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The Dialectics of Uneven Spatial-Temporal Development: Migrants and Reproduction in Late Capitalism

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Migration, Temporality, and Capitalism

Abstract

This chapter is an exploration of the ways in which the dialectic between space and time ramifies in the lives of women, who in confronting the vagaries of the unevenness of capitalist transformation are socially reproduced as migrants. To do this, the chapter draws on recent scholarship on the notion of uneven and combined development as well as insights from Lefebvre’s (Explorations et découvertes. Continuum, New York, 1992) methodology of “rhythmanalysis” and Bloch’s (New German Critique 11: 22–38, 1977) conceptualization of the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous”. An engagement with this work is intended to outline how their theoretical and methodological insights enable an understanding of the spatio-temporalities of migration in the context of capitalist change that moves beyond an emphasis of time as preeminently chronological, linear and historical. The chapter further explores how their insights also extend current notions of scale beyond a conventional conceptualization as spatio-political. I do this by thinking through what conceptual possibilities may be opened up by situating the analytic lens at the scale of migrant women’s bodies in delineating a historical materialism of bio-physicality. The chapter therefore focuses on migrants who have relocated to Paris from the Northeastern Provinces of China to address how women’s bodies and lives are entangled within local, regional, national and globe-spanning processes that are mutually consituted but spatially and temporally uneven. I focus particularly on the discrepant temporalities of such entanglements as are present in the lives of migration women to, argue that attempts to grant more analytical eminence to time may enhance understandings of how the lives of the people we study articulate with the imperatives of capitalist change.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for example , Aneivas and Kamron (Eds.) (2016), Harvey (2006), Smith (2010), Smith (2016).

  2. 2.

    See Trotsky (1977 [1930]) and Lenin (1899) as well as Rosenberg (2010).

  3. 3.

    See Brenner (1999) and Swyngedouw (2010).

  4. 4.

    See Çağlar and Glick Schiller (2018) and Nonini and Susser (eds) (forthcoming) .

  5. 5.

    A notable exception to this is Makki (2015).

  6. 6.

    See also Lem (forthcoming).

  7. 7.

    Ethnographic research upon which chapter is based has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Wenner Gren Foundation or Anthropological Research and Trent University.

  8. 8.

    Cf. Foucault (1997).

  9. 9.

    See, also, E.P. Thompson (1967), who argued that this temporal “work-discipline” is linked to the rise of capitalism, as increasingly precise units of clock time became the basis of quantifiable value in a manner that was imposed on the workforce (Moore 2013).

  10. 10.

    See Lefebvre, H. 1992 with Catherine Regulier-Lefebvre Éléments de rythmanalyse: Introduction à la connaissance des rythmes, preface by René Lorau, Paris: Ed. Syllepse, Collection “Explorations et découvertes”. English translation: Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life, Stuart Elden, Gerald Moore trans. Continuum, New York, 2004 and Bloch (1977) New German Critique 11 22–38.

  11. 11.

    Smith notes with reference to Marx’s (1973: 630) law of population that labor’s capacity to attain its value can only be achieved when it is saleable labor under capitalism. That is to say when labor power is sold, it adds value to capital. So, when it is not sold it does not add value to capital. Unsalable labor then appears to be of no use and therefore is surplus (2014: 187). Also see Smith (2011).

  12. 12.

    All names that appear in this article are fictive.

  13. 13.

    There are many detailed discussions of the nature of these reforms and effects of the reform program on agrarian livelihoods . See, for example, Zhang (2003) as well as Judd (1994), Oi (1999) and Murphy (2002).

  14. 14.

    For example, by 1995, 5 million hectares of arable land was transferred to infrastructure and real estate in China. In Fujian Province, 35 million hectares were transferred to industry (Banerjee-Guha 2011).

  15. 15.

    According to Deepak (2011) there were three such rushes. The first was during the mid-1980s, when cities expanded, town and township enterprises mushroomed and peasants started to build new houses. The second ‘land enclosure rush’ occurred between 1992 and 1993 in the form of land speculation; huge tracts of arable land were seized for constructing commercial houses. The third land enclosures took place between 2002 and 2004, when the government invited and sold land to developers at a very low price. There was also a fourth, which was to be driven by government’s resolve to convert rural population into non-rural by building ‘mini cities’ in the rural areas (see also Guldin 2001).

  16. 16.

