Michael Denning

Wageless Life*
Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being
exploited. Since the beginnings of the wage-labour economy, wageless life has
been a calamity for those dispossessed of land, tools and means of subsistence.
Expelled from work, the wageless also became invisible to science: political
economy, as Marx noted in the earliest formulations of his critique of the disci-
pline, ‘does not recognize the unemployed worker’: ‘The rascal, swindler, beggar,
the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal workingman – these are
figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of
the doctor, the judge, the gravedigger, and bum-bailiff, etc; such figures are spec-
tres outside its domain.’1 These days, Marxism – more often seen as an example
of political economy than as its critique – and other labour-based analyses face
the same objection. Understandings built upon wage labour cannot, we are told,
account for the reality lived by the most numerous and wretched of the world’s
population: those without wages, those indeed without even the hope of wages.
Bare life, wasted life, disposable life, precarious life, superfluous life: these are
among the terms used to describe the inhabitants of a planet of slums. It is not the
child in the sweatshop that is our most characteristic figure, but the child in the
streets, alternately predator and prey.
In face of this situation, neither of the classic Marxist designations for the
wageless – the reserve army of labour or the lumpenproletariat – seems ade-
quate. For some, only a theory of citizenship and exclusion from it, or rights
and their absence, can capture this reality: to speak of labour is to speak of the
already enfranchised. Others have turned to a biopolitics or necropolitics of bare
existence. Neither of these alternatives is persuasive. Though the struggle for
social and cultural inclusion as well as political citizenship is vital in a world of
sans-papiers, too often the theoretical battles over citizenship and human rights
remain caught in fantasies of sovereignty. On the other hand, the rhetoric of life
and death sometimes has a false immediacy, seeing a state of exception or emer-
gency in what is unfortunately a state of normality. To speak repeatedly of bare

* This article was first published in New Left Review 66 (2010), pp. 79–97.
1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, New York 1975ff (hereafter MECW), Volume 3,
p. 284. This essay was originally written as part of the Yale Working Group on Globalization and
Culture. I would like to thank the other members for their suggestions and criticisms, and Achille
Mbembe for his response to an earlier text at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research,
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, 22 February 2006.

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life and superfluous life can lead us to imagine that there really are disposable
people, not simply that they are disposable in the eyes of state and market.
Moreover, bare life is not without practical activity. A critical account of living
and making a living under capitalist imperatives must, I believe, begin not from
the accumulation of capital but from its other side, the accumulation of labour.
They are, dialectically, the same: as Marx put it, ‘Accumulation of capital is there-
fore multiplication of the proletariat.’2 But to approach the issue from the point
of view of capital is, as Hegel and Marx might put it, one-sided. A number of con-
temporary critics of political economy have noted this imbalance. Michael Leb-
owitz argues that Marx’s book on capital was meant to be accompanied by one on
wage labour; in The Limits to Capital, David Harvey describes ‘Marx’s rather sur-
prising failure to undertake any systematic study of the processes governing the
production and reproduction of labour power itself’ as ‘one of the most serious of
all the gaps in Marx’s own theory’.3
In what follows, I will suggest that we need a similar reversal regarding wage
labour. Wageless life has almost always been seen as a situation of lack, the space
of exclusion: the unemployed, the informal. I do not claim to solve this semantic
problem: my own working vocabulary – the wageless – is a parallel construc-
tion. However, I want to insist that we decentre wage labour in our conception
of life under capitalism. The fetishism of the wage may well be the source of cap-
italist ideologies of freedom and equality, but the employment contract is not
the founding moment. For capitalism begins not with the offer of work, but with
the imperative to earn a living. Dispossession and expropriation, followed by the
enforcement of money taxes and rent: such is the idyll of ‘free labour’. In those
rare moments of modern emancipation, the freed people – from slavery, serfdom
and other forms of coerced labour – have never chosen to be wage labourers.
There may be a ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’,
as Adam Smith put it, but there is clearly no propensity to get a job.
Rather than seeing the bread-winning factory worker as the productive base
on which a reproductive superstructure is erected, imagine the dispossessed pro-
letarian household as a wageless base of subsistence labour – the ‘women’s work’
of cooking, cleaning and caring – which supports a superstructure of migrant wage
seekers who are ambassadors, or perhaps hostages, to the wage economy. These
migrations may be short in distance and in interval – the daily streetcars or buses
from tenement to factory, apartment block to office, that will come to be called
‘commuting’ – or they may be extended to the yearly proletarian globe-hopping

2 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Harmondsworth 1976, p. 764.

3 Michael Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, New York
2003; David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, Chicago 1982, p. 163.

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of seasonal workers by steamship, railroad and automobile, as well as the radical

separation of airborne migration linked by years of remittances and phone calls.
Unemployment precedes employment, and the informal economy precedes the
formal, both historically and conceptually. We must insist that ‘proletarian’ is not
a synonym for ‘wage labourer’ but for dispossession, expropriation and radical
dependence on the market. You don’t need a job to be a proletarian: wageless life,
not wage labour, is the starting point in understanding the free market.

