By Judi Auderset
(Referenced in Adam Tooze, Chartbook, June 12, 2023)
Abstract: Scientific management and work rationalization are usually associated with the rise of industrial capitalism and factory labor. This narrow perspective, however, obscures the rural and agricultural spaces in which practices of labor management and work rationalization were important throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Following up on Caitlin Rosenthal’s book Accounting for Slavery, this essay explores how our view of the history of work under the conditions of industrial capitalism changes if we account for the multiple and fractured lineages that connected visions of rationalized work on plantations, factory floors, and family farms.
This approach not only renders visible the ecological and metabolic complexity of agricultural work, but it also provokes new questions on how agricultural labor was incorporated into the expanding frontiers of modern capitalism and how the transformative forces of industrialization changed the perception of work in modernity…
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:4hrbcxwd/
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Jairus Banaji on the Indian corporate strategy of subordinating farm households and family labor
After the truth-shower 