‘Knaves of common hire’: Wage Labour, Slavery and Reification

This chapter investigates the role of slavery in the Babylonian economy during the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods. As in Assyria, the relatively high price of slaves in Babylonia restricted slave ownership to the elite, though it should be noted that some wealthy Babylonian families owned enormous numbers of slaves, in some cases as many as several hundred. The chapter then turns to the various methods by which the propertied classes of Babylonian cities made their money, providing three thumbnail sketches as examples. It shows how slave labour had a limited contribution to elite fortunes due to the existence of cheaper labour alternatives, namely sharecropping tenancy and free wage labour. Slavery did, however, play an important role in the management of entrepreneurial activities.

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AGRICULTURAL WORKERS’ STANDARD OF LIVING DURING CENTRAL CHILE'S AGRARIAN EXPANSION, CF. 1870-1930

Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History ◽

10.1017/s0212610921000100 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-30

Author(s):

Claudio Robles-Ortiz ◽

Ignacio González-Correa ◽

Nora Reyes Campos ◽

Uziel González Aliaga

Keyword(s):

Living Standards ◽

Standard Of Living ◽

Real Wages ◽

Causal Factors ◽

Central Chile ◽

Rural Workers ◽

The Great Depression ◽

Urban Workers ◽

Wage Labour ◽

Agricultural Labourers

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to determine trends in the wages and living standards of male agricultural labourers in Central Chile during the agrarian expansion, c. 1870-1930. We found that nominal wages increased eightfold; this is relevant because wage labour became the main rural labour regime in this period. Nominal wages rose steadily from the early 1870s until 1910, and with significant fluctuations thereafter, before plummeting with the Great Depression. Real wages also increased, but only slightly. Furthermore, during certain short periods, agricultural labourers' real wages were similar to or higher than those of low-skilled urban workers. However, the persistent gap between agricultural and non-agricultural wages was one of the causal factors of the outmigration of rural workers.

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Swyngedouw’s puzzle: Surplus-value production in socionature

Human Geography ◽

10.1177/19427786211012663 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 194277862110126

Author(s):

Bosman Batubara

Keyword(s):

Surplus Value ◽

Wage Labour ◽

Value Production ◽

Production Of Nature ◽

Value Relations

This article engages with Swyngedouw’s puzzle, that is, how is surplus-value production under capitalism conceptualised given the entanglement of humans and non-human entities. It identifies how Swyngedouw’s socionature – a concept/way to express the oneness of human and non-human under capitalism – posed a critique to the tendency of labour-centred analysis in Marxist thought such as Neil Smith’s concept of ‘production of nature’ but did not engage with how surplus-value is produced. This article makes visible the role of non-wage-labour in surplus-value production through reference to Moore’s concept of value-relations and oikeios.

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Where did Italian peasants live?

Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society ◽

10.1017/s0068673500004090 ◽

1979 ◽

Vol 25 ◽

pp. 1-25 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

P.D.A. Garnsey

Keyword(s):

Characteristic Feature ◽

Rural Economy ◽

Negative Answer ◽

Second Century ◽

Small Farmers ◽

Scholarly Literature ◽

Wage Labour ◽

Economic Forces ◽

Tenant Farmers ◽

The Impact

Until recently this was a question that was not asked. It was not asked because there was a prior question that was asked, and that received a negative answer: Did peasant proprietors survive in significant numbers in the late Republic or early Empire?The consensus of opinion has been that they were always to be found, but that they were relatively few. As the traditional rural economy of which they had been the characteristic feature gave way under the impact of new economic forces, they became a residual phenomenon. Moreover, this development had already occurred by the late second century B.C.It is to be noted that peasant proprietors, small farmers working the land they owned, rather than free cultivators as a whole, have usually been the object of inquiry. The roles of tenancy in the late Republic and of wage labour in all periods have rarely been positively evaluated. Again, the idea that small ownercultivators, tenant-farmers and day-labourers were overlapping categories in ancient Italy has been little developed in the scholarly literature.

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Self-employed surfers, universal credit and the minimally decent life

Legal Studies ◽

10.1017/lst.2021.36 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-18

Author(s):

Christopher Rowe

Keyword(s):

Social Security ◽

Low Income ◽

Judicial Review ◽

The Self ◽

Tax Credits ◽

Minimum Income ◽

Wage Labour ◽

The Social ◽

Decent Life ◽

The Government

Abstract As part of its response to Covid-19 the government paused the use of the ‘Minimum Income Floor’ (MIF), which restricts the Universal Credit (UC) entitlement of the self-employed. This paper places the MIF in the wider context of conditionality in the social security system and considers a judicial review which claimed that the MIF was discriminatory. The paper focuses on how UC affects the availability of real choices for low-income citizens to limit or escape from wage labour, with two implications of the move to UC highlighted. First, the overlooked labour decommodifying aspect of tax credits, which provided a minimum income guarantee and a genuine alternative to wage labour for people who self-designated as ‘self-employed’, even if their earnings were minimal or non-existent, has been removed. Secondly, UC has in some respects improved the position of low-paid wage labourers in ‘mini-jobs’, who are not subject to conditionality once they work for the equivalent of approximately nine hours a week on the minimum wage.

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