PhD Dissertation

My thesis contends that the social reproduction of labor within capitalist labor process is atrophically linked to the social reproduction of precarity itself. The concept of ‘precarity capitalism’ emphasizes that it is ‘more than labor power extraction’ which fuels contemporary capitalism. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic research across agrarian spaces in Ganjam and powerloom shopfloors in Surat, within India’s powerloom shopfloors, I argue that the relation between spaces of migration are not simply mediated by relations of production but relations of precariousness. I call this relationship an entanglement of value arenas, which is salient aspect of precarity capitalism. I demonstrate that the entanglement is composed of multiple forms of precariousness where workers’ survival values are commodified, personhood is masculine, labor is atrophic, and politics is vibrational. These forms reveal the processes which confuse, obfuscate and  hinder sociability of workers. The thesis concludes that, even when workers seek to resist capitalist exploitation by seizing the instrument of labor, they inadvertently deepen and reproduce their own precarity. Failing to own their instrument of labor, the workers move to other labor environments but unwittingly reproduce an extractivist labor process. Ultimately, the thesis provides a critical analysis of the social reproduction of precarity among labor migrants in India’s informal economy where in workers often unwittingly sustain precarity. My doctoral thesis advisors are Maunaguru Siddharthan (UofT) and Sahana Ghosh (NUS).