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To date, the expansive social science literature on artisanal and small‐scale mining (ASM) in Africa has received little attention from scholars of agrarian political economy. This paper attempts to bridge this gap, based on an in‐depth study of ASM in South Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The main argument is that the capital–labour social relation underpinning ASM in South Kivu has facilitated the emergence of a capitalist managerial class of dynamic and prosperous rural Congolese. This class has, in turn, been driving increasing sectoral productivity via technological assimilation and capital formation, while also making commercial and productive investments in other, non‐mining sectors. Drawing from the findings, the common conceptualisation of African ASM as a low productivity, subsistence activity is questioned, and the perception in the existing literature that African ASM miners and foreign mining corporations are not in competition for the same mineral deposits is challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the trajectories of Norwegians who, in their late‐thirties, possessed financial assets, such as securities, company shares and stocks, qualifying them as the wealthiest one percent nationally. We describe the accumulation of financial wealth over a 25‐year period in adulthood and study how different wealth sequences are linked to family origins and kinship ties. Although some Norwegians manage to build up large fortunes from relatively modest starting points over their life courses, we find that the value of the assets possessed by self‐made individuals, and their ability to retain wealth over time, differ significantly to those based on dynastic lineage. Among the latter group, profound wealth early in adulthood and strategic positions in the economy add to propel exponential ownership of financial wealth from a young age and throughout adulthood. This chimes with C. Wright Mills' suggestion that the amassing of great fortunes is driven by two mechanisms of the big jump that enables initial asset build‐up, and the accumulation of advantages that flows from advantageous economic and social ties. Kinship seems of key importance to ensure the efficacy of both mechanisms. Differences in the relationship of wealth accumulation and class origin seem to have little to do with educational strategies. We draw attention to direct wealth transfers and the institution of marriage as two little explored dimensions involved in dynastic closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the consequences of Zimbabwe's land reform for the dynamics of differentiation in Zimbabwe's countryside, reporting on the results from a 10-year study from Masvingo province. Based on a detailed analysis of livelihoods across 400 households at 16 sites, the paper offers a detailed typology of livelihood strategies, linked to a class-based analysis of emerging agrarian dynamics. The paper identifies a significant and successful 'middle farmer' group, reliant on 'accumulation from below' through petty commodity production, existing alongside other worker-peasants and the semi-peasantry, whose livelihoods remain vulnerable, with prospects for accumulation currently limited. In addition, there are others who are 'accumulating from above', through patronage and corruption. While small in number, this group has significant political and economic influence, and is embedded in powerful alliances that have fundamental impacts on the wider political-economic dynamics. To conclude, the economic, social and political implications of the emerging patterns of differentiation in Zimbabwe's countryside are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews changing Marxian conceptions of the generation and meaning of capitalist crises. In 1848 Marx and Engels expected increasingly severe cyclical downturns to produce increasingly active revolutionary proletarian organization. Their expectations were informed by the thesis that capitalism, like feudalism, would unleash growth in the forces of production incompatible with its own relations of production. While Marx's own hopes for the transformative effects of crises were soon quieted, various traditions from the 1870s into the twenty-first century took as their central task the demonstration that capitalist development inevitably produces ever-deepening crisis tendencies. The article reviews both traditional and variant frameworks with an eye to their effect on the anti-capitalist imagination. Do they suggest that class transformation might be possible and desirable here and now? Or is it possible only in a dimly imaginable future, requiring the sort of epoch-initiating assumption of state power originally envisioned in 1848? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]