Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism
... Simultaneously, objective violence can remain dispersed and hidden, not attributable to a single actor (Gupta, 2012). Sanyal (2007) argues that in the post-colony, power operates through bureaucratic administration that legitimizes capitalist accumulation while managing dispossession through depoliticized development interventions. Here, Foucault's (1981) concept of 'biopolitics' explains how liberal capitalism controls the population, not through absolutist violence, but with diverse technologies to govern the biological, social, and economic life of subjects. ...
... While the postcolonial state's development discourse articulated capitalist accumulation with welfare measures (Sanyal, 2007), the neoliberal state promotes market-based poverty alleviation while privatizing the commons and withdrawing welfare (Banerjee and Jackson, 2017). Alongside ascendant monopoly capital, the working class faces a sustained weakening (Patnaik, 2024). ...
... Further, the informal sector is not a space of transition -'waiting to be developed'. It is the very product of development (Sanyal, 2007). The informal is constitutive of the formal, as seen in the waste sector, where informal entities service domestic and international corporations (Gidwani, 2015). ...
This study focuses on the people inhabiting an internal frontier of global capital marked by the zone of a waste landfill and its surrounding industrial belt. While the external frontiers of capitalist accumulation are traceable to identifiable corporations, internal frontiers involve ambiguous work and organizational relations. We draw on fieldwork at a settlement near a waste landfill in Ahmedabad, India. We weave research on infrastructures with organizational studies of violence to examine the (re-) production of these internal frontiers. We show how the state and private actors inflict socio-economic ruination and govern through infrastructural violence – such as exclusions from public infrastructures, proliferating private infrastructures, and exposure to toxic infrastructures – to produce the internal frontier. Residents endure life through the reparative infrastructural work of salvaging and patching infrastructures. We contribute to organizational research on violence by highlighting the under-theorized internal frontiers of global capital that comprise large swathes of the population. Further, using infrastructure as an analytic lens, we open new terrains of inquiry into work and organizing in the capitalist mode of production. We show how reparative infrastructural work at the internal frontier transgresses Global North-centric formulations of work. We advance nascent organization studies on majoritarian political formations.
... In a stark departure from standard economic theory that views the phenomenal expansion of India's informal economy as incidental to India's spectacular economic growth, some economists have argued that the Indian economy thrives on a deliberate inability to accommodate most of the country's population in the formal economic sector (Bhattacharya & Sanyal, 2011;Sanyal, 2007). According to them, the Indian economy -as part of a postindustrial global economy -works through two parallel registers of 'accumulation' and 'need.' ...
... According to them, the Indian economy -as part of a postindustrial global economy -works through two parallel registers of 'accumulation' and 'need.' As Sanyal (2007) discusses, the 'economy of accumulation' is an exclusionary apparatus centered on the desire to create surplus wealth for industrial development. Its requirements for an unending supply of land and mineral wealth are met by dispossessing subaltern populations in rural and urban areas using colonial laws of 'eminent domain' that continually usurp resources. ...
... Marx defines primitive accumulation as the historical process of separating the producer from his land and means of production, this dispossessed producer is absorbed in the capitalist system as a 'free' wage labourer (Marx 1887). However, this analysis is limited to early industrial Europe, where states managed dispossessed populations through emigration, conscription and so on (Sanyal 2007;Chatterjee 2017). In India, primitive accumulation is not only a precursor to capitalist production but an ongoing feature of it (D'Costa and Chakraborty 2017). ...
... In India, primitive accumulation is not only a precursor to capitalist production but an ongoing feature of it (D'Costa and Chakraborty 2017). Kalyan Sanyal's concept of 'need economy' explicates the excluded space where dispossessed people are relegated (Sanyal 2007). ...
The movement against land acquisition for industrialization in Singur (2006–2008) became emblematic of the defeat of CPI(M) in West Bengal—the longest democratically elected communist regime in the world. A decade later, in 2018, CPI(M) organized a farmers' rally from Singur, demanding industrialization and jobs. This article engages with this narrative of ‘demand for industrialization’ and asks why farmers who had opposed land acquisition for industry a decade ago have started supporting industry now. Amid an ongoing wave of political change, the demand for industry emerges as a hope for the future rising from its own ashes. This article also engages with the classical agrarian question to argue that today, the transition to industrialization occurs not due to agricultural surplus but due to agricultural economic insecurities. This article critically explores the relationship between industrialization and agricultural productivity.
... One cannot but agree with Aiyar's diagnosis of the underlying malaise of an economic model which has not generated sufficient employment resulting in the development of the compensatory state (Aiyar, 2023, quoting Rathin Roy). Indeed, years before, Kalyan Sanyal and Partha Chatterjee made a similar argument of the relationship between the formal sector and the informal sector (with 92 % of the working population), characterized by 'corporate' and 'non-corporate' capital, respectively, and mediated in the governmentalized space of political society wherein population groups negotiated for benefits with the state (Sanyal, 2007, Chatterjee, 2004. However adopting a feminist perspective that draws on social reproduction theory, illuminated in turn by empirical research problematises various assumptions of Aiyar's overarching critique. ...
... The new 2025 translation in English reads The Arcana rather than Arcane of Reproduction.6 See alsoBahduri and Banerjee (2025), on how these processes are further accelerated by contemporary internal colonisation within surplus economies like India.7 KalyanSanyal (2007) partially grasps this, in his analysis of postcolonial capitalism. However, by stressing the duality between capitalist accumulation and a so-called 'needs economy', he also misses the broader, integrated reproductive role played by the latter in sustaining the former. ...
