changes over time – as Harriss-White’s three-page checklist ‘default order’ of (over 80) questions to guide fieldwork underlines, along with her injunction to ‘map settlements on foot – not forgetting upper levels of commercial buildings and interiors of yards, prior to stratifying by quarters or commercial clusters evident from maps and then moving to random sampling’ (39-40). Serious empirical research in development studies, however rewarding, is unremitting toil.
I found Chapter Four, in which Muhammed Ali Jan uses the concept of ‘fractions of capital’ to explore rural and small town Pakistani Punjab and other sites in the global South, less good a fit with the volume as a whole. Jan finds that Marx ‘was unable to define the concept of “fractions” coherently’ (51), and proposes a further development and a synthesis of Marx and Weber. He is entitled to this point of view, of course, but given that he holds it, it makes its application in research problematic. Jan might have considered further the difference between references to ‘fractions of capital’ in a restricted sense (industrial, financial, and so on), and the perfectly conventional use of the term ‘fraction’ or ‘faction’ in relation to political parties and the like; and it is certainly bold, if not reckless, to address fractions of capital without reference to the ‘Amsterdam School’ (Jessop and Overbeek, 2019). Other readers may not agree, but to me Jan attaches Marx inappropriately to a loose pluralist version of ‘fractions of capital’.
A second study focused on India, ‘Marx in the Sweatshop’ (Chapter Five), is contributed by Mezzadri herself, and shares the strengths of Harris-White. It draws on her research monograph on the sweatshop regime (Mezzadri 2017), and is equally impressive in its grounding on Marx and its commitment to research on the ground. Mezzadri identifies three ‘tropes’ of Marx’s method as crucial to understanding key features of contemporary production in labour-intensive industries – ‘the initial framing of the analysis around the commodity; the observation of different modes of labour surplus extraction; and the mapping of different processes of labour subsumption’ (64). For reasons fully addressed in The Sweatshop Regime, Bangalore’s Fordist factories are feminised, while in Delhi’s factories and workshops male migrants predominate. In peri-urban and rural Uttar Pradesh, female home-workers have significant roles. Mezzadri complements Marx with ‘insights from radical feminist literature on the co-constitution of social oppression and exploitation and the role of social reproduction in production and extraction of value’ (73), making the important point, visible also in Marx (Cammack 2020), that ‘social production’ is a differentiated complex, embracing factory, workshop, ‘home-working’ and domestic reproductive labour, and demands a gendered analysis.
In Chapter Six, Adam Hanieh turns to Marxist conceptualisations of class to illuminate the nature of capitalist accumulation in the Gulf. Consistently with the collection as a whole, he notes Marx’s commitment to starting with the ‘concrete, lived experience of people’, then offers a discussion of shared capitalist interests between Palestine and the Gulf that puts social class and class formation rather than a ‘neo-Weberian’ perspective on rents and state autonomy at the centre of the analysis. This does not preclude a specifically Marxist analysis of rents, which is not discussed, but in any case the focus on regional political economy and Gulf and extra-Gulf class formation corrects any impression that private class interests are negligible, or secondary. He then addresses migrant (Palestinian) labour, in a region where migrant workers altogether represent over 70 per cent of the workforce. Gulf capitalism reproduces itself in ways that in concrete terms are unique, but at the same time are intelligible only in the wider context of regional and global commodity and labour markets.
Next, Susan Newman draws on the way in which Capital, Volume II, ‘develops Marx’s reproduction schema by examining the constant intertwining of appearance and disappearance of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital from the sphere of circulation into the sphere of production and back again’ to trace the integrated nature of production, exchange and finance in ‘economic reproduction in its totality’ (91) for the particular case of the changing social relations of production of coffee commodity chains. The focus is on the one hand on the increased salience in recent years of money owners, lenders and managers on international financial exchanges as coffee commodity chains experience ‘financialization’, and on the other on different complementary local pricing and marketing systems and their effects. Commodity chains, understood as networks of labour and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986: 159), demand an integrated analysis, and here the guiding thread is provided by the evolution of commodity derivative markets from means for farmers and traders to hedge against risk to an area of activity in its own right for coffee trading companies, and for international money managers. But Newman’s contrast between Uganda, where producers are exposed directly to international traders, and Tanzania, where a system of local auctions creates a degree of separation, makes the point elegantly that the ‘commodity chain’ is a useful abstraction, not a substitute for a detailed analysis.
