"The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: The ... Capitalism" w/ Ruskola

This talk draws on a book project by the same title. It seeks to offer a structural account of the remarkable political and economic transformation of the Chinese working class since 1949. My title is a deliberate reference to E.P. Thompson’s classic Making of the English Working Class. The English working class constituted the paradigmatic proletariat in the initial stages of industrial capitalism in the West, and it constitutes an especially useful lens for examining the emergence of another proletariat of global significance on the opposite edge of the Eurasian landmass, one that is in many respects emblematic of capitalism’s latest stage.

Thompson frames his analysis in terms of the Enclosure Movement, which expropriated peasants of their land and left them with no option but to sell their labor. In China, too, there is occurring a similar dispossession of peasantry that is often referred to as a New Enclosure Movement, yet the two enclosure movements differ notably in their temporal and spatial scope. Processes that took place over a period of some three centuries in England have been telescoped into just three decades in China. What is more, they are taking place in the opposite order: the initial commodification of industrial labor in the 1990s was accompanied by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of migrant laborers into cities even without the large-scale commodification of rural land. Why, then, dispossess a peasantry that has already submitted to capital voluntarily, i.e., under economic duress without the need to resort to forcible dislocation? This talk seeks to answer that question from a Marxian theoretical perspective that is historical as well as comparative, with England and the Soviet Union as the principal reference points.

Speaker's Bio:
Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations as well as a faculty member in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class, from which this talks draws, to be published by Verso Books in 2026; Legal Orientalism: China, the United States and Modern Law (Harvard University Press 2013); co-author of Schlesinger’s Comparative Law (Foundation Press 2009); and co-editor, with David Eng Shuang Shen, of a special double issue of the journal Social Text on “China and the Human” (2012).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Annenberg School for Communication, Walnut Street, Philadelphia, United States