Reflecting a longstanding intellectual heritage in Marxist political economy, contributions to agrarian studies have variously referred to the production, distribution and extraction of value. Despite this central role within the heritage of agrarian studies, the concept of value is often used inconsistently between authors and sometimes deployed without clear elucidation of the underlying theoretical tenets. As such, value often tends to be used more as a metaphor suggestive of conditions of exploitation rather than a detailed conceptual framework. In response, we must ask if there is still a robust case for value analysis forming a foundational pillar of agrarian studies? To address this challenging question, we invited three authors to give their perspective on the value of value for agrarian studies. First and foremost, we asked them to consider what value analysis does that is otherwise missed in critical agrarian studies and how we can mobilise its potential to sharpen analyses. Two further pivotal questions arise, spurred on by recent trends in the literature. First, to what extent do the categories of value enrich or hinder our evolving understanding of the dynamics of social reproduction within agrarian households and communities, including the gendered relations through which agriculture and livelihoods are performed? Similarly, are the largely anthropogenic concepts of value fit for the purpose of explaining environmental change and the more‐than‐human dynamics through which agricultural landscapes are produced and change over time?
... While these insights have been central in illuminating the disciplinary implications of racialized border control and the productive dimensions of migrant "illegality" for capitalist exploitation, a large proportion of the migrant population still remains trapped in a position of liminal legality, unable to be absorbed into the labor market even as highly exploitable workforce. In the Global North's externalized borderlands-from Kenya to Turkey and from Libya to Jordan-heightened border enforcement and immobilization have led to the emergence of semipermanent transit spaces where wageless migrants, often legally recognized as asylum seekers, stateless, temporary guests, and subsidiaries of international protection, are sustained primarily through humanitarian aid, familial networks, and limited access to the informal "needs economy" (Sanyal, 2007). This persistent reality compels us to seriously examine the place of humanitarized migrants in contemporary racial capitalism. ...
This article explores humanitarian-development responses to displacement as postcolonial modes of security within actually existing racial capitalism. Focusing on Greece's “Emergency Support to Integration and Accommodation” program, it provides insight into “make-live” interventions that temporarily subsidize stranded migrants’ social reproduction at Europe's frontiers. The article argues that development-led refugee-hosting strategies, marketed as win–win solutions for both “hosted” and “hosting” communities, actually serve a twofold function: containing racially subordinate outsiders and compensating so-called transit countries for taking up the task of “keeping out by keeping alive.” By minimally supporting migrants’ social reproductive needs within designated territories, the racial biopolitics of the humanitarian-development nexus brings surplus populations into the fold of local capital accumulation while sustaining the global color line. Analyzing the refugee humanitarian-development nexus as a spatioracial fix that harnesses the vital capacities of surplus populations, the article seeks to: invite discussion on the social reproduction of populations violently cast out of the wage relation; theorize racial capitalism beyond metropolitan centers and their (post)colonial borderlands, highlighting the role of intermediary spaces as crucial nodes of georacial and capitalist stabilization; and demonstrate how the dialectic between humanitarianism and rentier economies embeds new racialized hierarchies between crisis-affected local “hosts” and surplused migrant “guests.”
... Examining the logic of accountability can essentially shed light not only on the degree of fulfilment of promises but also reflects accountability in the domain of education. Sanyal (2007) examines the nature of the post-colonial capitalist state and governmentality in the country. The Indian state preserves the need economy or subsistence economy to sustain a large section of the masses. ...
This paper explores the crucial aspects of promissory representation in India, particularly attempting to analyse the degree of electoral accountability in the domain of education, as manifested by the BJD (Biju Janata Dal) and TMC (Trinamool Congress), two incumbent regional parties in the states of Odisha and West Bengal. Political parties make numerous electoral pledges when contesting elections; however, after forming the government, there is a perceived lack of political will and effective policy formulations to fulfil the pledged promises, thus eroding the notion of electoral accountability. This paper undertakes a survey research approach with the collection and analysis of responses from a sample of 200 beneficiaries of the educational accessories" support / scholarship programmes (Gangadhar Meher Shiksha Manukbrudhi Yojana and Kanyashree Prakalpa) of the two states. By investigating the party"s degree of fulfilment of electoral pledges, and the consequent beneficiaries" perception of the party"s accountability, this paper endeavours to provide insights on the relation between accountability in education, the degree of political awareness of voters and their consequential relation to the electoral accountability of parties. This in turn reflects the status of accountable governance in Odisha and West Bengal, from which broader generalisations may be drawn for the Indian context.
... Formality, while presented as attainable, however, does not result in complete integration or exclusion of surplus labour, but rather, by creating the expectation of inclusion, serves as a vehicle for expanded value capture. Following Kalyan Sanyal (2007) and Gargi Bhattacharyya (2018), they suggest that formality as an elusive goal follows the logics of racialized capitalism in procuring and disciplining cheap and precarious labour (Alessandrini et al. 2022). ...
... Another important dimension has been to incorporate colonialism as a central feature of development of global capitalism, along with the contemporary role of imperialism in shaping economies today (Luxemburg (1913(Luxemburg ( ) 1951Lenin 1937;Rodney [1972Rodney [ ] 2018Amin 1974;Patnaik and Patnaik 2021). Recent calls have pushed this forward to identify the specific dynamics of postcolonial economies, marked by dispossession without proletarianization, that cannot simply be analyzed as underdeveloped versions of advanced capitalist economies of today, but rather characterize the very dynamics of postcolonial capitalism (Sanyal 2013). These debates have challenged the Western-centric approaches to political economy and have, in response, reformulated and further developed the radical political economy frameworks. ...
... For a discussion on the idea of development as a politically contested space influencing the form that capitalism takes in postcolonial context, rather than the depoliticized version of the capitalist economic project, seeSanyal (2007).Chapter 11 Actually, the total amount of land obtained by the Senhuile-Senethanol consortium in Senegal might be greater and also include an additional 5,000 hectares granted in the community of Fass Ngom, also located in the Senegal delta, according to interviews conducted in October 2014 with members of the rural community. However, it was Authenticated maura.benegiamo@unipi.it/ ...
... The concept deconstructive creation contributes to debates around the urban waste economy and the relationship between waste and value. Scholars have particularly theorised the relationship between the formal and informal economy (Gidwani, 2015;Inverardi-Ferri, 2017;Samson, 2015;Sanyal, 2007) and the role of distributive labour and care work (Isenhour & Reno, 2019) in the formation of the urban waste economy. Deconstructive creation draws from the ruins of capitalist production and consumption and, in most of the exchanges that follow the point of transformation, a subsidiary and care economy is established that involves distributive labour (Ferguson, 2015) and acts of everyday communism (Graeber, 2010), at times even gift exchanges (Mauss, 1966), all of which constitute value alternative to capitalism and are not based on self-interested accumulation but rather on mutually ...
