Searching for the Informal Labor Movement: Theorizing Class and Collective Action among Informal Workers in West Africa

1. Introduction

Class analysis is most associated with a Marxist theoretical framework (Wright 2005). However, Marxists of all stripes—apart from many African Marxists themselves and a handful of influential Africanists, including a lively tradition of Nigerian Marxism (Mayer 2016)—have had infamously little to say about workers in Africa and about informal workers especially. What little Marxist thought has been focused on informality and informal workers has also subscribed to what I call the exclusion paradigm (McDermott 2021), viewing informal workers—especially within the vein of Analytical Marxism—as lacking power, class location, and the potential for class formation altogether, or—in more orthodox Marxist readings—as simply the industrial reserve army whose sole impetus in capitalist production is driving down global wages (or, in even more dismissive formulations, as a surplus population or “lumpens,” who are wholly exterior to capitalist relations). These insights reflect the near-sighted nature of much of academic and policy-centered research on informality and labor movements today, including critical approaches.

This work starts from the assumption that informal workers play important functions as a key component of the global working class for the continued accumulation of capital and the reproduction of the system at the global, regional, and national levels. Specifically, this work builds on my earlier work by offering a fuller critique of, and corrections to, the power-resources and similar approaches to class analysis and their assumptions about (or total overlooking of) informal workers in Africa. More crucially, I argue that a latent class consciousness exists among the growing informal working class and that class action by informal workers has the potential to challenge the global capitalist system. I do this via an overview of debates and contemporary thought related to informal worker organization and class consciousness. I contribute empirical insights garnered during ethnographic field work and interviews conducted in Sierra Leone in 2019–2020 and 2021. Rather than the proliferation of informality around the globe spelling an end to class politics and class struggle, the entrenchment of informality opens potential and novel forms in the class structure, in class formation, and in the class struggle. The proliferation of an informal and irregular segment of the global working class leads to a situation wherein, as Samir Amin (2019) eloquently put it, “the proletariat seems to disappear just at the moment it has become more widespread.” Our task is to reveal the nature of today’s proletariat in Africa.

2. Informal Worker Power and Analytical Marxist Shortcomings: Beyond the Power Resources Approach

Perhaps the most influential framework employed by contemporary labor scholars today is the “power resources approach,” an Analytical Marxist approach that entails the “implicit transformation of class power as a relation into compartmentalized capacities of workers and workers’ organizations” (Gallas 2018: 348). This intellectual compartmentalization of worker power perpetuates the exclusion paradigm. The exclusion paradigm characterizes both liberal and critical understandings of informal workers today and implies that informal workers throughout the Global South comprise a non-class, or surplus population of individuals, who live exterior to capitalist relations and engage, instead, largely in either survival activities and/or entrepreneurial work with little implications for the struggle between labor and capital (McDermott 2021). Crucially, the power resources approach, like the broader exclusion paradigm, assumes that the informal and formal sectors can be acted upon and conceived of in isolation from one another.

Influenced by the Analytical Marxism of Erik Olin Wright (2000) and Beverly Silver (2005), scholars deploying the power resources approach conceive of informal worker power (or lack thereof) as determined primarily by informal workers’ separation from direct commodity production, that is, their relatively weak “structural location,” and their lack of the resources and work-relationships necessary for developing effective associational power (i.e., worker organizations) (Kabeer, Sudarshan, and Milward 2013: 8; Kurtz 2004; Perry et al. 2007; Schmalz, Ludwig, and Webster 2018b). Indeed, many power resource scholars fail to consider informal workers in their conception of worker power whatsoever and, when they do, it is often only in their capacity to form coalitions with formal workers or to act as members of what are conceived of as non-class-oriented social movements (i.e., to act as social, as opposed to economic, actors) (Schmalz, Ludwig, and Webster 2018a). Thus, despite the useful insights that a power resources approach can provide, the approach oversimplifies the complex matrix of social, political, and material conditions necessary for capitalism’s continuation (i.e., the totality of global capitalist society) and, thus, the true power (and nature of power) of informal workers (Lebowitz 1988). The approach, in other words, perpetuates the exclusion paradigm, fails to consider the essential interconnection of the formal and informal economies and overlooks the potential sources of power and radical politics of informal workers.

To be fair, the approaches’ adherents have developed an ever-expanding number of typologies of power such as “associational,” “structural,” “logistical,” “institutional,” and “societal” power in an to attempt to address the framework’s limitations, wherein huge swaths of the global population are excluded from conceptions of power and capitalism. Yet, the growing proliferation of “powers” and the acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of these forms of power has begun to undermine the strengths and claims of the approach to begin with, namely, its supposed clarity and analytic value. Despite attempts to modify the power resources approach, the school of thought is based upon a conceptual framework of capitalism wherein informal workers are conceived of as extraneous actors (or, at most, lesser participants relative to formal workers, and thus less consequential actors) in the reproduction and challenging of the capitalist system. According to this line of thinking, although informal workers may be able to indirectly leverage their power as social or legal actors to indirectly affect the dynamics of capitalist accumulation (such as via associational power), they are in a less privileged position to do so than formal workers holding structural power vis-à-vis their direct involvement in commodity production and the employee-employer relationship (Schmalz, Ludwig, and Webster 2018b: 127).

In her research on dock workers across the Global South (supposedly workers with much relative structural power according to the literature), Katy Fox-Hoddess, for example, demonstrates that the power resources approach is not only conceptually but also empirically flawed (2019a, 2019b). The segmented understanding of worker power that, additionally, isolates the political, social, cultural, and economic spheres is a practical implication of the exclusion paradigm. It continues to taint theorists’ understanding of capitalism, informal workers, and, consequentially, informal worker movements. The realities of labor in Africa are especially overlooked by such a framework.

For instance, how are we to make sense of an approach to worker power wherein an astounding 61 percent of the world’s workers responsible for producing one-third of the entire world’s GDP are considered to be lacking structural economic leverage and are therefore unlikely to play a decisive role in the labor movements of the future (World Bank 2021)? The power resources approach, then, despite supposedly centering class in its understanding of the global labor movement, ends up dealing with de-classed categories of informal workers such as the “urban poor” or the “subaltern.” The framework falls short because of employing an overly narrow and compartmentalized conception of the capitalist system and by voiding social movements and actors in the Global South of class and economic dimensions (Barker 2013; Bayat 2017). This, despite the fact that recent scholarship is showing that informal workers have a tendency to mobilize around economic issues rather than other identity-centric ones (Bhowmik 2009; Hummel 2017).

