श्रीलंका का संकट और “जनता अरगलय”  


“हम नहीं जानते और न ही जान सकते हैं कि संसारव्यापी आर्थिक और राजनीतिक संकट के परिणामस्वरूप सभी देशों में उड़ने वाली असंख्य चिंगारियों में से कौन सी चिंगारी आग को भड़काएगी, यानी जनता को उठा खड़ा कर देगी।” — लेनिन (1920)

I

श्रीलंका की हाल की घटनाएँ आशा और निराशा दोनों ही पैदा करती हैं — अगर एक तरफ पिछले कई महीनों से दिखती जन-क्रियाओं की दृढ़ता, निरंतरता और  बहुआयामिता को देख कर आशा पैदा होती है, तो दूसरी तरफ इन घटनाओं के तात्कालिक नतीजे निराश करते हैं। यह बात सही है कि जिस फुर्ती से आंदोलन के नतीजतन राजसत्ता के चिह्नित मोहरे अप्रैल से जुलाई के अंतराल में एक एक कर लुढ़क रहे थे — मंत्रियों की कैबिनेट,  केन्द्रीय बैंक के गवर्नर, प्रधानमंत्री, और अंत में राष्ट्रपति गोताबया का देश से भागना और बाहर से इस्तीफा देना — उतनी ही तेजी से नए मोहरे जुलाई के मध्य से सत्ता की सीढ़ियों पर चढ़ते गए। श्रीलंका में जहाँ तमाम राजनीतिक आभिजात्य संकर नस्ल के हैं — यानी उनके बीच आंतरिक और आपसी प्रजनन (केवल वैचारिक नहीं) की एक मजबूत परंपरा रही है, वहाँ महान इतालवी लेखक ज्यूसेप्पे तोमासी दी लांपेदूजा के उपन्यास “इल गात्तोपार्दो” (तेंदुआ) का व्यवस्थापरक कूटनीतिक निचोड़ — Cambiare tutto perché niente cambi (सब कुछ बदलो ताकि कुछ न बदले) पूरी तरह से लागू होता है। और कई दशकों से यही होता रहा है। 

परंतु इस बार कुछ तो अलग हुआ  —  श्रीलंका में वैश्विक सत्ताओं को भी श्रीलंका के इस आभिजात्य वर्ग की क्षमता पर शक होने लगा। यही वजह थी कि अमरीकी राजदूत जुली चुँग भूतपूर्व-“क्रांतिकारी आतंकवादी” जनता विमुक्ति पेरामुन (जेवीपी) के नेतृत्व को भी एक विकल्प के रूप में पेश करने लगीं। इन पिटे हुए नेताओं से मिलकर चुँग ने कहा कि “मुझे पता है कि अतीत में बहुत सारी बयानबाजी हुई थी”, परंतु आज “मेरे लिए जेवीपी एक महत्वपूर्ण पार्टी है। उसकी मौजूदगी बढ़ रही है। आज की जनता पर उसकी पकड़ मजबूत है।” सचमुच सब कुछ बदलना पड़ता है ताकि कुछ न बदले। परंतु विक्रमसिंघे के राष्ट्रपति पद पर काबिज होने और भूतपूर्व त्रात्स्कीपंथी दिनेश गुणवर्देन के प्रधानमंत्री पद को संभालने से जेवीपी की बढ़ती महत्वाकांक्षा को एक हास्यास्पद अंत मिला, और फिलहाल सब कुछ बदलने की जरूरत नहीं पड़ी।

जो श्रीलंका की घटनाओं में निश्चित यथेष्ट “क्रांतिकारी” बदलाव देखना चाहते थे उनको अवश्य ही यह नतीजा उदासीन करता है। मगर तात्कालिक  राजनीतिक बदलावों से आंदोलन की महत्ता तय नहीं होती। ऐसे बदलावों में क्रांति को ढूँढ़ने वाले यह  भूलते हैं कि फ्रांसीसी क्रांति ने पूंजीवाद को पैदा नहीं किया, पूंजीवाद ने फ्रांसीसी क्रांति को जन्म दिया; या फिर, रूसी क्रांति बोलशेविकों के दिमाग की उपज नहीं थी, सोवियतों और अन्य सामाजिक सरोकारों में होते बदलावों ने रूसी क्रांति को जन्म दिया। नतीजों के आधार पर अगर जन उभारों और क्रांतियों के औचित्य को तय करेंगे तो निराशा हाथ लगनी ही है। यदि हम इन आंदोलनों को  जन-क्रिया के संघटन और अवस्थाओं के रूप में न देखकर कर्मफलहेतु समझते रहेंगे हमें ये आंदोलन विफल क्या निरर्थक भी लगेंगे — और तब तो बीसवीं सदी की महान क्रांतियों और प्रतिक्रांतियों के सौ साल को हम एक जगह पर घूमने वाले चक्र की तरह देखेंगे और हम नहीं समझ पाएंगे कि किस प्रकार सर्वहारा जन की क्रियाओं और उनके सामूहिक आत्मनिर्णय ने पूंजीवाद के तमाम अवतारों को संकटग्रस्त रखा, उनको भी जो सर्वहारा क्रांतियों में जनित सत्ता के अलगाव के मूर्तरूप थे और जिन्हें समाजवाद का नाम दिया गया था। 

