Rural-urban circuits of labour in the Global South: reflections on accumulation and social reproduction

Praveen Jha and Paris Yeros

Chapter 10 in Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work, 2023, pp 137-147 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter situates the patterns of labour migration across ‘rural-urban’ spaces and indicates important contemporary processes of accumulation and social reproduction in the Global South. Evidence suggests that there has been a massive population shift from rural to urban areas in search of better livelihoods, but most of this population ends up scrounging for subsistence in an incomplete process of proletarianization. This confirms Marx’s theory of a relative surplus population, which today encompasses a circulating population in diverse economic activities, residing in informal urban settlements, while also maintaining multi-locational households, but typically failing to gain social security and proper access to public services. This population serves as a powerful wage depressor for capital, in active collusion with the State, while presenting significant challenges for household dynamics and social reproduction.

Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781839106583.00019 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19739_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().