This article was originally published in Disasters

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abstract

Debates about ‘the trouble with aid’ are nothing new. But while these have usually focused on technical, financial or political concerns, the central challenge to the aid industry today is social. If the modern enterprise of aid was a systemic response to ‘the social question’ (the fallout of capitalist property relations in a class society), it is now faced with ‘the post-social question’ (the fallout of the social fragmentation brought about by the persistence of these property relations). As the withdrawal of aid from dependent recipients intensifies their hardship, a different politics of human life, grounded in radical needs, is now the necessary basis for a substantive contestation of the social transformations casting today’s catastrophic horizon.

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Before Elon Musk started ‘feeding USAID into the woodchipper’, before the British government announced a ‘new normal’ of reduced expenditure on overseas assistance, there was a growing sense among Western aid workers that their enterprise was in decline. Within their own societies, public scepticism towards aid had increased over the previous decade. Financial constraints were already forcing multinational aid agencies to downsize. Appeals to a compassionate humanity no longer featured in official articulations of North Atlantic interests. In June 2024, as a parting shot, the outgoing UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, lamented a ‘failure of values and commitments’. But now, following cuts to government aid budgets across the West, any residual assumptions that the aid industry will continue to grow as it had since the 1980s have surely been extinguished.

Initiating a new phase of economic organisation on the periphery, transforming social geographies of labour, the debt crisis of 1982 was a critical moment in the growth of the aid industry. Urban demographic expansion, which had accelerated since the 1950s, slowed down. But the contraction of labour markets caused an explosion of precarious informality. The implementation of structural adjustment programmes, which, at the behest of international financial institutions, prescribed austerity, privatisation and trade liberalisation, then reinforced this tendency. Amid a vast slummification of low-income and middle-income countries, violence and coercion came to play a more prominent role in mediating social relations, in lieu of formal labour. Deregulation facilitated the transborder movement of arms, drugs, people and dirty money, leading to the rapid expansion of an international criminal economy that produced new claims to sovereignty, not least over sprawling sites of urban informality. By now, formalisation of labour on the periphery was no longer in the general interest of transnational capital. But the management of precarious informality through aid became necessary for the stability of accumulation.

Until the late 1970s, overseas aid was generally promoted in the West as a factor in ‘modernisation’ on the periphery. Schemes of rural development that might provide Western economies with essential primary commodities were complemented by the transfer of Fordist technologies of production, albeit without challenging the system of unequal exchange. But, even before the debt crisis, the growth of precarious informality contributed to a shift in the focus of aid bureaucrats. After a report published in 1972 by the International Labour Office identified the ‘informal sector’ in Kenya as, in large part, ‘economically efficient and profit-making’, other international organisations started explicitly promoting informality as a means of boosting employment and fostering the entrepreneurial culture already lauded by neoliberal ideologues. By the early 1980s, partly in response to the growth of precarious informality, aid was increasingly being directed towards small-scale projects, often implemented through NGOs, aimed at alleviating poverty and hunger – long-term support for small trades and livelihoods, as well as emergency relief.

In the 1970s, as debates about informality intensified, several Latin American intellectuals associated with the dependency school argued that capitalism on the periphery produced a ‘marginal mass’ of workers, over and above the industrial reserve army required by the formal economy. In 1974, Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano postulated that, in Latin America, monopolistic sectors, derived from formations in the core of the world-economy without integrating new technology into the production matrix, suppressed labour demand; part of the surplus of labour then became permanently ‘excluded’ as the technical composition of capital changed and monopolistic sectors absorbed productivity gains.

However, it was not marginality that became the principal drag on development of low-income and middleincome countries. Contrary to the expectations of modernisation theorists, informality did indeed become a basis for accumulation on the periphery – albeit a largely extractive accumulation that transferred wealth to the imperial core. In the 1990s, efforts to regulate informality would facilitate its integration into value chains, stimulating competition and innovation to raise labour productivity. But the continued growth of precarious informality created a growing disconnection between the most rapidly expanding sector of the labour force and the technological developments that bring about increases in capital productivity. It was then ultimately the inability of peripheral economies to keep up with productivity gains in advanced economies that undermined their modernisation. Already in the 1970s, the level of capital intensity required for peripheral economies to be competitive demanded a level of investment that exceeded their liquidity. As debt skyrocketed, most peripheral economies suspended their incipient industrialisation, which was then sent into reverse as the imposed remedies for indebtedness fostered financialisation and different forms of Dutch disease.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, the deployment of aid to preserve the lives of a growing mass of humanity without ready access to the means of survival contributed to normalising informality. Maintaining potential wage labourers, it also played a role in transforming informality into a viable means of accumulation, primarily for Western monopoly capital. Aid therefore became an important form of social mediation as conventional schemes of labourmediated modernisation broke down. It also became a means of reproducing extractive forms of accumulation through the superexploitation of formal and informal labour, as well as the opening of consumer markets. And as informality loosened ties to territory, with a growing number of people prepared to displace themselves and their families to guarantee survival, it served as a means for their containment, lest they find their way to the borders of Europe and North America.