श्रीलंका को लेकर तमाम व्याख्याओं में जन-संघर्ष (जनता अरगलय) को जीवन-स्तरों में गिरावट को लेकर श्रमिक वर्ग (खास तौर पर उसके मध्य-वित्तीय तबके — इन्हें ही मध्यम वर्ग आजकल कहते हैं) की प्रतिक्रिया के रूप में देखा गया है। इनकी दृष्टि में जनता क्रियाशील नहीं प्रतिक्रियाशील है। वर्चस्वकारी शक्तियों के बौद्धिक सिपाही इसमें कुछ विपक्षीय दलों और राष्ट्रविरोधी तत्वों का षड्यंत्र देखते हैं तो प्रगतिशील लोग आशातीत होते हैं परंतु वांछित नतीजा न देखकर आंदोलन के अंदर राजनीति और राजनीतिज्ञों की कमी का रोना रोते हैं। श्रीलंका के संदर्भ में तो कुछ लोग इसे चीन के खिलाफ अमरीका के नेतृत्व में साम्राज्यवादी खेमे की चालबाज़ी देखते हैं। इन सभी व्याख्याकारों के लिए जन-क्रिया की कोई स्वायत्तता नहीं है — व्यवस्था के व्याकरण में जनता औसत व्यक्तियों अथवा नागरिकों की भीड़ है जो केवल अपनी प्रतिक्रिया दे सकती है, कोई पहल नहीं कर सकती।  

II

पूंजीवादी संकटों को महज आर्थिक प्रबंधन की कमजोरियों और गलत नीतियों के नतीजे के तौर पर देखना तो अवश्य ही गलत है, परंतु इन संकटों की वस्तुनिष्ठता को सामाजिक व्यवहार और संघर्षों के दायरे से परे समझना शायद उससे भी बड़ी गलती है। कम से कम मार्क्सवादियों का यह वैचारिक-कार्यक्रमात्मक दायित्व है कि वे जन-संघर्षों में इस तरह की द्वैतवादी अपरिष्कृतता की आलोचना करें ताकि ये संघर्ष व्यवस्था-बद्ध वर्चस्वकारी माँगवादी राजनीति के आगे अग्रसर हो अपने ही अंदर मौजूद सामूहिक तत्वों के आधार पर नए समाज के प्रारूप पेश कर सकें। 

राजनीतिक अर्थशास्त्र की मार्क्सवादी आलोचना पूंजीवाद की संरचना, राजनीतिक अर्थशास्त्रीय अवधारणाओं और उपस्थित बाह्यरूपों के तह में सामाजिक संबंधों के प्रक्रियात्मक सत्य और उनके आंतरिक अंतर्विरोधों को उजागर करती है। उसके अनुसार राष्ट्रीय और अंतरराष्ट्रीय संकटों को वर्गीय संबंधों — पूंजी और श्रम के अंतर्द्वंद्व — द्वारा समझने की जरूरत है। ऐसा न करने से हम मेहनतकश जनता को महज आर्थिक और राजनीतिक नीतियों के भुक्तभोगी की तरह देखते रहेंगे और उनके नायकत्व के चरित्र से अनभिज्ञ हम भी उसके अलगाव के जरिया बन अधिनायकों और राजसत्ता के पूजक बने रहेंगे। यह बात सही है कि मानव-जन अपना इतिहास मनचाहे ढंग से नहीं बनाते और वे उसे अपनी मनचाही परिस्थितियों में भी नहीं बनाते, पर तब भी वे उसे स्वयं बनाते हैं।

श्रीलंका के जनता अरगलय का तात्कालिक संदर्भ एक प्रकार का आर्थिक संकट है जिसके कारण को बहुत आसानी से स्थानीय अव्यवस्थाओं पर मढ़ा जा सकता है। वैसे भी संकटों के सारे स्वरूपों को अर्थशास्त्री आमतौर पर तकनीकी चरों और अचरों के असंतुलन  के रूप में पेश करते हैं। कुछ अर्थशास्त्रियों के अनुसार चूंकि ये संतुलन पूंजीवादी प्रक्रियाओं में स्वभावतः मौजूद होता है, असंतुलन बाह्य कारकों के हस्तक्षेप का नतीजा है। इन अर्थशास्त्रियों के अनुसार राजकीय व्यवस्था का मुख्य काम अपने और अन्य “बाह्य” कारकों के हस्तक्षेप को न्यूनतम करना है। अन्य अर्थशास्त्रियों के लिए पूंजीवादी प्रक्रियाएँ अपने आप में असंतुलित हैं इसलिए राज्य व्यवस्था का हस्तक्षेप जरूरी है। मामला दोनों के लिए प्रबंधन का है। दोनों ही पूंजीवादी प्रक्रियाओं को स्वतःस्फूर्त मानते हैं — बस अंतर उनके नैसर्गिक संतुलनता के सवाल पर है। 