The study consists of an ethnographic inquiry into the waste reuse practices performed by the urban waste precariat on the landfill and streets of Pretoria East, City of Tshwane. I analyse the contribution of this social grouping to the urban circular economy and environment by conceptualising of these waste reuse practices as value-production processes not rooted in capitalism, practised outside of state and formal market recognition and support. I term these forms of existing circularity “outside-circularity” and identify an alternative value-production process termed “deconstructive creation”. The deconstructive creation process produces life from capitalist ruins, an alternative form of value to capitalism. This form of value draws on new formations of kinship and exchanges in a subsidiary and care economy, and functions on principles of everyday communism. Life from the capitalist ruins finds expression in two ways. Firstly, urban life that is more than mere material sustenance is produced, and a form of social solidarity as new kinship formations develop between Zimbabwean migrants in the City of Tshwane. Secondly, urban space is produced in the form of street craft markets and garden beautification to transform the suburban aesthetic.
... Structural heterogeneity often characterises the creation of mining enclaves − where capital intensive production exists alongside high labour surplus and petty production (Bond, 2006) and where only the enclaves are connected to global capital, rendering connections between areas of the global South and North patchy and uneven (Katz, 2022). From such a perspective, one would not expect unevenness to even out, but rather for it to be continually reproduced with capitalist development (Bhattacharya et al., 2023;Kesar, 2023;Sanyal, 2007). Even Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who had published several Southcentred texts on neo-colonialism and imperialism (e.g. ...
Reforms of mining sectors across the global South have facilitated unprecedented increases in mineral production since the 1980s (Hund et al., 2020). Such increases have supported the World Bank’s (2002, p. v) claim that major mining reforms centred on liberalisation and deregulation “not only attract private investment but provide the policy framework for that investment to contribute to development”. In this article, we interrogate what such an understanding of mining entails, how it has evolved in recent years, and the notion of economic development that underlies it.
We start by introducing the idea of Eurocentrism and how this relates to development in general before evaluating the extent to which the sub-discipline of development economics itself is Eurocentric. In doing so, we contribute to the growing research agenda on the decolonisation of economics that this special issue is a part of (Dutt et al., 2025, Goodacre, 2018, Kaul, 2007, Kvangraven and Kesar, 2021, Madra et al., 2025, Zein-Elabdin, 2009). Beyond assessing the general theoretical foundations of development economics, we also examine specific theoretical developments relevant for mining, namely the resource curse literature and the colonial turn in New Institutional Economics. We then move on to deconstruct the dominant approach to mining policy by unpacking the dominant policies of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and the assumptions that underpin them. Ghana is important for this investigation because the countries’ mining sector reforms are often held up by IFIs as the ‘gold standard’ to follow for other countries in the global South (Campbell, 2010, Gajigo et al., 2012). Therefore, we specifically interrogate how mining reform was conceived of and implemented in Ghana as a part of our evaluation of the dominant policy approach to mining reform in general.
Next, we lay out a radically different way of understanding mining in the global South from a non-Eurocentric starting point which draws on radical, South-centred political economy traditions. Mining is particularly useful to study from such a perspective, given its localized grounded operations that exist within national and global structures of accumulation that allow us to assess how capital accumulation is both locally grounded and shaped by global forces. To explore and illustrate the stakes of the theoretical debates, we focus specifically on the Obuasi mine in Southwestern Ghana’s Ashanti region managed by AngloGold Ashanti (AGA), formerly known as Ashanti Goldfields Corporation (AGC). AGA has long been Ghana's single largest gold producer, with its Obuasi mine being Ghana’s flagship mine since 1897 (Hilson, 2002; Taylor, 2006a). As such, AGC/AGA’s operations in Obuasi provide an illustrative case for exploring the dynamics of mining from a South-centred vantage point through different phases of global capitalism. Finally, we conclude with some general reflections on what these theoretical discussions and empirical findings mean for the field of development economics at large.
... Zweitens steht die global sinkende Nachfrage nach Arbeit in Diskrepanz zu einer parallel steigenden Freisetzung von Arbeitskraft durch die Zerstörung und Enteignung nicht-kapitalistischer Ökonomien und Güter (Sanyal 2007;Srnicek/Williams 2016, 142ff.). Weltweit wächst somit der Anteil der sogenannten "Surplus-Bevölkerung", die nur phasenweise, rudimentär oder gar nicht in formelle Erwerbsarbeitsverhältnisse integriert ist (Marx 1975, 670ff.). ...
The debate about the shortage of skilled workers in Germany obscures the broader issue of diminished labour demand in industrialized societies, which is reflected in underemployment, hidden unemployment and state-subsidized employment in addition to the consolidation of long-term unemployment. This article considers these developments as expressions of long-term structural changes in the labour market. They illustrate an increasing decoupling of global economic and employment trends and materialize disparately across geographical regions. By examining four structurally weak regions in Germany, the article explores the declining livelihood security and social integration through waged labour in rural peripheries. Local labour market policies respond to this crisis of social reproduction through contradictory "fixes". On the one hand, they seem to adhere to the wage norm, while on the other hand, they reorganize work in ways that weaken traditional forms of employed/waged labour. In this pendulum movement between softening and restoring the employment norm, the local welfare state itself becomes the co-producer of a post-wage-work society. The article shows how new forms of post wage work, under current conditions, go hand in hand with precarisation and impoverishment, while the contradictory approaches of local labour market policies simultaneously enable subversive and critical reinterpretations of wage labour. The latter, as this article concludes, should serve as the reference point for any future social policy aiming to enforce and realize the emancipatory potentials of a post-work society.
