Labour Process in Informal Sector: A Case Study of Carpet Industry

The Carpet industry is an important informal sector in Kashmir, provides employment opportunities to lakhs of people in the rural and semi-urban areas of Kashmir. The carpet industry has made a significant contribution to production, employment, and export of handicraft products and contributes to economic development. Regardless of generating growth, weavers in carpet industry continue to be locked in the unequal and exploitative labour process. The purpose of the present study is to examine the labour process in the carpet industry with specific focus on organization of production, capital accumulation and wage pattern among carpet weavers in Pulwama district of Kashmir. The present study is both primary and secondary in nature. The primary data collected from four blocks of Pulwama district through interview-schedule, focused group discussion and field observation. The key findings revealed that there is diversity in production relation, weavers are facing with a problem of middlemen/master weaver exploitation, low earning, and long working hours and piece-wage is a mode of surplus extraction for capitalists in the carpet industry.

A Plebeian Lexicon of Capitalism (and Socialism)

It is by no means exaggeration to suggest that society finds itself increasingly ill equipped in the art of civil discourse.  In particular, the realm of political debate has polarized at partisan extremes, arguably fueled by gross economic inequality.  And as is typical when advocates’ hearts are aflame, logic can give way to passion, whether for lack of empathy or failures in communication.  With skirmish lines firmly drawn seeming eons ago, the opposing forces calcify in their trenches, rarely daring set foot on the field of battle, choosing instead to lob poorly calculated mortars at their “enemy,” not in honest attempt to “win” the war, but merely hoping to quiet the shells raining down, even if but temporarily.  Before we can broker peace, it is crucial we mend the broken lines of communication, starting with the most basic building blocks of language.  Of late, our (un)civil discourse has been rife with talking at each other and past each other, without pause to consider the foundational definitions of the words we lob.  We have weaponized our very means of intellectual connection, to the point that what remains is a toxic stew of defensive reactions.  Into this fray author beckons reader, with lofty goals of both deconstructing and then intentionally framing a lay person’s lexicon with useful definitions for capitalism, capitalist, and capital, each considered as relative to socialism.

Employer of Last Resort as a new ‘New Deal’: A few thoughts on Turkey

Modern Monetary Theory emerges as a plausible alternative to solve Turkey’s staggering unemployment problem. This proposed solution here is the introduction of job guarantee program, which produces a non-discretionary automatic stabilizer that fosters both price stability and full employment. As a monetary sovereign, Turkey has the capacity to use deficit spending to bring growth and provide full employment to the millions who are in involuntary unemployment. The goal here is to tame the business cycles without throwing millions into unemployment, which has social and economic ramifications. In the absence of job creation by the private sector, this can be achieved through the use of government, providing job guarantees and the state acting as an employer of last resort by creating public projects, which will be cyclically adjusted in order to achieve full employment. 

Is zero the safe real rate?

The current economic debate with regards to the secular trend of ever lower, even negative, safe real interest rates is dominated by Keynesian, neoclassical and Austrian explanations. The former (two) argue that the interdependence phenomena of a global savings glut and a secular stagnation cause an oversupply of savings and thus drive down rates. From this position, central bank merely react to market forces. The latter dissent and argue that it was rather the other way around and an asymmetric central bank policy aimed at propping up equity prices led to the secular stagnation now quoted for its justification. In contrast, from the perspective of a critique of ideology, safe real rates where neither driven down by market forces nor central banks but by the weight of being not reasonably safe but riskless. Specifically, I argue that by equating the riskless return with the short-term interest rate, Black and Scholes (1973) state a tautology and imply that both rates shall be zero. In the subsequent inquiry, I show that this argument allows for a neat narration of the economic history of the neoliberal age. Furthermore, I explain why under current conditions ultra low interest rates fail to translate into inflation.

The Existence and Evolution of Business Groups in Emerging Economies: A Selective Review of the Literature

Business Groups and their ubiquitous presence in emerging economies affect the broad patterns of economic performance. The study of such hybrid organizational form has been relevant to various domains such as industrial organization, corporate finance, strategic management, economics and sociology etc. This paper is an attempt to first understand the reason for their dominant presence in emerging markets and then proceeds to review the literature based on the dominant research perspectives of the existing scholarly work.

Gentrification and Care A Theoretical Model

Gentrification and care are two topics that are rarely brought into conversation in the economics literature. Often, gentrification is studied in relation to displacement, housing prices, property values, and segregation. The economics of care, on the other hand has often been occupied with measurement and valuation of women’s labor on a global, de-regulated market. Anthropologists and other social scientists, however, have studied the collaboration and care work that women foster beyond the household. The sharing of unpaid social reproductive labor among networks of women/families is key to sustaining the coherence of low-income communities. If gentrification causes displacement, then, an episode of gentrification can cause care networks to disperse. To bridge the largely parallel literatures on gentrification and care work, we present a mathematical model of gentrification where agents base their decision to move on both the price of housing, and the price of care. The price of care is offset by the ability of agents to form care networks. Our models suggest that gentrification disperses the care networks of the poor, increasing their vulnerability to rising housing prices. Thus, decisions to move are predicated on a particular ‘social price point’-a decision that is not only economic but reflects increasing geographic distance from those who collaborate to accomplish social reproductive and other tasks of community maintenance.

Heterodox Microeconomics: A Spatial Turn for Environmental Health and Just Food System Social Provisioning

This paper examines food system social provisioning at low levels of geographic scale to merge the heterodox microeconomic approach outlined by Frederic Lee (2018) and the activist spatial justice methodology of Edward Soja (2010). Combining these two theoretical frameworks blends academia and activism by joining community perspectives with spatial, quantitative and qualitative data techniques to hypothesis test and investigate disparities in social provisioning. Initiating the inquiry with data available at the address level of geography allows the analysis to develop across diverse geographic scales and reveal consistent patterns of inequality. It is argued that these consistencies afford researchers, activists, and practitioners benchmarks for the study and development of transdisciplinary intervention design and implementation. This spatial study of pediatric food allergy frames a practical example of how this approach is applicable across a variety of socioeconomic and environmental health disparities and the pursuit of spatial justice outcomes at local and national levels of social provisioning.

The unilateral gift economy conjecture

I offer the conjecture that unilateral maternal provisioning constitutes a basic economic model for all with implications and a logic of its own. Market exchange is a derivative of this model, which contradicts it and creates its own area of life. The two models interact without our awareness because we have not taken unilateral gifting seriously. Renaming exploitation as the taking of unilateral gifts reveals another way to connect the dots between unwaged housework, surplus labor and ‘nature services’, and these are also connected to colonialism, corporate globalization and ecological devastation.