What explains the contested conditions for migrant worker citizenship under socialism? Migration scholarship often elides socialist contexts, tracing migrant deservingness to the neoliberal rise of labor-based conditionality for legal status across Western states in the late twentieth century. However, a broader historiography suggests that socialist states, despite their institutional differences, conditioned migrant inclusion on labor performance throughout the twentieth century. To explain how this form of civic conditionality operated under socialism, this paper draws on the case of migrant “limit” worker management in Moscow from the early 1960s to 1987. Using archival materials, I show that state-owned enterprises operated as migration intermediaries, establishing and enforcing a labor-based conditionality for local citizenship even as the state pursued additional civic aims. I find that civic campaigns initiated in the early 1960s provided an ideological framework and material base for enterprises to govern migrant workers at their dormitories. Managers and officials at the dormitory redirected resources intended for social activism and cultural tutelage toward ensuring baseline productivity and compliance. Enterprise managers and union officials additionally substituted the material conditions at the dormitory for the assessments of individual migrants’ moral and productive status. This paper extends the literature on migrant deservingness to a socialist context, showing how conditionality for civic inclusion develops beyond the neoliberal shifts in contemporary citizenship.

Management of broadleaf weeds in chile pepper may be improved by including a rotation with sorghum treated with selective, non-residual herbicides. However, herbicides applied to sorghum specifically for managing weeds in subsequent chile pepper crops have not been evaluated. This study evaluated two herbicide treatments applied to sorghum for their effects on broadleaf weed density and hand hoeing time in chile pepper crops the following year, and compared the treatments for their net economic benefits across sorghum and chile pepper growing seasons. Treatments included 1) a sorghum nontreated control; 2) one herbicide application, which was a premix combination of 2,4-D (0.35 kg ai ha−1), bromoxynil (0.35 kg ai ha−1), and fluroxypyr (0.14 kg ai ha−1) applied at the 4-leaf stage of sorghum; 3) two herbicide applications, which included the aforementioned premix combination followed by bromoxynil (0.28 kg ai ha−1) applied at the 6-leaf stage of sorghum; and 4) weed-free sorghum using hand hoeing. Results indicated that broadleaf weeds covered less than 10% of the ground where sorghum had been treated with herbicides. The two-application treatment resulted in 24% fewer broadleaf weeds in chile pepper than in sorghum that had been hoed by hand, and 63% fewer than the one-application treatment. Hand hoeing time for chile pepper was similar among the two-application treatment, one-application treatment, and weed-free sorghum. A partial budget analysis indicated that the one-application treatment provided greater net economic benefit than the two-application treatment (US$6,550 ha−1 vs. US$5,894 ha−1), due to lower input costs and greater overall gross revenue. These findings indicate that a two-application treatment maximizes reductions of broadleaf weeds in chile pepper caused by rotational sorghum; however, the one-application treatment may be a cost-effective approach to reducing broadleaf weeds in chile pepper.

This article is an environmental history of Anaconda Copper Company’s disposal of hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic waste from its Potrerillos and El Salvador mines into Chile’s Río Salado and Bahía de Chañaral. First, it uncovers a long history of disputes between copper companies and workers who panned the river for tailings. This early water war in Chile was shaped by competing understandings of water’s legal status. While workers claimed rights under the water law’s definition of water as a bien nacional de uso común, mining companies invoked the mining code and contended that the river’s water and waste were private property under civil law. Mining companies claimed rivers’ water by treating rivers in legal terms as mines and property of the state, bienes fiscales, that could be conceded as private property. They argued that human engineering of rivers in dams and canals, and through pollution, made rivers into a commodity and a form of property akin to subsoil minerals. Second, the article describes how, during the social reformist government of Eduardo Frei (1964–1970) and the revolutionary government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973), the state asserted control over Chile’s waterways while balancing centralized state management of water in the name of development with local users’ claims of long-standing riparian use rights. Third, the article traces the long history of the state and mining companies treating water as an economic commodity, often superseding local use rights, and argues that this history built the foundation for the later privatization of water during the Pinochet dictatorship. The article demonstrates that the privatization of water in Chile under Pinochet had its origins in the resolution of the tension between water and civil law in favor of extending property rights to water and building as a subsidy to transnational mining companies. This meant rolling back state management of rivers and often eroding local users’ water rights. Finally, the article concludes by examining the town of Chañaral’s successful 1987 lawsuit against the El Salvador mine to win an injunction against further pollution of the Salado as part of a moment of broader Latin American “environmental constitutionalism” during the 1980s. While this legal victory reflected a significant change in environmental law and an emergent environmentalist movement in Chile and across Latin America, it struck a blow to hundreds of workers who depended on extracting tailings from the river for their livelihood and who responded with unsuccessful protests.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the concepts of surplus labor, disguised unemployment, and underemployment emerged as key tools for thinking about economic development in the emerging “Third World.” This article examines how these concepts were developed and debated in Egypt, a country that was at the forefront of postcolonial planning efforts internationally. To this end, the article examines the statistical construction of the “labor problem” and the way it shaped competing visions of economic development among national, colonial, and international actors. Using a variety of sources—including Egyptian government archives, documents from the British Foreign Office, and the International Labour Organization—the article contributes to the global history of development and quantification, and contributes to the scholarship on Nasserism in Egypt.