... Reclaimers who salvage recyclable and reusable materials are often upheld as emblematic of 'disposable people' or 'surplus populations' , who are assumed to be superfluous to the contemporary capitalist economy and social and political life (cf. Davis 2005;Giroux 2008;Li 2010;Sassen 2010;Sanyal 2014;Millar 2018). In perhaps the best-known example, Zygmunt Bauman (the academic most closely associated with the concept of 'human waste') famously asserts that in the modern era, 'the stage is set for the meeting of human rejects with the rejects of consumer feasts; indeed, they seem to have been made for each other' (Bauman 2004, 59). ...
Reclaimers who salvage recyclable and reusable materials are frequently upheld as emblematic of disposable ‘surplus populations’ considered superfluous to the contemporary capitalist economy and social and political life. Through analysis of how black reclaimers in South Africa revalue commodities that others have disposed as waste, this chapter exposes the patriarchal, white supremacist colonial assumption underpinning capital accumulation (which I argue has intensified in the current period of ‘disposability capitalism’) that subjugated people, nature, and commodities can be treated as disposable, understood not as excluded and unnecessary, but as simultaneously disposable and at capitalists’ disposal (hence exploitable). The chapter argues that analysis of reclaimers’ complex labour and organising facilitates a fundamental critique of the ideology and practice of disposability and ‘disposability capitalism’ and provides crucial insights into ways to struggle beyond them, as well as challenges in doing so.
... What is not explicit in the dominant view in development studies, in general, and development economics, in particular, is that development is essentially a surrogate the development of capitalism (Amin 1989;Escobar 2011;Rist 2014;Sanyal 2014). This is specifically because the theories and methodologies of economics have permeated other disciplines (Fine & Milonakis 2009;Lazear 2000), including development studies, and economic style of reasoning (Berman 2022) has established itself as the hegemonic way of thinking about policy. ...
The decolonisation of development studies and knowledge in general has become a very popular conversation. However, the idea of decolonisation is rather ill-defined in academia, with a variety of arguably unrelated initiatives being pursued in the interest of decolonising development studies. This paper defines what decolonising development studies entails by arguing that development studies is characterized by eurocentrism. Specifically, I argue that the idea of development in development studies is that of the development of capitalism, which is seen to have developed in Europe due to largely intrinsic European characteristics related to resource availability, labour productivity, and institutions. Therefore, much of the discourse of development is based on this implicit idea that the periphery can and should follow this path of progress. However, this is a path of development is mythical, and ignores the role played by colonialism and the slave trade, and the transformation of social relations. And since the Eurocentric understanding of the development of capitalism in the capitalist centre is the epistemological norm for development, the periphery can only be understood as aberrant from the ideal developmental norm. This compromises our understanding of the process of development. This article argues that decolonising development studies means dismantling the dominance of Eurocentric theories, methodologies, and approaches in development studies and to challenge the structural exclusions in development studies that supports and legitimizes Eurocentrism, and in turn, imperialism.
... 68), operating with different objectives/ agendas and serving different social groups. The first is government schools, which largely serve to manifest "welfare governmentality" (Sanyal 2007, as cited in the book) and appeal to the electoral base. The second is nonelite private schools, which cater to the aspirations of middle-class India. ...
... Notes 1. Less than the regulatory requirement to be termed as formal. 2. Interested readers can refer to the introduction of the book by Sanyal (2014) for various aspects of this debate. 3. ...
This article examines income disparities by considering both employer and employee perspectives of informality to scrutinize labor market segmentation in India. Additionally, the research investigates the impacts of varying degrees of urbanization, migration patterns, and industrial structures on formal and informal employment in the labor force. Utilizing data from the National Sample Survey Employment and Unemployment Survey rounds, specifically the 2004–2005 (61st) and 2011–2012 (68th) rounds, along with the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2018–2019 round, quantile regression models and the Recentred Influence Function decomposition method were employed to analyze wage inequality. A selection-corrected wage equation and its estimate were also presented by applying Bourguignon, Fournier, and Gurgand’s model-based selection correction. The study’s findings indicate that by 2019, the labor market had divided into two groups: organized formal workers and others. Further, the study reports wage convergence at lower quantiles and a widening gap at higher quantiles between organized formal and unorganized informal workers. Organized formal workers witness rising earnings, indicating positive wage growth, yet their share in overall employment remains small, which is significant given low job creation and high educated unemployment. At higher wage quantiles, there is a premium for being an informal worker in the organized sector compared to the unorganized sector, indicating a queue for formal employment opportunities in the organized sector. Despite the service sector’s significant role in Indian growth, it lags in creating formal job opportunities, unlike the manufacturing and construction sectors, which emphasize their substantial contribution to formal job generation. This study underlines that categorizing a firm as merely organized or a worker as formally employed is insufficient. Upgrades in these classifications should be accompanied by premiums, with wages being a key consideration.
JEL Classification J31, J42, J62, J71
... The processes of production and reproduction themselves are inter-connected. As Harriss-White (2012) and Sanyal (2014) point out, surplus generated through the production process in the PCP household-enterprise could be used for augmented consumption, which aids the expanded reproduction of household labour-power and thus enables future production processes, complicating the boundary of productive and reproductive expenses. ...
... For post-colonial democracies like India, this conceptualisation has been expanded further to denote a process of apparent reversal of the consequences of primitive accumulation and a distinct form of social governance. State power in post-colonial capitalism arguably assumes a dual role through governmentality: on the one hand it regulates class conflict by managing poverty and the social reproduction crises to prevent "people" from transforming into "dangerous classes," while on the other hand, it ensures continual surplus accumulation (see Sanyal 2007). In this context, the political legitimacy of a regime is garnered not through the participation of sovereign citizens but by providing "life support" to the "people" or the vast "reserve army of labour" which is deemed superfluous in post-colonial capitalism. ...
Considering the June 2024 general parliamentary election results in India, this article undertakes a broad discursive analysis of the parliamentary Communists, tracing their trajectory from the inception of independent India to the present day. It argues that the Communists have continued to oscillate between liberal and neo-liberal notions of “governmentality,” constrained by its perpetuation of “capitalo-parliamentarian” hegemony. Drawing parallels with B.R. Ambedkar’s dichotomies on liberal democracy, the article highlights that the shifts in capital–labour dynamics have further deepened this ideological vacillation of the Communists. The article suggests that to move forward, Indian Communists must choose between constitutional governmentality and extra-parliamentary interventions rooted in transformative class politics.
