This talk draws on a forthcoming book, to be published by Verso Books.  The title a deliberate nod to E.P. Thompson’s classic Making of the English Working Class.  The English working class constituted the paradigmatic proletariat in the initial stages of industrial capitalism in the West.  I use it as a lens for examining the emergence of another proletariat of global significance on the opposite edge of the Eurasian landmass, one that is emblematic of capitalism’s latest stage.  Thompson framed his analysis in terms of the Enclosure Movement, which expropriated peasants of their land and left them with no option but to sell their labor.  In China, too, there is occurring a similar dispossession of peasantry that is sometimes described as a New Enclosure Movement.  However, processes that took place over a period of some three centuries in England have been telescoped into just three decades in China.  Moreover, they are taking place in the opposite order:  the initial commodification of industrial labor in the 1990s was accompanied by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of migrant laborers into cities even without the large-scale commodification of rural land.  Why, then, dispossess a peasantry that has already submitted to capital voluntarily, i.e., under economic duress without the need to resort to forcible dislocation? 

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About the speaker: 

Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He received an A.B. and M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Prior to joining Penn he was the Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law at Emory University.  He is the author of The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: The Global Limits of Capitalism (forthcoming by Verso Books, 2026) and Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Harvard University Press, 2013).  He is also co-author of Schlesinger’s Comparative Law (Foundation Press, 2009) as well as a co-editor of (with David L. Eng and Shuang Shen) of a special double issue of the journal Social Text on “China and the Human.”