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In this brief essay, we suggest that contemporary efforts at reworking Leon Trotsky's theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) are enriched by an historical ethnographic lens focused on "real people doing real things," which grounds and de-fetishizes the abstractions of capitalist development. We sketch three ways to develop UCD to better apprehend contemporary capitalism: tracing the effects of unevenness and combination within social formations; pointing to the ways those processes fracture historical consciousness; and underscoring the political implications for dividing populations and for creating novel combinations of people and socio-political experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on fieldwork in the majority Latinx (gender-neutral Latinos/as) rust-belt city of Reading and the majority white suburbs and rural towns of Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States, where three social movement groups are forging a left/liberal alignment. A history of uneven economic and social development in Reading/Berks underlies current divisions that confront the social movement organizations. Scholars grapple with bringing capital's non-waged and marginalized "others" into class analysis, and they remap class stuggles to account for capital's many laborers. The article proposes to apprehend how class is formed by combining difference, in the medium of time, and through political struggle. It explores the hidden relations among diverse populations and highlights the political moments that bring those connections to the fore at a specific historical conjuncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: community organizations; elections; radicalism; politics; social movements EN community organizations elections radicalism politics social movements 32 40 9 02/20/21 20210101 NES 210101 Graph: Sharryn KasmirYouth leaders of the March Against White Supremacy address protesters on July 8, 2020, in front of City Hall, Reading, Pennsylvania. The recent trajectory of progressive political capacity in both Reading and Berks County, including the consolidation of a radical reformist position, offers a window on trends nationwide.[4] About Reading and Berks Reading is a rust-belt city of row homes and red brick factories and warehouses. 8 Steve Striffler, "The Left, Labour, and the Future of U.S. Radicalism: The Struggle for Immigrant Rights", I New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry i 7, no. 1 (2014): 6-15. 9 Penn State Berks, "Through the Eyes of Local African Americans: Reflections on the Civil Rights Movement in Reading and Berks", available at https://sites.psu.edu/localhistories/books/african-american/. [Extracted from the article]

Although concerns about complexity and multiplicity have long been at the core of ethnographic research, this article moves beyond such descriptive terms and develops a theoretically engaged concept of unevenness and combination. We argue that unevenness is not just the outcome of capitalist development; it is politically momentous. Unevenness emerges from the struggle between capital and labor and from the historically specific ways that they configure social space. Because power coalesces in some places and social relationships and networks become dense, whereas they recede in other places, we need to understand how labor contributes to making these lumps and how the differentiated parts of a causally interactive world combine and intertwine to create novel social, cultural, and political configurations. We can then better understand the current moment in which labor is fragmented and differentiated. The analysis draws on case studies of the Saturn automobile factory in Tennessee and the oil export enclave of Barrancabermeja in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the case for considering 'unevenness' as a central theoretical concept for anthropology. By closely examining three case studies, from Latin American and the US, we develop a fourfold approach to the study of unevenness: the histories of particular connections and disconnections; spatial/scalar differentiation; state formation; and the development of labor. This approach is located at the intersection of history, geography, and anthropology and, we contend, is particularly useful for exploring the political struggles that lie at the heart of capitalist development and that unfold over time and across space in divergent, irregular ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the case of the Mondragon cooperatives around the world to examine the feasibility of worker-owned cooperatives as a business model as of January 2016. Also cited are the move by the United Steel Workers (USW) union to partner with Mondragon Corp. in 2009 to evaluate the feasibility of unionized co-operatives, and the various subsidiaries and partnerships by Mondragon, including the supermarket chain Eroski.

The article discusses thoughts of anthropologists on new culturalism and capitalism. Topics discussed include approach with new configurations of capitalism, world historical anthropology which uses case studies to make new discoveries about nature and dynamics of processes, tracing connections between capital accumulation and everyday lives on the basis of class, labor and social reproduction and restrain to capitalism with social structures and communist ideas.