“Completely Free”: How a Subsumption of Labour and Nature Framework Explains the Surprising Expressions of “Freedom” by Immigrant Worm pickers in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Canadian nightcrawler ( Lumbricus terrestris ) worms, the most popular live bait for recreational freshwater anglers, are hand‐picked from Ontario dairy farmers’ fields by an immigrant labour force working in the middle of the night with limited equipment. Though no picker enjoys the arduous activity of picking worms, they do express feelings of “freedom” and “autonomy” in the job. Such expressions are surprising coming from mostly non‐English‐speaking immigrants, labouring with bent backs under dreary conditions producing profit for their employers in an unregulated industry. To understand these counterintuitive conceptions of freedom, I connect debates around “un/free labour” and “constrained agency” with the Marxist concepts of formal and real subsumption of labour and nature to reveal how the ecological conditions of commodity production shape capitalist control over labour. I argue worm‐picker agency should be understood by seeing how the subsumption of labour is related to the subsumption of nature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".