Introduction

A bewildering and contradictory set of data, experiences, and critical positions attend the contemporary debate about labour. Despite the orthodox claim that capitalism “eliminat[es] peasantries” and “push[es people] out of agriculture” and into industry as proletarians (Endnotes n.p.), ‘long downturn’ theorists note “a chronic under-demand for labour” (Benanav 117). Yet formal employment in the deindustrialised United States is reported to be relatively high (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2), leading those such as Aaron Benanav to suggest that the problem is not “mass unemployment” but “continuously rising under-employment” (118). The result of what is often called the moving contradiction of capital is that more and more workers are drawn into a system of production that increasingly renders them redundant through greater ‘efficiencies’ of the process. This creates a vast ‘reserve army of labour’ which, when left unaided by income from wage or welfare, often has to struggle for the means to reproduce itself through ad hoc work, communal pooling of resources, or eliciting the favour of patrons. Taking my lead from the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz, for whom cultural forms are shaped by objective social conditions, in this book I analyse the impact of economic informality on the novel across the world-system.