Killing us with slow poison: Organizing infrastructural violence and work at an internal frontier

Abstract

This study focuses on the people inhabiting an internal frontier of global capital marked by the zone of a waste landfill and its surrounding industrial belt. While the external frontiers of capitalist accumulation are traceable to identifiable corporations, internal frontiers involve ambiguous work and organizational relations. We draw on fieldwork at a settlement near a waste landfill in Ahmedabad, India. We weave research on infrastructures with organizational studies of violence to examine the (re-) production of these internal frontiers. We show how the state and private actors inflict socio-economic ruination and govern through infrastructural violence – such as exclusions from public infrastructures, proliferating private infrastructures and exposure to toxic infrastructures – to produce the internal frontier. Residents endure life through the reparative infrastructural work of salvaging and patching infrastructures. We contribute to organizational research on violence by highlighting the under-theorized internal frontiers of global capital that comprise large swathes of the population. Furthermore, using infrastructure as an analytic lens, we open new terrains of inquiry into work and organizing in the capitalist mode of production. We show how reparative infrastructural work at the internal frontier transgresses Global North-centric formulations of work. We advance nascent organization studies on majoritarian political formations.