This article examines how the labor and community structures of female skin-divers, the Japanese ama and Korean haenyeo, believed to exemplify the primitive ability to adapt to extreme climates, became staple research subjects for global adaptation-resilience science. In the context of development studies, adaptation-resilience discourse has been seen as reflecting the emergence of neoliberal governmentality. In contrast, this article frames adaptation-resilience as a reactionary technological response that emerges in times of scarcity and crisis. This article demonstrates how the discourse can be traced back to interwar Japanese physiologists, who saw themselves as rescuing Japan from the ills of modernity through a socio-biological development program that drew on the diver’s adaptability as a means to create subjects not only capable of surviving extreme deprivation but willing to do so in the service of the community and the state. These scientists and their research were taken up uncritically in the postwar by international science and development organizations, who found in them a shared vision of a labor-intensive and low ecological impact model of community-rooted development that offered a sustainable and healthier alternative to capitalism, one that could help humanity overcome crises of modern excess such as climate change. However, sustainability meant the valorization of absolute austerity as a development goal, ruling out relief for suffering marginalized populations. This article therefore suggests that resiliency-based development entraps its subjects in a regime of self-exploitation that forces them into a constant state of emergency, paradoxically deepening their vulnerability in the process.

Resilient Zulu moral economy compelled Natal’s sugar planters and white settler state to introduce Indian indentured workers since 1860. As concerns over productivity in a weak colonial economy informed this decision, meticulous management of labor time crucially shaped the treatment of migrant Indian indentees. Moreover, systemic violence in capital’s life processes formed the culture of work-discipline in the plantations and in other industrial sectors. Subsequently, as contract expired Indian indentees acquired relative economic mobility compared to Africans, they appeared in Zulu critiques of Natal’s settler colonial order. Ironically, dispossessed Zulus reproduced colonial logic of time management while discussing the comparative economic success of Indian “newcomers.” Zulu critiques of colonial labor management also complemented the racial exclusivity of migrant Indians. Analyzing the complex workings of capital, labor, and race in nineteenth-century Natal, this article explains how capital’s life processes shaped violent conflicts in the intimate domestic space of working-class lifeworld.

By focusing on the American Protective Association (A.P.A.), this article demonstrates how anti-Catholicism influenced free labor ideologies and working-class movements during the Gilded Age. The labor movement in the late nineteenth century generally believed that the so-called “dangerous classes” threatened working-class social mobility and economic independence. Religious bigotries, though, often dictated which people and institutions were considered economically dangerous. This article argues that, as anti-Catholic stereotypes collided with emergent anti-monopoly critiques, some working-class reformers saw Catholicism as incompatible with traditional notions of free labor. These reformers embraced anti-Catholic politics and chose to establish, join, or support the A.P.A. Many in the A.P.A. thought Catholic workers lacked the autonomy necessary to be free laborers, leading to intra-union conflict and a distrust of labor organizations with significant Catholic membership. They also charged that the Catholic Church itself opposed free labor and was already profiting off slave labor in institutions like the Houses of the Good Shepherd, a charitable institution, which sought to reform “abandoned women.” Ultimately, the A.P.A. and its anti-Catholic bigotries contributed to the fragmentation of the working class in Gilded Age America in ways that scholars have not yet recognized.