3. Methodology and Context

The insights of this work are based upon ethnographic research conducted 2019–2020, with follow-up research conducted in the summer of 2021, in Sierra Leone. Ethnographic research consisted of participant observation via living and interacting with informal workers largely in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, for a total of ten months. I conducted interviews with approximately sixty individuals over the course of the research, including informal workers of various professions and sectors of the economy—from petty traders to domestic workers to taxi drivers to factory workers to diamond miners and others. I also conducted interviews with a handful of government and union officials, including the president of the country’s drivers and transport workers union.

Methodologically, I utilized an extended case method, as developed by Michael Buroway, to contextualize and guide the research (1998). The extended case method is an ethnographic approach that differs from the more prominent grounded theory approach to ethnography in its macro-oriented and theoretically driven nature. The extended case method approach relies upon insights from macro-contexts (i.e., global or regional dynamics of capitalist accumulation) to understand the local, and is based on an a priori theoretical framing with the aim of “modify[ing], exemplify[ing], and develop[ing] existing theories” (Tavory and Timmermans 2009: 244)—the framing, in this case, being Marxist understandings of class.

As for Sierra Leone—or “Salone” as it is affectionately called—the country is a small constitutional republic located in the Mano River region of coastal West Africa. Sierra Leone has a population of roughly seven million people and for several decades has consistently ranked among the lowest countries in the world in terms of human development, despite impressive mineral wealth and a climate conducive to rich agricultural production. The country ranked 182 out of 189 countries in the 2020 Human Development Report (UNDP 2020). After initial European contact, the coast of the country was an important slave trade site. Later, the country’s capital and Western Area was settled as a British Colony in 1792 by repatriated slaves and black loyalists who had fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War. After gaining political independence in 1961, the country eventually succumbed to one-party rule under Siaka Stevens throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Alie 2016). From 1991 to 2002, the country experienced a civil war that gained global notoriety for the exploitation of conflict minerals by warring factions, especially blood diamonds, and the widespread use of child soldiers.

Today, the country has among the highest rates of informality in the world, with 92.5 percent of total workers and 86 percent of non-agricultural workers being informal, a number which has likely increased in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (ILO 2018: 86). The country’s domestic class structure is defined by a petite-bourgeois class composed largely of expats from India and other middle-income countries who tend to own the country’s few light manufacturing facilities. A small merchant class of wholesalers with international connections also exists, and is largely composed of ethnic Lebanese Sierra Leoneans, members of the Fula ethnic group, and, less frequently, Nigerians. The wealthiest members of society tend to be investors and politicians (or former politicians) with holdings and lucrative positions in the country’s mineral and growing agro-industrial industries. The country’s vast mineral and natural resources tend to be controlled by foreign corporations via generous government contracts, such as the private Chinese company Kingho Investment Company’s holding in iron ore, or Australia’s Iluka Resources’ control of the country’s vast rutile deposits. The vast majority of Sierra Leoneans, on the other hand, survive as workers in the informal economy.

4. Capitalism as Totality and the Significance of “Survival Activities”

To understand informal workers’ labor activities—their “survival activities”—as being significant in terms of class and dynamics of capital accumulation, I draw on the Italian Autonomous Marxist School. Sylvia Federici and Mario Tronti, for instance, utilize an understanding of capitalism as a “totality” that understands the working class (especially women engaged in domestic work, in the case of Federici’s work) as broader and more inclusive than the traditionally narrow understandings of the working class as defined solely by direct commodity production (Tronti 2019; Federici 2012; Cleaver 2019). One key theoretical insight offered by the Autonomists that is essential to adequately understand the importance of informal workers today is the notion that the realization of capital is just as essential in capitalist production as the valorization process—or the act of workers imparting surplus value via exploitation by capitalists in the process of commodity production (a process inhabited by the traditionally defined proletariat—a definition itself that is problematic). Valorization is the process by which new value is added to capital assets, and the realization of capital is the process by which profit, produced via that valorization, becomes a reality via the successful sale of the commodity in the value chain for consumption (Kenway 1990). It is the realization of capital in which informal workers play a central role in the process of capitalist accumulation, a key role that has long been overlooked.

Another key concept from the autonomous school, applied here to understanding informal workers, is the concept of society as the social factory. From this point of view, capitalism is an “organic whole” wherein “production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are. . . elements of a totality, differences within a unity” (Tronti 2019: 17). Conceiving of capitalism as a totality means recognizing—thanks to the maturation and spread of capitalism and the generalization of monopoly capitalism—that all social productive forces become functional in transferring their value from labor to capital. As Dennis Mumby puts it, “In this sense, capitalism is no longer content simply to extract surplus value at the point of production from purchased labor time, but increasingly captures the (free) sociality of everyday life and turns it into surplus value” (2020: 2). Mumby uses the example of Uber and Lyft drivers and similar sharing platforms that have transformed daily interactions and everyday life into transactions of capital. Feminist thinkers, influenced by the Autonomous school such as Sylvia Federici, apply this concept to the domestic sphere to analyze the role of women in the reproduction of the capitalist system (Federici 2012; Bhattacharya 2017b; Mies 1999). For purposes here, I draw on the social factory/totality understanding of capitalism by understanding what have previously been narrowly conceived of as survival activities done by informal workers as also acts within the production process of capital—summarized in this statement: “In the social factory. . . the capital-labor relationship is reframed as a capital-life relationship, in which—potentially at least—all spheres of human activity are mediated by the capital accumulation process and viewed through the lens of the market” (Mumby 2020: 2; Fleming 2014). The survival activities done by informal workers not directly engaged in global value chains have often been considered as superfluous and exterior to capitalism and, thus, class dynamics. These survival activities represent diverse instances of the selling and buying of labor power.

That is not to say that capitalism is eternal or all-encompassing, as the seeds of a society beyond capital are always necessarily being cultivated within the capitalist system’s own contradictions—but it is saying that all social productive forces within the capitalist system tend to exist as functions of that system. This work is novel in applying these Autonomous school insights explicitly to understandings of the informal working class.

In so doing, I challenge understandings of not only workers worldwide and the assumptions of the power resources approach but also the role Africa plays in the global capitalist system, which is definitive of the capitalism system, rather than an anomaly in the history of capital (Bernards 2019). An adequate conception of capitalism must be deep enough to enable an understanding of why two-thirds of the world’s workers do not adhere to the historical and popular conceptions of “normal” labor relations, and then to also recognize and imagine ways in which class formation among those billions of workers may look like and what shapes class struggle waged by informal workers take.

