ABSTRACT
A glance at emerging forms of resistance in the current era of globalization and ecological crisis suggests that the appropriate “agents of history” may now be “meta-industrial workers,” rather than the industrial proletariat. In exploring this thesis, I will not spend time on exegesis, sifting through definitions of class or revisiting old debates in socialist feminism or left anthropology. For, as Bertell Ollman (1992: 48) has pointed out, even Marx did not define class, but varied his usage of the term according to the context of his discussion. So, in daring to speak of “a meta-industrial class,” I take courage from this pragmatic attitude. Even so, I do adopt a rule of thumb on class as a material relationship, and often a self-conscious joining together, of people who share a similar place in systems of production (or reproduction). This chapter destabilizes reified notions of class which have prioritized productive labor and marginalized socially and ecologically reproductive activities. Most analyses of capitalism have tended to treat workers as waged white men, whereas reproductive labor is deemed the province of the unwaged – women domestics and carers, peasant farmers, and indigenous hunter-gatherers. However, the latter meta-industrial groupings, nominally outside of the economic system, actually constitute the majority of workers in 21st-century global capitalism.