Emergence of unemployment
In this essay, I want to explore the lineaments of wageless life over the past century
by offering a genealogy of two key representations which not only name and seek
to regulate it, but draw a dramatic line between its conceptions in capitalism’s
imperial metropoles and its periphery: the figures of unemployment and the
informal sector. The former was the founding trope of twentieth-century social
democracy, invented in the midst of the great economic crises which gripped the
industrial capitalisms of the North Atlantic and reverberated across their colonial
territories. It displaced a host of earlier conceptions of the poor, the idle and the
dangerous, and became a central part of state and popular discourse through
the next century, particularly during the moments of mass unemployment: the
Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of the 1970s. On the other
hand, the term ‘informal sector’ was coined in the early 1970s to reckon with the
mass of wageless life in the newly independent Third World, which seemed to
escape the categories of employment and unemployment alike. It too displaced
earlier conceptions – perhaps most notably that of the lumpenproletariat figured
by Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth – and continues to be part of official and
unofficial discourse.
An older institutional history might say that the welfare state was created in
response to unemployment: the spectre of the unemployed returns with every
depression and recession, as illustrators and photographers try to represent the
absence of work in icons ranging from Victorian cartoonist Tom Merry’s ‘The
Meeting of the Unemployed’ to Dorothea Lange’s ‘White Angel Breadline’. But a
more recent biopolitical history suggests that the emerging social state invented
unemployment in the process of normalizing and regulating the market in
labour.4 The word itself emerged just when the phenomenon became the object

4 Biopolitical readings of unemployment are in a way the product of the intellectual upheaval
triggered by the third wave of mass unemployment; two landmark texts both date from 1986:

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of state knowledge production in the long economic downturn of the 1880s and
1890s. The term was first used in English in 1887, when the chief of Massachu-
setts’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, Carroll D. Wright, attempted to count the unem-
ployed, triggering a statistical practice that became central to the modern state,
and by the following decade was in common use. The earliest theoretical treat-
ment, the 1895 article ‘The Meaning and Measure of “Unemployment”’ by the
liberal economist J. A. Hobson (best known for his influential analysis of imperi-
alism), set the agenda for a century of debate: how does one define and measure
it? The French word for unemployed, chômeur, dates from the same era, and the
German equivalent, Arbeitslosigkeit, was rarely used before the 1890s. Indeed,
as John Garraty, the author of the still-standard Unemployment in History, points
out, Marx himself did not use the expression. In Capital, as well as in the passage
from the 1844 manuscripts quoted earlier, Marx writes of die Unbeschäftigten –
the not-busy, the unoccupied in one English translation – rather than die Arbeit-
slosen, the contemporary term for the unemployed.5
The modern notion of unemployment depended on the normalization of
employment, the intricate process by which participation in labour markets is
made ordinary. As employers make rules, workers insist on customary practices,
while courts, legislatures and factory inspectors set standards. ‘The creation of
a normal working day [ein Normalarbeitstag]’, Marx argued, ‘is, therefore, the
product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist
class and the working class.’ Indeed, he insisted that: ‘in place of the pompous
catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes the modest Magna Carta of a
legally limited working day.’6
Normalizing employment made possible the normalization of unemploy-
ment in at least three senses. First, to be unemployed was to lose one’s usual
employment – and indeed the first forms of unemployment protection came from
trade unions that tried to maintain the going wage rate by offering members out-
of-work benefits. In his discussion of unemployment and government William
Walters proposes that ‘the status of “out-of-work” was actually invented by trade
unionism’. The second form of normalization arose as the wageless began to meet
and march as the unemployed. The canonical starting point is the famous Feb-

Robert Salais, L’invention du chômage: histoire et transformations d’une catégorie en France des
années 1890 aux années 1980, Paris 1986, and Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century
of Unemployment in Massachusetts, Cambridge 1986. See also Christian Topalov, Naissance du
chômeur: 1880–1910, Paris 1994. A more recent study that draws on this work is William Walters,
Unemployment and Government: Genealogies of the Social, Cambridge 2000.
5 John Garraty, Unemployment in History, New York 1978, pp. 109, 4; J. A. Hobson, ‘The Meaning
and Measure of “Unemployment”’, Contemporary Review 67, March 1895.
6 Marx, Capital, pp. 303, 307.