दोनों पक्षों के लिए सरकार और राजनीतिक शक्तियों की स्वायत्त सत्ता है जो मन चाहे ढंग से आर्थिक प्रबंधन कर सकती है। ये दृष्टिकोण पूंजी, आर्थिक प्रक्रियायों और यहाँ तक कि बाजार की भी जिंसीकृत समझ रखते हैं — इनको सामाजिक संबंधों के रूप में नहीं देखते। इसी कारण से वे समझ नहीं पाते कि किस प्रकार राजसत्ता, सरकार, राजनीति और आर्थिक-वैधानिक नीतियाँ इन संबंधों के गतिकी में जड़ित हैं — उनकी सापेक्ष स्वायत्तता की प्रतीति इस गतिकी के अन्तर्विरोधात्मक चरित्र का नतीजा है। इस अन्तर्विरोधात्मकता के जड़ में पूंजी-श्रम संबंध का द्वंद्ववाद है। यही अंतर्विरोध समयासमय संकट को जन्म देता है जो विभिन्न रूप ले सकता है, परंतु इतना तो साफ है कि पूंजी अथवा उसके तंत्र पूंजीवाद का संकट अंततः पूंजी-श्रम के संबंध का संकट है।

मार्क्सवाद ने पूंजीवादी संकट के विभिन्न अभिव्यक्तियों को पूंजीवादी संचय के गूढ़तम प्रक्रियाओं से जोड़ कर विभिन्न संकट सिद्धांतों की पेशकश की है। ज्यादातर मार्क्सवादी “अर्थशास्त्री” (पेशेवर और शौकिया दोनों) भी इन सिद्धांतों को महज पूंजी और पूँजीपतियों के विकास के सिद्धांत के रूप में देखते हैं जिसका वर्ग-संघर्ष से सीधा कोई वास्ता नहीं है। यदि उसमें प्रतिस्पर्धा की बात आती भी है तो उसे पूंजी की विभिन्न इकाइयों के बीच रिश्ते का पर्याय समझा जाता है। सामान्य तौर पर संकट को उत्पादन और संचरण की एकता में विच्छेद के रूप में देखा जाता है — बहस महज उत्पादन या संचरण के केन्द्रीयता को लेकर होती है। इस विच्छेद में निस्संदेह तथाकथित “उत्पादन शक्तियों” की निर्णायक भूमिका समझी जाती है, परंतु इन शक्तियों की गणना में जो सबसे महत्वपूर्ण तत्व है, यानी मानवीय श्रम, उसे ही निष्कासित कर इन्हें टेक्नोलॉजी का पर्याय मान लिया जाता है। इस तरह राजनीतिक अर्थशास्त्र की मार्क्सवादी आलोचना की विशिष्टता गायब हो जाती है और उसकी अवधारणाएं जड़ता का शिकार हो जाती हैं। निष्कर्षतः मार्क्सवादियों के बीच भी पूंजीवादी संकट के तमाम सिद्धांत निवेश चरित्र और यांत्रिक ब्रेकडाउन के सिद्धांत बन जाते हैं। (बेल 1977; बेल और क्लीवर 1982) इस प्रकार पूंजीवादी संकट के मार्क्सवादी सिद्धांतों के अन्तर्सम्बन्ध और अखंडता  का संप्रत्ययात्मक (conceptual) आधार ओझल हो जाता है और ये सिद्धांत अलग-अलग, यहाँ तक कि विरोधास्पद प्रतीत होते हैं। इन सब के केंद्र में श्रम और वर्ग संघर्ष के सवाल जो इन तमाम सिद्धान्तों को बांधते थे, उनके ओझल हो जाने से पूंजीवादी संकट की विभिन्न अभिव्यक्तियाँ विकेन्द्रित होकर अपनी-अपनी कहानियाँ गढ़ती हैं। 

इस तरह जो कारण है वह महज कार्य में तब्दील हो जाता है, वह कुंठित प्रतिक्रियात्मकता का द्योतक हो जाता है, और कई टुकड़ों में संगठित हो राजनीतिक प्रतिस्पर्धा का मोहरा बन कर रह जाता है। अर्थशास्त्रीय मार्क्सवादियों से तो यही उम्मीद की जाती है परंतु राजनीतिक मार्क्सवादी भी पूंजी की जिंसीकृत ही नहीं व्यक्तिकृत समझ रखते हैं और उसे सामाजिक संबंध और निर्वैयक्तिक सत्ता के रूप में नहीं देख पाते। तथाकथित मार्क्सवादी राजनीतिज्ञों के अनुसार पूंजी कोई वस्तु है जिस पर पूँजीपतियों का आधिपत्य है और अगर मजदूर उस पर कब्जा कर लें तो सब ठीक हो जाएगा।

जबकि मार्क्स के लिए पूंजी वह सामाजिक संबंध है जिसके तहत पूंजीपति पूंजीपति होते हैं, और मजदूर मजदूर होते हैं। पूंजीवादी संकट के विभिन्न स्वरूप इस संबंध के आंतरिक संकट की अभिव्यक्तियाँ हैं। वर्ग-संघर्ष केवल फैक्ट्री या फैक्ट्रियों के अंदर अथवा मजदूरों-पूंजीपतियों के बीच के सीधे टकराव से ही नहीं शुरू होता। वह तो आदिम संचय द्वारा श्रम को दोहरी आजादी मिलने से लेकर श्रम बाजार की धक्कम-धुक्की से होता हुआ वर्कशॉपों, फैक्ट्रियों, जमीनों, या कहें उत्पादन/श्रम संबंधों के तमाम स्वरूपों को समेटता हुआ, उपभोग की सीमाओं में घुस श्रम-शक्ति और बेशी आबादी के पुनरुत्पादन के सवाल से जूझता है। या कहें आज पूरा समाज ही सामाजिक फैक्ट्री के रूप में वर्ग संघर्ष का रणक्षेत्र है। इन तमाम सामाजिक-आर्थिक क्षेत्रों में वर्ग-संघर्ष मौजूद है, पूंजी की समस्याएँ इन सारे क्षेत्रों में श्रम को नियंत्रित करने की हैं, और इसी में असफलताएँ संकट के विभिन्न स्वरूपों को पैदा करती हैं।