5. Working-Class Structure and Action

But how does one’s class location translate into class action? This question has been one of the primary considerations of class analysis since its inception. As Rina Agarwala, one of the foremost scholars on informality in India, puts it, “class membership predicts and explains endowment-necessitated behavior. . . such behavior is shaped by what people have to do, not merely what they want to do” (Agarwala 2013: 12 emphasis in original). As Agarwala and other class analysts have noted, it is difficult to deduce class interests from just class structure/class location. This is because, as Vivek Chibber also points out, class interests are “meditated” by culturally constructed meanings (Chibber 2017: 41). Not only that, but political structures and opportunities also affect how/whether class interests are acted upon.

In other words, it is difficult to address how informal workers translate class location into action and thus we must be careful of attributing every social action to a reductionist reading of class. To overcome class reductionist readings of informal workers, I find it fruitful to turn to the definition of class as conceptualized by Chibber in his 2017 article, “Rescuing class from the cultural turn,” wherein class occupies a unique position as a social structure that “places limits on the variation in cultural codes” (Chibber 2017: 40). In Chibber’s framework, while socially constructed meaning (i.e., culture) is still the “proximate cause” of class action, culture only serves as a “transmission channel” for structural influence rather than “a casual mediator” between structure and action (but only when it comes to class) (2017: 40).

Class, then, is a social relation dictated by one’s access relation to the means of production and reproduction. Informal workers are those members of the working class who are forced to sell their labor/engage in petty trading to survive while lacking any sort of legal framework of worker or welfare protections. The selling of labor informally and the result of petty trading are not somehow exterior to capitalist production, and instead serve important functions in the reproduction of the working class in the Global South and of the global capitalist system generally (McDermott 2021).

Following this framework, there is much future work to be done in understanding how class identity and action among informal workers intersects and is animated by (or animates) other factors and identities, such as gender, political affiliations, ethnicity, government programs, etc. that can only be touched on tangentially given the scope of this work. Yet, it is hard to understate the importance of gender in this regard—for instance, the role women (and children) play in the informal economy, whether via conducting housework necessary for the social reproduction or supplementing too-small wages of other family members with petty trading and sustenance work is an absolute necessity for global capitalist accumulation. Women have thus been central in the informal labor movement, thanks to the fact that women make up a majority of the informal labor market in many countries and tend to be overrepresented in the informal economy, whether in sweatshops, as sex-workers, as informal wageworkers, as domestic workers, as street vendors, as family workers who ensure the reproduction of labor via domestic work for the family (Bhattacharya 2017a, 2017b; Arbache, Kolev, and Filipiak 2010: 40–41; ILO 2013: xi–xii). Many women also work from home producing commodities for subcontractors, such as sewn clothing or woven rugs, a fact that further blurs the line between domestic and nondomestic work.

Informal workers are precisely those workers whose precarious place at the bottom of the pyramid—a place determined by legacies of colonialism and imperialism—ensures their easy exploitation in the service of capital. To extend the metaphor: the place of informal workers at the base of the pyramid cannot be resolved without the rest of the pyramid—capitalism itself—crashing down.

Informality is a symptom of a world capitalist system that necessarily relies on impoverishment, exploitation, and inequality among workers. Informality is a typology of labor, a fulcrum upon which the capitalist system’s hyperexploitation and the immiseration of workers turn, enabling the engine of capitalism to keep running, and it is also, I argue, a potential chink in the armor of the global economic system that is vulnerable to class struggle if informal workers can recognize and act upon their shared class location.

6. Informal Workers and Collective Action: An Overview

Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik’s formulation of the ever-increasing absolute poverty under capitalism in their book A Theory of Imperialism provides an especially dire outlook for the future of the world’s informal workers (2016). Yet, Prabhat Patnaik also concludes that what he refers to as displaced petty producers (a synonym for informal workers) will be located—as part of a broader alliance among all those on the worker/peasant spectrum—as the revolutionary class that has the ability and the necessity of taking state power and challenging capitalist globalization (Patnaik 2018). This is because, according to Patnaik, globalization continues to “squeeze” petty producers as part of primitive accumulation, forcing them to either attempt to survive on dwindling incomes or to move to cities in search of jobs that will never come. One way this dispossession of petty producers comes about is through income deflation policies—such as those pushed by IMF and World Bank via structural adjustment that are aimed at keeping petty producers’ demand for essential commodities low, thus ensuring the prices of these essential crops and minerals—which are produced almost primarily in the tropical and semitropical South—do not inflate as Northern demand inevitably grows as part of capitalism’s inherent need to expand. According to Patnaik, if demand among petty producers was allowed to also grow, this would cause instability in the global capitalist price system via inflation due to a rise in prices of these essential commodities (Patnaik and Patnaik 2016).

This dispossession also takes the form of the more familiar land-grabbing and influx of cheap, foreign, mass-produced goods in the place of local hand-made crafts. Thus, squeezed peasants and other petty producers are forced to migrate to cities to look for work. But, as part of essential characteristics of the system, there will never be enough employment opportunities to fully absorb their labor—Patnaik considers this lack of formal employment another aspect of dispossession via the strategic deflation of worker incomes. Displacement of peasants and petty producers creates a vast labor reserve army (informal workers), which disciplines labor (both in the metropole and the periphery) by forcing workers to accept poverty wages. In turn, this ensures income deflation and keeps global prices in check. Thus, absolute poverty grows. As Prabhat Patnaik argues, “the spontaneous tendency under capitalism which both unleashes primitive accumulation of capital and does not create enough employment to absorb the displaced petty producers into the active army of labor, is to give rise to growing absolute poverty” (Patnaik 2018). How will this new class of informal workers, who are essential to capitalist accumulation, respond to continued capitalist crises and immiseration? If, as Amin and the Patnaiks argue, reactionary tendencies among them (such as patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and fundamentalism) can be minimized in favor of class consciousness, they will recognize the necessity of taking state power, aligning with other radicalized states, and “delinking” from the global capitalist system and thus challenging capitalism (Amin 2010, 2011; Patnaik 2018). Of course, these are big “ifs.”

