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This article emphasizes the withdrawal of women from African politics due to their marginalization by male-dominated states that ignore women's social needs. Women's seeming withdrawal from politics has been explained by reference to the introduction of a public/private dichotomy in social relations that legitimizes the construction of politics as a male domain and relegates women to the domestic sphere. Women's organizations are seen as frequently dominated by elite women who follow the imperatives of male politicians. The gendered pattern of proletarianization exist in the state, in which men were generally proletarianized earlier and to a greater degree than women through forced or migrant labor. As a result, women remain concentrated in subsistence and petty commodity production and trading. The notion of women's political withdrawal is problematic in a number of respects. Methodologically, the infrequent occurrence of mass women's protests does not simply imply that they are politically negligible or that women's political behavior should be characterized by withdrawal. Such an assumption implies a unilinear relationship between the quantity or frequency of a political phenomenon and its qualitative effects. Moreover, it dichotomizes the norms and extremes of political consciousness and action.

The article explores the adaptive and non-adaptive strategies of deproletarianization that were followed by Jewish immigrants in Palestine from 1882 to 1914. The process of proletarianization is accounted for by the historical transformation of the feudal mode of production. By means of precapitalist modes of production that eroded the feudal system, feudalism gave way to a new system, via an intermediate stage of proto-industrialization. In 1880, Palestine was made up of elements from various provinces of the Ottoman Empire wherein a primarily prebendial feudal mode of production prevailed. Feudalism in Palestine was the realm of opportunities that involuntarily made it possible for the Jewish immigrants to initiate a settler capitalization that in fact started as a proto-capitalist formation. From the beginning of colonization in Palestine, unpropertied Jewish immigrant families joined the Moshavot. Because of their limited economic capacity they constituted, as an actual proletariat, the embryo of a potential Jewish working class. The economic incapacity of these immigrants was the primary factor in their being forced to become day laborers. This was subsequently reflected in their living conditions and social status in the Moshavot. The immigrant workers in this situation did not want to remain day laborers. They chose an explicitly non-adaptive strategy and considered the Ikarim as their anticipated class. This practice of non-adaptation was evidenced by the workers' reluctance to accept their immediate position in the socio-economic system of the Moshavot. The immigrants of the Second Aliya brought with them working class ideology and a practical image of class organization, which they converted into working class political parties. They were conscious of their future position as proletariat. In fact, proletarization was a core component of their parties' ideology.

This article examines the structural relations between physicians and those who capitalize them in some of the most important types of medical settings and financing arrangements. As suggested by proletarianization theorists, physicians, like almost all other producers of commodities or services in advanced economies, have now become dependent on external sources of capital. Yet for reasons peculiar to medicine, providers of capital are not primarily capitalist employers and have been differentiated in a manner that significantly fragments their class-wide interests and weakens their capacity to manage physicians' work. Historically, proletarianization has meant the emergence of a production system in which producers become wage-employees, dependent on their employer to provide capital for two fundamental purposes. The first was capitalization of the process of production itself. Because of mechanization and increased capital-intensiveness of production, producers were unable themselves to purchase necessary fixed-capital. Second, producers increasingly became dependent on external capital for mediation of the market. Geographical expansion as well as growing competition for local markets increased the capital required for recruitment, promotion, and distribution to the market.

The article focuses on the growing stratum of professional employees and ideological proletarianization and post-industrial labor. The importance of this stratum in advanced societies is highlighted by post-industrial theorists who identify the salaried professionals as the major protagonist of the coming post-industrial society and by Marxist theorists, including theorists of the new working class, professional-managerial class, new petty-bourgeoisie class, new class and others who also conceive the employed professional as a key new actor in contemporary capitalism. The argument here has been that professionals are increasingly subject to management control, but a different type than that experienced by industrial workers. The distinction between ideological and technical proletarianization points to both parallels and contrasts between industrial and professional workers and suggests limitations of the Marxist and post-industrial theories of professionals as currently formulated. Proletarianization theorists argue that professional autonomy, under the emerging conditions of proletarianization, assumes largely symbolic forms. Post-industrialist theorists have pointed out grave problems with simple analogies to craft proletarianization, however, and explicitly reject images of the factory or industrial life as appropriate to the description of the professional work-place.

The article focuses on Christopher Lasch's views on proletarianization of the working classes. Lasch begins by comparing the proletarianization of parenthood to the proletarianization of the working classes. In both cases people who controlled some body of traditional skifis, which only they could exercise through their own ingenuity, self-confidence and creative endeavor, had the rug pulled from under them by modern "technology" and its scientific-managerial "experts." What the subdivision of production, the parcellization of tasks, the outside interference by "labor-saving" technicians represented to the workers, is in the domain of family life matched by the psychiatric social workers. The most recent scholarship on schizophrenia, of which Lasch seems entirely unaware, denies specifically that a continuum exists between the normal and the schizophrenic family. Schizophrenia, as measured by the incidence of inpatient or out-patient admissions does not display strong differences between adult men and women, and is certainly not centered in some cross-sex deviance between mothers and sons, as Lasch would have it.