III

अंतर्राष्ट्रीय कर्ज के संकट को लेकर अर्थशास्त्रीय अटकलें कर्ज की तह में छुपे सामाजिक-राजनीतिक तत्वों को सामने नहीं आने देतीं। 1982 के मेक्सिको संकट से लेकर आज तक कई प्रकार के कर्ज संकट हमारे सामने आए हैं। ये कर्ज मुख्यतः सरकारी और बहुपक्षीय अंतर्राष्ट्रीय वित्तीय संस्थानों द्वारा दिए जाते हैं, परंतु हाल के वर्षों में निजी संस्थानों का हिस्सा बढ़ता जा रहा है। ये कर्ज साधारणतः आधारिक संरचना और बाजार के विकास के नाम पर  लिया जाता है, परंतु ये मासूम लगने वाले कारक सामाजिक-भौगोलिक दिक्काल का कायापलट कर स्थानीय सामाजिकता को पूरी तरह से झकझोर देते हैं। इनका काम उन सामाजिक संबंधों और क्रियाओं को इस प्रकार पुनर्संयोजित करना है ताकि नई स्थितियों के विकास में वे बाधक न हों और उनके अधीन रह वे उत्पादक बन सकें। मार्क्सवादी भाषा में यही आदिम संचय की प्रक्रिया है जो संसाधन को आबादी के नियंत्रण से और आबादी के श्रम को पुराने सामाजिक संबंधों से आजाद करती है, ताकि वे पूंजीवादी संचय और बाजार के विकास के आधार बन सकें। 

इसके अलावे कर्ज की वे शर्तें हैं जिन्हे संरचनात्मक अनुकूलन कार्यक्रम अथवा संरचनात्मक सुधार कहते हैं और जिनके तहत स्थानीय अर्थव्यवस्था, संस्थाओं और सामाजिक संबंधों को वैश्विक पूंजी संचय की जरूरतों के अनुकूल विकसित करने की कोशिश होती है। निजीकरण, श्रम बाजार का युक्तिकरण, मौद्रिकरण का विस्तार, मितव्ययिता इत्यादि ऐसे औजार हैं जो स्थानीय श्रमिकों की आबादी को लाचार बना उन्हें इन जरूरतों के अनुसार अनुशासित करने की कोशिश करते हैं। पूंजी के स्थानीय प्रशासक उधार ली गई धनराशि का उपयोग मुख्यतः एक तरफ अगर स्थानीय औद्योगिकीकरण के साथ-साथ इसकी सभी परिचर लागतों को वित्तपोषित करने के लिए करते हैं जिसमें ठोस निवेश के लिए बुनियादी ढांचे पर खर्च शामिल है, तो दूसरी तरफ स्थानीय संघर्षों के जवाब में, विशेष रूप से, मजदूर वर्ग पर सैन्य/पुलिसिया नियंत्रण स्थापित करने के लिए करते हैं। (क्लीवर 1989; बेल और क्लीवर 1982)

यदि हम अंतर्राष्ट्रीय कर्ज के अर्थशास्त्रीय दलीलों और उसके शर्तों के औपचारिक व्याकरण को बिना इन व्यावहारिक पक्षों को ध्यान में रख पढ़ेंगे तो पूंजीवाद द्वारा फैलाए वैचारिक मायाजाल में फँस हम वर्ग-संघर्ष के बहुरूपिए पक्ष से अनभिज्ञ ही रहेंगे। सर्वहारा के खिलाफ पूंजी के विशिष्ट हमले को हम सर्वहाराकरण के खिलाफ सर्वहारा होती आबादी के संघर्ष के विभिन्न स्तरों को समझे बिना कभी नहीं ग्रहण कर सकते। कर्ज का संकट इसी वर्ग संघर्ष का नतीजा है — जिसे पूंजी के हित में जीतने के लिए सरकारों को और कर्ज लेना पड़ता है। 

यह बहुस्तरीय वर्ग संघर्ष सामाजिकता के विभिन्न दायरे की विशिष्ट भाषा को लिए होते हैं, उन्हें एक स्वरूप में बांधना नामुमकिन ही नहीं प्रतिक्रियावादी भी है, क्योंकि वह मजदूर वर्ग की अपनी अभिव्यक्तियों का दमन है जो कि अंततः पूंजी को ही सुरक्षित करता है। कहीं पर यह संघर्ष अगर औद्योगिक संघर्षो के रूप में मिलते हैं तो कहीं राष्ट्रीयताओं और अस्मिताओं की भाषा में ये मौजूद रहते हैं। मार्क्स की “क्रांतिकारी सामान्यीकरण” की अवधारणा इन संघर्षो की स्व-अभिव्यक्तियों में पूंजी विरोधी क्रांतिकारी सूत्र को पहचानना है।

