As mentioned in the Introduction, this chapter addresses the socialisation of labour by neo- liberal means, while the final chapter examines socialisation of labour and resources by means of war. The making of wage labour at ever- faster rates under neo- liberalism is a common characteristic of the AW, and the chapter will examine the issue for all Arab countries. Why should so much attention be paid to the dislocation and pauperisation of labour since the heydays of Arab socialism in particular? Labour power is the principal input into production, and the labourer is both subject and object of accumulation. An understanding of the formation of the labour process through the development of the law of value is rudimentary to understanding the whole process of resource disengagement under neo- liberalism.

More than three decades ago, many envisaged a significant rise in the industrial workforce in developing countries (Amin 1976; Wallerstein 1979; Frank 1982; Arrighi 1982; Abdel- Malek 1963 and 1985). Since then, the rate of proletarianisation globally has soared. In 1950, industrial workers from developing countries composed roughly 30 per cent of the total industrial labour force. In 2010, industrial workers from developing countries represented over 80 per cent of the global industrial labour force (ILO- KILM, various years). In China and the few other newly industrialised Asian economies that enjoy a margin of autonomy in policy, the majority of the newly evicted peasants have moved into high productivity- cum- rising- wage employment. The socialist legacy of China had enshrined certain labour rights that were difficult to undo by the rising capitalist class and that resulted in a steady rise in Chinese labour wages (Weil 2010). For most of the world, however, the transformation has been perverse (Patnaik 2015), and most new wage- labourers either become unemployed or are engaged in low- productivity/ poverty- wage informal jobs.

The AW falls into the latter category. Between 1980 and 2010, the share of rural to total population in the AW dropped from about 60 per cent to around 40 per cent. In absolute terms, an estimated 70– 100 million people moved from the countryside to urban centres within the Arab region.