Featured illustration by Mirko Rastić. Photo by Angel Garcia/OTR

Christopher Columbus towers over Barcelona, pointing outward, far beyond the harbor. Carved in stone beneath him, an indigenous man kneels before a priest, head down, eyes averting the holy man’s gaze. Built in 1888 for Spain’s first International World’s Fair, this monument to colonialism stands where the port meets the Ramblas—the tree-lined mall Orwell described as the Catalan city’s “central artery”. There, it commemorates the bloody events that inaugurated Western dominance over the global economy. And today, it is a flashpoint in the struggle between life, property and the Sovereign.

This is among the first places tourists see when they step off of luxury liners and into Europe’s cruise ship capital. In every direction, the path is framed by commerce. Boisterous salsa music shuffles sweetly over the din as street musicians, vendors and artisans compete for the visitors’ attention with over-priced restaurants, tacky cocktail bars, hotels and corporate shopping centers. But every so often, the party is violently broken down. In a coordinated effort to expel them from the city’s streets, police forces from three separate authorities—local, regional and port—charge at dark-skinned street vendors, swatting at their backs and limbs with telescopic steel batons. It’s an unsettling sight, but an increasingly common one in a city that has come to symbolize the European left’s hopes for a working model of emancipation.

Informal work has never fit neatly within leftist categories. While the governing left tends to view it as a space for regulation, in more anarchistic circles it is often treated with suspicion as a field dominated by capitalist values. For mainstream organized labor, informal work is just one more form of exploitation that happens to affect women, migrants and other vulnerable groups more than others. The International Labor Organization (ILO), for instance, defines its characteristic features as a lack of protection against non-payment of wages, compulsory overtime or extra shifts, lay-offs without notice or compensation, unsafe working conditions and an absence of social benefits including pensions, sick pay and health insurance.

Of course, none of this is false. But the characteristics outlined by the ILO hinge on expectations defined by the social rights particular to Western welfare states. In this sense, they depart from a very specific idea of work constructed within a very specific set of power relations—namely, those depicted in the Monument to Columbus. That African and Asian informal workers are routinely pursued next to scenes from what Marx called “the chief moments of primitive accumulation” harbors a poetic truth. To unpack that image is to unveil one of the critical antagonisms at the heart of world trade.

Codifying Informality

The concept of “the informal economy” was coined by the anthropologist Keith Hart in the 1970s as he was studying low-income work in Accra, Ghana. It’s an odd term when you consider that, according to the ILO, between half and three-quarters of the non-agricultural work being done in developing countries falls into the category. In fact, the OECD claims that half of the world’s workers were informally employed in 2009, and that, by 2020, the number will rise to two-thirds. So by labeling it as “informal”, it appears we are depicting most of the work being done in the world as an anomaly, peripheral to the global “formal” economy.

But this was not Hart’s intention when he first applied the term. Departing from Marx’s notion of the “reserve army of the unemployed”, he was more interested in knowing whether the “surplus population” of low-income workers in the urban Third World were a “passively exploited majority” or if their informal economic activities possessed “an autonomous capacity for generating incomes”. At the time, he concluded that both were true, to a certain extent, and that there was some potential there for economic development.

The ILO were particularly enthusiastic about his findings. After seeing Hart present his work at a conference in 1971, and before he could even publish his work in an academic journal, they sent a large employment mission to Kenya. There, they examined the potential for converting the country’s traditional economy—which they began to refer to as “the informal sector”—into something more in line with the “formal economy” of Western welfare states. This approach continues to this day, and the formalization of informal work has gone on to become an important part of the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda.

Meanwhile, Hart’s position has evolved somewhat. In recent years, he has described the informal economy as the antithesis of the national-capitalism that dominates world trade. He also claims that it has become “a universal feature of the modern economy” as a result of the deterioration of employment conditions in rich countries, which began in the 1980s under Thatcher and Reagan and was exacerbated in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen explores this further in her own research, attributing the expansion of informal work in advanced capitalist countries to two main processes. The first is rising inequality and the resulting changes in the consumption habits of the rich and poor. The second is the inability of most workers to compete for the basic resources needed to operate in urban contexts, since leading firms tend to bid up their prices. This is particularly notable in the price of commercial space.

Yet, raising the costs of participating in commerce or national labor markets is not solely the domain of private enterprise. The state plays a major role in reproducing national-capitalist class relations through the selective inclusion or outright criminalization of certain types of work and certain types of people. This is especially clear in the case of undocumented migrants or ex-convicts, minoritized workers who are expelled from the formal economy and warehoused in slums, prisons and detention centers. If neoliberalism is, as sociologist Loïc Wacquant claims, “an articulation of state, market and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third,” then it is the tension between unemployment, informality and survival that makes its most repressive institutions so sticky.

Because it encompasses work that lies beyond the halo of legitimacy that enshrines national-capitalist values, informality is often associated with corruption and violence in the Western imagination. This has implications at both the global and local level. In poor countries, the informal economy provides an impetus for colonization via the imposition of Western norms and legality. In rich countries, the very real employment insecurity faced by informal workers is believed by citizens to be a breeding ground for shadowy mafias, and thus a threat to their own security.

The recent implementation of Spain’s draconian Citizen Security Law is a textbook example of how this social dynamic becomes codified into public law. Better known as the Gag Law, the legislation drew considerable attention from the international press and human rights groups due to its assault on the right to protest. Less was written, however, about how it punishes being poor in public by levying heavy fines on informal workers whose livelihoods depend on their access to public space. Coupled with a simultaneous reform of the country’s penal code, the new legislation inaugurated a sea change in policing poverty which cemented the informal sector’s role as the pipeline connecting prisons with the urban periphery.

A System of Mutual Aid?

Almost everything you see in the Besòs neighborhood was built by and for migrant workers. Lying on the outskirts of Barcelona, on the southwestern bank of the Besòs River, it began as a shantytown housing workers who had come from Southern Spain to work on the 1929 International World’s Fair. From then on, its history has been a tug-of-war between the precarious structures of the informal city and the hulking bureaucracy of the metropolis, as successive waves of migrant workers organized into rowdy neighborhood associations to demand the most basic forms of urban infrastructure.

But despite countless bottom-up victories, it remains a poor neighborhood. Today, roughly 30 percent of the population was born abroad, primarily in poor countries, and families earn roughly half the income of the average Barcelona household. This is where many of the Senegalese street vendors who sell bootlegged goods by the harbor live, partly due to the dynamics inherent to international migration and partly due to severe racial discrimination in Barcelona’s housing market. “The moment property owners hear your accent, they just hang up,” Mamadou tells me when I ask if he’s ever experienced racism while looking for a place to live. “Sometimes they’ll just flat-out say it: ‘Nope. No Africans.’”

The house I’m in is small, but well-kept. The image of a smiling Sufi marabout hangs serenely on the wall as the television news mumbles quietly in the background. The sweet, spicy smell of djar drifts in from the kitchen where a fresh pot of café touba is being brewed. Noting that there are only three tiny bedrooms, I ask my host how many people live here. “About six or seven,” he answers. Curious, I ask him where they all sleep. He tells me people generally come and go as they please, but a few stay all the time. That’s why the number he gave me is so high. When I ask him if it doesn’t get crowded with so many people, he nods, “A little. But we’re not going to let another African sleep on the street.”