School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Accumulation by
dispossession and the
informal economy – Struggles
over knowledge, being and
waste at a Soweto garbage
dump
Melanie Samson
School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa
Abstract
Recent scholarship highlights that accumulation by dispossession creates surplus populations who
must sustain themselves outside wage labor, often through informal work. This article theorizes a
different aspect of the relationship between the informal economy and accumulation by
dispossession by analyzing how the state and capital seek to capture new spheres of
accumulation created by informal workers. Drawing on Searle’s theorization of social ontology
it explores how reclaimers at a Soweto garbage dump reconceptualized trash as holding potential
value and transformed the landfill from a commodity cemetery into a resource mine. The attempt
to enclose the landfill therefore required appropriating not only the materials at the dump but the
very framing of these materials as valuable. Reclaimers’ grievance over this ‘‘epistemic injustice’’
fueled their successful opposition to the enclosure, demonstrating the centrality of ‘‘epistemic
dispossession’’ to accumulation by dispossession. Highlighting the epistemic and social agency of
informal workers considered the epitome of ‘‘human waste’’ establishes the need to recognize all
informal workers as producers of knowledge and social reality and facilitates more nuanced
understandings of accumulation by dispossession, how and why it is contested, and how
alternatives can be forged.
Keywords
Accumulation by dispossession, informal economy, waste pickers, social ontology, epistemic
injustice, epistemic dispossession
A growing body of scholarship highlights that accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003)
creates surplus populations who must sustain themselves outside wage labor (cf. Li, 2010;
Perreault, 2013; Sanyal, 2014 [2007]; Sassen, 2010). Noting that many of the dispossessed
Corresponding author:
Melanie Samson, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits Johannesburg Gauteng 2050, South Africa.
Email: melanie.samson@wits.ac.za
Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space
2015, Vol. 33(5) 813–830
! The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0263775815600058
epd.sagepub.com
turn to the informal economy, this literature establishes the need to interrogate how informal
aspects of the economy are bound up in processes of accumulation by dispossession.
However, there is a tendency to focus exclusively on how accumulation by dispossession
leads people to become informal workers. Disrupting the unidirectional nature of this
narrative, this article explores how informal workers create new spheres of accumulation
that the state and formal capital seek to capture.
The article is based on analysis of the attempt by the Johannesburg Council and its
Pikitup waste management company to grant a tender to a private company to recycle
materials at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa. It draws on 42 group
interviews with informal reclaimers who salvaged materials at the dump and 63 individual
interviews with reclaimers, Pikitup management, and Council representatives conducted
between March 2009 and August 2010 as part of a longer social history of the dump.
I argue that the Council and Pikitup’s desire to enclose the dump must not be taken as
the simple effort to dispossess reclaimers of a pre-existing resource. Historically, garbage
dumps have been the final burial grounds for unwanted commodities and sites for the
permanent destruction of value. Drawing on Searle’s (2006) theorization of social
ontology, I explore what is required to transform a dump from a commodity cemetery to
a resource mine. I argue that at Marie Louise (as at many dumps across the developing
world), it was informal reclaimers who re-cast the waste as valuable and the dump as a site
for the production of value through a combination of intellectual labor, physical labor, and
struggle. In attempting to enclose the dump, the municipality sought to capture the physical
materials interred within it as well as the very framing and establishment of these materials
as valuable, while simultaneously erasing the role of reclaimers in these processes. The
reclaimers’ understanding that they produced both the knowledge and the new sphere of
accumulation that the Council and Pikitup were trying to appropriate played a pivotal role
in spurring them to contest and ultimately prevent the enclosure of the dump. ‘‘Epistemic
injustice’’ that disregarded the reclaimers in their capacity as knowers (Fricker, 2007) and
epistemic dispossession were therefore central to both the attempted process of accumulation
by dispossession and how it was successfully challenged. Highlighting the epistemic and
social agency of informal workers frequently considered the epitome of ‘‘human waste’’
(Bauman, 2004) establishes the importance of recognizing all informal workers as
producers of knowledge who transform social reality and interrogating the implications
for how we theorize accumulation by dispossession