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- Convenors:
-
Jacob Nerenberg
(International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University)
Alina-Sandra Cucu (Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel examines approaches to governing livelihoods in contexts lacking a viable "home market" that could integrate labour, consumption and production. Its varied case studies illustrate contradictory politics involved in the coordination of labour markets within capitalist value logics.
Long Abstract:
As dogmas of self-regulating markets slowly recede, the interweaving of market planning and labour regulation has re-entered mainstream discussions. It is becoming more common for governments to state once-taboo goals of coordinating labour markets and even guiding the organization of production. In many contexts however these objectives are impeded by the absence of what Marx called the "home market": the market for domestically or locally produced goods, whether for consumption or as inputs for industries. Dependency analysts once recognized that the lack of a viable home market can destabilize work forces through exposure to international price fluctuations. This panel proposes to consider the social, economic and discursive life of—and obstacles to—various modes of market management; and to analyse approaches to governing livelihoods and labour (whether waged or not) under circumstances where the home market is uneven, absent, or unfeasible. It brings together case studies from different contexts where government bodies at various scales have been confronted with problems as varied as dependence on food imports, lack of off-farm employment, narrowing industrial profit margins, unstable supply of workers or buyers, or inter-ethnic inequalities and inter-regional unevenness. What class contradictions arise in attempts to coordinate labour and other markets within particular capitalist logics of surplus value appropriation? How do contemporary problems relate to histories of dispossession, dis/investment, crisis or market reform—and dynamics of capital flow linking scales from local to global? What forms of meaning-making and political action take shape in the shadow of the elusive home market?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Natalia Buier (University of Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
The conflicts between agrarian interests and the conservation of the Doñana National Park are an expression of the transformation of the social form of exploitation of agrarian labour. Contradictory constructions of the “home market” in labour have been an integral part of this transformation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the construction of the elusive “domestic labour market” in Huelva, Spain. Huelva is home to Europe’s largest strawberry farming area and the beneficiary of Spain’s most important guest worker programme. It is also the region where the Doñana National Park, one of Europe’s most-well known protected wetlands is located. For several decades, the overexploitation of groundwater resources has fueled the confrontation between agrarian and conservation interests. The question of labour and employment have been at the center of this debate. In this paper I discuss the way in which the regional employment model is dependent on contradictory constructions of the labour market. On the one hand, the implementation of the guest worker programme has relied on the discursive and administrative creation of national and regional labour scarcity. On the other, the environmental conflicts arising from the regional agricultural model have been dependent on the construction of natural resource extraction as a source of job creation and productivity. When looked at through the lens of the construction of the labour market, the articulation of the conflict between development and conservation is revealed as the history of the transformation of the social form of exploitation of agrarian labour.
Yonas Amaya (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Paper short abstract:
How has industrialization alienated the peasants' labor in Ethiopia? What, if industrialization failed to generate expected employment for the dispossessed peasants? How are they surviving, and what is the source of the living wage after the dispossession?
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses dispossessed peasants' demand for industrial labor and the non-absorption of peasants' labor into industrial production in Bole Lemi industrial park (BLIP) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The scores of peasants who were dispossessed to enable the establishment of BLIP were promised compensatory jobs. Although the park's expansion ensures capital accumulation for companies, it produces a "pile of pain" for the dispossessed peasants. This paper illustrates that the promise of changes in the life of peasants from farm to factory and rural to urban lifestyle did not materialize. This is because the industrial job market is flooded with the influx of young rural girls who moved to the city searching for employment. Rural girls are women migrant workers from different corners of the country, while dispossessed peasants are those who were expropriated from their land. While rural girls migrate to the city for industrial labor, on the contrary, the dispossessed peasants living in Addis Ababa are seasonally "returning to the farm" as daily laborers in rural areas known for their labor shortages. The companies neglected dispossessed peasants' labor because they are illiterate, unskilled, and beyond the productive capitalist age. The peasants become surplus to industrial production due to capitalists' preference to employ young rural girls they consider to be of 'productive age.' As a result, a new precarious peasant class of "three nos"— no land, no work, and no hope—is emerging. The aspiration, hope and expectation of modernity—urban lifestyle, proletarianization and improvement in livelihoods—turned into a reality of unemployment, underemployment, and migration.
