Contribution short abstract:

This paper examines precarious informal labor in Tanzania where imports sustain livelihoods through distribution, not production. Using Ferguson’s “labor of distribution” and critiques of surplus labor under capitalism, it explores traders’ moral economies and political critiques.

Contribution long abstract:

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, some precarious informal street traders align with Joan Robinson’s observation that “the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all” (1962). However, surplus labor and coerced labor share a condition of exclusion from the legal rights and social inclusion promised by the “licit life of capitalism” (Appel 2019), while still being subsumed into capitalist accumulation. Although Tanzania’s industrialization remains unrealized, the influx of commodities from China sustains livelihoods through distribution rather than production. In the Kariakoo wholesale district, traders, agents, porters, and bureaucrats engineer licit and illicit value diversions via fees, wages, bribes, thefts, mark-ups, and profits. While wholesale traders may profit from supply chain control, small-scale informal traders face precarious capital accumulation, while most others just get by. This paper compares two lenses for understanding precarious informal labor. James Ferguson (2015) reimagines “labor” in the global South as the “labor of distribution,” emphasizing “rightful shares” of wealth-in-motion over production or value capture. A second critical perspective challenges the notion that the informal economy is “external” to capitalist accumulation (cf. Shivji 2009). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with traders and would-be-traders in Chinese commodities, I explore tensions between their entrepreneurial ethos and the moral economy of claims on the resources of others Additionally, I discuss traders’ critiques of the international division of labor, highlighting their perspectives on what has contributed to their precarious lives in an era when the promise of South-South capitalism has promised otherwise.