Labor and working class historians, whether explicitly Marxist or not, have tended to use models of class and class formation that privilege urban industrial workers, depicting their lived experience as, somehow, hermetically sealed off from the countryside. Despite an awareness of the intertwined and overlapping nature of rural and urban economies, most historians have treated rural workers as either peasants or slaves, and therefore fitting subjects for separate fields of historical inquiry, or as individuals on the cusp of proletarianization, would-be or about-to-be industrial workers. Indeed, even studies focused on recent history have viewed the rural sector as a “backward” one and constructed the industrial setting as “modern.” Thus, even if few labor historians have dismissed agricultural workers with the condescension of Marx's “sack of potatoes,” as a collectivity we have paid them insufficient attention and our field is weaker as a result.¹

The essays that comprise this special issue of International Labor & Working Class History are offered in an effort to prompt labor historians to begin to think seriously about agriculture, to bring to the rural world their concerns with power and contestation, their understanding of the relationship between work and consciousness, and the ability of their field to integrate not just the social and economic realms but the political as well. In short, we want to suggest that the countryside is a site where class “happens” and that an understanding of both the rural and urban sectors will be enhanced if we begin to study them both as coequals and as interdependent.

We wish to do more, though, than propose that attention to agriculture will expand the remit of labor history and thereby render the field more holistic and complete. Although sustained consideration of rural work is, in our opinion, long overdue and holds out the promise of refining our conceptual tools and theoretical models, the countryside is a vital subject of study in its own right. Indeed, it is our contention that scholars interested in understanding contemporary social and economic history ignore agriculture at great peril. Take the case of the late twentieth-century United States as an example, where farms, home to a mere two percent of the nation's population, have among the highest per-unit levels of productivity, capital investment, and technological deployment in the American economy. Few other sectors, with the possible exception of the defense-related aerospace and munitions industries, have been so thoroughly transformed in the last century by state policies and capital intensive high technologies.

Of course it is the impact of these political and economic forces upon social life that most interests us as historians of labor. Indeed, all of the concerns that have characterized our field from its inception—the work process, immigration and the adaptation of cultures, state power, technological change, capital consolidation and the rise of management, movements for social justice, the gendered division of labor—have played themselves out on the rural stage with only passing notice from labor historians. With only slight exaggeration, we note that one could investigate a single farm (albeit a carefully selected one) and discover the interplay of all these dynamics.

The need for labor and working-class historians to take agriculture seriously becomes even more compelling if we look beyond the American case. Consideration of other regional and national contexts, and attention to transnational perspectives, yields observations that upset the conventional wisdom held by many North American scholars. Perhaps the most fundamental point to be made in this regard is that, globally speaking, rural workers are the norm and not the exception, making up the bulk of the world's labor force. Likewise, a wider view of migration decenters the way in which we tend to privilege urban and industrial sites as foci of study, for considered over time mass migration to new agricultural regions has both preceded and dwarfed movement to industrializing areas.

Transnational comparison, in fact, brings into sharp relief the importance of agricultural history for an understanding of class formation. Scholars concerned with class and social stratification have been at the forefront of the recent upsurge of comparative analysis. Their methodological observations have been well received by labor historians, particularly the now commonplace understanding that careful comparison highlights the distinctive features of each case under review while underscoring basic structural similarities.²

As far as study of the rural sector is concerned, labor historians would do well to attend to one of the comparativists' often-overlooked assertions: that a deep reading of different historiographies allows scholars to transcend the parochialism of their own fields and thus question orthodoxy, challenge basic assumptions, and formulate novel questions.³

The far-reaching ramifications of these insights derived from comparative methodology can be illustrated by returning to the case of American agriculture. Even passing familiarity with the other rural histories brings into question some of the implicit suppositions that have closed off the US countryside as a subject of study. For example, US labor historians have long thought of farm workers as outside their purview. They have regarded rural laborers as largely outside the working class and beyond the reach of the state, an assumption valorized in many ways by farmworkers' exclusion from the legal-institutional system of industrial relations established by the 1935 Wagner Act and their historically low-levels of unionization.⁴

Yet a transnational perspective offers a radically different picture of both state and labor. Viewed globally, nation states play active roles in shaping the world economy, international commodity markets, and long distance labor streams. It would be impossible, for example, to understand the current Latinization of the meatpacking, textile, construction, and service industries in the United States, without also understanding the history of the agricultural industries and their state allies that initiated, managed, and that continues to sustain Latino migration to the US.⁵ In the US and beyond, numerous rich historiographic traditions have explored the way in which states, within and across borders, have consciously structured rural labor markets, created new workforces and policed their mobility, and regulated rural economies.⁶