The tendency of contemporary capitalism to cause a proliferation of informal workers who threaten the political stability of global capitalist system has been formulated differently by other Marxian economists, such as David Harvey (2003). For Agarwala, informal workers are a “vital component” of contemporary capitalism because they not only “absorb the reproduction costs of formal and informal labor” (2013: 59) but also provide “an attractive alternative that enables employers to constrain the expansion of the costly, protected formal working class” (2013: 59). Regardless of the formulation, there is an emerging consensus among scholars that informal workers, because of their swelling numbers, youth, and lack of opportunity, are one of the biggest threats to stability. This focus on informal workers has led to a return of the question of taking state power and of anti-imperialist nationalism—a question largely lost on the left since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This matches my findings in Sierra Leone, where nascent socialist movements, such as the Democratic Socialist Movement for Workers and Equality, have recently begun to emerge.

But does the question of state power take the form of revolutionary or other more reformist-tactics? Or, perhaps, the role of city governments becomes paramount and the site of claims-making, as opposed to the national state. This aligns with the findings of many other thinkers. Agarwala argues, using empirical evidence from her study of informal workers’ movements in India, that “whereas the employer continues to serve as the primary target of formal-sector workers’ movements, the employer remains outside the direct interaction of informal workers’ movements” (for obvious reasons) (2013: 58). “To accommodate this shift in target [from the employer to the state],” she continues, “the nature of demands among informal workers has shifted from workers’ rights to welfare demands at home and for the family” (2013: 58). This involves utilization of claims of citizenship and of rights, and usually occurs at the city or state level, as opposed to the federal, Agarwala points out.

These demands on the municipal institutions often take the form of engagement in electoral politics, usually at the city level, with informal workers using their voting power to elect candidates willing to expand welfare programs. Though this may mean the proliferation of exclusivity in patrimonial relationships and clientelism, as opposed to democracy and citizenship rights which entail at least a semblance of universality. Robert Gray’s fifteen-year-long study of politics in two favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, came to this conclusion, where “contacts with politicians were restricted almost exclusively to the period immediately prior to elections,” and attempts by informal workers from the neighborhood to transform politics in the neighborhood of Vidigal have ultimately had little impact (2006). Indeed, according to the literature, clientelism is a prevalent strategy that informal workers/the urban poor engage to receive what they need from local governments (Prag 2010; Auyero 2006).

Alison Brown and Michal Lyons argue that the global trend of democratization in the twenty-first century has opened up space for the urban poor to utilize the political landscape, and that the political and institutional landscape is central in the success of urban poor movements. Nevertheless, it is still usually the case that “formal processes of participation established by governments” tend to be exclusionary. To counter this, the urban poor must utilize citizenship and participatory rights “conferred by the state” to assert their will (Brown and Lyons 2010: 33). They point to participatory budgeting experiments in Porto Alegre, Brazil, as examples of the successful mobilization by the urban poor to have a say in urban governance and better their lives. Still other authors, such as Jan Theron, from her work in South Africa, argues that member-based organization, like cooperatives and NGOs, are the best option for informal workers to organize—forms of organizing often labeled as nontraditional unionization (Theron 2010). These novel types of organizations highlight the way in which many informal worker organizations blur the line between unions and cooperatives (Bhatt 2013: 278). Very little work has been done on informal workers, however, which privileges a Marxist class analysis of informal workers as members of the working class with anticapitalist tendencies and interests.

Additionally, for many scholars, formal labor unions remain the primary focus of research on informal organizing because of assumptions like the power-resources approach: that all real power is held by formal workers, and specifically by formal workers within specific sectors of the economy. Thus, much work on unionization among informal workers has focused on how formal and traditional labor unions have begun to incorporate (or have continued to malign) informal workers.

What’s needed, then, is an understanding of informal worker power and potential, which is endogenous within the class makeup of informal workers themselves and which highlights the importance of claims making on, and challenges to, the state. More work needs to be done that seeks to uncover real, potential, and latent anticapitalist thought among informal workers. Scholars must look beyond the reformist and piecemeal unionization and clientelist efforts of informal workers and instead understand informal workers’ relations to the state as a site of conflict and struggle, because of the state being a capitalist-enabling institution.

Indeed, despite the importance and concrete gains provided by such unionization efforts among informal workers, INGO unionization advocated by Streetnet, and similar organizations has proven to be ineffective at tackling the root causes of informality. For instance, Sierra Leone has been ahead of the curve in terms of giving legal recognition to informal sector unions, with informal sector unions forming the bulk of union representation in the country’s Labor Congress. The willingness of the government to recognize these unions is the product less of concern for workers’ rights and well-being, however, and more reflective of the growing awareness of the need to maintain control over informal workers.

The unions in the country, following the long-standing precedent established by the British colonizers to quell labor unrest under the organizational efforts of Sierra Leonean labor advocate I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson in the 1930s and 1940s, are controlled by the national government, with union and Sierra Leone Labor Congress leadership being more or less handpicked by the ruling political party. The creation of informal unions is a good first step, but without political independence or grassroots, rather than top-down INGO and government-led initiatives, informal worker unions are likely to make limited gains. Indeed, a strong apathy and feeling of abandonment toward their unions pervades the informal economy in Sierra Leone, where unions are viewed more as top-down control mechanisms unconcerned with workers’ plights than as empowering institutions.

The union does not defend drivers. Sometimes, the police arrest the driver, sometimes they beat the driver, take them to the police station, take them to Pademba Road [prison].. . . The police will arrest someone and take them to the police station for an ordinary traffic infraction, you understand? They jail them. And the driver’s union does not provide any help. So that is why we say the driver’s union is not good in this country. The driver’s union, it is just a union for the leaders. It is to empower themselves.. . . We pay dues for when we travel into any part of the interior of the country. Every vehicle buys a ticket. We buy a ticket anytime we drive passengers, and that money goes to the union for protection for if anything happens as we travel, you understand? But when anything happens with the driver, the union still does not do anything.

It should be noted that formal workers in Sierra Leone are not the beneficiaries of generous rights or protections either, as interviews with factory workers at the light-manufacturing zone in eastern Freetown—the only manufacturing zone in the country—attest. In my attempts to interview workers from the factories as they left for their lunch break, I was threatened and kicked off factory premises. Those formalized workers I could convince to speak with me in secret, for fear of reprisals from bosses, still lacked a base pay necessary for a dignified life. In a not-unique scenario, one worker in a paint factory, owned by Indian nationals, where harsh industrial chemicals are in use, was barefoot and lacked any eye or head protection. What’s more, nearly half of those workers from the factory I did manage to speak with were informal. Informal workers interviewed tended to have lower wages than the formal workers in the factory, but working conditions were largely similar according to interviewees. Across the board, both formal and informal workers in the country complained that they find no recourse with their unions nor with the country’s Ministry of Labour when dealing with injustices at work.