... In this paper we seek a non-essentialist Marxian epistemology to theorise this category of social need and place it in the Indian context (in close dialogue with non-Marxian epistemologies). This then amounts to two things: pointing out the need blindness in the traditional Marxian formulation and analysis made through class; as well as pointing out the class blindness in need formulations in hegemonic economic and development discoursesin failing to recognize how the conceptualization and 6 See Chakrabarti and Cullenberg (2003) and Sanyal (2007). satisfaction of needs can have a distinctive class character. ...
India’s transition has always been caught up in a ceaseless dialectic of both change and non-change; of movement and staticity; of the creation of a new order of things while simultaneously holding on to old institutions (such as state) and pervading relations (such as that of the capitalist class relations) – which we argue can best be revealed through a class-focused Marxian theory attuned to class process of surplus labor and need as entry-point concepts, while committing to a methodology of overdetermination. This paper poses a new problematique of the transition debate in India by re-formulating the relation between transition and development from the vantage point of social need. It argues that the incursion of social need in these debates, developed in the context of the hegemony of global capital and the unleashing of the forces of neoliberal globalization, is key to a radically different understanding of ‘transition’. In this context, we illustrate the role of class-need frame in interpreting some facets of Indian public policy on poverty, universal basic income and food security, and in the process underscore the process through which the continual recurrence of radicalized social needs gets dislocated into the hegemonic space. Our analysis reveals public policy to be a site of struggle over social needs, class distribution and developmental distribution. We end with a brief discussion on the justice question from the perspective of socialized political transformation in a postcapitalist direction. We argue on behalf of continuing class struggle over surplus for nonexploitative arrangements and distributional struggle for radical needs.
... For the rest of our expenses, we have to work on the plantation and crush stones by the river." This revelation and an emphasis on there is no other way point to the ubiquitous presence of a "need economy" (Sanyal, 2007). ...
In Assam state, northeastern India, human–elephant conflict mitigation has included technocentric measures, such as installation of barriers, alternative livelihoods, and afforestation. Such measures treat conflict as a technical problem with linear cause–effect relations and are usually ineffective over the long term because they do not consider how historical conditions have shaped present interactions between humans and elephants. Human–elephant encounters in South Asia, including in Assam, have arisen from colonial and postcolonial land‐use policies, ethnic relations, and capital extraction. To disentangle these relations, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Udalguri district of Assam among the Adivasi (Tea Tribe) to examine their interactions with wild elephants. Through socioecological ruptures, caused by displacement and deforestation, Adivasi (Tea Tribe) and elephant lives have intersected through space and time. Adivasi (Tea Tribe) life narratives and observations of daily encounters with elephants revealed that their interactions are multifaceted and motivated by multiple factors. Myths and oral testimonies revealed that the community has created conceptualizations of the elephant by closely observing their behavior, especially their movements, diets, vocalizations, and interactions with humans. These conceptualizations are filled with vignettes of shared marginalized lives, caused by the loss of homeland, food poverty, and uncertain ways of living. The empathy, expressed by the Adivasi (Tea Tribe), highlights ways of living with elephants that are affective and reach beyond technocentric interventions. For Adivasi (Tea Tribe) members, cohabitation could thus be achieved by living close to elephants as uneasy neighbors. Concepts of cohabitation, we suggest, could be harnessed to inform conservation policy and bring into focus the critically important—and yet often underutilized—values, encompassed by bottom‐up, place‐centric understandings of what elephants are and how coexistence may be possible in increasingly anthropogenic landscapes.
... Kalyan Sanyal(2014) has also contextualised the growth of the informal economy in the background of post-colonial development trajectory. However, his findings are different from those of Breman. ...
This paper attempts to look at the ways informality is conceptualized in India and argues that the problems with the laws pertaining to informal labour are not simply an implementation issue, but the design of the labour laws itself exclude informal labour. While reviewing the history of labour laws in India and the social history of labour participation, the paper also examines the current change in the political approach to labour by changing the labour laws in the pretext of the pandemic. Focussing on the changes made in labour laws in Madhya Pradesh the paper argues that these changes would further informalise the workers intensifying the crisis. The need to question informality becomes particularly important due to the events that unravelled after covid lockdown. Several post-lockdown incidents have highlighted the plight of workers, who have been left to their own devices, without any state support and forced to travel hundreds of kilometres to their homes. In the most tragic incident in this travail, 16 migrants attempting to return home were run over by a train in Aurangabad. The sight of hundreds of workers walking back home was not limited to a few locations but was seen across the country. The common thread that connects them is their dependence on the informal economy. However, as this paper attempts to elucidate, two other things cannot be overlooked. First, their life before the pandemic was defined by severe forms of precarity. Second, the post-lockdown distress which workers in the informal economy are facing has to do with structural factors that define the sector-unequal power relations, lack of job security, and absence of regulatory mechanisms. In the face of a crisis, the severity of these problems cumulatively impacted their lives, leading to a catastrophe. The informal economy: its size, role and roots: India's informal economy is enormous. It consists of export-driven industrial clusters, manufacturing hubs, and enterprises which deal with precious gems, a vast majority of agrarian 1 Contact: Jenny Sulfath: jenny@centreforequitystudies.org> Balu Sunilraj: balusunil@centreforequitystudies.org production, street vendors, and a large part of the black economy. Estimates for 2018 indicate that 80% of India's 461 million workers, or 369 million of them, are in the informal sector(Kannan 2020). Even within the formal sector, several workers are employed as informal workers, as casual labour. Despite islands of prosperity such as the diamond-cutters-who live in conditions comparable with workers in the formal economy-for a large number of informal-sector workers, domestic and workspaces converge into one. These workers both eat and live at their place of work or their work is conducted in congested domestic spaces. Unlike the formal sector, there is no regulation of wages, living conditions, working hours, and other social security nets. Due to their paltry wages, occupational multiplicity is the only way many workers can make ends meet. However, despite the different operational features of both informal and formal economy, scholars like Jan Breman(1976) have pointed out that the formal-informal duality should not let one lose sight of the continuum between the two. The informal economy plays an active role in the functioning of the formal economy, for it is symbiotically linked to big businesses, which subcontract and outsource cheap informal labour. Now, how has the informal economy come to occupy such prominence? Scholars have pointed at the development trajectory of the post-colonial Indian state to explain this phenomenon. For instance, Breman(1999) points out that budget deficits were the norm for the rural underclass, as a direct result of the development trajectory of Indian capitalism. The urban-rural mobility in the industrial West is characterised by the "free labour" deciding for itself how and where to sell its labour-power. But this has proven non-applicable to the post-colonial Indian situation. In particular, because of the absence of land reforms, the only option for the Indian rural poor was to migrate (including as bonded and neo-bonded labour) in order to survive. Second, Breman(1999) also notes that labour legislation which was passed immediately after Independence was mainly designed to define the industrial procedures and to solve disputes between employers and workers. These legislations exclusively addressed labour and employment in the organised sector. These laws were designed mainly with the hope to expand into an industrial society, even if the size of this sector was always minuscule compared to the economy as a whole. As a result of diminished attention to a great segment of the urban population and neglect of the social relations of production in agriculture, the process of informalisation was accentuated. Kalyan Sanyal(2014) has also contextualised the growth of the informal economy in the background of post-colonial development trajectory. However, his findings are different from
... We build this theoretical framework following the works of Bhaduri, 2018), Chakrabarti (2013Chakrabarti ( , 2016, Sadhu and Chakrabarti (2018), Sanyal (2007), and Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2009). The basic structure of the framework is illustrated in Figure 4. ...
