Introduction1
The current landscape of Romania is striking due to its unevenness. Once you drive off a main road, recently repaired with European money, typically amidst two corruption scandals, or you step out from the cubicle of a transnational corporation, eagerly swallowing the cosmopolitan graduates who duly report their numerous unpaid internships as “work experience,” or you exit the backdoor of the greenest homemade cafeteria, you may rapidly lose your way on the unpaved lanes running through a hectic mixture of shacks that accommodate the precariat. In the passionate postsocialist quests to praise or condemn global capitalism, service sector “growth” and gentrification were often in the spotlight, while the decomposition of the former working class, the emergence of a racialized stratum of the dispossessed, and its violent expulsion to the margins remained sidelined as a geopolitically contingent issue of “backwardness.”
Usually, deprivation and marginalization are explained in terms of insufficient development of (human) capital, historically persistent ethno-racial prejudice, public policy failure, or the relentless culture of informal economy. We propose a different approach: our focus lies in how processes of precarization and social-spatial polarization constitute endemic features of capitalism. Embracing expanded definitions of “dispossession” (Kasmir and Carbonella 2014) and “class” (Kalb 1998, 2015), we explore the shadows of “uneven development” (Harvey 2003, 2011) in order to reveal how a category of racialized labourers, the majority of them (self-)identified ethnic Roma, was produced and confined within stigmatized spaces of marginality and drawn into the engines of capitalism Thus, our analysis entangles class divisions in a Marxist tradition with racialization and spatialization, while addressing how these phenomena are mutually producing each other.
The ethnographic journey goes through five cities located in various regions of Romania, a country at the periphery of global capitalism, and it visits twenty urban areas recorded in local narratives as no-go areas of “Țigănie.”2 While we acknowledge their spatial marginality, deep deprivation, and stigma, we do not see these settlements as insular communities governed by their own historically embedded cultural norms (as some scholars of Romani studies might do), but as emergent places dynamically tied to the social, political, and economic processes crossing through the city in its connectedness to global capital. Thus, we join voices with those claiming that inner-city development cannot be understood unless we also look at what happens at the peripheries or in the spaces of marginality, as both are connected to the current regime of capitalist accumulation.
In doing this, we situate our research in a particular place and time, that of urban Romania in the mid-2010s, a country marked by a history of peripheral status in the global economy, that made it particularly vulnerable to changing capital flows and markets, even under the more regulated and domestically oriented economic order of state socialism (1947–1989). We explain the relevance and timeliness of this choice in the first section of this introductory chapter. We acknowledge that the ethnicization or racialization of precarious workers, far from constituting a historical contingency, provides an enduring means for the subordination, dispossession, and productive exploitation of those rendered to belong to dispossessed groups in a given political order. For a better understanding of how these processes play out in the case of the Roma, an ethnic group with a well-documented history of slavery, dispossession, and persecution, we connect to the literature on postcolonialism. On the one hand, we take inspiration from the South Asian subaltern group studies in showing how the de-proletarization of legally freed former slaves brought about new forms of unfree labour, in our case provided disproportionately more by the Roma. On the other hand, we follow the Latin American decolonial studies tradition in asserting that unfree labour is quintessential for capital accumulation, and furthermore, cultural classifications (race, ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.) are embedded in the division of labour. In the case of Central and Eastern Europe, as elsewhere, racialization occurs entangled with spatial marginalization and segregation in severely deprived areas, a process that further strengthens ethno-racial borders already entwined with class boundaries, constrains participation in unfair and ultimately unfree labour, and, at the same time, perversely devaluates the financial costs of labour force reproduction. Thus, in building our theoretical lenses, we take a step forward from a mere description of the spatial dimension of social and economic inequalities and scrutinize the entangling between global capitalism, racialized labour, and spatial marginalization.
Relevance and Timeliness of Our Study
We are not the first to make the point that global capitalism has made its ascent by incorporating various types of labours to produce commodities for the global markets, while simultaneously disqualifying that very labour. A major Central and Eastern European theme, at the turn of the nineteenth century, was exactly that the modernization process, which includes industrialization, was strongly hindered by the ways in which local economies were incorporated in global capitalism. The second serfdom at the East of Elba in Central Europe (Kochanowicz 1989; Janos 2000) and rural peonage and debt bondage in Eastern Europe (Stahl 1980; Mateescu 2012) were far from being feudal residues of a still traditional society but, rather, particular ways in which labour was reconfigured in the nineteenth century as part of an agriculture that served the need of Western capital (Brenner 1989; Boatcă 2007; Guga 2015). The dismantling of communal property, the increasingly severe deprivation faced by the majority of the population, the harsh work conditions, the new forms of unfree labour, and the persistency of slavery of the Roma population in the Romanian provinces until 1856 are no accidents. In the radical interpretation of nineteenth-century socialists, these are effects of the “law” by which “undeveloped” economies become satellites of “developed economies” (Dobrogeanu-Gherea 2010 [1910]), and consequently they maintain a cheap and politically oppressed labour force. However, much of this critical thinking with Marxist roots was phrased in the nationalist frame of the time, and collective dignity claims were amended in the local intellectual endeavour to create national communities and build independent states (Boatcă 2003; Costinescu 2014). The ethnicist undertones and sometimes blunt racism against the urban bourgeoisie, mostly composed of ethnic minorities such as the Jews, Armenians, Albanians, and Greeks, are finely ingrained in these theories (Chirot and Reid 1997). This is mirrored, at the other edge of the economic assets spectrum, by the inferiorization of the Roma and the creation of dual-labour markets, which render them under-proletarianized. Finally, even if labour relations are conceptualized as asymmetrical exchanges, they fail to observe the way in which ethnicity and race are justificatory categories used in the attempts to control economic life, property relations, and labour.
These debates received a new life in the 1970s as part of their incorporation in the compelling language of dependency theories and world system theories. Especially with the work of Wallerstein (1974), Chirot (1976), and Stahl (1980), the thesis of the second serfdom in Eastern Europe was brought into dialogue with the emerging efforts to conceptualize slavery and serfdom as an integral part of the primitive accumulation in the periphery (Amin et al. 1982). Yet, the explicit theorization of the link between race and labour is done by heirs to the latter, more specifically the two regional branches of postcolonial studies.
First, the South Asian subaltern studies tradition, with the debate over the de-proletarization (Brass 1999, 2011, 2014) and the agrarian semi-feudalism in India (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2012; Patnaik and Dingawaney 1985), has shown that the persistency of unfree labour—chattel slavery, peonage, debt bondage, indenture—is far from being a historical accident. The legal abolition of slavery, as part of the complete subsuming in the capitalist logic, does not transform the whole mass of workers from a region into free wage labourers. On the contrary, their faith is an open question, linked with the processes of class compositio...