Crucially, informal worker demands tend to be more ambitious than just unionization or even formalization. The real demands and goals of informal workers involve dignity, living wages, meaningful work, universal health care, free and quality education, and tend to be made upon the state. Thus, the primary aims of INGOs and labor policymakers is often out of step with the radical ambitions of informal workers themselves. While gaining access to microloans or signing agreements with municipalities that legalize certain forms of vending, for instance, can be beneficial and better the lives of informal workers, they can also be tools that blunt the more ambitious aspirations of informal workers, aspirations that tend to be more radical and fundamentally at odds with the very economic structures of global capitalist society.

In Sierra Leone, a country where many sectors of the informal economy are, in fact, unionized and given representation in Sierra Leone’s National Labour Congress—largely thanks to the help and work of the INGO Streetnet—the vast majority of respondents were either not aware that their trade/sector had a union or they were cynical about the impact and priorities of their union. Unions’ leadership positions tend to be appointed and embedded within networks of clientelism. The unions themselves, save for perhaps the Sierra Leone Motor Drivers Union and General Transport Workers Union, tend to be weak and ineffectual. I had the opportunity of interviewing the president of the Motor Drivers Union, for instance, who was in the process of being forced from his position by the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) government for lacking sufficient loyalty to the regime.

7. Seeing Class: Emergent Forms of Radical African Socialist Politics?

One must be willfully blind not to see the manifestations of class struggle and class consciousness, borne of firsthand experience, among the informal working class of Sierra Leone. It is hard to imagine that a mother and her young child, sitting and breaking stones next to the locked gates and barbed-wire walls of the mansions of politicians, foreign diplomats, and multinational stakeholders in the Regent section of Freetown, does not only live a life deeply shaped by class forces but also does not understand significant aspects of her life in class terms.

Indeed, while envy and awe and even admiration for the rich do exist, so too, and more fundamentally, does a general anger and distrust toward the rich, and a conviction, sometimes explicit and other times in the form of a sneaking suspicion, that society and the structures by which its material goods are distributed, and its laws passed and upheld, is fundamentally broken and unjust and must be radically transformed. Workers know full well the current system will not provide for them. They also know full well, as is almost universally attested, that “our country is rich.” In other words, it is not assumed to be natural or intrinsic that their poverty persists.

And it is exactly these types of insights from workers that are motivating the growth of uniquely African socialist movements, with an emphasis on workers broadly defined, who seek to mobilize the informal class for revolutionary ends. Class politics and consciousness in Africa, though long maligned by neoliberal, subaltern, and Marxist scholars alike, is experiencing a resurgence as the foundation for a nascent but growing people’s movement in West Africa.

And so it is with Nigeria’s Federation of Informal Workers, one of the member organizations of the Coalition for Revolution (CORE), and co-conveners, along with Socialist Workers and Youth League of the August 2019 and August 2020 #RevolutionNow movement, which, among other things, demands “the right to free, quality, and compulsory education and healthcare; [an] end to poverty and inequality; right to cost of living allowance of the unemployed; payment of at least 100k [Naira] leaving [sic] wage to workers; 100k [Naira] cost of study allowance for students.” The CORE movement, largely ignored by Western media and activists, represents the clearest and most promising sign of a political coalition with an explicitly anticapitalist message in West Africa in decades (Aye 2019). And, judging by the Nigerian state’s arrest of CORE organizers and violent response to protestors, those in power are aware of the potential of a class-based political movement rooted in the informal working class.

Behind the work of organizations such as the Federation of Informal Workers of Nigeria or Sierra Leone’s own Democratic Socialist Movement for Workers and Equality, there is evidence that informal workers across West Africa are beginning to adopt revolutionary language and programs long deemed irrelevant or passé by neoliberals and critical thinkers alike. A central component of the rising class consciousness of informal workers in West Africa is a realization that their material interests—and moral and cultural values—are inherently opposed to interests of the ruling class. As Melvina, a young woman and petty trader living in the Eastern sprawl of the capital of Freetown in Sierra Leone put it:

The poor are made by the rich to not have mouth. They don’t have speaker. What do I mean by speaker? They [the poor] don’t have their right in anything because of their [the rich people’s] money. They use their money to buy anything. They use their money to buy the poor. They use their money to buy the rights of the poor. They use their money to buy the satisfaction, the freedom, of the poor.. . . The rich people do not have heart, they do not have sympathy for the poor. So, we too, I do not have sympathy for them.

Herein lies the essence of class formation. Almost universal among informal workers is a recognition that there is more than enough wealth to ensure the prosperity of the general population, and an equal recognition that the primary stumbling block to that prosperity remains the ruling class. A strong sense of moral outrage, and a condemnation of the moral depravity of the rich, also pervades the general populace. Despite the attendant joy, resilience, and creativity—so often fetishized by liberal and critical thinkers alike—that undoubtedly animates urban culture in West Africa, there also exists a pervading sense of anger, indignation, desperation, and deprivation. The true potential of the informal class lies in how workers understand the cause of their deprivation. And herein lies the most surprising aspect of my findings, given my preconceived notions and the prevailing scholarship on Africa: the people tend to blame the ruling class. This type of class realization reflects a renewed coming to terms with the reality, often concealed by the logic of free-trade and market fundamentalism but also by narrow ethnic and nationalist politics, that inherent class antagonisms remain the central stumbling block to human development on the continent.

These realizations also entail, as CORE and other new leftist organizations attest, that reforms are not going to cut it. With the failures of neoliberal reforms, liberal democracy, and national independence becoming clear as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, so too is a growing aversion to reformism (Sylla 2013; Abdullah 2015). As Nigeria’s Socialist Workers and Youth League puts it: “The parliamentary way to socialism has historically proved futile and so has reformism. The only viable road to socialism is the revolutionary overthrow of the present system led by the mass of workers.”