India is being projected internationally as a country of good growth and good governance, which in turn, it is asserted, should lead to prosperity for its people, especially in terms of proper employment, income, and overall standard of living. Drawing on certain dimensions of decent work proposed by International Labour Organization to measure the quality of employment in India, this article explores how far the notions of good/high growth and good governance discourse are corroborated by the evidence of good quality employment in India. The study is based on the nationally representative unit/individual-level data published by the Government of India during the three periods 2009–10, 2018–19, and 2022–23. The main findings of analysis are: (a) the overall quality of employment in India is poor and stagnant or deteriorating, and (b) the macro-level (sub-national state-level) aspects, such as the overall volume of economic activities, the extent of quality governance, the flexibility of business regulatory environment and better labour law-related compliance, have had a significant negative influence on the quality of employment. Thus, this paper suggests that the very policy environment and the pattern of economic growth have put a drag on the quality of employment in India. Given this, we suggest a variety of countervailing policy options and emphasise the role of civil society and politics.
This commentary investigates platformization in global south and global north labor markets, arguing they are linked via a process of uneven and combined development. Focusing on platformization in India and the United States, we briefly describe long-standing patterns of formal and informal labor in the United States and India, which prepare the ground for the 21st-century explosion of gig platforms. We conclude by returning to the global scale of uneven and combined development, drawing on contemporary Indian Marxists to explain the global spread of gig platforms post-2008 as a global financial response to the political problem of surplus workers within premature deindustrialization.
Objetivos: El presente artículo analiza las formas de generación del excedente económico en las actividades productivas y reproductivas de la economía popular y la manera en que éste es extraído en relaciones de tipo comercial, de endeudamiento y tributarias por otros sectores de la economía capitalista Métodos: A partir de estudios de caso se estructuraron ejercicios de diálogo, acompañamiento y observación al quehacer de trabajadoras y trabajadores de confección textil satélite y de reciclaje en la ciudad de Bogotá. Se utilizaron herramientas metodológicas como guías de observación, entrevistas semiestructuradas, reconstrucción de historias de vida y talleres de economía doméstica, con el fin de obtener información sobre los usos del tiempo, los ingresos y los gastos de las unidades económicas y familiares. Resultados: Las actividades de generación del excedente económico se articulan a procesos de reproducción social en los que participan diferentes actores y, que operan desde una escala territorial de la vida cotidiana, hasta una escala macro de intercambios económicos y relaciones entre instituciones como el Estado y el mercado. En los procesos de generación y extracción del excedente confluyen actividades que no son monetizadas como la valoración social de un tipo particular de trabajo. Así, actividades como la reproducción de la vida, la salud, las emociones, el cuidado, son creadoras de valor y facilitan la generación de excedente económico, el cual no es reconocido, a pesar de que es transferido en las relaciones sociales tributarias, comerciales y financieras. Esta imbricación de relaciones económicas y no económicas que subsidian circuitos de capital comercial, financiero e industrial a través de diversas formas de articulación de las unidades económicas de la economía popular, implican una cadena sin fin de relaciones de explotación. Además, se observa que la sostenibilidad en el tiempo y en el espacio de estos trabajos, está asociada a relaciones de protección familiar y comunitarias que cubren los déficits que generan las relaciones monetarias en el intercambio económico. Conclusión: Las formas de reproducción y protección social de la fuerza de trabajo de los sectores de la economía popular están ligadas a actividades no remuneradas y no monetizadas al interior y exterior del hogar, soportadas principalmente por las mujeres, que a su vez representan el sustento de diversas formas de valorización del capital. Lo anterior provoca que los y las trabajadoras de la economía popular caigan en un espiral descendente de vulnerabilidad que atenta contra sus condiciones de subsistencia.
It is said that the indigenous economy is non-materialistic, non-accumulative, non-competitive, reciprocal and subsistence oriented. Subsistence is also considered as one of the principal cultural traits in order to get state recognition of indigenous people. It needs conventional documentation for receiving protection which is of a vital sign of indigeneity. But what do we mean by subsistence? What constitutes everyday understanding of subsistence practices? In academic perception, subsistence economy means bare survival. Terms like vernacular and subsistence have some pre-conceived connotation like hunting-gathering pauperish mode of existence which has no connection with the market.