In Chapter Eight, Benjamin Selwyn addresses the ‘dynamic and multistranded’ class relations in North East Brazil’s export grape sector in another exemplary study organised around an account of how a research process guided by the ‘abstraction’ of a two-class society arrived at an understanding of the necessarily more complex specific empirical reality on the ground, and particularly the ‘intertwining’ of class and gender in a context where the majority of hands were women. In brief, as grape production won export markets in the EU and UK, quality standards became more demanding, and enabled workers to win gains from employers. At the same time, though, women went from a majority to a minority of permanently contracted workers, with men encroaching on or taking over roles that were previously their exclusive preserve as farms adopted new production methods to increase worker productivity.
This account is complemented particularly well by Chapters Ten and Eleven. The first is a marvel of economy, in which five authors – Farai Mtero, Brittany Bunce, Ben Cousins, Alex Dubb and Donna Hornby – describe four different fieldwork projects bearing on different aspects of class relations in rural South Africa. The second, by Lorena Lombardozzi, looks at the use of ‘forced labour’ in Uzbekistan’s cotton agriculture. Mtero and colleagues place front and centre Marx’s statement that ‘the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure’ (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101, cited 129). All four case studies are excellent, as is the clarity with which the different facets of the research process are explained. As throughout the book, the emphasis is placed on the need for painstaking and detailed multi-method fieldwork, in a context where ‘households combine a multiplicity of income sources, including local and migrant wage labour, self-employment in petty commodity production (both agricultural and non-agricultural) and welfare payments by the state. In these contexts, class differentiation is constituted through complex relations and processes, involving many social forms, including income stratification, diversified livelihood strategies and social difference along lines of race, gender and generation’ (130). Class locations shift over time, demanding household surveys and the collection of life histories as well as wider analysis of particular sectors and agricultural projects that have their own specificity, relations with the state, and mode of integration into the wider political economy. Petty commodity production predominates, and endures, but differentiation still takes place, in the sense of an evolution towards recognizably different strata of ‘rich’ farmers (hiring labour), ‘middle’ farmers (using family labour only), and ‘poor’ peasants, compelled to sell their labour to survive. Lombardozzi’s chapter on cotton in Uzbekistan has exactly the same character, and she herself refers to the survey of farmers at the heart of her fieldwork (along with semi-structured interviews, focus groups, life histories, field notes, observations of urban life and the analysis of secondary data) as requiring a ‘disciplined, non-reducible, time investment’ (152). Hard work, in other words. The thrust of argument, again consistent with others in the book, is that nothing is gained by appealing out of context to the notion of ‘forced labour’ in supposed antithesis to ‘free labour’: ‘the only way to unpack the material reality around cotton in Uzbekistan is to move beyond simplistic discourses of modern slavery, and study labour exploitations as a connected whole within the broader contours of the complex capitalist relations of production and exchange characterizing the region’ (150).
Also among these chapters (Nine) is Satoshi Miyamura’s analysis of labour relations and struggles in India. Miyamura sets himself the goal of illustrating ‘the contemporary relevance of Marx’s analysis of labour relations and struggles with reference to India’ as an alternative to the ‘methodological individualistic, reductionist and conflict-free mainstream conception of labour relations’, and challenging the ‘juridical and dualist approach to labour’. Starting from the elementary and essential point that labour relations are at base antagonistic class relations, Miyamura draws on all three volumes of Capital, and secondary literature (e.g. Campling et al. 2016) to argue that class antagonisms are not limited to the formal workplace, but cut across all social relations, so allow ‘struggles to be encountered in places and contexts beyond the conventional gaze of industrial relations and labour economics’ (121). Class intersects with gender, race, religion, caste and various other forms of social domination in direct, specific and concrete ways that shape labour relations, especially among the ‘informal’ workers who make up the majority of the labour force. So, in short, ‘struggles in practice challenge formalistic and juridical boundaries such as between ‘workmen’ and others, formal and informal, regular and irregular, productive and reproductive, among others’. As a consequence, ‘there is increasing space for workplace struggles to engage with social reproductive issues around homeplace-based relations, housing, healthcare, environment and others’, while as always, ‘ways in which productive and reproductive struggles are linked [are] contingent upon the specific history and context of mobilisation’ (125).