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ruary 1886 London riot. A Tory-led Fair Trade League had called a meeting of
the unemployed in Trafalgar Square that attracted 20,000 jobless building- and
dock-workers; when the Social Democratic Federation led part of the crowd down
Pall Mall, windows were smashed, shops were looted and London, according to
The Times, was in a panic. Similar demonstrations continued and grew through
1887, culminating that November in Bloody Sunday, the protest against coercion
in Ireland, in which police attacked demonstrators and three were killed.7
Finally, unemployment was integrated into the work of turn-of-the-cen-
tury theorists such as Hobson and William Beveridge, who argued that it was
not a matter of individual depravity or idleness but was a normal and unavoid-
able aspect of industrial society. ‘Personal causes, no doubt, explain in a large
measure who are the individuals that shall represent the 10 per cent “unem-
ployed”’, Hobson argued, ‘but they are in no true sense even contributory causes
of “unemployment”’. These analyses built on the earlier notion that capitalism
created a reserve army of labour, a concept often taken to be distinctively Marxist
since it appears in Capital’s discussion of capitalism’s relative surplus population.
However, Marx was simply adopting the rhetoric of the British labour movement.
Radicals, particularly the Chartists and Fourierist associationists, imagined the
new factory workers as great industrial armies, and this common trope led the
Chartist leader Bronterre O’Brien to write of a reserve army of labour in the North-
ern Star in 1839. The young Engels picked up that image in The Condition of the
Working Class in England in 1844, and Marx would invoke the metaphor occasion-
ally, distinguishing between the active and reserve armies of the working class.
By the end of the nineteenth century, it was part of the common sense under-
standing of unemployment: by 1911, even the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics
of Labor could conclude that, ‘however prosperous conditions may be, there is
always a “reserve army” of the unemployed’.8

Risk and relief

This normalization of unemployment was the basis for the great social-demo-
cratic techniques that sought to contain the spectre of wageless life. The first

7 Walters, Unemployment, p. 18. See also Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London, New York
1984, pp. 291–6. In his letters Engels was very critical of the SDF’s ‘bunkum about social revo-
lution’. His characterization of their procession as merely comprised of ‘idlers, police spies and
rogues’ is one of the classic passages on the lumpenproletariat; MECW 47, pp. 407, 408.
8 Hobson quoted in Walters, Unemployment, p. 32. See also Stedman Jones, Languages of Class,
Cambridge 1983, p. 159. Massachusetts Bureau quoted in Keyssar, Out of Work, p. 72.

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moment was characterized by an initial conceptualization of unemployment as

an insurable risk, an accident like illness, fire, theft or death. This was the basis
of Britain’s National Insurance Act of 1911, the first government programme of its
kind. Imitating Bismarck’s regime of welfare provision, the Asquith government
created a state-managed fund to insure workers against unemployment. However,
the logic of insurance fails in cases of collective disaster, when there are too many
accidents all at once. And thus it was the mass unemployment during the Great
Depression of the 1930s that made clear the limits of such safety-nets. A new gen-
eration of unemployed movements emerged, usually led by young communist
militants, such as the Comités des Chômeurs in France or the Unemployed Coun-
cils in the United States, where a third of the population was out of work. The
most celebrated street processions and eviction protests were in these industrial
heartlands – the 1930 Wall Street riot, the Ford hunger march two years after, the
Lille-to-Paris hunger march in late 1933 – but there were similar demonstrations
in the colonies as well, such as the 1933 hunger march in Jamaica.
The subsequent Keynesian reconceptualization of unemployment as an eco-
nomic indicator subject to national macroeconomic fine-tuning became the basis
for the post-WWII welfare states, which imagined a full-employment economy.
For two decades, it appeared as if mass unemployment was a thing of the past.
However, the Great Recession of the 1970s in Europe and North America marked
the return of the spectre of wageless life, now under the sign of redundancy –
the permanent shuttering of plants as entire regions underwent an Industrial
Counterrevolution. A new wave of movements arose, particularly in France in the
winter of 1997–98. As in the 1930s, deindustrialization is often understood to be
a First World phenomenon, but, as we will see, it took place in rust belts around
the globe like Ahmedabad, the Manchester of India.
But for some theorists, deindustrialization marked the end of unemployment
as a political and conceptual tool. Among those arguing that we had reached the
end of work was Ulrich Beck, the German theorist of neoliberalism’s risk society,
who pointed to the shift from a ‘uniform system of lifelong full-time work organ-
ized in a single industrial location, with the radical alternative of unemployment,
to a risk-fraught system of flexible, pluralized, decentralized underemployment,
which, however, will possibly no longer raise the problem of ... being completely
without a paid job.’9 Neoliberal economists insisted that involuntary joblessness
did not even exist; unemployment was either a choice for the marginal utility of
leisure, or a temporary blockage of the labour market caused by high wages made
too sticky by union monopoly and the state’s minimum wage.

9 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, London 1992, p. 143.