It is difficult to discover the point where subsistence ended and capitalism began. It also raises curiosity about the term commoditised or anti-subsistence and non-commoditised or subsistence. One thing is clear that, all capitalist enterprise is about commodity production but not all commodities are produced through capitalist mode. Subsistence based communities do sell some of their gathered stuff or homemade products in the market in order to purchase essential things, but this sale and purchase are characteristically different from that of capitalism. It is believed that commodity production and labour force for wages make people capable of earning a livelihood. It will be surprising for them who believed in this way that the aboriginal subsistence economy often brings affluence, rather than poverty. But indigenous people who mostly depend on garden cultivation, subsistence farming, fishing, hunting and gathering of wild foods livelihood is becoming a grave matter of concern. Due to the development intervention, many non-capitalist subsistence-based communities have been compelled to struggle for an indigenous economic space. With the growing tension of ecological degradation, however, the relationship between man and nature has garnered attention from all corners of the world economic giants. In this situation, subsistence economy plays a crucial role in making people aware of the economic constraints and the role of the local indigenous forms of livelihood for the survival of the humanity. The moral subsistence practices are key to a synchronised environment friendly economy which ensures an unbreakable tradition of survival and sustainability. But that does not mean we should go back to self-provisioning, commons and communal ownership; rather it gives us an alternative means of livelihood under capitalism. According to the popular perception, subsistence means production for self-consumption and not for sale in the market which no doubt is a wrong perception because there is no conflict between subsistence and exchange per se. The border between the market and non-market has falsely been created; it is not unchangeable or uncontested. When new and potential sectors of economy is introduced which was previously not a part of the market economy, it got inducted in the national economy. Subsistence communities were once perceived as egalitarian and non-economic. But it has been found from our discussion that they do possess property, have social hierarchy, produce surplus and have complex social organisations. So, egalitarianism is not an important hallmark of indigeneity. Subsistence simply speaks against the motive of profit maximisation. Community-based subsistence practices are based on rural household which relies on a set of collective as well as individual rights to access the resources. The vernacular domain of subsistence economy protects the indigenous communities from food insecurities and uncertainties of the global capitalist economy and becomes their life support.
With the Cold War’s epicenter shifting from Europe to the Third World, the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy concerns of containing the Soviet bloc were tied to questions of socioeconomic development. Besides “trade and aid,” the appeal of this shift rested on the apparent complementarity between ideas of rural modernization and the practices of agrarian democracy. “Community development” referred to a series of projects initiated by the Ford Foundation and postcolonial governments toward this cultural-political end. This article examines the contested meanings, practices, and outcomes of such a project in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Drawing on the project’s archives and published sources, it addresses how and why a disjuncture between the political-societal aspirations of decolonization and the hardening Manicheanism of Cold War competition came to characterize the contested trajectory of this project. As its proponents and detractors negotiated competing expectations, inter-regional tensions, and geostrategic interests, this disjuncture gave way to a developmental ideology envisioned around the technocratic nodes of population control and food production. Consequently, the supposed complementarity between “agrarian democracy” and modernization was relegated to the margins of developmental thinking, even as growing rural unrest and Cold War realpolitik propelled its need for legitimizing new claims on political power. The prism of community development enables a novel analysis of the conjunctural dynamics of mid-twentieth-century decolonization and the contingencies of Cold War politics of agrarian modernization.
During and after the months of pandemic control measures, newly formed unions of platform and gig workers in India started leveraging electoral contests, campaigns and politics to advocate for and with laws that would regulate platform work and provide workers with social security. This signalled the adoption of direct political interventionism as a bargaining strategy for gig and platform workers’ rights. This strategy was built upon the strengths and abilities of workers to coordinate tactically and organise independently, without conforming entirely to existing political formations and ideologies – reminiscent of the historical ‘third-wave’ movements for informal workers’ legal empowerment in India. Drawing on examples of practices of ‘political and civil society’ amongst gig and platform labour organising in India, this paper demonstrates the unique ways in which new unions of gig and platform workers are both following and deviating from earlier trajectories of third-wave labour movements, as well as from gig and platform workers’ movements in the global context. We show in the paper how this is allowing unions to make greater claims for gig workers’ social protection and expand the remit of welfare politics in India. We then deliberate whether this signifies a potential movement towards a new ‘fourth wave’ of labour’s legal empowerment for workers in India under digital capitalism.
This qualitative inquiry examines the ways in which the governmentality of ‘conducting the conduct’ of the farming population contributes to adverse ecological outcomes, such as the widespread practice of stubble burning in neoliberal India, which exacerbates the challenges posed by climate change. The analysis suggests that governmentality, as a governing framework, distorts interactions within the marketing system, leading to misalignments in the motivations of system actors that ultimately contributes to the failure of the system. By focusing on the phenomenon of stubble burning in India, this study highlights the complex interconnections between governmental framework, market forces, and individual actors in agricultural marketing system. The misalignment of these elements is shown to result in negative system outcomes. The qualitative analysis identifies three key themes: the interplay of governmentality, hegemonic commissioning agents, and marginalization of farmers. The study proposes the development of an inclusive ‘farm waste’ value chain that emphasizes the circularity of agriculture, and fosters equitable sharing of benefits, thereby preserving the regenerative capacities of agricultural systems.
Gegenwärtige Debatten zur relativen Überbevölkerung sind von zwei Tendenzen geprägt. Während die einen die exkludierende Gewalt neoliberaler Entwicklung betonen, heben andere die funktionalen Aspekte der industriellen Reservearmee hervor. In diesem Artikel überwinde ich diese Gegenüberstellung, indem ich theoretisch und empirisch aufzeige, wie Prozesse der Ausbeutung, Enteignung und Exklusion arbeitender Klassen ineinandergreifen. Am Beispiel von Wanderarbeiter*innen in der indischen Metropole Bengaluru arbeite ich heraus, dass die Ausbreitung reproduktiver Schulden, die das prekäre Überleben der subalternen Arbeiter*innenklasse gewährleisten, verschiedene Formen von Gewalt und Klassenherrschaft im postkolonialen Kapitalismus vermitteln.