IV

श्रीलंका की कर्ज की जरूरत को और आज के उसके कर्ज संकट को उसके पीछे काम कर रही सामाजिक प्रक्रियाओं और संघर्षों को पहचाने बगैर समझा नहीं जा सकता। इस पुस्तिका में हमारे साथियों ने इस संदर्भ को समझने के लिए जरूरी तथ्यों को बखूबी पेश किया है। इसलिए मैं बस दो तथ्यों को यहाँ गिनूंगा। पहला कि श्रीलंका की राजसत्ता लातिन-अमरिका में पिनोचेत की दमनकारी सरकार के बाद दूसरी थी जिसने वाशिंगटन कंसेंसस के नवोदारवादी मुहिम को जगह दी। दूसरा, आज से पहले श्रीलंका सोलह बार आईएमएफ के आर्थिक स्थायीकरण कार्यक्रमों को कार्यान्वित कर चुका है। उसके बाद भी वैश्विक और स्थानीय पूंजीवादी सत्ताएँ श्रीलंकाई जनता और संसाधनों को अपने गिरफ्त में नहीं कर पाई हैं। गृह युद्ध में जीत और सिंहली राष्ट्रवाद के  सशक्तिकरण ने श्रीलंकाई राजसत्ता को जो वैधानिकता प्रदान की थी वह पूरी तरह से श्रीलंका की जनता ने मटियामेट कर दिया। वर्ग संघर्ष की भाषा वह कुंजी है जो हमें श्रीलंका में कर्ज की राजनीति, गृह युद्ध, अस्मिताओं/राष्ट्रीयताओं के खूनी संघर्ष और आज के आर्थिक, सामाजिक और राजनीतिक संकट को एक दूसरे से बांध के समझने में मदद करती है।

अंत में कुछ घरेलू बातें।

कुछेक संगठनों को छोड़कर हिंदुस्तानी वामपंथियों में श्रीलंका की घटनाओं को लेकर आम अलगाव बहुत ही निराशाजनक है, जबकि हिंदुस्तानी राजसत्ता और शासक वर्ग ने लगातार अपने हित को साधने में और विश्व-पूंजीवाद के क्षेत्रीय नायकत्व के नाते हस्तक्षेप करने में कोई कसर नही छोड़ा। हालांकि दक्षिण एशिया में नेपाल के लोकतंत्र आंदोलन के बाद श्रींलंका का जनता अरगलय पहला ऐसा जन उभार है  जिसने शासन-व्यवस्था और क्षेत्रीय संतुलन को संकट में डाल दिया, मगर दोनों आंदोलनों में अंतर काफी साफ है। जहां एक तरफ नेपाली आंदोलन का लक्ष्य, उसका राजनीतिक स्वरूप और नेतृत्व साफ दिखता था, तो दूसरी तरफ श्रीलंका के जनता अरगलय में न कोई निश्चित लक्ष्य है, न कोई निश्चित राजनीतिक स्वरूप है और ना ही कोई निश्चित नेतृत्व है।  निश्चित्तता प्रतिक्रियाओं के दायरे को भी निश्चित करती है — आंदोलन के विरोधियों और समर्थकों दोनों की प्रतिक्रियाओं को व्याकृत करती है। इसी कारण से भारत की विभिन्न राजनीतिक शक्तियाँ अपनी-अपनी राजनीति के अनुसार नेपाल की राजनीति के साथ जुड़ती रहीं है, उस पर टिप्पणी देती रहीं और असर भी डालती रही हैं। परंतु इस निश्चितता का आडम्बर उसके पीछे की अनिश्चित संभावनाओं की अपारता को नापने नहीं देता जबकि इसी अनिश्चितता में क्रांतिकारी परिवर्तन की गुंजाइश होती है। निश्चितता के दायरे में  राजनीति केवल निश्चित संभावनाओं का इंतज़ार है, उसमें आशा की कोई गुंजाइश नहीं होती — जो होना है उसकी आशा नहीं की जाती, उसका इंतजार होता है।

श्रीलंका को लेकर हिंदुस्तानी वामपंथ की उदासीनता और निष्क्रियता के पीछे एक कारण तो अवश्य ही प्रत्यक्ष रूप से श्रीलंका के आंदोलन में  “राजनीति की कमी” और अनिश्चितता थी। परंतु यह पर्याप्त या मुख्य कारण नहीं है। इसका सबसे प्रमुख कारण भारतीय वामपंथ का निम्न-पूंजीवादी राष्ट्रवादी विचलन है जो उसे भारतीय राजसत्ता और क्षेत्रीय पूंजीवादी प्रक्रियाओं में भारत की वर्चस्वकारी भूमिका की सटीक अंतर्राष्ट्रीयवादी आलोचना करने से रोकता है। जो धाराएँ आज भी भारत में “पूंजीवादी-जनवादी” कर्तव्यों को क्रांति द्वारा पूरा करने की बात करती हैं उनके लिए भारतीय पूंजीवाद और उसकी राजसत्ता का विश्व साम्राज्यवादी नेटवर्क के अंतर्गत एक वर्चस्वकारी शक्ति होने की बात कैसे स्वीकार होगी? वे छुटपुट धाराएँ भी जो भारत में समाजवादी क्रांति का सपना देखती हैं, वे भी पेड़ गिनने में लगी रहती हैं, जंगल की संश्लिष्ट समझ विकसित नहीं कर पातीं। (वे बहुत मायने में भारतीय राजनीतिक अर्थतंत्र की विश्लेषणात्मक स्तर पर सटीक और विस्तृत आलोचना पेश करती हैं, परंतु पूंजीवादी संरचना की संश्लिष्टता अथवा समग्रता को ग्रहण करने में चूक जाती हैं)। इसीलिए, भारतीय पूंजीवाद और राजसत्ता की (उप)साम्राज्यवादी रणनीतियाँ, पड़ोसी और अन्य देशों में भारत के दाँव-पेंच, जिनका निश्चित आर्थिक चरित्र है — ये सब इनके कूपमंडूक चिंतन प्रक्रिया से बाहर हो जाते हैं। और यही कूपमंडूकता हमें हमारे घर के दरवाजे पर हो रहे संघर्षो से सीख और प्रेरणा लेने से रोकती है।