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It is also worth noting the great weakness of the social-democratic normal-

ization of employment and unemployment. It constituted a normal subject: the
wage earner. As a result, much of capitalism’s multitude was unrecognizable
to a labour movement that had been reconstituted by state apparatuses into an
employment movement, the agent of wage-earners divided into collective-bar-
gaining units. Across society, there were many who lived outside typical employ-
ment and unemployment – women working in their own households, deindus-
trialized and disinvested communities without wages, those subjected to racial
codes, even wage-earners in officially unrecognized industries and workplaces
(in the US, for example, domestic, agricultural and academic workers not covered
by the National Labor Relations Board). As a generation of feminist critics of
the welfare state argued, this led to a gendered and unjust bifurcation of social
security. Working-class households and neighbourhoods were divided between
the independent, characteristically male, subjects of social insurance, and the
dependent, characteristically female, subjects of social relief. One arm of the
state apparatus insured and secured the normative male breadwinner against the
risk of involuntary unemployment; another arm tested the ways and means of
women raising children, before doling out a stigmatized relief. If the social-demo-
cratic conception of unemployment broke with the nineteenth-century rhetoric of
the Poor Laws by understanding it as systemic rather than individual, as a waste
of social labour rather than a malingering of the idle and dissolute, it also drew a
stark and ideological line across the working multitude.

Favelas and bidonvilles

If unemployment dominated the imagination of the capitalist states of the West, it
was not to be the governing concept in the development discourse of the post-co-
lonial states. Here the spectre of wageless life in the sprawling shanty towns and
favelas of Asia, Africa and Latin America overwhelmed any clear divide between
employed and unemployed. Wageless life was not a temporary accident that
might be insured against, nor a macroeconomic failure of aggregate demand; it
appeared to be the main mode of existence in a separate, almost autonomous,
economy.
The idea of the informal sector emerged following two decades of extraor-
dinary Third World migration to cities, in which the urban working population
doubled between 1950 and 1970. Colonial and settler-colonial regimes, as well as
the plantation economies of the Americas, had restricted and even criminalized
migration to the city; thus many mid-century revolts were based on the insur-

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gency of peasants and rural agricultural workers. But in the wake of national lib-
eration, ‘the poor’, as Mike Davis put it, ‘eagerly asserted their “right to the city”,
even if that meant only a hovel on its periphery’.10 New forms of livelihood and
struggle emerged out of the great squatter cities of the 1950s, and even before
the development economists and sociologists had named the informal sector,
filmmakers represented the wageless life of the new shanty towns in films that
became paradigmatic for the rest of the century: Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus
(1959), which launched the first World Music – bossa nova – out of a mythic
romanticization of Rio’s favelas during carnival; and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of
Algiers (1966), which lastingly portrayed the anti-colonial Algerian revolution not
as the peasant war it was but through the epic metonymy of the defeated urban
insurrection of 1956–57.
The first great theoretical engagement with this new form of wageless life
also came out of a reflection on the Algerian revolution: Frantz Fanon’s revival
of the nineteenth-century Marxist word ‘lumpenproletariat’ in The Wretched of
the Earth. Coined by Marx in the 1840s as one of a family of terms – the lumpen-
proletariat, the mob, i lazzaroni, la bohème, the poor whites – it characterized the
class formations of Second Empire Paris, Risorgimento Naples, Victorian London
and the slave states of North America. In most cases, Marx even used the origi-
nal language to suggest the historical specificity of these formations rather than
the theoretical standing of the concept. For him, such expressions had two key
connotations: on the one hand, of an unproductive and parasitic layer of society,
a social scum or refuse made up of those who preyed upon others; on the other
hand, of a fraction of the poor that was usually allied with the forces of order – as
in the account of Louis Napoleon’s recruitment of the lumpenproletariat in The
Eighteenth Brumaire, or Marx’s analysis of the slaveholders’ alliance with poor
whites in the US South.
In these formulations, Marx had two antagonists. First, he was combating
the established view that the entire working class was a dangerous and immoral
element. He drew a line between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat to
defend the moral character of the former. Second, he was challenging those –
particularly his great anarchist ally and adversary Bakunin – who argued that
criminals and thieves were a revolutionary political force.11 By the mid-twentieth
century, the concept of the lumpenproletariat had pretty much disappeared from
socialist and Marxist discourse. However, its reinvention in The Wretched of the
Earth to describe the entirely new urban populations of the Third World made

10 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London 2006, p. 55.

11 See Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 2, New York 1978, ch. 15 and appendix
G: ‘On the Origin of the Term Lumpenproletariat’.

