Low-Wage Capitalism,Social Difference,and Nature-Dependent Production

Abstract

Internationally, neoliberalism is often associated with the export-oriented production of nontraditional agricultural goods from poorer to richer countries. Shrimp aquaculture is a very important aspect of this process. Economic geographers, sociologists, and others have critically analyzed the problems of shrimp farmers and the adverse environmental effects of shrimp aquaculture. But they have generally neglected a crucial dimension: the conditions under which men, women, and children work for a wage in producing shrimps. The story of shrimp culture has been, more or less, the story of the missing wage laborer. Drawing on in-depth interviews in India, this paper discusses the conditions of laborers in export-oriented shrimp culture. It shows how the export-oriented production of shrimps results in the reproduction of a working class that works for abysmally low wages and under very poor conditions. The exploitation and domination of aqualaborers happens in ways in which capitalist relations are mediated by place-specific relations of difference and the specificities of nature-dependent production.