Highlighting informal workers is an epistemic strategy parallel but fundamentally opposed to ‘real politik” of political economy. The affirmative is a radical deconstruction of inherently gender and sexual labor relations both public and private.

A growing body of scholarship highlights that accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003) creates surplus populations who must sustain themselves outside wage labor (cf. Li, 2010; Perreault, 2013; Sanyal, 2014 [2007]; Sassen, 2010). Noting that many of the dispossessed turn to the informal economy, this literature establishes the need to interrogate how informal aspects of the economy are bound up in processes of accumulation by dispossession. However, there is a tendency to focus exclusively on how accumulation by dispossession leads people to become informal workers. Disrupting the unidirectional nature of this narrative, this article explores how informal workers create new spheres of accumulation that the state and formal capital seek to capture. The article is based on analysis of the attempt by the Johannesburg Council and its Pikitup waste management company to grant a tender to a private company to recycle materials at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa. It draws on 42 group interviews with informal reclaimers who salvaged materials at the dump and 63 individual interviews with reclaimers, Pikitup management, and Council representatives conducted between March 2009 and August 2010 as part of a longer social history of the dump. I argue that the Council and Pikitup’s desire to enclose the dump must not be taken as the simple effort to dispossess reclaimers of a pre-existing resource. Historically, garbage dumps have been the final burial grounds for unwanted commodities and sites for the permanent destruction of value. Drawing on Searle’s (2006) theorization of social ontology, I explore what is required to transform a dump from a commodity cemetery to a resource mine. I argue that at Marie Louise (as at many dumps across the developing world), it was informal reclaimers who re-cast the waste as valuable and the dump as a site for the production of value through a combination of intellectual labor, physical labor, and struggle. In attempting to enclose the dump, the municipality sought to capture the physical materials interred within it as well as the very framing and establishment of these materials as valuable, while simultaneously erasing the role of reclaimers in these processes. The reclaimers’ understanding that they produced both the knowledge and the new sphere of accumulation that the Council and Pikitup were trying to appropriate played a pivotal role in spurring them to contest and ultimately prevent the enclosure of the dump. ‘‘Epistemic injustice’’ that disregarded the reclaimers in their capacity as knowers (Fricker, 2007) and epistemic dispossession were therefore central to both the attempted process of accumulation by dispossession and how it was successfully challenged. Highlighting the epistemic and social agency of informal workers frequently considered the epitome of ‘‘human waste’’ (Bauman, 2004) establishes the importance of recognizing all informal workers as producers of knowledge who transform social reality and interrogating the implications for how we theorize accumulation by dispossession. The article proceeds in six sections. The first reviews literature on accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy. The second draws on Searle’s (2006) theorization of social ontology to understand how sanitary landfills are established and transformed as social facts. The third section explores how reclaimers converted Marie Louise from a commodity cemetery into a resource mine, while the fourth analyzes how neoliberalization created a motivation for the municipality to enclose the dump in order to benefit from this transformation in its social ontology. The fifth section argues that ‘‘epistemic injustice’’ (Fricker, 2007) and epistemic dispossession are central to accumulation by dispossession and struggles against it. The final section draws out implications for theorizations of accumulation by dispossession. Accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy In Capital, Marx (1990) focuses primarily on the dynamics of expanded reproduction within capitalism. However, since Perelman (2000) highlighted the continuing nature of primitive accumulation throughout capitalism’s history, a growing body of literature theorizes the role, form, and nature of primitive accumulation within contemporary capitalism (cf. de Angelis, 2001, 2004; Hart, 2006; Harvey, 2003). The understanding of primitive accumulation as an ongoing process is most closely associated with David Harvey’s arguments in The New Imperialism (Harvey, 2003). Harvey argues that in order to assist capital in addressing a crisis of overaccumulation, neoliberal governments are creating new spheres of accumulation by privatizing public goods and services and facilitating the enclosure of common resources. As this form of accumulation is not limited to the birth of capitalism, Harvey argues against calling it ‘‘primitive’’ and proposes the alternative concept of ‘‘accumulation by dispossession.’’ Webber notes that Harvey’s theorization of accumulation by dispossession differs from Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation in important ways. Most crucially, while for Marx primitive accumulation changes class relations by separating producers from their means of production and forcing them into wage labor, Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession includes the erosion of common property rights to means of consumption (Webber, 2008: 401). As it is not focused exclusively on changes to access to the means of production, the concept ‘‘accumulation by dispossession’’ opens the possibility that dispossession is not necessarily bound up in a shift to wage labor. Li observes that even at the time of the initial enclosure movement, dispossessed peasants did not move seamlessly into waged employment (Li, 2010: 70–71). She and a range of scholars argue that a key feature of accumulation by dispossession in the current era is precisely the fact that dispossession is delinked from proletarianization, as capital values the resources to be enclosed, but not the people who must be dispossessed of them. Rather than being a central mechanism for bringing people into capitalist labor relations, accumulation by dispossession plays the opposite role of rendering increasing numbers of people permanently surplus to the needs of capital (Li, 2010; Perreault, 2013; Sanyal, 2014 [2007]; Sanyal and Bhattacharyya, 2009; Sassen, 2010; Soederberg, 2012). As many of these people turn to the informal economy to generate their livelihoods, this understanding facilitates fresh ways of theorizing the relationship between enclosure, dispossession, the informal economy, and capitalism. Scholars working with a classical Marxist understanding in which the transition to wage labor is central to primitive accumulation see the rise of the informal economy as pathological and as evidence of a stalled transition to ‘‘real’’ capitalism (Moore, 2004: 91–92). By contrast, Sanyal sees informal workers (other than those subcontracted by capital) as part of the ‘‘need economy’’ constituted by people excluded from capitalist relations. Rather than serving as evidence of an incomplete capitalist transition, they are an integral part of the ‘‘capital – not-capital’’ complex that, as Sanyal argues, characterizes postcolonial economies. According to Sanyal, because India is a democracy, government cannot simply abandon the excluded and must engage in ‘‘developmental governmentality’’ to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation by supporting people in the ‘‘need economy’’ to reproduce themselves outside the circuits of capital. For Sanyal, government support for the informal economy is not about promoting budding capitalists, but is, instead, about containing the political effects of dispossession by ensuring that people excluded from wage labor are able to sustain themselves (Sanyal, 2014 [2007]). Gidwani and Wainright (2014: 44–45) correctly note that Sanyal overstates the separation of the need economy and the accumulation economy and fails to recognize that, far from being permanently quarantined within the informal economy, people move between wage labor and informal work. In addition, it is important to note how economic activities themselves cross the so-called need and accumulation economies. While Sanyal and Bhattacharyya claim there are two distinct spheres within the informal economy – one linked to circuits of capital through subcontracting and outsourcing and one completely outside capitalist circuits (Sanyal and Bhattacharyya, 2009: 36) – reality cannot be parsed into such neat categories. For example, informal reclaimers salvage materials for a range of purposes that span the so-called need and accumulation economies. They reclaim reusable items such as food, clothing, furniture, and building materials for personal use and for sale to people who will use them as is or as inputs into informal production. They also collect recyclable materials that may initially be sold informally to intermediaries but are transformed into inputs for formal production as they are sold upwards into highly globalized value chains. Reclaimers’ decisions regarding what to collect and sell are informed and conditioned by a number of factors, including access to waste; knowledge of and access to markets; conditions in the multiple markets for their materials; relations with the state, formal business, customers and the community where they work; and power-laden social relations of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality between reclaimers themselves.1 While reclaimers’ actions are, therefore, undeniably shaped and constrained by other actors and the contexts within which they work, reclaimers are also active and central agents in the forging of recycling systems. As elaborated below, in most postcolonial contexts, recycling services were created informally by reclaimers. Until the point when municipalities develop formal policy on recycling, reclaimers’ integration into formal circuits of capital results from their own decisions based on known constraints, opportunities, and conditions, rather than being determined by the informalization strategies of capital as assumed by Sanyal (Samson, forthcoming). Once it is understood that the formal and informal economies constitute an interrelated, dynamic, complex whole, it is possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy than that presented by Sanyal. Sanyal’s focus on the relationship between accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy is one-sided and unidirectional, focusing only on how accumulation by dispossession and exclusion foster the creation and expansion of the informal economy. However, Soederberg’s (2012) theorization of the extension of formal credit to poor Mexicans who previously relied on informal lending as a form of accumulation by dispossession demonstrates that accumulation by dispossession can also involve the formal economy capturing a sphere of accumulation forged within the informal economy. Unfortunately Soederberg does not analyze the dynamics of this process or ask crucial questions related to how the informal market was created, functioned, or was affected by the capture of a significant proportion of clients by formal lenders. She also does not interrogate how workers and lenders in the informal credit market resisted accumulation by dispossession or were affected by it. Answering such questions is, however, crucial to developing a more complete theorization of accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy. This task is taken up in the remainder of the article through a study of how the state and formal capital attempted to capture recycling activities created informally by reclaimers at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, as well as how this was contested. As I am particularly interested in understanding how reclaimers informally create a new sphere of accumulation, I am closely attentive to their role as creators of both knowledge and resources.