Precarization, Informalization, and Marx

Abstract

It is argued that informalization (used primarily to understand economic dynamics in the Global South) and precarization (used primarily in the analysis of the labor market in the Global North) are in the process of becoming identical phenomena and are both related to the expansion of the reserve army of labor. Insights from Marx are useful in understand both processes, especially his concepts of the value of labor, of formal subsumption vs. real subsumption, and of absolute vs. relative surplus value. The vast expansion and globalization of the labor force has fostered the trend toward a reversion to formal subsumption and facilitated the recommodification of labor.

Kafala System and Precariat Exploitation at Qatar World Cup Title

“…Such exploitation is realized when workers are paid low subsistence wages that are solely sufficient for the survival of workers and their families, or in Marx's terms "necessary labor". (Wilson, 2020) Furthermore, capitalists can also profit by manipulating working time, either by increasing or subtracting from it, in order to obtain a surplus of labor. According to Marx, there are two types of surplus value in the context of exploitation of workers, namely absolute surplus value and relative surplus value.…”

Flexible Employment for Generation Z Youth: Characteristics and Challenges

“…When the economy declines, the unemployment rate rises, and the reserve forces can also absorb some of the unemployed population, reducing the employment pressure on society. In the labor market, informal gig economy is often employed as an institutionalized form of capital utilization of labor reserves [9]. According to the China Sharing Economy Development Report (2021), the number of participants in the sharing economy in 2020 was approximately 830 million, of which approximately 84 million were service providers or new forms of employment workers [10].…”

Precarity and Development: Production and Labor Processes in the Informal Economy in India

“…In that context, the resurrection of the issue of precarity, usually viewed as a symptom of underdevelopment due to the lack of capitalist transition, raises questions about the long-promised ability of capital to provide a secure and stable path towards economic betterment for vast sections of the laboring population. 2 However, it should be noted that even for LDEs, there has been a newly induced precarity in the formal capitalist sector through a similar process of informalization or precariatization of labor relations in recent decades, which can, at least partly, be attributed to similar global structural factors (Wilson 2019). This rise of a similar phenomenon in both spaces, in spite of unevenness in their development trajectories, raises questions about the preordained unilinear trajectory of capitalist development.…”