ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Articles by Kalyan SanyalSubscribe to Kalyan Sanyal

Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-colonial Urbanisation

India's "bypass" approach to urbanisation seeks to decongest its post-colonial metropolises by building new towns for a new economy of knowledge-based activities and businesses driven by global capital on their fringes. The globalised economy, hegemonised by immaterial labour, creates conditions for these new towns to culturally secede from their national or regional location and align themselves with the global cities. However, the condition of post-coloniality, characterised by capital and its wasteland, manifests itself in the new towns as the slow but inevitable encroachment of the excluded population on these new zones of exclusivity

Beyond the Factory: Globalisation, Informalisation of Production and the New Locations of Labour

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.

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