Adverse Incorporation of the Roma and the Formation of Capitalism in Romania

Abstract

Empirically rooted in the findings of a research conducted between 2012- 2014 in localities of Romania under the umbrella of a larger contextual inquiry concerning faces and causes of marginalisation of the Roma, the approach of this article is informed by critical urban theory’s understanding of the political economy of space and development, and their role in the formation of capitalism. My study argues: the way how marginalised Roma are included into the mainstream society while pushed into and kept in its dispossessed spatial and social peripheries, is a manifestation of the adverse incorporation of a precariatised and racialised working class into the capitalist system. In Chapters 2 and 3 the article describes how, on the one hand, the politics of socio-spatial marginalisation and, on the other hand, the politics of entrepreneurial development creates the Roma as adversely incorporated (dispossessed and racialised) subject. Furthermore, Chapters 4 and 5 of the analysis conclude that nowadays capitalism (in Romania) is (also) formed through the politics of socio-spatial exclusion and racialisation of the working class (Roma), and as well as through the politics of entrepreneurial development conceived via neoliberal governance that exclude them from development resources. Therefore the article proposes to use the analysis of the adverse incorporation of the Roma as a critique of capitalism.