Jacob Nerenberg (International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
The integration of "frontier" zones is a type of process where market expansion generates contradictory forms of displacement. In the highlands of Papua, Indonesia, citizenship is shaped by the sorting of autochthons and newcomers into categories unequally marked by the lack of a viable home market.
Paper long abstract:
"Frontier" zones, somewhat isolated from centralized infrastructures and markets, provide intriguing combinations of opportunities and obstacles to the governance of labour. The political integration of national peripheries opens spaces for merchant expansion and resource extraction, fueling growth of petty trader communities and rentier arrangements. Conversely, entry of new commodity provision networks and land-rent mechanisms tends to disrupt rural subsistence livelihoods without generating wage work opportunities to absorb labour made, effectively, surplus. This contradiction characterizes recent transformations of livelihood, residence and citizenship in the Central Highlands of the contested, resource-rich Papua region at Indonesia's far east. The inter-ethnic constellation in Papua's La Pago customary territory features an autochthonous majority increasingly shifting from technologically rudimentary agriculture into informal work and attachment to indirect rent distribution via an expanding state administration, and a growing, variegated newcomer trade sector. While newcomer traders entering Papua have exited situations of economic stagnation in other Indonesian regions, Papuan highlanders increasingly leave the highlands seeking work elsewhere. These intersecting patterns of displacement reflect a hypertrophy of administration and petty trade and the unavailability of a viable home market that could integrate work and consumption. The slow separation of autochthonous Papuans from the means of production is embedded in the emergence of new modes of frontier citizenship that call attention to the political function of labour market management in processes of national integration and fragmentation.
Alina-Sandra Cucu (Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on an automotive factory in Romania, the paper suggests labour fragmentation has been driven by an increasingly feeble and asymmetrical supply network, which failed to absorb local labour and allowed the emergence of regional employers that are too big to fail.
Paper long abstract:
While taking a stroll in the streets of the Southern Romanian city of Craiova, it is impossible to miss the graffiti stating: "The new Labour Code = the reinvention of slavery". Conspicuously displayed in some of the most important intersections, the dark green letters stand witness for a historical turn in the Romanian tripartite relation between labour, capital, and the state: the 2011 modification of the country's Labour Law. Hailed by local and foreign capital as evidence for the Romanian government's commitment to flexibility, it was denounced by the trade unions as "a return to the dark 19th century". Despite the unions' unequivocal stance, their actual opposition to the newly introduced changes was minimal, confirming the erosion in Romanian labour's capacity to defend its interests.
My paper analyses the dialectical relationship between the fragmentation of labour's interests and the weakening of the local and national supplier network in car industry since the mid-2000s. Focusing on an automotive factory in Romania and on the expansion/contraction moments of its horizontal relations in the territory, I suggest that on the ground, labour decline has been driven by an increasingly feeble and asymmetrical supply network, which failed to absorb local labour and allowed the emergence of regional employers that are too big to fail. Following Marx, these entanglements can be seen as antinomic processes within which the elusive home market has been articulated, disarticulated, and rearticulated around contradictory structural necessities of capitalist production relations, as well as around conflicting rights, belongings, and solidarities.
Aaron Kappeler (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to develop a theory of the social profit as a category of economic planning in Venezuelan state enterprises. This device orients productive and commercial activity towards absorption of rentier surpluses, but it is also performative in that it seeks to organise labor and consent.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to develop a theory of the ‘social profit’ as a category of economic planning in Venezuelan state enterprises. Designed as a metric for resource allocation and internal cost accounting, the device strives to unite social objectives, such as the provision of goods and services to impoverished communities, with long-term sustainability and returns that can defray costs of operation. As a form of planning that engages the market and attempts to valorise an initial capital stock, the social profit orients the productive and commercial activity of state enterprises toward the absorption of rentier surpluses. But the tool is also ‘performative’ in that it serves to organize political consent and obviate tensions associated with the exploitation of labor power. Exploring efforts to create an endogenous food system capable of protecting the Venezuelan population in times of low oil prices, I evaluate the potential of this category for enacting post-neoliberal development and freeing the public sector from its reliance on oil rent. I conclude that despite the aim of constructing a stable internal market by recycling surpluses from the state oil company, the social profit does not fully negate the tensions associated with pricing, supply and demand, or realization of value embedded in commodities, and that struggles over the terms of labor continually surface in these enterprises.
Keywords: [social profit; markets; value; the state; development; industrialization; social enterprises; economic planning]