Petty Producers and Casual Labour

Abstract

The working poor in underdeveloped capitalist societies, especially in the urban areas, are structurally excluded from access to the means of generating adequate incomes; very small proportions of the total populations of such economies are employed as wage-workers in industry and commerce (at least in the Western senses of the word). Consequently, aside from peasant agriculture, the major means of subsistence available to the urban working poor are those left to them by the dominant capitalist system which controls the commanding heights of the economy; this situation benefits capitalist industry in as much as the industrial labour-force and their dependents have access to selectively cheap mass consumption goods, a factor which exerts a downward pressure on industrial wages and cheapens the cost of production. But this is no “dual economy”, with a quaint traditional sector on one side, and the vibrant, dynamic modern sector on the other; though the urban economy is almost invariably analysed along these lines, the linkages between self-employed producers and mainly foreign-owned industrial giants are not insignificant.