In Chapter Twelve, Tania Toffanin looks at gendered exploitation and adverse health outcomes in Italy in the light of Marx’s historical materialist approach to capitalist development and health depletion. The focus is primarily on Chapters 10 and 15 of Capital, Volume 1, on the working day and large-scale industry respectively. As Toffanin notes, Marx identifies all the major problems intrinsically present in homeworking: dispersion of workers; the impact of intermediaries on lowering wages; high competition between homeworkers and factory workers; miserable working conditions; and irregularity of working activity. She quotes him as saying that the modern ‘domestic industry’ he observed had ‘nothing except the name in common with old-fashioned domestic industry’, having been ‘converted into an external department of the factory’, and noting that these ‘outworkers in the domestic industries’ (166-7), grow in proportion to the size of the business as a whole. So it is surprising that she goes on to say, without providing any evidence, that he made the mistake of assuming that it was destined to play a marginal role within the growing capitalist dynamic, and failed to capture its gendered character or explain its persistence over time (168). Marx had far more to say than she acknowledges, too, about what has come to be called ‘depletion’ in relation to social reproduction (Cammack 2020, 91-4). These are comments in passing, though. In substance, she details at length the history and contemporary reality of homeworking in Italy’s fashion industry, and the varied lessons to be learned from Marx’s mapping of patterns of work and health outcomes in his period.
In the following chapter, Sara Stefano takes up the related topic of the nourishment of the poor, with reference to Marx’s analysis of nutritional and health depletion in Chapter 25 of Capital, and John Bellamy Foster’s recent essay on Marx as a food theorist (2016). As she notes, the political economy of nutrition has been rather in abeyance as medicalised and individualised approaches have proliferated; and in this context, ‘the key contribution of Marx’s perspective on the nourishment of the labouring class in Britain is that diets and nutrient intakes are depicted as manifestations of labour regimes, agrifood systems and, ultimately, of processes of capitalist accumulation’ (179). Stevano outlines her meticulous studies of Mozambique and Ghana, and identifies both the significance of hiring versus selling labour as a critical divide, and the variety of ancillary characteristics that complicate this criterion. ‘Poor households,’ she notes, ‘face both income and time constraints that limit their ability to produce, acquire and prepare food’ (181). Importantly, rural households have long been engaged in circuits of commodification and food purchase (O’Laughlin 1996), and certain categories of food, such as soft drinks and snacks, are consumed, in this case in Accra, across all wealth groups. Marx, as it happens, noticed the beginning of the same trend, driven by time constraints, with negative consequences for ‘economy and judgement in the consumption and preparation of the means of subsistence’ (Capital, Vol. I, Penguin 1990, p. 518).
What turns out to be a systematic review of aspects of social reproduction is then completed by Sigrid Vertommen’s ‘Marx in Utero’, which reflects on Georgia’s surrogacy industry. Vertommen suggests that her research ‘uncomfortably disrupts capitalist dualisms of production versus reproduction, family versus market, gift versus commodity and waged versus unwaged work’, and so it does, as she sets out to ‘use the work of Marx and his disobedient “granddaughters” to analyse and politically translate the invisibility of reproductive work in the global surrogacy industry’ (189), characterising Marx’s work on reproduction as ‘indispensable yet insufficient’ (190). I don’t agree with the terms in which the argument is made (Cammack 2020), and I’m sorry to see no reference to the pioneering work of Martha Gimenez, but I don’t wish to labour the point. The chapter does an excellent job of introducing a ‘broader political economy analysis of how surrogacy was integrated into a capitalist “bioeconomy”, structured around the global flow of reproductive tissues, technologies, workers, mediators, investors and consumers’ (192), and draws substantially and effectively on a historical materialist critique of political economy to do so.