8. Beyond the Shop Floor: Class Formation in the Tea Houses and Social Clubs of Sierra Leone

They [informal workers] are quite powerful, because, take for instance the keke [rickshaw] drivers, the bike riders, and the drivers’ union. They can grind the economy to a halt if they decide to go on strike. Because you know, performance of the economy basically means movements of people, of goods and services. And those people have the power to stop the movement of goods and services, which in turn means grinding the economy to a halt.

But what are the prospects and dynamics of informal worker class organizations, especially given the lack of factories and shared workspaces that scholars have long considered crucial to class formation, solidarity, and class politics?

In the Freetown mountainside neighborhood of Red Pump, amid the piles of stones awaiting the hammer of a man, woman, or child, to break them into smaller pieces for use in housing and road construction, I duck into a small shelter built out of boards, curtains, and zinc. In tea houses or ataya bases such as this one, informal workers—usually men—sit down to drink a strong green tea tasting of licorice, and talk. Ataya bases exist across the urban centers of Sierra Leone.

In the bustling capital of Freetown, most neighborhoods have one, some more than one. As with most small shops, they are not formally licensed establishments. An organic cultural institution, ataya bases are mostly built with zinc and plywood, they have their own names, political leanings, rules of membership, and rules for electing leadership. In election years, politicians will court the larger and more influential ataya bases, seeking endorsements in return for promises of employment or kickbacks in potential administrations. In recent years, the two ruling political parties of the SLPP, largely affiliated with the ethnic Mendes from the south of the country, and the All People’s Congress (APC), largely affiliated with Temnes and Limbas of the north of the country, have even tried to manufacture their own bases, in an attempt to give the appearance of spontaneous grassroots energy to their campaigns.

But present in the dynamics of those ataya bases not sponsored by the major political parties (and even sometimes in those that are), one finds a nascent culture of class consciousness being fostered in spaces of education, mobilization, and socialization. In these “free space”’ (Rao and Dutta 2012), one finds a complex and rich community of creativity and debate around topics of philosophy, sports, art, and politics. Some ataya bases are affiliated with informal sector unions, such as the driver’s union, though rarely do members in union outposts offer praise for their union’s efforts. Instead, one hears grievances about police harassment or the unwillingness of union leaders to support strikes, such as the wildcat strike that brought the violence of the state down upon drivers in early 2019.

In these spaces, mutual aid and solidarity are commonplace. In tight-knit ataya bases, for instance, it is often customary for members to share bounties with one another. If one member has a bag of rice to offer today, or extra money to help a friend in need, perhaps another will offer a goat for a communal dinner next week. For those base members who are illiterate, it is common for literate members to read aloud to an audience of listeners.

It was in the forerunners to ataya bases, known as potes, Sierra Leone Marxist Ibrahim Abdullah contends in his influential ethnographic article “Bush Path to Destruction,” that the roots of the rebel forces behind the outbreak of the country’s brutal 1990s civil war were laid (1998). It was in potes that unemployed and illiterate elements of the local youth culture intermingled with similarly unemployed, yet college-educated, youths who had been alienated by the then-one-party APC regime. The potes provided the spaces of socialization, along with funding and training provided by Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, that would foment an armed uprising by the (largely ethnically Mende) Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in 1991 against the country’s failed economy and the oppressive one-party regime of the APC party.

Crucially for Abdullah, it was the “chronic lack of cadres imbued with any revolutionary ideology,” the lack of a guiding “revolutionary theory” among rebel leadership in the RUF, an embrace of ethnic-based populism, and the proliferation of criminal elements in the movement only interested in power and personal enrichment (what Abdullah labels as “lumpen” elements) that turned a moment of justified revolutionary upheaval into a “protracted and senseless war” that decimated the country with wanton violence and destruction for over a decade (1998: 223–225).

With much of its leadership ending up as casualties of the war, including being forced into serving as child soldiers, Sierra Leone’s African Socialist Movement, which was active in the early 2010s, rejected the criminal nature, violence, populism, ethnic fundamentalism, and greed inherent within the RUF project, instead embracing an explicitly socialist, Pan-Africanist, and human program rooted in legacies of radical labor practice on the continent, especially in the work of Sierra Leone’s I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson. But, departing from Abdullah, the ASM rejected slurs such as “lumpen,” believing that the country’s informally employed workers are not destined to reactionary political lives as “thugs” or criminals. Instead, the ASM viewed the mass of informal and unemployed as the heart of the revolutionary working class, requiring ideological direction and discipline, which the RUF fatefully lacked.

It is the task of class-consciousness building that activists are recognizing as the primary task today. It is in spaces such as the ataya bases, in WhatsApp groups, on Facebook, and in neighborhood parties and cookouts that today’s young organizers and radicals see spaces of class association capable of undergirding a socialist movement.

Like ataya bases, other similar social institutions populate the incredibly rich communal and social life of informal workers in urban Sierra Leone: social clubs, regular social outings, weekly dance parties, and traditional secret society ceremonies. among the urban poor of Freetown, one undoubtably finds community and social engagement that far outpaces, in richness, depth, and sheer scope, the declining and stifled nature of “civil society” in the developed capitalist countries and among the supposedly more-likely-to-be-socialized-along-class-lines Western proletariat. Defying the stereotypes of rigid ethnic identities and religious fundamentalism associated with Africa in the Western psyche, the marketplaces, social outings, and communal spaces of the urban sprawl of Freetown are far more likely to exhibit ethnic and religious harmony than conflict: intertribal marriage, romance, and friendship are the norm; Muslim, Christian, and traditional religions blend, both in practice and in membership. And all the while locals decry the underdevelopment, inequality, and corruption of their society. All together they mourn the needless deaths of children and young adults to preventable and treatable illness, for lack of health care, or the fifteen dollars usually needed to see some sort of medical professional in one of the crowded hospitals.

Ataya bases aside, one also finds women-led organizations, clubs, traditional societies, and family compounds that are unashamedly matriarchal. One Saturday, I joined one such social club for a beach outing. The group organizing the outing was an entirely informal organization of female friends who call themselves “Ladies with Charisma,” almost all of them either street sweepers or cooks who survive cooking and selling food from their porches. For would-be attendees unable to afford the four-dollar tickets (a significant amount of money in the local context) for the trip, arrangements were made to pay at a future time, favors were incurred, or friends chipped in to cover expenses. The energetic songs and jokes of the exuberant passengers helped ease the discomfort of the oppressively hot and humid A/C-free bus ride to Kent Beach, outside of Freetown. At the beach, songs, dancing, and the smell of couscous and dried fish (provided free of charge to all attendees and cooked by the club members) filled the air.