पता नहीं लेनिन (1920) की निम्नलिखित बात का इस भूमिका में कही बातों से पाठकों को कोई सीधा रिश्ता दिखता है या नहीं, परंतु मेरी समझ में वामपंथी रूपवाद जिसको तोड़ने में हिन्दुस्तानी वामपंथियों को बहुत समय लग रहा है, और जो उन्हें नए संघर्षों को उन संघर्षों के अपने रूप में अपनाने से रोकता है, उसको यह उद्धरण चुनौती देता है:       

“सबसे अधिक प्रगतिशील वर्ग की अच्छी से अच्छी पार्टियाँ और अधिक से अधिक वर्ग -सजग हिरावल जिस बात की कल्पना कर सकते हैं, इतिहास आम तौर पर, और क्रांतियों का इतिहास खास तौर पर, उससे कहीं अधिक सामग्री-समृद्ध,अधिक विविध, अधिक अनेकरूपीय, अधिक सजीव और प्रतिभा-सम्पन्न होता है। यह बात समझ में आनी चाहिए, क्योंकि अच्छे से अच्छे हिरावल भी केवल हजारों आदमियों की वर्ग-चेतना, निश्चय, उत्साह और कल्पना को ही व्यक्त कर सकते है, जब कि क्रांतियाँ वर्गों के तीव्रतम संघर्ष से प्रेरित करोड़ों आदमियों की वर्ग-चेतना, निश्चय, उत्साह और कल्पना से ओतप्रोत सभी मानव क्षमताओं के विशेष उभार और उठान की घड़ी में होती हैं। इससे दो महत्वपूर्ण अमली नतीजे निकलते हैं: पहला, यह कि क्रांतिकारी वर्ग को अपना काम पूरा करने के लिए, बिना किसी अपवाद के सामाजिक गतिविधि के सभी रूपों में, सभी पहलुओं में पारंगत होना चाहिए (इस विषय में जो कुछ वह राजसत्ता पर अधिकार करने के पहले पूरा नहीं कर पाता, उसे सत्ता पर अधिकार करने के बाद — कभी-कभी बड़े जोखिम उठाते हुए और बड़े खतरों के साथ — पूरा करना पड़ता है); दूसरा, यह कि क्रांतिकारी वर्ग को बहुत ही जल्दी के साथ और बड़े अप्रत्याशित ढंग से एक रूप को छोड़कर दूसरा रूप अपनाने के लिए सदा तैयार रहना चाहिए।”

और वैसे भी, बाबा वाक्यं प्रमाणम्!!!

संदर्भ सूची:

हैरी क्लीवर (1989), “Close the IMF, Abolish Debt and End Development: a Class Analysis of the International Debt Crisis,” Capital & Class (39), Winter 1989

पीटर बेल (1977), “Marxist Theory, Class Struggle and the Crisis of Capitalism” in Jesse Schwartz (ed.), The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism. Santa Monica: Goodyear

पीटर बेल और हैरी क्लीवर (1982),” Marx’s Theory of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle,” Research in Political Economy (Vol. 5) 

व्लादिमीर लेनिन (1920),  वामपंथी कम्युनिज्म – एक बचकाना मर्ज

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Capitalism, law and surplus population – in the context of the Mundka incident


Industrial accidents are a necessary condition of the capitalist economy, that is, their possibility is an integral part of capitalist life. Their occurrence can be avoided to some extent by legal-administrative reforms and vigilance. There are limits to these reforms, however. The Mundka incident, on the one hand, exemplifies corruption and non-compliance of the law (which attracts the most attention of the well-wishers), and on the other, it is primarily a manifestation of the organic brutality of capitalist industrial life. This brutality reflects the dispensability of individuated workers in an environment of continuous surplusing.

Capitalism and Social Justice: The Floyd Protests in the US


In 1968, when Europe was witnessing student revolts, Italian Marxist filmmaker, novelist and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a poem addressing students, where he unabashedly told them,

When yesterday at Valle Giulia you fought 
with policemen, 
I sympathized with the policemen! 

He went on to explain that these boys in the police came from poor families and were dehumanised by the system — 

…Worst of all, naturally, 
is the psychological state to which they are reduced 
(for roughly sixty dollars a month); 
with a smile no longer, 
with friends in the world no longer, 
separated, 
excluded (in an exclusion which is without equal); 
humiliated by the loss of the qualities of men
for those of policemen (being hated generates hatred). 