In the penultimate chapter Alessandra Mezzadri discusses the figures of the ‘chief’, the ‘prisoner’, and the ‘refugee’ with Gavin Capps, Genevieve LeBaron and Paolo Novak respectively, asking whether Marx can throw light on ‘what would appear as “marginal” categories in the study of political economy, namely those that are either often (mis)represented as remnants of a precapitalist or a non-capitalist past, or inaccurately theorised in residual or exclusionary terms vis-à-vis the main working logics of global capitalism’ (203). The issue is an obvious one: although as general categories, chiefs, prisoners, and refugees predate capitalism in any form, today ‘these realities are instead contemporary, coeval to capitalism and, in fact, often fully integrated into capitalist logics’ (204). In principle, then, insofar as they are integrated into capitalist logics, a Marxist approach should have something to say, and what it can say will depend on the ‘concrete specifics’ of the case. This is precisely the line Capps takes, detailing how the BaFokeng chieftaincy in South Africa ‘did not only resolve “the native question”; it also actively managed “the labour question”’ (207). How far this may be true of other chieftaincies is of course a matter for empirical investigation. LeBaron in turn argues that in the US prison labour has been ‘a tool of social market, and racial discipline and terror, and to habituate the bodies of prisoners into the dictates of the waged labour market’ (209), with varying emphases from time to time and place to place. Paolo Novak ventures that the concept of imperialism is ‘the stronger contribution of conventional Marxist analyses to the study of refugees – and, at the same time, its weakest spot’ (212); but this judgement is put forward in relation to the proposition that all instances of refugee displacement and of refugee-related interventions are ‘the ultimate expression of the economic relationships of imperialism’. Anyone who argued this would not be following a Marxist approach or method. Refugees are not wholly integrated into capitalist logics, so the first question to ask is whether or not any such logic, imperialist or not, can be discerned in particular institutions, processes or situations.
In the final chapter, Subir Sinha analyses the impact on migrant workers of the national lockdown declared in India in March 2020, and assesses the implications of the need to rely on social media to research it, given the impossibility of face-to-face fieldwork. The resulting reflection on ‘fieldwork’ and on researching the ‘collective political subjectivity of “labour” becoming “working class”’ is sensible, but limited, as the author acknowledges, by the immediacy of the events, and the limited range of empirical material.
Overall, then, this collection does exactly what you would want an introduction to Marxist fieldwork methods to do. Many of the trends and tendencies observed in the research reported are well established, and the research methods used are tried and tested. Far from being a criticism, this is all to the good. There is actually no mystery about what makes for an effective Marxist research agenda: it must be grounded on the core concepts of the production and appropriation of surplus value, accumulation and social reproduction, and set to work in the close study, through multiple methods, of individual lives, households and wider communities in context over time. At the same time, and just as importantly, any serious research effort is ‘a fatiguing climb of the steep paths of science’. But help is at hand, and there is a very considerable body of work, much of it contemporary, from which the researcher can learn, and on which they can build. Both in the way in which it understands and portrays Marx’s method, and in the varied range of excellent research it profiles, this collection makes an exceptionally valuable starting point. No beginning researcher should be without it.
References
Banaji, Jairus. 2010. Theory as History. Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. London, Verso.
Cammack, Paul. 2020. Marx on social reproduction. Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Campling, Liam, Satoshi Miyamura, Jonathan Pattenden and Benjamin Selwyn. 2016. Class dynamics of development: A methodological note, Third World Quarterly 37, 10, 1745– 67.
Jessop, Bob. 2018. From the 1857 introduction to the 1867 preface: Reflections on Marx's method in the critique of political economy, Politeia, 8, 16, 15-37.
Jessop, Bob, and Henk Overbeek. 2019. Transnational Capital and Class Fractions: The Amsterdam School Perspective Reconsidered. London, Routledge.
Foster, John Bellamy. 2016. Marx as a Food Theorist, Monthly Review, 68, 7, 1-22.
Liedman, Sven-Eric. 2018. A World to Win. The Life and Works of Karl Marx. London, Verso.
Mezzadri, Alessandra. 2017. The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
O’Laughlin, Bridget. 1996. Through a divided glass: Dualism, class and the agrarian question in Mozambique, Journal of Peasant Studies, 23, 4, 1-39.
Pradella, Lucia. 2014. Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings. London, Routledge.