• Age: 18
• Grade: 12

In recent years anthropologists have focused on informal, unfree, and other nonnormative labor arrangements and labeled them as "noncapitalist." In Along the Integral Margin, Stephen Campbell pushes back against this idea and shows that these labor arrangements are, in fact, important aspects of capitalist development and that the erroneous "noncapitalist" label contributes to obscuring current capitalist relations.

Through powerful, intimate ethnographic narratives of the lives and struggles of residents of a squatter settlement in Myanmar, Campbell challenges narrow conceptions of capitalism and asserts that nonnormative labor is not marginal but rather centrally important to Myanmar's economic development. Campbell's narrative approach brings individuals who are often marginalized in accounts of contemporary Myanmar to the forefront and raises questions about the diversity of work in capitalism.

Stephen Campbell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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This introductory lesson in historical economics goes beyond the simple linear approach, its purpose being to highlight, in modern times, a systemic contradiction between elites and workers, a truncated relationship that the author qualifies as " passive revolution".