These observations can function as inspiration as well as critique. Hopefully, they can encourage a reexamination of the American case and nudge US labor historians to set aside both outmoded “industrial relations” paradigms of the labor movement and limited Marxian notions of the working class. Just as much as the wheatlands of Argentina or South Africa's Transvaal, the American countryside and the human actors inhabiting it have been shaped in multiple ways by state policies.⁷

Crop allotment plans, agricultural price supports, government subsidies, and guest worker programs, have structured the relationship, often in decisive ways, between those working the land and those who own it.⁸ It is precisely because these rural class relationships appear different than those prevailing between “labor” and “capital” in an industrial setting that labor historians need to take agriculture seriously.

However, this special issue does more than just revisit US labor history from the perspective of the countryside. We asked five historians specializing in different parts of the world—India, Italy, South Africa, Ecuador, and the American Midwest—to write about the significance of class formation in the countryside with an eye to what labor historians ought to know about agriculture. The very excellent Italian paper is no longer included in this collection due to its length and the journal's space constraints.⁹

Although the four remaining papers span two hundred years and four continents and vary enormously in intent, character, and content, each highlights strikingly similar themes.

All four authors make absolutely clear that there can be no radical intellectual divide between rural and industrial workers because they were and often are the same people. Workers do not just migrate from the countryside to the city; they go back, sometimes many times over the course of their lives, sometimes in the same workday. Steve Striffler's principal subject, Javier Alvaro, for example, defies the stereotype of one-way migration between the countryside and the city. In 1920 Javier and his brother Paco left a hacienda high in the Ecuadorian Andes for a cacao plantation on the coast. With the collapse of cacao prices just two years later, Javier followed Paco to the coastal city of Guayaquil, where Paco had found work on the docks. Arriving after the start of an economic slump, Javier bounced between jobs, taking short-term work in the city and the surrounding countryside, depending on what was available, and sometimes relying on his wife's wages. In the early 1940s, Javier and his wife, Maria, gave up on city life altogether and returned to the countryside permanently, this time for work in a United Fruit company town. It was only at the end of his life that Javier, pushed out of banana production, became what Marx might recognize as a peasant producer. Yet, even then, he was anything but a sack of potatoes; an activist for social justice in the countryside and the city throughout his life, Javier Alvero stands as a vivid reminder that a vibrant field awaits any labor historian willing to venture beyond the end of the city sidewalk and the nation's borders.

The other three articles similarly dissolve the artificial barrier dividing agricultural and industrial work. Keith Breckenridge's historiographical essay begins with the post-Apartheid economic convulsions that threw a million industrial workers out of work. As displaced miners beat a path back to the countryside, scholarly interests followed them, enriching South African labor history with new attention to rural themes: sex, marriage, identity, desire, witchcraft, nationalism.

Likewise, Toby Higbie and Samita Sen describe fluid movements between the city and the countryside in the American Midwest and in northeast India, respectively, as men, and sometimes also women, shifted back and forth between rural and urban work in search of survival and escape. Higbie's late nineteenth and early twentieth century midwestern migrants might be harvest workers in late summer, ice cutters or lumberjacks in the winter, construction workers in the spring and summer, depending on what, when, and where work was available. While American historians may be surprised by the extent to which Midwestern industrial workers divided their time between the city and the countryside, Indian scholars have long recognized the duality of male migrants' peasant-proletariat identity. Yet, according to Sen, what they ignored was the extent to which rural women also migrated between mines, mills, and what American historians would call “factory farms.”

Where there has been a rural-industrial divide, as all four authors reveal, it has often cleaved families in two. Sen's migrating women caused paroxysms of protest by husbands, fathers and colonial officials who saw the recruitment of women workers away from their homes as a violation of the sanctity of the family and patriarchal power within it. One cannot help wondering whether the current dependence of American family farms on the off-farm labor of female school teachers, bus drivers, bank tellers and Walmart cashiers, causes similar tensions within rural families.

The seeming ubiquity of migrant men, however, raises another question. Whether they were gold and diamond miners locked in compounds for a year at a time, Euro-American “hobos” riding the rails in search of work, or Mexican braceros in the US on contract, rural men have often been separated from their families. This suggests that, if nothing else, labor historians would do well to recognize the feminization of the farm, instead of imagining farmers as men and thus rural women as farmers' wives and daughters. The prevalence of men among the ranks of rural migrants suggests that globally and historically many farms were run by women and their children for months, if not, years at a time.

