Marcel van der Linden's “The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History” aims to contribute to a “mental map,” which tentatively charts a heretofore unexplored territory while suggesting paths for navigating it. The territory is “global labor history” as a “new field of research”Footnote ¹ that promises to rejuvenate through the study of worldwide connections labor studies fixated for too long on the national as a privileged unit of analysis. While sharing van der Linden's excitement for the promise of global labor history, I would like to expand its challenges by interrogating the place African workers have in it. My contention is that all three terms in the proposed new discipline—“global,” “labor,” and “history”—have impacted Africa's troubled dealings with capitalism in ways that question and problematize the idea of a global working class, which underpins van der Linden's conceptualization.

To begin, one may well doubt whether the global manifests itself in Africa mostly in the form of connections rather than, as James Ferguson puts it, “dynamics with sharp, jagged edges; rich and dangerous traffics amid zones of generalized abjection; razor-wired enclaves next to abandoned hinterlands … a global not of planetary communion, but of disconnection, segmentation, and segregation.”Footnote ² Ferguson was warning against the dangers of writing globalization as a “convergence narrative,” where progressive and emancipatory possibilities emanate from the structural and cultural processes underpinning flows of capital and investment. Such dangers surface, conversely, in some of van der Linden's formulations, for example his grounding of workers’ “teleconnections” in global commodity chains. Colonial and postcolonial Africa shows indeed that the globalization of capital did not only provide a minority of unionized workers with new opportunities to converse with the global working class. It has also, and more importantly, excluded and marginalized multitudes of producers, households, and communities, casting them as objects of humanitarian intervention or the neocolonial-type oversight of Western Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), “socially responsible” corporations and—for example in the case of the international programs of American labor bodies—trade unions.Footnote ³

Similarly, the liberal democracies established on the continent over the past twenty years have surely connected Africa to a globally hegemonic template of “civil society” as a terrain of contestation, whereby labor movements are no longer as susceptible as in the past to the patronage and control of authoritarian governments. They have done so, however, by confirming trends evident in the previous late colonial and neocolonial phases of Africa's capitalist globalization. In all three periods, local and foreign technocrats aligned to international institutions have taken care of depoliticizing Africa's civil society at the same time they asserted the necessity of liberal norms of development, economic growth, and individual responsibility.Footnote ⁴

Fred Cooper provides an unrivaled discussion of how late colonial labor reforms aimed to improve African workers’ conditions and protections to defuse the linkages between labor movements and broader social struggles and stabilize urban wage earners within colonial economies.Footnote ⁵ The effort was underwritten at the time by many European leftists and former trade unionists, like Britain's colonial secretary Arthur Creech-Jones, turned into colonial social engineers of a white-ruled modernization project. Similarly, for current experts on “poverty eradication” in international organizations the global circulation and connectivity of development discourse also provide opportunities to contain, rather than enhance as van der Linden hopes, grassroots awareness of and opposition to capitalism and its power relations. Such “networks, institutions and media”Footnote ⁶ are at least as important as the ones, emphasized by van der Linden, which bring (post)colonized African workers closer to their colleagues in the “global North.” But to what extent do they respectively disconnect, rather than connect, workers' movements and struggles? Do both types of circulation and networks equally enable knowledge of how local realities relate to global capital, which for van der Linden is a defining condition for the global working class?

As Africa's connectedness to the global is messy indeed and open to all sorts of unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences, it seems by no means guaranteed that, as van der Linden claims, one can always use “small details” to “identify the big picture” and “macro-processes.” If the big picture is supposed to be an entity defined as “global working class,” then a focus on details can in fact return quite a blurred image, which brings me to the problems related to the second term, “labor,” of the new discipline under discussion.

Van der Linden's reliance on structural conditions as determinants of working class formation and his drive for an inclusive conceptualization lead him to a definition of global labor as encompassing all producers that, through varying degrees of coercion, commodify their labor power to feed the accumulation of capital. He provides a convincing argument for transcending time-honored boundaries between “free” and “unfree” labor or between capitalist and precapitalist social formations to the extent such notions assume wage labor as the sole embodiment of modern capitalist relations of production. Many of the scholars he citesFootnote ⁷ have powerfully argued how the capitalist labor contract as the ostensible interaction between free-willed individuals is in fact enmeshed in all sorts of modalities of unfreedom. When van der Linden, however, translates such economic and juridical positions into the category of “interest,” then a problem emerges, especially to the extent he posits a “shared interest”Footnote ⁸ as central to defining global labor. My above discussion of the global hints at the fact that the ways in which Northern working classes and their political representatives and organizations have defined their interests have often subordinated, or, in some instances, outright subjugated the demands of colonial and postcolonial workers. Van der Linden recognizes as much in his discussion of “super-wages” in the North in relation to exploitation in the South. The problem, however, runs much deeper than that.