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it one of the key stakes in the theoretical debates of the 1960s and 1970s. The
discussion of the lumpenproletariat comes primarily in the book’s second essay,
‘Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness’, in which Fanon delineates the contra-
dictions of the anti-colonial coalition, as urban nationalist militants turn to the
peasant masses. He makes three powerful and controversial claims. The first is
a sociological one about the emergence of a new dispossessed population, the
people of les bidonvilles: ‘Abandoning the countryside ... the landless peasants,
now a lumpenproletariat, are driven into the towns, crammed into shanty towns
and endeavour to infiltrate the ports and cities, the creations of colonial domi-
nation’; ‘These men, forced off the family land by the growing population in the
countryside and by colonial expropriation, circle the towns tirelessly, hoping that
one day or another they will be let in.’ Fanon resorts to biological metaphors: ‘The
shanty town is the consecration of the colonized’s biological decision to invade
the enemy citadels at all costs, and, if need be, by the most underground chan-
nels.’ It is an ‘irreversible rot’, a ‘gangrene eating into the heart of colonial dom-
ination’. ‘However hard [this lumpenproletariat] is kicked or stoned it continues
to gnaw at the roots of the tree like a pack of rats.’12
Secondly, Fanon, like Marx, argues that this lumpenproletariat is readily
manipulated by the repressive forces of colonial order – if it is not ‘organized by
the insurrection, it will join the colonialist troops as mercenaries’ – and gives
examples from Madagascar, Algeria, Angola and the Congo. Thirdly, and most
famously, against the accepted wisdom of both nationalist and communist move-
ments, he insists that

it is among these masses, in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpenproletariat
that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead. The lumpenproletariat, this cohort of
starving men, divorced from tribe and clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneously and
radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people ... These jobless, these species of sub-
humans, redeem themselves in their own eyes and before history.13

Birth of informality
Fanon’s appropriation of the nineteenth-century term fuelled political debates
throughout the 1960s. Virtually all the pioneering studies of labour in the Third
World addressed his formulation: Pierre Bourdieu on work and workers in Algeria;
Ken Post on the Jamaican labour uprisings of the 1930s; Charles van Onselen on

12 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York 2004, pp. 66, 81.
13 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, pp. 87, 81–82.

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everyday life on the Witswatersrand. Development economists and sociologists

struggled to name the new reality that Fanon identified. In his landmark history
of the economic development of the Third World, Paul Bairoch argued that ‘con-
cepts of unemployment and underemployment as they have been formulated in
the West cannot be applied ... except in a very crude and approximate way.’14
Working in a social-democratic tradition, the Jamaican economist W. Arthur
Lewis developed an influential model of the colonial ‘dual economy’ in the early
1950s. By the mid-1960s, the Argentine Marxist economist José Nun’s concept of
the marginal mass had provoked an important debate.
The phrase that came to dominate official discourse – the ‘informal sector’
– was coined in the early 1970s by a British development economist, Keith Hart,
who was studying the communities of Frafra migrants from northern Ghana
living in the Nima shanty town on the northern outskirts of the old city of Accra.
‘A very large part of the urban labour force is not touched by wage employment’,
Hart wrote. He went on to outline the forms of ‘self-employment’ that made up the
means of livelihood of Nima slum-dwellers: ‘the distinction between formal and
informal income opportunities is based essentially on that between wage-earn-
ing and self-employment.’ The term was quickly adopted by the International
Labour Organization in a 1972 study of employment in Kenya. Twenty years later
the ILO had developed standards for the statistical measurement of the informal
sector, and there were distinct debates not only in Anglophone Africa, but also
in South Asia and Latin America. The ‘informal sector’ became the master trope
for representing wageless life in cities around the world. According to the ILO
‘informal employment comprises one half to three-quarters of non-agricultural
employment in developing countries’: 48 per cent in North Africa, 51 per cent in
Latin America, 65 per cent in Asia and 72 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa. More-
over, ‘three types of non-standard and atypical work – self-employment, part-
time work, and temporary work –omprise 30 per cent of overall employment in
15 European countries and 25 per cent of total employment in the United States.’
By the end of the century, the informal economy (as it had been renamed) had
been made visible not only in Accra and Nairobi but in Los Angeles and Moscow.15
In his essay on Accra, Hart launched the debate about informal wageless life
that has continued ever since: ‘It is generally understood that growing residual
underemployment and unemployment in the cities of developing countries is “a

14 Paul Bairoch, The Economic Development of the Third World since 1900, Berkeley 1975, p. 165.
15 Keith Hart, ‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana’, Journal of
Modern African Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, March 1973, pp. 62, 68; Paul E. Bangasser, The ILO and the
Informal Sector, ILO Employment Paper 2000/9, p. 10; and ILO, Women and Men in the Informal
Economy, Geneva 2002, p. 7.