Pasolini tauntingly challenged the students,

We obviously agree against the police as institution. 
But get mad at the Legal System and you will see! [1]

The Defunding of Police: What does it signify?

In the context of the ongoing movement against police violence in the US, the proposal for defunding and disbanding the police force has gained a wide currency. It has enthused many towards a more libertarian future. Its influence has also reached the learned sections of the left and liberal circles in India. As in 1968 and some years after it, today once again we see a confluence between those who stress on the virtues of a lean state and those demanding social justice, trying to give meanings or definite agenda to the movement —binding it to concrete demands. As David Harvey has shown, the intellectual force and initial consensus for neoliberalism were derived from such confluence.[2] However, neither in the case of the 1968 upsurge nor today can one reduce a whole movement to these vocal agencies who are there to negotiate with the system — in the case of the Floyd protests, to bring in police reforms and the Democrats to commit for them, while blaming Trump for everything. 

It is interesting to see the complementarity of Trump and his right-wing bandwagon, on the one hand, and the left-liberals, on the other. The former sees the conspiracy of anarchists, communists and anti-capitalism everywhere, destroying American values and institutions; therefore, they stress on violent incidents that have happened during the upsurge. The liberals and left see in the protests the assertion of American values rescuing  institutions from their takeover by conservative and even fascist elements. They downplay violence and sometimes even blame rightwingers for infiltration. Hence, in both discourses American values and basic institutions remain sacrosanct.

Even the apparently radical suggestion to defund and even disband the police is perhaps not very drastic. With the growing numbers of private security agencies and the localised community-level management of their engagement, the state run formal police force is increasingly becoming obsolete. Two prominent journalists-cum-business experts, while writing in Business Insider, applauded police-free Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and found Trump’s accusation that such zones are  anarchistic to be unwarranted and “a wrong response”. They go on to say,

“Whether you believe in the Black Lives Matter cause or not, you should want this test to continue. If the Floyd protests have shown us anything, it’s that America needs new models for law enforcement, regulation, and community organising. CHAZ is one tiny demonstration. We can think of tons of experiments worth trying: no-armed-police zones, no-police-car zones, an-officer-on-every-corner zones… Let’s try ‘em all. May there be 1,000 more CHAZzes!”[3, emphasis mine] 

Disbanding the police force is a wonderful idea, but what does it mean to implement this idea in an unequal system? Isn’t policing an intrinsic need of such a system? Is this system itself being questioned, or is it just an anger against a particular “alienated” form of policing? Empowering people without destroying the internal hierarchy in a community will only allow those on top to accumulate more power. Disbanding police in this scenario will force the community to internalise policing, and the powerful will play the judge. Power always clings to the powerful, who in turn are only personifications of power. That is why you see no significant outrage at such “radical” proposals in the US, except from the supporters of Trump, and Fox News. But what we see most of the time, if not always, depends on the perspective that we take, which in turn is dependent on our location relative to various socio-cultural (superstructural) asperities that break open whenever there is a heightening of structural stress energy in capitalist class relations.  Hence, the relevant question would be whether the Floyd Protests are merely about different demands that are being posed, or whether something more is happening in the American society that we need to understand.

Capitalism is ever ready to recompose itself according to the crisis that a social movement poses. Reducing a movement to its immediate demands is one of the main ways that contribute to this recomposition. The demands are crucial to organise the movement, but reducing the latter to the literality of the former is not just ludicrous, but a serious reduction that reifies demands and is a  result of commodity fetishism — of reducing social relations to thingness, which helps in capitalist reproduction not just in ideology, but also materially. It is through this reduction that the legitimation of a capitalist state, as the chief arbitrator of the system, is derived. But a movement is definitely more than its demands, it is about social relations. What is happening in the US is not simply a reaction to an incident, rather it is the eventalisation of that incident exposing the ab-normalcy of those relations.       

The Political Economy of Policing and the Floyd Protests

It seems corporate America has found “a public relations windfall” in the Floyd protests. Many delivery-based firms, like Amazon, Instacart, GrubHub among others, who have been crucial agencies of commodity circulation during the ongoing pandemic, were engulfed in labour conflicts. They found a respite in the protests, as “corporate anti-racism is the perfect egress from these labor conflicts. Black lives matter to the front office, as long as they don’t demand a living wage, personal protective equipment and quality health care.”[4] However, these spectacular protests could not be reduced to militant black liberal demands of Black Lives Matter, foremostly because the problems of policing themselves could not be understood simply from the perspective of race. 

Racial disparity is an important description of inequalities that characterise the American society. The statistical significance of this phenomenon can hardly be overstated in describing police violence and incarceration in the US.  However, it is not self-explanatory, it is linked to the deeper political economic processes. 

“What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion of police violence all along, that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working class populations produced by revanchist capitalism.“[5, emphasis mine]

In the Marxist framework, “the uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the constant return and long duration of gluts of labour are all symptoms of a relative surplus population.”[6] The growing number of marginalised sub-employed segments of the working class are what constitute today the relative surplus population and its various types: Floating, Latent, Stagnant and “the sphere of pauperism…the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army.”[7] This ever growing population must be harnessed for capitalist accumulation, to obtain cheap labour and to cheapen existing labour. Yet it is a dangerous disruptive force when not engaged productively in an immediate manner. The increase in police violence is perhaps evidence of an increased self-activity of this population.  A proper regime of incarceration and policing is needed to contain, suppress and productivise its energy. 