    See Marx (1976 [1867]: 874–875); also see Webber (2008) as well as Harvey (2003), who has discussed this process as “accumulation by dispossession”.

  17. 17.

    For a discussion of the details of interlocked mechanisms involved in the appropriation of rural land in the process of urbanization, see Webber (2008).

  18. 18.

    For example, in 1993, 50 kilograms of rice was worth only a bottle of pesticide. Furthermore, while prices for certain agricultural crops are fixed by planning mechanisms, industrial commodities such as chemical pesticide, chemical fertilizers and other industrial commodities were sold at market (Zhang 2003: 32).

  19. 19.

    Under the hukou system migrant flows in China are grouped into three categories: migration with residency rights (hukou migration), migration without hukou residency rights, and migrants who are engaged in short-term movements such as visiting, circulating and commuting. Changes in hukou must be approved by the official authorities who have historically granted them when they were not at odds with the state’s developmental objectives and policies (for more details see Zhang 2003; Judd 1994).

  20. 20.

    Interregional migration was common in the Maoist era, while international migration was forbidden. For a discussion of migration in different eras, see Lary (1999).

  21. 21.

    Zhang (2003: 33) lists differences in income between urban and rural areas between 1978 and 2000. With the exception of 1984, urban incomes were at least double that of rural incomes.

  22. 22.

    For discussion of the “Wenzhou Model of development”, see Liu (1992), Parris (1993) and Bramall (1991).

  23. 23.

    It has been estimated that 100 million Chinese farmers have left their native villages to search for work in urban centres (Zhang 2003: 162).

  24. 24.

    The ‘floating population’ refers to people who have not migrated officially. According to the Chinese conception, the chief characteristic of the floating population is that they “float and move”, which implies they are not and cannot become a permanently settled group. In China , those considered members of the floating population have crossed over some administrative boundary but have not altered their permanent registration or hukou. Hukou migration or official migration is endowed with state resources and is referred to as “planned migration” by the government. “Floaters” are a “self-flowing population’ whose movements occurs outside state plans and whose movements are described by planners as “anarchic” and “chaotic” (see Zhang 2001; Solinger 1999: 15; Chan 1999: 49; Murphy 2002).

  25. 25.

    Tontines are an investment vehicle that is a mixture of group annuity, group life insurance and lottery in which investors each pay a sum into the tontine. The funds are invested and each investor receives dividends. Usually the scheme involves an arrangement that is made upon the death of an investor so that when an investor dies his or her share is divided amongst all the other investors. This process continues until only one investor survives, who receives all of the remaining funds. Amongst the Chinese in Paris what is called a ‘tontine’ resembles more a rotating credit society, one in which investors each advance small loans to the borrower, who repays each investor with interest according to a predetermined schedule. The death of investors seems not to figure in the arrangements in a prominent way. For a detailed discussion of the ways in which tontines are organized amongst Chinese ”immigrants in Paris, see Pairault (1990).

  26. 26.

    The iron rice bowl system was developed in the Maoist period in China and guaranteed job security to employees in state-run enterprises as well as benefited military and civil servants.

  27. 27.

    In 2011, roughly 8 percent of the urban population came to be unemployed; much of this was the result of the restructuring of industries after accession to the WTO in 2001. See Banerjee-Guha (2011) and Tian (2008).

  28. 28.

    Women from China’s northeast are referred to as dong bei women by people from the southern China to signal the regional distinctions that prevail between different cohorts of migrants in Paris. According to many informants, this is done to denigrate them as people and to devalue their work.

  29. 29.

    See Levy (2005), who observes that his is a competitive economy, which increases Chinese migrants who have no other option in France besides prostitution. Arrivals from other parts of China reported to have entered prostitution as soon as they arrived, and there is also a tendency for professionalization, with the presence of younger Chinese women, often with legal status, who seek a wealthier clientele, and who, like prostitutes of other origins, work in wealthier areas of Paris.

  30. 30.

    For a discussion of realist ethnography , see Smith (1999).

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  1. International Development Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada

    Winnie Lem

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  1. Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Pauline Gardiner Barber

  2. Champlain College, Trent University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Winnie Lem

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Lem, W. (2018). The Dialectics of Uneven Spatial-Temporal Development: Migrants and Reproduction in Late Capitalism. In: Barber, P., Lem, W. (eds) Migration, Temporality, and Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72781-3_10

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