Eingangs diskutiere ich die Notwendigkeit einer glokalen raumtheoretischen Perspektive, um Peripherisierungsprozesse in Süd und Nord wahrzunehmen und sie als Bestandteil einer übergreifenden neoliberalisierten »Entwicklungs«-Logik zu fassen. Dann werden vier Kritiken am Revival des Surplus-Begriffs entwickelt: Er führt erstens zu irreführenden Dualismen, kann zweitens die insgesamt entsicherte (Lohn-)Arbeit begrifflich nicht fassen, reproduziert drittens partikular-bornierte Kapitalperspektiven, statt von einem sozialökologisch allgemeinen Arbeitsbegriff auszugehen, und führt viertens zu autoritären Klassifizierungen, die für eine emanzipatorische Perspektive von unten fraglich sind.
Die »surplus populations« des Globalen Südens rücken wieder stärker in den Blick kapitalismustheoretischer Debatten. Denn die Mehrheit der weltweiten Erwerbsbevölkerung muss ihr Überleben nach wie vor weitgehend außerhalb der im engeren Sinne kapitalistischen Produktionsweise sichern. Dabei vertrete ich in diesem Beitrag unter Bezugnahme auf jüngere Veröffentlichungen im Feld der kritischen Entwicklungstheorie die These, dass die »surplus populations« vielmehr als dysfunktional oder zumindest afunktional für das Kapital begriffen werden müssen. Ihr Überleben ist daher in hohem Maße eine Frage politischer Kräfteverhältnisse und nicht ökonomischer Funktionalität geworden.
I propose the concept of disciplinary urbanism to capture the Pakistani military's economic, political, and spatial strategies driving urbanisation in the rural–urban frontier in Lahore. Firstly, disciplinary urbanism accounts for the financial, spatial, and coercive strategies for acquiring agricultural land on the urban frontiers. I show how agrarian caste and class relationships are central to accumulating land values through the market and how such transformations create a new class of relative surplus populations along the axis of class, caste, and gender. Secondly, disciplinary urbanism elucidates the extensive application of militarised architectural practices and spatial discipline to enclose state and common lands while controlling surplus populations. I examine the methods used to control, securitise, and capture land and labour and the tactics employed to counter the challenges posed by the informal economic and political activities of the surplus populations, which are controlled differentially based on class, caste, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship.
Namibia is positioning itself as a green hydrogen superpower to supply the German market with the much-needed energy carrier. While the hydrogen hype is marketed as a pathway facilitating the German and European green transition that is mutually beneficial for African interests, social movements and affected communities have been denouncing green colonialist tendencies of the hydrogen rush. This paper is centring these claims. Applying a heuristic of green colonialism along the lines of externalisation, enactment, expansion, exclusion and empowerment, we highlight colonial tendencies of the hydrogen rush in Namibia. While still in a nascent stadium, current developments indicate patterns to transform Southern economies according to European interest, which can then uphold their allegedly superior image as renewable energy pioneers. Our study indicates that the green hydrogen rush resembles a longue durée of (neo)colonial violence: while clinging to old colonial patterns, it takes advantage of the post-colonial state, and at the same time uses narratives of contemporary multiple crises to advance and legitimise a supposedly green, but intrinsically violent transition.
L’articolo offre una rassegna introduttiva di alcuni degli sviluppi più recenti del rinnovato dibattito filosofico-politico in materia di lavoro, facendo riferimento alle ricerche di studiose e studiosi tra cui Dejours, Ferreras, Fraser, Honneth, Jaeggi, Renault, Battilana, Méda, Lordon, Virno e Negri. Si introdurranno brevemente le principali trasformazioni del lavoro avvenute negli ultimi decenni di globalizzazione neoliberista, con particolare attenzione alla moltiplicazione del lavoro e al ruolo crescente riconosciuto al lavoro riproduttivo, alle migrazioni e alla conoscenza. Verranno poi presentate alcune analisi della sofferenza e dell’alienazione nel lavoro contemporaneo. Infine, si passerà in rassegna il dibattito teorico sulle sfide politiche sollevate dal nuovo scenario, concentrandosi sulle questioni della democratizzazione del lavoro, della società “post-lavoro” e della potenza riconosciuta al “lavoro vivo”.
This paper aims to analyze the contradictions between sustainability and social justice by examining the deaths caused by asbestos processing and the resulting environmental disasters in affected areas. In the first part, the author explores the contradictions between sustainable reforms and “performative environmentalism” as compared to integral ecology, which advocates an integrated and holistic approach to addressing political, social, economic, and environmental issues. Her analysis is grounded in a theoretical framework that argues sustainable development must be evaluated in its full complexity and contrasted with neoliberal simplification practices that prioritize efficiency and the economization of economically assessable resources. From this perspective, the second part of the paper discusses these issues through an Italian asbestos case study, viewed as an instance of social injustice conflicting with sustainability policies. The author outlines three main points demonstrating how sustainability governance can bypass any potential for social justice in situations involving asbestos processing. She explains that managing asbestos cases contributes to the normalization of environmental disasters and exacerbates the conflict between the right to work and the right to health. The incidents involving asbestos exemplify how sustainability is interpreted through a neoliberal lens.
Anti-mining movements are gaining momentum in mineral-rich regions of India, often led by local and tribal communities who resist the negative environmental and social impacts of mining. While governments promote mining as a crucial economic development tool, many mining areas remain underdeveloped compared to non-mining regions. Local resistance to mining is often framed within broader environmental and social justice struggles, particularly in the Global South. Many of these movements, termed the “environmentalism of the poor,” emerge as marginalized communities fight to protect their resources, livelihoods, and rights. The ideological foundation of these movements centers around opposition to capitalist exploitation, focusing on “accumulation by dispossession”—the privatization and destruction of local resources for profit. Such movements articulate alternative development models and often highlight the failure of industrial projects to improve the quality of life for local communities. The chapter offers a detailed discussion on anti-POSCO and later anti-JSW projects in Odisha, and it offers theoretical debate on the anti-capital local movement and cartel politics in the global south and its ideological challenges.
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