Paper short abstract:

As the question of employment is increasingly left to ‘market forces’, this paper draws on oral histories with ex-mining employees to analyse the moral economies of extraction and public sector work in the context of a decommissioned iron-ore mine in south India.

Paper long abstract:

Across disciplinary boundaries, as well as in the Indian context, the state form has been shown to be concomitant with neoliberalism, development goals, as possessing corrupt, elite, and inefficient, and with a monopoly over violence. Equally, recent work on the Indian state has shown that it has been held accountable through collective political action, petitions, and the demand for redistributive functions. In a moment where the question of employment is increasingly left to ‘market forces’, this paper grapples with the question, ‘What is the (social) state good for?’ Drawing on oral histories with mining engineers and contract employees who worked at a now decommissioned mine in southern India, and bringing together ethnographies of engineering, theorisations of the ‘public good’ and the moral economies of industrial work, this paper analyses how ex-state employees frame their demand for state employment as a form of ethical imperative. Across these accounts, I show how the work of iron ore extraction when tied to the state is not only framed as a ‘public good’ which 1) generates substantial foreign exchange value for the nation-state and prevents “resource wastage”— but 2) also engenders what I term as ‘affects of everyday security’ tied to ideas of place, identity, and access to stable work. By examining what everyday practices of state capitalism make visible, I suggest that aspects of the ‘social state’—specifically its capacity to provide stable work, and what this stability means in turn for a meaningful life—is an integral aspect of imagining socially-just environmental futures.