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  • Much Marxist literature on industrialization has assumed that production has been carried out on an increasingly large-scale, centralized basis since the nineteenth century, and that as workers become concentrated together in production, and as the labour process becomes more uniform, there is a homogenization of the working class . This thesis challenges these assumptions and attempts to develop a critical, Marxist anthropology of industry and labour through an examination of the clothing industry and clothing workers in Quebec. In the 19th century the clothing industry in Quebec developed largely on the basis of outwork and sub-contracting. This hindered the development of large-scale factory production, and created a fragmerited, dispersed labour force. ln the 1930s, clothing workers responded to the decentralization of production and intense competition between clothing manufacturers by organizing unions, but these tended to reinforce the occupational, gender and ethnic divisions within the labour force. These dynamics are examined in their contemporacy form in the context of a clothing factory where the production process is sub-divided into distinct phases which separate workers by gender, occupational category, and department. Workers reinforce this fragmentation by defining their interests on the basis of their occupational group. Within the largest group, the female sewing machine operators, competition between individual operators combines with an informal ethnic division of labour to further separate workers from one another. Analysis of the structure of the clothing industry shows that not aIl capitalist production is increasingly large-scale or centralized. And rather than being increasingly homogeneous, the clothing proletariat is is marked by a nincreasingly hierarchical and heterogeneous organnization.

Last update from database: 9/11/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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