For Frantz Fanon the separation, presided over by colonial governance, between Africa's largely urban wage earners and a predominantly rural lumpenproletariat, allowed colonial and nationalist elites to claim the former's acquiescence while marginalizing and oppressing the latter. It was thus not merely a matter of labor markets and economic dynamics, but was rather part of the broader “ontological” violence of colonialism, which used race as a means of domination and social hierarchy while donning universal values of modernity, civilization, and productivity.Footnote ⁹ Frank Wilderson, building on Fanon as well as Achille Mbembe, Saidyia Hartman, and Hortense Spillers,Footnote ¹⁰ further elaborated that colonialism was part of a broader modality of antiblackness, inaugurated with the Middle Passage and continued in the United States through Jim Crow and contemporary mass-incarceration. Albeit deeply implicated in capitalism, Wilderson continues, antiblackness has instantiated in slave and colonized societies a “grammar of suffering” predicated upon not just class exploitation and alienation but, most especially, gratuitous violence in the form of accumulation and fungibility of objectified black bodies.Footnote ¹¹ The problem of gratuitous violence within the institutional and socioeconomic machinations that ontologically defined blackness as a condition of oppression is indeed central to scholarly discussions of slavery and African colonialism. It is also one of the reasons why, as van der Linden notices, studies of slavery and (white) waged working classes have generally proceeded on separate tracks. It is not, however, just a problem, as he liquidates it, of labor historians and students of chattel slavery subscribing to different journals or attending different conferences. More substantially, it has to do with how, despite both categories referring to structurally commodified work, it is far from guaranteed that they will, as a logical consequence of that structural positioning, “share a common interest,” which allegedly makes the experiences of waged work, slavery, and forced labor just “a matter of degree.”Footnote ¹²

In the end, therefore, van der Linden's quest for an “inclusive” and “more neutral definition of work” is seriously at risk of simplifying and mutilating the lives, expressions, and modes of existence of many of those he recruits into the global proletariat as the subject of this new field of research. It would be paradoxical indeed that the intellectual debut of global labor history was complicit in silencing those very actors that it promises to give voice to. Avoiding this outcome will likely depend on the ability of global labor historians to be less obsequious than conventional and national ones to the structural forces of capitalism as ultimately responsible for defining what one means by “labor.” Should this type of reflection fail the researcher's responsibilities, a “neutral definition of work” would be a far less satisfactory alternative, which in van der Linden's paper sounds like a catalogue and taxonomy of labor relations where waged workers and various types of “unfree subaltern” are brought under the same frame because of their “capital-positing” functions. Incidentally, it is a rather curious way of challenging Eurocentrism, as van der Linden claims to be doing, one that places the quintessential enabler, capital, of Europe's imagination of its own expansion as a world-encompassing totality at the core of determining what being a worker in colonized societies is essentially about.

Useful in this regard would be a more rigorous intellectual engagement with concepts of workers’ subjectivity and their limitations, but here van der Linden's paper disappoints. To his merit, he does raise the issue of subjectivity, which, as he correctly underlines, has been almost entirely neglected by a labor historiography overwhelmingly concerned with formal organizations and explicit ideological pronouncements. But, having reduced the essence of the working class to its becoming a “capital-positing” commodity, not much is left to say about subjectivity except narrowing it down to the mere level of individual biographies and exemplary life histories of workers that through their peculiar travels and travails illuminate the connections that capital has already established at a cross-national level.Footnote ¹³ Workers’ subjectivity and discourse have provided a much richer terrain of study to African labor scholars. In it they have found how, as Cooper puts it, African working classes are defined by social relationships as much as by contested “imaginative projects.” Not only did colonial and postcolonial rulers confront the mobilizations and organizations of African proletariats; they also presented waged employment as a modern and virtuous socioeconomic condition with the aim of producing the African working class as an orderly and industrious collectivity.Footnote ¹⁴ In the process, the colonial state hoped to limit and constrain the ability of casual employees to use intermittent jobs as a weapon to undermine and subvert capitalist production. Most African workers were in fact able to wrest from employers a measure of control over their work rhythms by eschewing regular jobs as they could rely, while moving from one contingent occupation to another, on multiple networks of subsistence and income sharing along family, religious, or ethnic lines.Footnote ¹⁵ Therefore, in a long history of struggle, African workers have opposed capitalism not only by organizing as a class but also by refusing to become a working class.Footnote ¹⁶

The governments of independent Africa have recursively used legal compulsion into gainful employment and punishment for desertion to discipline rebellious youth, which the normativity of work allowed to depict as idle “vagrants” and “dangerous classes.”Footnote ¹⁷ As in the colonial context, postcolonial African workers have maintained toward their jobs complex and ambivalent relations. They declined to merely identify their subjectivity and desire with their productive status, rather than necessarily embrace it as a promising opportunity for unprecedented global connections.Footnote ¹⁸ What African labor historians used to categorize as “resistance to proletarianization” has been persistently evident in contexts where wage labor penetrated more deeply and was used by colonial and nationalist discourse as an embodiment of civilization and dignity to embellish underlying practical hierarchies and inequalities by race, gender, and ethnicity. In such realities, as in Hoyt Alverson's classic discussion of the distinction between tiro (doing) and mmereko (working) among Tswana migrant mineworkers, “labor” stood in direct contradiction to any notion of meaningful human activity.Footnote ¹⁹ To the extent, finally, that state governments and patriarchal authority have translated it into the exalted condition of breadwinning masculinity, wage labor has provided a polemical target, rather than an icon of solidarity and commonality of interests, for African women that found in “informal” self-employment both an income modality and a barrier to gender oppression.Footnote ²⁰ The central role of work in the self-fashioning of respectable masculinity as a rhetorical device of domination would then deserve more serious scrutiny than allowed by van der Linden, or, for that matter, by any structuralist account of domesticity as the mere “articulation” of production and reproduction.