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bad thing”. But why should this be so? In what way precisely does this phenom-
enon constitute a problem?’ His question might be seen as the beginning of the
normalization of the informal economy. Earlier models of the dual economy had
treated it as the ‘bad’ legacy of colonialism’s incomplete modernization, a tran-
sitional moment on the way to formal employment and unemployment. These
states had inherited colonial labour apparatuses that had tried to discipline and
regularize casual work. And, indeed, the mid-century era of import-substitu-
tion industrialization did see the growth of formal-sector employment in Latin
America and even in some parts of Asia and Africa; the emergence of new armies
of organized industrial workers gave rise to the great labour uprisings of South
Africa, Brazil and South Korea. However, by the 1970s the growth of such jobs
had stalled, and the discourse that named the informal sector saw it as a normal
– indeed under neoliberalism, expanding – sphere of economic activity, part of
the logic of post-colonial capitalist accumulation.16
Just as the definition of unemployment in the late nineteenth century had
depended on a new understanding of the economy, so the discovery of the infor-
mal sector depended on a sense of the state’s formal wage-labour apparatuses,
which set minimum wages and maximum hours and provided unemployment
insurance and social security. It was not the size of the enterprise that charac-
terized the informal sector, nor the form of the labour process, but its relation to
the state. The central issue then becomes the strength or weakness of the state:
for some, informal economies develop when states regulate too much, driving
economic activity to an underground, unregulated, untaxed world; for others,
they are a product of weak or failed states, unable to provide social protections
to their citizens and enforce rules or collect taxes. Neoliberal critics of state regu-
lation have tended to celebrate the entrepreneurial gusto of the informal sector,
its micro-enterprises that need only micro-credit to thrive. Defenders of social
democratic welfare states have advocated the formalization of the informal: the
extension of social protections and representation in unions.

Organizing in Ahmedabad
At the same time as development economists like Hart were discovering the infor-
mal sector, the first major organization of informal-sector workers took shape.

16 Hart, ‘Informal Income Opportunities’, p. 81. See also Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman,
‘Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era’,
Latin American Research Review, vol. 38, no. 1, February 2003.

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284   Michael Denning

In 1972, an activist in the Gandhian Textile Labour Association, Ela Bhatt, began
to bring together the women head loaders and street vendors of the Gujarat mill
town of Ahmedabad into a union, the Self-Employed Women’s Association. She
had been assigned to survey families affected by the closure of two major textile
mills.

While the men were busy agitating to reopen the mills . . . it was the women who were earning
money and feeding the family. They sold fruits and vegetables in the streets; stitched in their
homes at piece-rate for middlemen; worked as labourers in wholesale commodity markets,
loading and unloading merchandise; or collected recyclable refuse from city streets ... jobs
without definitions. I learned for the first time what it meant to be self-employed. None of
the labour laws applied to them; my legal training was of no use in their case.

‘Ironically’, she recalls three decades later, ‘I first glimpsed the vastness of the
informal sector while working for the formal sector.’17
Over the next thirty years, SEWA became a cluster of three types of mem-
bership-based organizations of the poor: first, a union – by 2004, the largest
primary union in India – of a variety of informal trades – rag pickers, home-based
chindi and garment stitchers, bidi rollers, vegetable vendors – bargaining with
buyers, contractors and municipal authorities over piece-rates and pavement
space; second, a coalition of dozens of producer co-operatives, producing shirt
fabrics, recycling waste paper and cleaning offices; and third, several institutions
of mutual assistance and protection, including a SEWA bank and health coop-
eratives, organized around midwives who were themselves part of the informal
sector.
A key part of its history has been a struggle over representation. ‘When
someone asks me what the most difficult part of SEWA’s journey has been’, Bhatt
writes,

I can answer without hesitation: removing conceptual blocks. Some of our biggest battles
have been over contesting preset ideas and attitudes of officials, bureaucrats, experts and
academics. Definitions are part of that battle. The Registrar of Trade Unions would not con-
sider us ‘workers’; hence we could not register as a ‘trade union’. The hard-working chindi
workers, embroiderers, cart pullers, rag pickers, midwives and forest-produce gatherers can
contribute to the nation’s gross domestic product, but heaven forbid that they be acknowl-
edged as workers! Without an employer, you cannot be classified as a worker, and since you
are not a worker, you cannot form a trade union. Our struggle to be recognized as a national
trade union continues.18

17 Ela Bhatt, We Are Poor but So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India, Oxford 2006,
p. 89.
18 Bhatt, We Are Poor, p. 17–18.

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SEWA rejected the rhetoric of the informal sector that dominated official dis-
course: ‘dividing the economy into formal and informal sectors is artificial’, Bhatt
argues, ‘it may make analysis easier, or facilitate administration, but it ultimately
perpetuates poverty’: ‘to lump such a vast workforce into categories viewed as
“marginal”, “informal”, “unorganized”, “peripheral”, “atypical”, or “the black
economy” seemed absurd to me. Marginal and peripheral to what, I asked ... In
my eyes, they were simply “self-employed”.’ Indeed the women street vendors
who were among the first to build SEWA called themselves traders.19
This rhetoric of self-employment drew on the ideologies of the Gandhian wing
of Indian trade unionism from which SEWA emerged, and it has been adopted
by other organizations of wageless workers, notably the Durban-based South
African Self-Employed Women’s Union founded in the mid-1990s. However, in
retrospect, it seems to have been a nominal place-holder, as SEWA took as one of
its key tasks the representation of a world of wageless work which was invisible
to the labour apparatuses of the state. When SEWA organized the women who
stitched chindi – fabric scraps discarded by textile mills – into khols (quilt covers)
in the late 1970s, they began by depicting them, in spite of their scepticism:

in order to better understand the problems of chindi workers, we decided to conduct a

survey in the seven poles, or streets, where most of the khols were stitched. Karimaben [one
of the militant workers] had no patience for a survey. She complained, ‘We all know exactly
what the problem is. Let me tell you that I spend more on a khol than I earn from making it’.

