“No one actually starves”?: from proletariat to working class and back again

These articles join a now extensive literature providing evidence that the way people pursue their livelihood is uncomfortably described as labour in the way it was spoken of by Braverman or Burawoy, and they offer both correctives to past studies and proposals for new ways of thinking and theorizing. Here I suggest that they encourage us to think of the scale of the historical past we, consciously or unconsciously, use as the base from which we make our comparisons. Similarly it is worth reflecting on spatial differences in the global political economy and how these have been re-thought. In a final part of the paper, I reflect on what I call ‘internal solidarity’ and how it might relate to class collectivity.