Rethinking informal labor in peripheral capitalism: the dynamics of surplus, market, and spatiality

ABSTRACT

The paper presents a critique of the discourse of precarity that assumes that regulated era labor relations in advanced capitalist economies represent the norm, while ‘irregular work’ represents a historical aberration under capitalist employment. We argue that this approach fails to inform labor theorists in any meaningful way as it conceals the differences in the social relations under which work is performed. The catchall term ‘precarious labor’ makes it difficult to design policies for specific social groups who are non-homogenous in social relations. We propose a Marxian socio-spatial class framework that gives visibility to three key dimensions: 1) the manner in which surpluses are produced, appropriated, and distributed during the labor process; 2) the spatial component of where work is performed, and 3) the degree of market-orientation. Recognizing on the one hand that precarity will always be a ubiquitous feature of capitalist labor markets, and  that there are differences within forms of work depending on the social context and location of work on the other, has a number of benefits for contemporary debates. These include a better appreciation of the multiplicity of processes in which labor participates and generates radically new ways of thinking about anti-capitalist resistance across national boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarious Labor
• informality
• marx
• peripheral Capitalism
• socio-spatial dialectic
• class analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their insightful comments that help us improve the paper. Hamza Aurangzaib provided excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. International Labor Organization Report ‘Measuring Informality: A statistical manual on the informal sector and informal employment’.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Marx uses the German word Mehr (literally ‘more’) which has been translated into English as ‘surplus’.

7. As pointed out in Section II, the raison d’etre of accounting for informal production in official policy circles was to include them in national income accounts.

8. Another possibility would be that the improved connectivity makes it much more profitable for the landholders to use wage-laborers rather than sharecroppers to produce crops. As a result, sharecroppers would be evicted.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. For example, drawing on Marx’s discussion on class struggles in ancient Greece and Rome, Lukacs points out that when street peddlers would find themselves in the precarious position of falling to the ranks of the lumpen, the chief manifestation of class struggles in those states was often those between ‘creditors’ and ‘debtors’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shahram Azhar

Shahram Azhar is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Bucknell University.

Danish Khan

Danish Khan is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of Franklin & Marshall College, PA, USA