Yet, at the same time, these essays make clear that not all migrants were men. Families often migrated together, as in the case of the South Asians who ventured to the Caribbean on contracts in the aftermath of emancipation or Striffler's Alveros. But women also migrated on their own in order to escape abusive fathers, husbands, and in-laws. Some may have been duped or kidnapped by conniving labor contractors, but for many women migration clearly had a different meaning than it did for men.

The second theme present in these essays is the omnipresence of the state in the countryside. The pervasiveness of state power on the farm may not be immediately evident to US historians, given the exclusion of farmworkers from New Deal-era labor laws and social insurance systems, but the global perspective afforded here reveals a countryside structured in virtually every regard by the interventions and presence of the state. The state has often been a source of oppression in the countryside but it has also, however inadvertently, been an agent of class formation. In South Africa, for example, British colonial and later South African officials crafted a black working class out of less than cooperative rural people by encouraging long distance migration, by acceding to the compound system of housing, and by isolating workers in artificially created “homelands.” In Southern Asia, British colonial taxation policies spurred the commercialization of agriculture and thus forced subsistence farmers to migrate to plantations in India or beyond.

Yet, at the same time, colonial officials were horrified at the phenomenon of female migration that their policies had engendered, and thus collaborated with male family members and local officials in regulating women's movements, sexuality and morality. In other words, the colonial state both provoked and constrained rural women's mobility. In the United States, federal immigration policies both created and criminalized a highly mobile Mexican workforce. Given the ubiquity of the state in the countryside from state-sponsored labor recruitment of indentured servitude to state-managed guestworker programs, from strikebreaking by soldiers to pass law policies, it is fair to say that state actors have had a greater and more pernicious presence in the countryside than they have had in the city.

Yet both because of, and despite, state invention, class happens in the countryside. Together these essays make clear that labor historians cannot think of class formation as a one-time, triumphal process. Classes form in the countryside but they also unravel. States help build classes and destroy them, sometimes at the barrel of a gun, sometimes simply by letting prices fall or borders open. Just in the last decade, Keith Breckinridge notes, the labor movement in South Africa has been transformed from a “tightly organized and militant nationwide union movement in the factories, mines and townships” to a struggling movement “battling to hold on to its political place in the face of an increasingly confident state and crippling economic and technological changes.” We can lament these changes as a crisis for class formation—it is certainly a crisis for the workers thrown out of work—or we can ask how class formation will change as a result of organized industrial workers' diffusion into the countryside. Likewise, we can mourn the American union movement's half-century decline and declare a crisis for the field of labor history or we can widen our lens to see class formation in its latest state of being: among Guatemalan peasants in North Carolina's poultry plants, among Mexican migrants working in Los Angeles's hotel rooms, and in an immigrant “freedom ride” across the United States.

In Latin America, where, as Steve Striffler points out, industrialization has been a relatively minor factor, class movements have always been primarily agrarian movements. Yet Striffler's article also reveals the interconnections between rural and urban mobilizations. Javier Alvaro moved easily from rural movements to urban unions, adapting the struggle for survival and justice to whichever circumstance he found himself. What, we might ask, have rural people brought to urban struggles, besides pre-industrial work habits? What knowledge, expectations, and practices do they take back with them to the farm?

Finally, by considering the countryside and the city, those who migrated and those who did not, these articles challenge us to remember that both migration and class formation are highly gendered experiences. Samita Sen reveals, for example, that as a result of legislation restricting women's mobility and colonial authorities' support for men's power over “their” households, by the early twentieth century women in northeast India were less mobile and less likely to be paid for the work they did than they had been in the mid-nineteenth century. The male “peasant-proletariat” so often discussed by Indian scholars could survive in the city only because women were increasingly bound to the farm and to unpaid work. The proletariatization of Indian men, in other words, depended in part on the deproletariatization of women.

Given women's very different experience of work and migration, we must therefore ask again whether women's experience of class formation is different from men's. “Class emerged from the interaction between rural and urban work, between labor market and community, and in the clash of representations about poor people,” writes Toby Higbie. How, then, did class happen among the women who remained behind as their fathers, sons, brothers and husbands, went on the tramp?

Clearly, the breadth, depth, and subtlety of all these papers suggests that what labor history needs is not another obituary, but a birth announcement for a new, richer, and more inclusive field.