ABSTRACT
A fundamental requirement of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is the liberation of labor from feudal obligations to a specific employer qua lord and the creation of a free market in labor power. The focus of this chapter is an examination of the economic, political, and cultural factors shaping the creation and expansion of capitalist labor power markets in China. The dismantling of the communes and erosion of the danwei system brought an end to the feudal bonds between direct producers and the state bureaucracy, creating a large pool of free wage laborers. Economic growth in China has been dependent, in part, upon these processes wherein a sizeable pool of direct producers found themselves at the mercy of “market conditions” and sometimes unemployed. The result has been a widely recognized labor power surplus. Workers who had only a short time before being attached to communes made up a low wage, relatively hard-working labor pool that would fuel an economic boom within TVEs and pour into the cities as rural migrant workers. A similar process in the cities saw these rural migrants competing with “redundant” workers who had been “permanent” employees of state-owned urban industrial enterprises until the flexibility of capitalist labor power markets was instituted. And workers in all the social sites in China faced the insecurity that came as an inevitable side effect of the transition from a social system where they (and their families) were “guaranteed” not only work but all the basic necessities of life to a system where seemingly everything was up for grabs. Uncertainty of employment, of compensation, even of identity is the new order in the reform era.
