World-system, production, and labour

The chapter addresses the late twentieth-century critiques of Marxian political economy directed explicitly at the “blind spots” of its definition of capitalism, particularly with respect to its inattention to enslavement, colonialism and the gender dimension. Starting in the 1970s, several critiques of the concept of primitive accumulation gradually converged into an explicitly Marxist reconceptualisation of gender relations and colonial exploitation under capitalism that actively incorporated developments outside of Europe. Among them, the chapter focuses on the world-systems perspective, which argued that non-wage, colonial modes of labour control were integral to and essential for the logic of capitalism, as well as on the feminist approach of the Bielefeld School of development sociology, which claimed that subsistence labour paralleled wage labour as a core pillar of capital accumulation. Focused on the attempt to decentre the role of the proletariat as the main exploited class, and that of wage labour as the defining moment of the capitalist system, these approaches shift attention to enslaved plantation workers on the one hand and housewives on the other as pillars of capital accumulation at the global level. In the process, they reveal the structural entanglements between metropoles and colonies as main determinants of global inequalities. According to these combined perspectives, the methodological implications of accounting for coloniality as structurally embedded in modernity, instead of as a set of anomalies, therefore include complementing the analysis of processes of proletarianisation in the core with that of bourgeoisification in the entire world-system, of ethnicisation of the labour force in the periphery, and of gendering as their underlying logic.