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Emma Teitelman, McGill University
This paper examines political struggles over the boundaries between the state and capital, the economic and non-economic, and work and home in Arizona’s mining towns at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses in particular on the politics of water, a scarce resource that was important both to mining companies’ productive processes and to workers’ domestic consumption. By the late nineteenth century, this resource came to be effectively monopolized by mining corporations, who owned workers’ housing, charged heavy fees for water use, and thus reaped profits not only at the point of production but also from working people’s social reproduction. This paper shows how capitalists came to exert this power during the Gilded Age, an era of rapid privatization of natural resources. It then tracks how workers’ struggles over conditions at the mines expanded into broader struggles over the social geographies of corporate power. By tracing working people’s efforts to make water a public good, rather than a privately-controlled commodity, this paper offers broader conclusions about the history of progressive reformism in this period. Key to this movement, it argues, were struggles to de-commodify the means of social reproduction and expand the state’s role in managing those spheres of life. It was on this terrain of social reproduction that a political restructuring of the capitalist order began to take hold in the twentieth century.
No extended abstract or paper available
Presented in Session 56. Critical Perspectives on U.S. Historical Development