To be sure, the growth of precarious informality was not a phenomenon exclusive to the periphery. In the West, though the crises of the 1970s caused a significant rise in unemployment, the neoliberal strategies adopted in their aftermath were intended as an assault on full employment. As deindustrialisation forced many out of wage labour, governments incentivised entrepreneurship and self-employment. The negation of the work society would invite back from the periphery, in a sort of boomerang effect, conditions derived from the uninvited arrival of European modernity – not least a seemingly unresolvable social division. Such ‘peripherisation’ has accelerated since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, contributing to the emptying of the Western middle class, which once provided the social base for the expansion of the aid industry.

Over the course of the 2010s, labour markets in the West developed a remarkable resemblance to those on the periphery. To the extent that informal workers in countries like France, Germany, the UK, and the US can be considered ‘surplus’, they have not served as a sufficient reserve army, leaving chronic labour supply shortages in critical industries of the formal sector. Their impact on wages (which are at a historic low) and labour productivity has not been sufficient to stimulate accumulation in the competitive economy. Therefore, while informality has contributed to astronomical profits for tech oligarchs and certain other rentiers, it has, on balance, done almost nothing for growth. Faced with persistent budget deficits, unwilling to borrow more for capital investment, and failing to bring about substantial growth, governments have then been left with limited capacity to provide safety nets that can catch the growing number of surplus workers unable to attain the means for survival.

Decades after the first debates about marginality, there is now a growing ‘marginal mass’, not only on the periphery, but also across a ‘peripherised’ metropole. Segments of relative surplus populations have become absolute surplus populations, or superfluous populations – externalities to the formal sector that are no longer functional to the regime of accumulation, and indeed represent a threat to it, and to political stability. A disfiguring excrescence, the superfluous population – as Hannah Arendt noted in Origins of Totalitarianism – is not to be managed, but cut out. For contemporary capitalism, then, rather than providing a solution to a systemic problem, aid comes to be a hindrance.

It now seems that, in much of the world, there is not enough capitalism to go around; and so all those dependent on selling their labour power, not just those in the informal sector, are thrown anxiously into a war for work. This has provided conditions for the emergence of a new politics of the far right. Unlike past fascistic movements, the new right today has no project for the world; it is strictly defensive, bounded by its ethno-territorial concept of the nation. Obsessed with the possibility of their replacement, its exponents seek to raise walls and close borders. While the racism that inflates this obsession cannot be reduced to economic determinants, the introversion of far-right politics reflects the fundamental concern of its popular base with limiting the expanse of competition, through a containment of the war for work that might also slow down globalisation’s ongoing reorganisation of the international division of labour.

The widespread anti-humanitarian sentiment this has produced in the West underlies recent decisions to cut overseas aid. A phenomenon that once compelled expansion of the aid industry – the growth of precarious informality – has now provoked its substantive deconstruction. And the institutions of neoliberal humanitarianism have proven utterly incapable of contesting this tendency.

Debates about ‘the trouble with aid’ are nothing new. But while these have usually focused on technical, financial or political concerns, the central challenge to the aid industry today is social. Or, more precisely, if the modern enterprise of aid was a systemic response to ‘the social question’ (the fallout of capitalist property relations in a class society), it is now faced with ‘the post-social question’ (the fallout of the social fragmentation brought about by the persistence of these property relations). As the withdrawal of aid from dependent recipients will intensify their hardship, the scramble of aid advocates to come up with a new policy paradigm suggests a blindness to this predicament. There should be no illusion that restoration of the legitimacy of humanitarian norms and aid institutions might provide a basis for realising even the modest ideal of universal access to the means of survival. A different politics of human life, grounded in radical needs, is now the necessary basis for a substantive contestation of the social transformations casting today’s catastrophic horizon. And this demands the development of new institutions of the dispossessed across the peripherised geographies of the world. If aid is to play any role in that, it will be the result of jeopardy, produced through social organisation to counter the compulsion of markets and state power.