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Based on an exploratory fieldwork with migrant workers in agriculture in the South of Portugal, the objective of this paper is to show how precarity, deportability, and racialization are deeply articulated and impact on the lives of these workers.

Paper long abstract

In the past years, the export oriented agricultural sector in the South of Portugal relied on a flexible transnational labor force. Based on an exploratory fieldwork with migrant workers (Bangladeshis – mainly Sylhetis and Dhakaias –, Nepalis, and Punjabis), local activists (cultural mediators and immigrant associations), and political representatives in Odemira (South of Portugal) and Lisbon, together with media analysis, this paper addresses the working conditions but also the increasing racialization and the production of several moral panics (Cohen 1972) about these workers. These moral panics mobilize a series of arguments centered on anti-immigration, racial prejudice, and menacing masculinities. This racialized violence has been accompanied by a growing hostility towards these migrants, that are ultimately projected as matter out of place. Simultaneously, though, these workers are perceived as indispensable not only within the logics of flexible forms of capitalism – as cheap labor – but also as a source of income to many locally (that are now able to rent previously empty houses, for instance), especially during the non-touristic months of the year. A preliminary reading of this ethnographic material reveals three dynamics that interpolate our interlocutors daily, namely, precarity, deportability, and racialization. The objective of this paper is to show how these three dynamics are deeply articulated and their impact on the lives of these migrant workers.

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Paper short abstract

Capitalism since its birth has bound to it other coeval structures of oppression, allowing it to violently expropriate labor and use-values from populations of workers, peasants and indigenous people defined as inferior. Race, gender, caste viewed through the optic of capital’s “value in motion.”

Paper long abstract

Capitalism since its birth has bound to itself other coeval structures of oppression, thus allowing it to violently expropriate labor and use-values from populations of workers, peasants and indigenous people defined as inferior.

Across Trans-Atlantic and Anglophone Pacific Rim regions, capitalism takes the form of racial (and gendered) capitalism. Racialization operates through structures of oppression based on state-defined essential inequalities between biologically/culturally ranked “races” – distinctions predating capitalism but intrinsically joined to its control of labor and other use-values.

Elsewhere, other preexisting structures of oppression are captured by capitalism, but not racial in nature. Caste in South Asia is one such structure of oppression; in East Asia, civilizational distinctions between “civilized” and “barbarian” are another. These structures historically have been multiply entwined with capitalism, marking off specific devalued populations for extraordinary expropriation of their labor and other use values.

This paper offers an analysis of capital as “value in motion” in its four moments of transformation in the accumulation process – valorization, realization, distribution, and conversion (Harvey 2023: 1-23), revealing how during these moments capitalists confiscate surplus-value from specific devalued populations. Examples from historical and ethnographic research on the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia (Nonini 1992, 2015, 2025) illustrate the argument. Violent expropriation by capitalists and the Malayan/Malaysian state of labor and other use values from Chinese as a devalued “race” in Malaysia are examined, as are caste and civilizational structures of oppression.

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This paper tells a story of indebted Roma in Czechia and develops the argument that racialization operates as a vector of labour devaluation (Wynter) in the service of capital accumulation. It is drawing on a decade-long research in Ostrava, an industrial city embedded in the global supply chains.

Paper long abstract

This paper tells a story of indebted Roma in Czechia and develops the argument that racialization operates as a vector of labour devaluation in the service of capital accumulation. It is drawing on a decade-long research among working-class Roma in Ostrava, a city long shaped by heavy industry that transformed into a hub for electronics and automotive production in the post-socialist period. Inspired by the writing of Sylvia Wynter on racism being the material base, the economic infrastructure of the capitalist system rather than merely an ideology (unpublished, p. 33), I propose that the predatory debt in Czechia amounts to a form of racial captivity that locks Roma in a position of subordinate labour. This captivity is documented by segregation in housing, which turns neighbourhoods where Roma live into a target of various forms of predatory capital as door-to-door salespeople continue push high interest loans, gas and electricity ‘deals’, mobile phone and internet ‘deals’, health insurance, along with various consumer items, on the residents. Predatory credit is functionally connected to state-sanctioned predatory debt enforcement, that locks people in an endless cycle of repayments. The paper provides ethnographic details on how debt enters these processes through social reproduction where it changes the material conditions in which people live, and shapes their employment options. This way the dispossessive power of debt, underlined by a racial logic, becomes entangled with the model of capital accumulation based on cheap industrial labour that characterizes the Czech context.