Social clubs such as the Ladies with Charisma, or ataya bases such as the one in Red Pump, are omnipresent among the informal workers of Freetown. Most individuals belong to multiple clubs, organizations, bases, etc. These areas of association provide the means—both real and potential—of socialization, mobilization, and education along class lines. Unhindered by the ideological will and material threats of the management or ownership class in a traditional business or factory setting, one finds a rich class culture, cutting across ethnic and religious lines. Indeed, during the Ladies with Charisma outing, Mendes, Limbas, and Temnes interact indiscriminately. And Muslim and Christian prayers are offered in conjunction with one another—a microcosm of the culture of religious tolerance and ethnic harmony that predominates in the poor neighborhoods of Freetown—despite the best efforts of some religious and political elites.

And though serious ethnic divisions, especially the ones punctuated by liberal party politics embodied in the machinations of the two ruling parties, do exist in popular discourse, one sees little ethnic division in daily life in the streets, in the neighborhoods, or in the marketplaces of Freetown. Perhaps the greatest social divide aside from class remains in the realm of gender, with domestic abuse, sexual violence, female genital mutilation, stigmas against pregnancy and sex-work, and unpaid care work perpetuating the exploitation of women in the country. Yet, on the other hand, one also finds a relatively sexually liberated female populace in the country—divorce, casual sex, and frank discussion of sexual matters are common. And strong matriarchal currents undergird social life—women often control the family finances, for instance, and retain their own traditional societies and empowering cultural practices. It is atop a common class foundation that one finds the most intersectional and transformative capability in Sierra Leone political and social life, and it is in their roles as home-workers, market women, street sweepers, and mothers that women often build their strongest connections with members of the same sex.

Indeed, the clearest social divisions come not between groups of differing identities but groups of differing classes. The lives of the wealthy, even the (relative) middle class of the country, which is largely populated by locals who occupy managerial positions for foreign companies and INGOs, are defined by geographical and cultural segregation from the masses. Hidden behind towering walls topped with razor wire and broken bottles, guarded by dogs and armed men, or hidden behind the tinted windows of their vehicles that are only rolled down to buy plantains or other goods from one of the countless petty traders at one of the city’s intersections, the well-to-do live lives segregated from the general populace. Ataya bases, social clubs, and open-doored compounds are foreign to the wealthy and, of course, to diplomatic, corporate, and INGO foreigners themselves—who are usually segregated in Western-style apartments complete with electricity and satellite TV. Even in church, the smaller and poorer mosques and chapels are not attended by the wealthy. In the congregations where the wealthy do attend, class segregation remains front and center; it is common for wealthy and powerful members to be seated apart from the rest of the congregation, or even given seats of honor beside or behind the pastor, for instance.

9. Conclusions: Recognizing the Power and Geopolitical Significance of Informal Workers

The sheer omnipresence of informality in virtually every industry throughout Africa undermines attempts, whether implicit or explicit, at conceptualizing informality and informal worker power as isolatable from state regulation, the formal market system, and the so-called legitimate (as opposed to illegitimate) processes of production and trade. There is no industry or state function that is not fundamentally reliant on informal labor in a country where 89 percent of workers are informal (ILO 2018: 86), as in Sierra Leone, or on a continent where 75 percent of workers are informal, as in Africa (ILO 2018: 81). Class analysts overlook and underestimate informal workers at their own peril.

Informal workers form a major tax base on which the state functions. Just as during the colonial era, a major component of achieving integration of societies into the capitalist system is achieved via the imposition of tax burdens on populations. It is one of the primary future goals of the Sierra Leone National Revenue Authority to better capture taxes from informal workers and businesses, according to a Revenue Authority official interviewed under conditions of anonymity in December 2019. It is already the case, however, especially for street vendors in urban areas throughout the country, that taxes are paid daily to keepas, or tax collectors, who circulate streets and markets administering tickets of proof of payment, the lack of which may result in fines or arrest. Thus, contrary to some popular conceptions of informal work, informal workers do, and increasingly so, pay taxes despite having no labor protections or labor contracts.

The sheer proportion of informality in Africa also highlights the centrality of informal workers in the social, political, and economic spheres of the continent. Informal workers in Africa represent both continued opportunities for exploitation and reproduction of the system and liabilities for its very foundations. In essence, the present capitalism system cannot afford, because of its structural constraints, to offer decent jobs to all (or even some) of Africa’s workers, neither is the system capable of providing decent welfare protections for people within the constraints of the Post-Washington Consensus era and, now, the COVID-haunted world. Yet, it also has no answer for how to control and mitigate the threat that hundreds of millions of angry informal workers pose for the current global order in Africa.

An additional key finding in my research has been that many national and municipal governments in much of Africa only function thanks to informal labor. Though quantitative data is not available, one of my most surprising findings has been the sheer quantity of informal workers I have met who are working as civil servants for the national government of Sierra Leone or for chiefdom, district, and municipal governments throughout the region. From family-services professionals to tax collection officers to immigration agents to street sweepers, many state and municipal workers have no set pay, no contracts, and no benefits, and are informal workers even by the most stringent of definitions. It is common practice, for example, for young professionals hoping to one day land one of the exceedingly rare government employment contracts to work in a government office where they receive pay only intermittently, usually when a boss or a supervisor comes across extra money (which is rare). The logic behind their unpaid labor is that they are waiting for a permanent position to open, a permanent position that is unlikely to ever come. These permanent positions are represented and referred to in terms of “pincodes,” or a number identifying someone as a formal worker recognized by the state and entitled to a salary. As one unpaid nurse working in the public Connaught Hospital explained it:

After I completed my nursing school in 2012, I started volunteering at the Connaught Hospital in 2013. But there weren’t enough nurses with pincodes working. So, I went and spoke to the matron because I didn’t want to be doing nothing. So I said, “Let me volunteer so that I will not forget [what I have learnt in my studies].” Because we were just sitting down, we were finished, they had given us our certificates, but they did not give us pincodes. We were just sitting down doing nothing. And for me, I was tired of sitting at home. That was why I went to the matron to ask to volunteer, because I was tired of sitting at home. They didn’t give us pincodes. We walk up and down waiting, but it becomes futile. From 2013, I started working at the Connaught Hospital and up to now, they haven’t begun to pay me. I work for eight hours, sometimes more than that. ¹

Thus, informal workers enable the reproduction of peripheral states in a very direct and concrete way: as civil servants and as professionals. As civil servants they are also the ones who, just as in other industries, often perform the most menial and difficult of tasks. This is especially true since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the attendant Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, which require cuts to state funding throughout Africa (Skinner 2009: 187). Without the unpaid and underpaid labor done by informal workers, many African states simply would not have the budgets to function. Indeed, a major tactic of Sierra Leonean journalist and well-known Africanist Chernoh Bah, for instance, has been to highlight the discrepancies and inequalities in public wages.