In the end, in Africa commodified work has highlighted with particular intensity inequalities and lines of fracture that crucially pertain to the concept itself, rather than being the mere outcomes of capital's machinations. Such intensity has facilitated other ways of identifying workers’ “shared interests,” ways more available or probably desirable than labor organizations. Van der Linden cursorily notices that in the “global South” workers do not seem to prefer trade unions and labor parties, but rather opt for “radical religion” and other types of ideal affiliations.Footnote ²¹ African labor scholars, not only historians, have also established that. Van der Linden's observation does not, however, say much as to how such diverse affiliations fit the agenda of global labor history, especially considering that workers’ localized ethnic or spiritual associations are often hardly conducive to “inclusive” class identities. Yet they are recursively more responsive to workers’ sensitivities and claims than, for example, trade unions aligned with the disciplinary imperatives of authoritarian governments. As Paul Lubeck showed in the case of Northern Nigeria, Islamic networks have sustained the solidarity of working-class communities precisely because they are rooted in economic relations that operate as an alternative to and criticism of regular employment.Footnote ²² The decline under structural adjustment of working-class safety nets with religious roots has often surrendered the terrain of spirituality to chauvinist politics or individual acquisitiveness. The problem is therefore to explain not only why workers prefer religious allegiances to trade unions but also how discursive changes in those allegiances question the self-representation of a working class.

Confronted with such problematic entanglements, governmental agencies, corporate actors, and labor historians of socialist, liberal, or nationalist persuasions have often been on the same side in glorifying work as a condition of emancipation, solidarity, and modernization. The working class they debate, envision, and intervene upon is, as Dipesh Chakrabarty noticed, their “desired subjectivity,” which precisely by attaching universal attributes of freedom, citizenship, and dignity to “capital-positing” labor, constitutes, he continued, an insurmountable limit for the politics and struggles of the subaltern.Footnote ²³ Without a serious engagement with the ways in which African workers’ practices and significations contest and subvert work in their multifaceted interactions with capital and political institutions, the impact of global labor history on such workers would be explanatorily powerless at best, complicit in their subordination at worst.

If a focus on Africa indicates the many problems a definition of “global labor” would have to confront, adding “history” to the mix compounds and encapsulates such quandaries. Van der Linden's understanding of “global labor history” seems to consist of a script with two intersecting plotlines. On one hand, we have capital bringing together a range of working classes from diverse modes of exploitation. They are all on the verge of recognizing their connections and shared interests based on the place they come to occupy in a process of universal commodification. On the other hand, the self-awareness of labor scholarship proceeds in tandem with those material processes as the discipline makes workers’ global connections its object of inquiry. The resulting sense of historical time is linear and cumulative: The objective constitution of the class and its representation in scholarly discourse tend toward a common progressive outcome and reinforce each other in the process. Africa's experience with capitalist work does not warrant this representation of historical time, which actually better fits the modernizing imagination of colonial states, postcolonial elites, and international organizations. Rather, this paper has argued, African workers have continuously articulated subjectivity and desire as more or less conscious attempts to escape capital-creating work. They debunk its emancipatory promises and reverse or disrupt its progressive temporal imaginings. In the irreducible variety of their struggles and material and discursive practices they enacted multiple histories and temporalities that defy uniform representations of class that predominantly reflect the logics of capital. Indeed, African labor struggles rather resonate with Gayatri Spivak's definition of the subaltern as “the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic.”Footnote ²⁴ Narrativization into logic, namely the logic of turning human activity into abstract labor and multitudes into employees, is precisely the precondition of capitalist accumulation. Thus, challenges to such narratives should expand the potentials of global labor history and contribute to its sense of excitement, rather than instill apprehension for the loss of familiar coordinates.Footnote ²⁵

In other words, and to conclude, my critical discussion of Marcel van der Linden's contribution wants to endorse the importance of global labor history as an intellectual project and a field of study. Van der Linden's case for it is quite convincing: In the past labor history has indeed, as he writes, excessively focused on the national, and it did often incorporate juridical distinctions devised by capital and the state—for example between “free” and “unfree” labor—as if they were self-evident categories of analysis. Problematic are the conceptual foundations van der Linden's paper places at the heart of this endeavor: its assumption that global capital necessarily enables emancipatory connections among workers, its theory of a working-class subject determined by the structural conditions of commodification, and its vision of a linearly progressive historical time. Criticizing all of this, I contend, would greatly expand the range of questions to which this path-breaking field of inquiry is relevant as well as enhance its power of analysis. Van der Linden is quite correct that labor history now encompasses “a much larger intellectual territory than we were previously taught,”Footnote ²⁶ which is why attempts to map it should not be afraid of losing sight of familiar harbors and venture into the vast unknown.