Nonetheless, SEWA insisted on ‘proceeding methodically and conducting a

survey’, reporting the findings to the chindi workers, and using them to fight for
an increase in piece-rates both to khol traders and Labour Department officials.
Surveys, Bhatt argues, ‘have served SEWA well over the years. They help us gain
a thorough understanding of the issues before taking any action, and the process
helps us identify potential leaders in the community.’20 These studies have given
a much more complex view of the world of the self-employed. By 2004, SEWA’s
research had divided its members into more than eighty occupations in four main
categories: street vendors and hawkers, home-based producers, labourers and
service providers, and rural producers.21 Table 1 shows

19 Bhatt, We Are Poor, pp. 18, 10, 11.

20 Bhatt, We Are Poor, p. 63.
21 Martha Alter Chen, Self-Employed Women: A Profile of SEWA’s Membership, Ahmedabad
2006, p. 12.

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Table 1. SEWA Membership in Gujarat

Year Total Vendors Home workers Labourers Producers

% of % of % of % of
total total total total

1975 3,850 825 21 950 25 2,075 54 –

1980 4,934 950 19 1,934 39 2,050 42 –
1985 15,741 2,472 16 8,464 54 4,805 31 –
1990 25,911 3,230 12 13,821 53 6,700 26 2,160
1995 158,152 11,515 7 55,114 35 73,768 47 17,755
2000 205,985 18,759 9 72,156 35 105,811 51 9,259
2002 535,674 39,460 7 141,458 26 314,245 59 40,511
2003 469,306 42,745 9 105,439 22 298,761 64 22,361
2004 468,445 28,575 6 85,976 18 313,814 67 40,080

Source: Chen, Self-Employed Women, p. 14.

the growth of each of these categories since the 1970s: notice how the most visible
group – the street vendors who make up about two per cent of urban India – were
a major part of the early SEWA, before dropping off proportionally.
After beginning in the cities, the organization of rural producers and agri-
cultural labourers took off in the 1990s. Two-thirds of their members are not so
much self-employed as what Jan Breman has called ‘wage hunters and gather-
ers’, casual labourers and service providers who work for others in the intricate
disguises of contracted and piece-rate jobs.22 A more specific breakdown in 2004
(Table 2, above) shows not only the variety of informal trades – from

22 Jan Breman, Wage Hunters and Gatherers: Search for Work in the Urban and Rural Economy
of South Gujarat, Delhi 1994.

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Table 2. SEWA Membership in Gujarat by Occupation, 2004

Trade Group % of total membership

Vendors & Hawkers 28,575 6

Fruit & vegetable 21,553 5
Utensils and old clothes 2,252 <1
Other 4,770 1
Home workers 85,976 18
Embroiderers 26,782 6
Garment makers 20,878 4
Bidi rollers 15,478 3
Agarbati rollers 8,928 2
Kite makers 2,576 1
Other 11,334 2
Labourers & Service providers 313,814 67
Agricultural labourers 227,345 49
Tobacco workers 20,421 4
Waster pickers 20,165 4
Casual day labourers 14,732 3
Construction workers 11,673 3
Cleaners 6,741 1
Contract factory workers 3,950 1
Head loaders 3,259 1
Other 5,528 1
Rural producers 40,080 9
Milk producers 14,247 3
Animal rearers 10,867 2
Small farmers 9,281 2
Gum collectors 1,425 <1
Salt makers 3,288 1
Other 972 <1

Total 468,445

Source: Chen, Self-Employed Women, p. 16.

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288   Michael Denning

vegetable vendors, waste pickers to head loaders – but the overwhelming

numbers of agricultural labourers.
Thus, organizations of workers in the so-called informal sector have mapped
their world less by its relation to a formal state-regulated economy than by its
workplaces, particularly the street and the home. When SEWA pioneered trans-
national alliances of informal-workers associations in the 1990s, they did so by
creating StreetNet and HomeNet. Increasingly, the two key representations of
informalized workers in both official discourse and popular culture are the street
vendor and the home-based worker.

