Waiting for the call to prayer: Exploitation, accumulation and social reproduction in rural Java

This article analyses processes of exploitation, accumulation and social reproduction in rural Java. Using fieldwork in a primarily agrarian and a predominantly non-agrarian village, it underlines the ways in which pluri-active labouring class households contribute to processes of accumulation through a variety of forms of petty self-employment and wage-labour–above all sharecropping and female homework, which is interwoven seamlessly with reproductive labour. Agrarian accumulation is dominated by traders and absentee capitalist landowners. Forms of exploitation are linked to petty capitalism's relationship to capital-in-general. The article briefly discusses the potential for labouring class collective action given the villages' relatively flat social structures.