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This paper argues that caste is a historically constituted mode of production transformed, not dismantled, by capitalism. By integrating caste–class–patriarchy with racial capitalism, it shows how Indian labour is caste-oppressed domestically and racialised globally.

Paper long abstract

This paper intervenes in debates on caste capitalism by arguing that dominant Marxist and historical-materialist analyses remain limited insofar as they fail to theorise caste as a historically constituted mode of production and exchange that is transformed, but not dismantled, under capitalism. Drawing on Sharad Patil’s Marxist–Phule–Ambedkarite multilinear historical materialism and Umesh Bagade’s theorisation of the caste economy, the paper foregrounds Patil’s central insight that caste and patriarchy function as material forces, successively restructured through historical transitions—from caste-patriarchal to caste–class–patriarchal formations under capitalism. While Patil offers a powerful account of how caste, class, and patriarchy are materially reworked within Indian capitalism, his framework does not fully theorise the global racialisation of Indian working classes, composed largely of Dalit, Adivasi, and Shudra populations across religious communities, under colonial and postcolonial capitalism.

Addressing this absence is analytically unavoidable. The paper therefore extends the caste–class–patriarchy framework by engaging Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism, not to collapse caste into race, but to argue that caste and race operate as distinct yet integrated structures within global capitalism. Colonialism racialised large sections of the Indian population as surplus and disposable labour, a process intersecting with and stabilised by caste hierarchies. Contemporary capitalism reproduces this racial–caste ordering through imperial labour regimes, migration, and neoliberal accumulation, rendering caste-oppressed populations simultaneously caste-subordinated domestically and racially subordinated globally.

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This paper reveals how legacies of race and the ongoing operation of caste create new forms of mediation in the neoliberalization of agrarian labor markets, complicating traditional understandings of exploitation and resistance.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyzes the contradictory role of the labor contractor or maistree, who simultaneously disciplines feminized agricultural labor for global markets while collectively bargaining on behalf of workers with farmer-employers. This form of gang labor was imported from Virginia tobacco plantations to colonial India along with the technology for growing Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco, as the British Empire sought to create new producers and consumers of tobacco. Originally relying on racialized enslaved and indentured labor in Virginia, these gangs became constituted through Adivasi (tribal) labor in colonial India. Today in Andhra Pradesh—one of two southern states growing this lucrative tobacco strain—the gangs comprise predominantly women who are exclusively Dalit.

Intermediary figures like labor contractors navigate the tension between market demands for standardized labor and marginalized workers' need for advocacy. This paper reveals how legacies of race and the ongoing operation of caste create new forms of mediation in the neoliberalization of agrarian labor markets, complicating traditional understandings of exploitation and resistance. I analyze how the emotional and affective labor of contractors—as they manage workers' frustrations, farmer demands, and state regulations—becomes central to sustaining India's integration into global tobacco markets while maintaining localized forms of worker solidarity. Feminized agricultural workers develop agency through these mediated relationships, challenging binaries between autonomy and subordination in neoliberal labor arrangements.

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This paper asks what reconfigurations of racial capitalism are necessitated within the historical materialism of caste. I propose “caste capitalism” as a framework for thinking through entanglements of sexuality politics, caste, and capital in contemporary India.

