Beyond the factory: Globalisation, informalisation of production and the new locations of labour

Abstract

This essay foregrounds the phenomenon of informalised self-employment and explores its implications for potentially new forms of labour activism. The relation which defines the new location of labour is one in which the labourer is no longer a source of surplus, rather he/she is an unwanted possessor or occupier of economic resources from which he/she must be divorced to free those resources for use in the circuit of capital. This process of dispossession without proletarianisation or exploitation is referred to as exclusion. The traditional contradiction between wage-labour and capital is overshadowed by the contradiction between capital and a surplus labour force. Class politics - traditionally focused on exploitation of wage-labour - must reinvent itself to address the other great political movement shaping up around the exclusion of labour.