Wandering the market

What can we conclude from this genealogy of representations of wageless life?
It seems clear that neither of the great twentieth-century terms – unemployment
and the informal sector – remain adequate, not least because of their segregation
to specific zones of the capitalist world system; even the scholarly literatures on
them barely speak to each other. This sense of conceptual exhaustion also applies
to their traditional Marxist analogues: the socialist adoption of Marx’s ‘indus-
trial reserve army’, and the anti-colonial adoption of Fanon’s re-figuring of the
lumpenproletariat. But what alternatives do we have?
As I suggested earlier, two types of metaphor seem to dominate our contem-
porary imagination. The first points to the insecurity of many kinds of contem-
porary work: we speak of casualization, informalization and the proliferation
of temporary and precarious jobs. In 1999, the ILO – long a site of struggle over
forms of representation of work, its 1996 convention on home-based work the
product of a protracted battle led in part by SEWA – tried to cut across the for-
mal-informal divide by characterizing such work as vulnerable, against which
they called for decent work. This demand is both a retreat – a recognition that
formal labour regulation does not touch the majority – and an advance – an argu-
ment for social protections and labour rights for the vulnerable. In the face of the
many still-pompous invocations of inalienable human rights, one might note that
we still await the modest Magna Carta of decent work.
A second metaphor goes further, suggesting that we have passed a historical
watershed, the end of work as we have known it. Work, we are told, has lost its
centrality to life; wageless life is workless, wasted life. Noting the dramatic break
in popular discourse between the rhetoric of unemployment and that of redun-
dancy, Zygmunt Bauman writes that ‘“redundancy” shares its semantic space
with “rejects”, “wastrels”, “garbage”, “refuse” – with waste. The destination of

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the unemployed, of the “reserve army of labour”, was to be called back into active
service. The destination of waste is the waste-yard, the rubbish heap’. ‘The pro-
duction of “human waste”, or more correctly wasted humans ... is an inevitable
outcome of modernization’; ‘refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants’ are ‘the waste
products of globalization’.23
Bauman’s apocalyptic denunciation of our culture of waste is powerful, but it
misses the mark for two reasons. First, in its overly glib linking of material waste
and human waste, it repeats one of the oldest tropes regarding the wageless –
that they are akin to garbage, rubbish. Such metaphors run throughout this lit-
erature: early on Hobson characterized unemployment as waste; Marx was not
immune, referring to the lumpenproletariat as refuse in The Eighteenth Brumaire.
And indeed there is a connection: for those without wages have long worked as
scavengers. As I noted earlier, not only are waste pickers a significant part of
SEWA, but many of their trades, like the chindi stitchers, were built out of the
by-products of the textile industry. In March 2008, the first international confer-
ence of waste-pickers’ organizations was held in Bogotá.
That globalization produces redundancy would be better understood not
through the deceptively concrete image of wasted lives, but through Marx’s two
dialectically related concepts: the relative surplus population and the virtual
pauper. The one is from Capital; the other from the Grundrisse. In the key chapter
on ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’ in Capital, Marx views the
problem from the vantage point of capital: ‘it is capitalist accumulation itself that
constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy
and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which
is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is
therefore a surplus population.’ He continues: ‘this is a law of population pecu-
liar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every particular historical
mode of production has its own special laws of population’. Indeed, ‘the relative
surplus population exists in all kinds of forms. Every worker belongs to it during
the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed.’ The indus-
trial reserve army is thus merely one of these forms; in fact, as might be expected,
Marx’s specific examples of the relative surplus population are the most dated
part of his analysis.24
The fundamental metaphor in Marx’s account is that of opposing forces: it
is not as if there are two kinds of workers, employed and unemployed, or two
sectors of the economy, formal and informal; rather, there is a process in which
‘greater attraction of workers by capital is accompanied by their greater repul-

23 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives, Cambridge 2004, pp. 12, 5, 66.

24 Marx, Capital, pp. 782,783–784, 794.

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290   Michael Denning

sion ... the workers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater
masses’. The ‘higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the
workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the
condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labour-power’. Intrigu-
ingly, almost the entire contemporary vocabulary – redundant, superfluous, pre-
carious – can be found in this chapter.25
If the passage in Capital tells the story from the point of view of the accumula-
tion of capital, the parallel passage in the Grundrisse begins from the point of view
of living labour: ‘It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer, that he
is a pauper: a virtual pauper ... If the capitalist has no use for his surplus labour,
then the worker may not perform his necessary labour’. Marx is not arguing that
all workers are or will become beggars, as in the immiseration thesis often attrib-
uted to him. Rather, this is his account of bare life: since the exchange required
for the means of living—the selling of labour-power—is accidental and indifferent
to their organic presence, the worker is a virtual pauper.26 Virtual paupers: this
strange figure – which combines an almost lost word with one that has taken on
entirely new connotations – will be my temporary resting place. In a letter written
as he turned fifty, Marx wrote: ‘half a century on my shoulders and still a pauper’.
A century and a half on again, the spectre of wageless life still weighs upon us.

25 Marx, Capital, pp. 783, 794, 798.

26 Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, New York 1973, p. 604. For an intermediate draft of
this passage in the 1861–63 manuscripts, see MECW 30, p. 40.

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