The plight of late industrializers: what if peasants do not want to move to cities? — Branko Milanovic

A very interesting post.

The author fails to discuss the the situation with China, however, perhaps owing to limited scope.  The Chinese situation is interesting in that prior to Deng's reforms, China was a country dominated by poor peasants. The way that the contemporary Chinese government is dealing this is is building cities and requiring people to move to them. There is apparently not much resistance owing to the extreme poverty of the countryside. This was inevitable in the move to industrialized agriculture, where peasant labor was made grossly inefficient.

Something similar happened in the US fairly recently. The industrialization of agriculture all but eliminated the family farm as a viable income source owing to efficiencies of scale and technology.

Global Inequality
The plight of late industrializers: what if peasants do not want to move to cities?
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The Global Industrial Working Class — Alejandro Reuss interviews Immanuel Ness

Alejandro Reuss: You’ve written that there are more industrial workers in the world today than ever before. Can you explain how that growth has occurred and how it has reshaped the world’s industrial working class in recent decades?

Immanuel Ness: Yes, there are two major factors. The first is the deindustrialization of the traditional industries in North America and Western Europe—garment manufacturing, electronics, automobiles and other heavy industry—and the relocation of those industries in the global South—Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia, as well as to some extent Latin America. As a consequence, the latter regions have become major centers of production and export. And as part of that, the number of manufacturing workers there has grown dramatically.

The second factor is that, within industrializing countries like India, China, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, there has been a dramatic urbanization forced by the end of productive farming in rural areas. Many of the working peasants have been moving into urban centers where there are concentrations of industry. So while many in North America and Western Europe would say “the industrial working classes is virtually dead,” I would make the case that there are in fact more industrial workers on the planet today than anytime in human history.

Roughly speaking, the industrial working class has grown over the last 50 years from somewhere around 200 million to nearly a billion people. Of course, that doesn’t include other workers outside of manufacturing. The process has been unrelenting, and is bringing a number of Marxist arguments about capitalist globalization to fruition: Workers are engaged in very significant industrial struggles in places like New Delhi, Shenzhen, Cairo, and beyond....

I would argue that there are leading imperialist powers—the United States, especially—that engage in economic forms of imperialism and ensure that it takes place through military expansion and financialization.…

There is a form of financialization that starts from the early 20th century, when German banks were investing in Russia, and now we have this taking place on a global scale. And in many ways, it is contributing to a politicization of working-class people around the world.…

Worth reading in full. Is capitalism entering its final phase in Marxian terms as the world industrializes?

Triple Crisis
The Global Industrial Working Class

Alejandro Reuss interviews Immanuel Ness, professor of political science at Brooklyn College the City University of New York and the author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto Press, 2015)

Matias Vernengo — Ben Franklin, Consumption and the Industrial Revolution

Short history lesson and some useful links if you don't already have them.

Naked Keynesianism
Ben Franklin, Consumption and the Industrial Revolution
Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, University of Utah