Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Probes the multispecies mutualisms that structure multispecies coercive labour in Indian brick kilns, this paper argues that animals are made co-constitutive of the impoverishment that produces capitalist efficiencies in the peripheries of global supply chains for global construction.

Paper long abstract

This paper probes the multispecies mutualisms that structure coercive labour, human and non, in Indian brick kilns. It argues that animals are made co-constitutive of the impoverishment that produces capitalist efficiencies in the peripheries for development, in this case, global construction. India is among the globally-leading producer of bricks, and Indian brickmaking, located in the peripheries of global construction, remains largely manual – and animal. The “core” of global supply chains is subsidised by violent labour relations in its “peripheries,” frontiers of severe poverty and ecological devastation. This is not accidental. “Global poverty” is a structural requirement of development, including urbanisation, sustaining a permanent reserve army of impoverished multispecies surplus labour. Indian brick kilns achieve low-cost, high-output production because humans and animals are systematically impoverished, indebted, underfed, and expendable. These conditions are paradoxically maintained by the “basic needs” framework of human poverty alleviation. Development discourses recast animals as livelihood pathways to meet basic needs in the Global South, yet this misdiagnoses how accumulation operates in peripheral sites, obscures how surplus value is extracted from depleted animal bodies through “low-value” human–animal labour relations driven by human precarity, and naturalises multispecies suffering as livelihood strategy, resilience, or opportunity. Yet amid these conditions, fragile but radical visions of alternative worlds emerge. The paper closes by imagining an animals’ ecological politics that safeguards sovereign animal-nature relations as integral to renewed urban infrastructural futures.