Strikes and agitation by publicly employed informal workers have the potential to disrupt and undermine society. As I witnessed on April 11, 2019, a crowd of unpaid street sweepers employed by Freetown City Council descended on the Ministry of Labour Headquarters demanding their backpay. Among the protestors—most of whom were women—violent scuffles with capitol police and Ministry security occurred. One woman explained the situation to me:

We have been sweeping with no salaries. So, they promised to pay us back in July! We came in July; they didn’t pay us. So, because we have done our work, we have come this morning for our money, and I am the head of our constituency [our group’s sweeping area]. They [the government] gave me a small portion of what we’re owed for all the deprived sweepers in my neighborhood, so at least they were able to get something small. But since then, it is over five months now without salaries. So, they called us into a meeting the day before yesterday and they said they will pay us today. So that is why people are gathering here, because they are expecting to get paid their salary. But up to now, no payments. Then when we came today, they said they are only going to pay people within the New England [neighborhood] here. So, they told our own people to return back to their constituency, that they will pay them back in their constituency. So, we don’t know when that is going to happen. And people are struggling! ²

Apart from the active role informal workers play in the political reproduction of peripheral states, their political power also becomes apparent when one analyzes recent world-significant political upheavals and the practices enacted by states and international institutions to suppress movements arising largely from informal workers. In other words, political reproduction of peripheral states (and thus the reproduction of the current US-dominated capitalist system) necessitates control over informal workers via both propaganda and scapegoating (as seen in the rise of officials’ xenophobic rhetoric and attacks against immigrants in South Africa) and outright state-sanctioned violence and force (Bhowmik 2009; Skinner 2009; Wallerstein 2004). Policies ranging from appeasement to outright oppression of antipoverty and labor uprisings among informal workers have become a central focus of regimes throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Arguably, the most earthshaking series of political events of the twenty-first century thus far were instigated by informal workers in Northern Africa. Namely, of course, the Arab Spring, which was sparked by the self-immolation of an informal worker (a fruit vendor) in Tunisia to protest continued extortion by police and the precarity and hopelessness of his economic position.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, sub-Saharan African countries fearing similar fates as their Arab neighbors are trying to integrate youth into the employment market or appease them with bribery and clientelism (with mixed success) (Hummel 2017; ILO 2013: 94). Yet excruciatingly few scholars have focused on the class dynamics of the Arab Spring, nor have they theorized the Arab Spring as a class/labor movement. Asef Bayat’s powerful Revolution without Revolutionaries is an exception, arguing that had the participants in the Arab Spring uprisings, many of whom were informal workers, developed and maintained a class-oriented revolutionary program resistant to co-optation by the Western liberal democracies and bourgeois national elites, the outcome of the uprisings may have been much different (2017). In other words, while scholars have largely missed the salience of informal workers as a potentially system-altering force, states have not.

Thus, it appears that the capturing of state power, a labor tactic long assumed passé by scholars in the wake of globalization, is gaining renewed relevance among the informal working class, from India to Burkina Faso to Sierra Leone. Because of their relative degrees of separation from direct employee-employer relationships, informal workers have long tended to make their claims on states and local governments for better wages, welfare protections, and safer working environments (Agarwala 2013). Yet, up to now, the demands of informal workers have been understood in relatively isolated and reformist terms. How are we to make sense of growing demands by informal workers to take state power and/or fundamentally alter the economic and political landscape?

In 2020, another potential system-altering movement occurred with the largest ever labor strike in history taking place in India, where labor unions and workers of all stripes—including millions of informal workers—made demands that, significantly, included calling for universal protections and rights for all workers, including especially those in the informal economy (Grevatt 2020). It is estimated that over 250 million workers participated in the general strike that, despite its magnitude, received relatively little international press—especially in the United States. The 2020 general strike had been preceded in recent years by similar major strikes, many of which have been characterized by informal workers playing central roles and some of India’s traditional and conservative business unions being sidelined in the new burgeoning radical labor movement (Murphy 2017; Telesur 2018). The strikes have coincided with increasingly anticapitalist ideological trends, and challenges to the liberalization of key industries and attempts by the right-wing Modi government to further deregulate the labor market.

As has been anticipated by a small but prescient number of Global South scholars and Africanists, a “delinking” of nation-states from the geopolitical/economic order and the formation of a newfound united front against Western capital is again becoming a recognized tactic of resistance used by the world’s poorest and more exploited populations (Amin 1990, 2011; Moyo and Yeros 2011; Patnaik and Patnaik 2016). Given their sheer number and their attendant economic and political power in Africa, informal workers will necessarily be the central popular agents of any push toward a delinking from the world capitalist system in Africa. In Burkina Faso, for instance, 2014 saw an unprecedented uprising among the nation’s informal working youth that culminated in the forced ouster of long-time dictator Blaisé Compaoré and an explicit resurrection of the legacy and ideas of the late Africanist and socialist Thomas Sankara. The rising political salience of informal workers is of major global importance and its being overlooked is one of the major blind spots among social movement, Marxist, and labor scholars today.

A more holistic class framework that highlights the significance of all labor within the capitalist totality is necessary if we are to truly appreciate the significance and potentialities of the world’s informal workforce. In this holistic framework, the power and potential of informal workers cannot be deduced to isolatable and compartmentalized variables. Informal workers are the workers, and the workers are the system.

For the majority of West Africans, gone are the days of subsistence agricultural and survival activities exterior to capitalist markets and relations. Being forced to survive via informal work is a fate to which the bulk of the global proletariat are relegated. It is fate defined by precarity and poverty, by exploitation and desperation. Informality is both a legacy of European colonization in the global division of labor and a necessary correlate of contemporary capitalist accumulation. The proliferation of informal workers is both a boon to and one of the major liabilities for today’s global capitalist class and their adjacent and numerous national comprador classes. It is a primary contradiction of the global system in which we live today and demands the attention of all scholars and activists invested in understanding today’s world and in crafting a more just one.