ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical interpretation of the changing modes of precarisation across colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal Mozambique. It shows how the violent colonial constitution of precarity changed through the politics of contestation into the postcolonial period of a state-attempted social engineering project based on Frelimo’s interpretation of Marxism. Through the colonial modes of extraction and postcolonial socialism focused on collectivisation and villagisation programmes, as well as the socio-political contestation that enabled this transition, the state fundamentally relied on the labour power of rural populations, thereby directly intertwining them with capital accumulation processes. Contrasting these modes of precarisation with the current neoliberal period, the chapter demonstrates a rupture in the constitution of precarity that is primarily associated with Mozambique’s unequal integration into the global neoliberal system that commenced with Structural Adjustment. Today, the intensification of extractive capital accumulation, rather than directly exploiting the bodies of Mozambique’s rural populations, has made them unnecessary for the production of spatial abstraction. This, the chapter concludes, constitutes a specific modality of precarisation that unfolds through the dispossession of the most vulnerable and disempowered into material and epistemic margins of the Mozambican state.