Paper long abstract

This paper takes up the question of what the transnational travels of queer of color critique look like and what kind of reconfigurations of racial capitalism are necessitated and enacted by such travel. I propose “caste capitalism” as a framework for thinking through entanglements of sexuality politics, caste, and capital in contemporary India. I develop this frame through a queer hermeneutic of heritability and endogamy, drawing inspiration from Indian feminist, anti-caste, and Marxist critiques, and from critiques of racial capitalism as they have circulated in American critical race and queer studies. There is an urgency for this argument with respect to the Indian context, where the rise of autocratic Hindu nationalism is being waged in the terms of upper caste Brahminism and extractive capitalism. This project of Hindu nationalism, known as Hindutva, relies on the ruse of “identity” as being distinct from questions of political economy, offering limited forms of legibility on the basis of caste, gender, and sexuality, while attempting to cut off democratic processes that enable access to justice, or even advocacy for social welfare. Binding Hindutva to an autocratic turn, this mode of governance aggressively targets criticisms of the state and political dissent, pitting them against the logic of privatization and the consolidation of wealth, while steadily waging the erasure of the public sector. My argument builds on critiques of “casteification” (the ongoing production and processual iteration of caste categories) and its imbrications within and relations to class and the political economy of land and enclosure.

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This paper examines environmental casteism in Mumbai through Sanjay Nagar, an informal settlement beside a dumping ground. It argues that housing precarity and environmental harm are structurally produced through caste–class hierarchies that push marginalised communities into hazardous urban spaces.

Paper long abstract

Abstract

This paper examines environmental casteism as a form of caste-based marginalisation that shapes urban space, housing locations, and environmental exposure in Mumbai. Focusing on Sanjay Nagar, an informal settlement located beside a major garbage dumping ground, the paper argues that environmental degradation is not an accidental outcome of urban growth but a structurally produced condition tied to caste–class hierarchies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, residents’ narratives, and critical engagement with Dalit autobiographies and urban scholarship, the paper demonstrates how marginalised communities are systematically pushed into environmentally hazardous spaces where pollution, housing insecurity, and state neglect become everyday realities.

The paper extends existing discussions on environmental injustice by conceptualising environmental casteism not only as a denial of access to natural resources, but also as the forced settlement of specific caste and class groups in unsafe and unhealthy living environments. It shows how housing locations near dumping grounds, drains, and polluted infrastructures are shaped by long-standing processes of social exclusion, limited social and financial capital, and caste-based segregation. Residents’ migration histories reveal that settlement in such spaces is driven not by choice, but by constrained survival strategies within a deeply unequal urban structure. By foregrounding caste as a central organising principle of urban environmental inequality, this paper argues that debates on pollution, housing, and urban development in India must account for caste as a fundamental axis shaping who bears the socio-spatial burden of environmental harm.

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This paper seeks to add specificity to the ways capital reaps value from racialized flesh. Treating race as a dynamic index of transformative potencies, it compares the ways race is activated by productivist (plantation) and speculative (necrocapitalist) value regimes in late-20th century Ecuador.

Paper long abstract

This paper seeks to add ethnographic and theoretical specificity to the ways capital reaps value from racialized flesh. Approaching race less as a static taxonomy of unevenly distributed containers of value to be mined from laboring bodies and more as a dynamic index of different transformative potencies for accentuating value through the labor process, it seeks to identify the different ways race is deployed and activated under different kinds of value regimes. For this, it stages a conversation between two capitalist formations growing up simultaneously in late-20th century Ecuador, an export plantation system relying heavily on racialized Indigenous labor and a counter-insurgency regime of state terror intimately tied to the global necrocapitalist war economy. In the former, a productivist regime, race operates as a life-enhancing framework for Indigenous laborers to achieve post-racial forms of personal growth alongside their mastery of quality metrics in commodity production. In the latter, race marks the body of the dead or tortured insurgent, identifies its expulsion from the community of rights, but generates value through circulation in the global death economy as a speculative commodity or derivative, the material referent for flourishing terror industries promising security to expanding capitalist formations. This paper challenges us to attend to the historically particular ways “all capitalism is racial capitalism”. Consistent with postcolonial racial systems in Latin America, the two cases examined show race operating as a technology of personal transformation activated by the specific modes of value extraction built into the material work of plantation and political labor.