Marx described very well the process by which the informal sector grows, looking at British society 150 years ago:
. . . The additional capital formed in the course of accumulation attracts fewer and fewer labourers in proportion to its magnitude. The old capital. . .repels more and more of the labourers formerly employed by it. 39
This dynamic produces a "stagnant" component of "the active labour army" with "extremely irregular employment":
Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class; this makes it at once the basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation . . . characterised by maximum of working time, and minimum of wages . . . Its extent grows, as with the extent and energy of accumulation the creation of surplus-population advances.40
In general, the suffering of a very large chunk of the urban masses in Third World countries comes not from being super-exploited by large capital, but from the fact that large capital does not see a way of making sufficient profits out of exploiting them at all. This is most clearly the case in much of sub-Saharan Africa. After squeezing wealth out of the continent during the period from the onset of the slave trade to the end of empire in the 1950s, those who run the world system (including local rulers who move their own money to Europe and North America) are now prepared to write off most of its people as "marginal" to their requirements-except in the all-important local enclaves where raw materials, especially oil, are to be found.
The relation of the formal and informal sectors
The unevenness of industrial expansion and the mushrooming of the informal sector can lead to conclusions about the incapacity of workers to organise and fight that very much parallel the orthodoxies about "precariousness" in the old industrial countries. It is assumed on the one hand that those workers with stable jobs in the formal sector are privileged labour aristocrats-as one report on north east Brazil puts it, to "be formally employed is almost a privilege, since less than half of those who want such a situation are in fact 'enjoying' it" .41 At the same time it is assumed that those in informal sectors suffer from "social exclusion" and are not capable of self-organisation.
Who Can Overcome?
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