State socialism, like capitalism, relied for its functioning on certain “background conditions of possibility” (N. Fraser). These include the unpaid and frequently invisible reproductive labor of rural women, who not only raised new cohorts of workers but also fed and clothed their families with little help from the state. They also include “free gifts of nature” (J. B. Foster): the use of nature as a source of cheap inputs and as pollution sink. In this talk, I focus on rural women’s “muck work:” the back-breaking and time-consuming work of producing manure in order to maintain soil fertility under conditions of hyper-intensive agriculture.

Jacob Eyferth is a social historian of twentieth-century China interested in the lives of non-elite people. His first book, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots, is an ethnographic history of a community of papermakers in Sichuan. He is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Cotton, Gender, and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China.