In fact, Ruth Gilmore in her book, Golden Gulag, shows “how resolutions of surplus land, capital, labor, and state capacity congealed into prisons.” The “phenomenal growth of California’s state prison system since 1982” can be understood as a part of the resolution to the crisis of the golden age of American capitalism, which was characterised by overaccumulation wanting radical measures like “developing new relationships and new or renovated institutions out of what already exists.” [8] Since the late 1990s, Gilmore along with Angela Davis and others has been involved in the organising efforts against what they call, the Prison-Industrial Complex.[9] 

With regard to the Floyd Protests too, it has been observed that among the masses that have emerged on the streets, there are those who have suffered because of the pandemic and being sheltered-in-place “without adequate sustained federal relief.” Therefore, these protests are also a consequence of “mass layoffs, food pantries hard pressed to keep up with unprecedented need, and broad anxiety among many Americans about their bleak employment prospects in the near future.” This can be grasped only if the widespread looting is not rejected, but explained. 

Unlike the ghetto rebellions of yesteryears, the composition of the looters today is multiracial and intergenerational, targeting downtowns and central shopping districts. These are “the most dispossessed of all races and ethnicities who are the most likely to be routinely surveilled, harassed, arrested, convicted, incarcerated and condemned as failures, the collateral damage of the American dream.”[10] The law-preserving and law-constituting forces can understand only the language of demands, and the surplus-ed do not demand, but act.

Beyond Neoliberal Social Justice 

The hegemonic tendency in the American anti-racist movement today “accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice”. It has emerged as “the left wing of neoliberalism  [whose] sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines.”[11] This provides a crucial clue to understand not just the limits of the movements for representation, recognition and redistribution, but also the compatibility of social justice with neoliberalism. This can help in making sense of why in some countries, like India, policies and laws towards ensuring social justice frequently accompanied the aggressive implementation of neoliberal economic reforms. 

The history of capitalism shows that it includes through differentiation and segmentation, constituting the unevenness of its social geography, which is a crucial factor in the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. It is this differential inclusion that structures the extension and intensification of division of labour, facilitating the circulation of commodities and capital and ensuring the transfer of value. This aspect of capitalist development manifests itself in real identitarian inequalities, insecurities, anxieties and politics at diverse levels of social structures. Social differentiation, obviously, in effect preempts or defers the emergence of class-against-capital that threatens not just law and order, but the very system that they conserve. Simplistically put, identities are all about horizontal divisions and vertical (re)integration. This engenders a perspective that does not allow various segments to think beyond redistributive economics and the politics of representation and recognition. So all social conflicts become just problems of management, engineering, and of statistics. Hence, tweaking specific variables is what needs to be done. Blaming individuals  or even specific institutions for what is an endemic problem of the system is the best way to salvage the system. This is how today, as Pasolini would put, people everywhere (differentially, but definitely) “belong to a ‘totality’ (the ‘semantic fields’ on which they express themselves through both linguistic and nonlinguistic communication).” This is how “bourgeois entropy” is reached, when “the bourgeoisie is becoming the human condition. Those who are born into this entropy cannot in any way, metaphysically, be outside of it. It’s over.”[12] But, is it so?  

Can we deny the experience of racism and, for that matter, of any enclosed segment of class? Aren’t such experiences crucial to the politics of class? While it is true that racism cannot be understood in its own terms, and all problems faced by black proletarians cannot be reduced to racism, can we deny that class always appears through such specific geo-cultural forms of social relations? The sedimental reality of all these forms is, of course, the dynamics of class relations and struggle, but these dynamics can only be captured in the experience of these forms. The struggle against segmentation is not to wish it away. Any unity based on such ideological wishing away of inter-segmental conflicts will be external and an imposition. 

An identity assertion becomes revolutionary when it is a ground for negating the very logic of differentiation and segmentation that sustains capitalist accumulation through competition and hierarchy. Then, the assertion is not for identitarian accommodation, but against the logic of identification—to envisage a non-identity against and beyond all identities. The positive assertion of identities, on the other hand, is for accommodation within power and accumulation of power —this is what social justice means within the logic of capital. However, any assertion of oppressed identities always contains the possibility of the release of an anti-identitarian subject, the class of proletarians, that goes against racism, casteism and other segmentations to destroy the stability of the very system of classification and gradation of labourers that sustains capitalism. It is this subject that can be traced in the incidents of looting and arson in the Floyd protests. Since they serve no means, they are ignored by those who don’t decry them.

Note: My special thanks to Arvind, Lalan, Nilotpal, Paresh, Prakash, Pritha and Satyabrat for innumerable discussions on the article. 

References

[1] Il PCI ai Giovani (The PCI to the Young), in Pier Paolo Pasolini. 1972 [2005]. Heretical Empiricism. Tr. Ben Lawton & Louise K. Barnett, New Academia Publishing, pp 150-158.

[2] David Harvey. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. (Chapter 2, ‘The Construction of Consent’).

[3] David Plotz & Henry Blodget. 2020. ‘We need more experiments like Seattle’s police-free’, Business Insider (June 13, 2020). Accessed on June 15, 2020.

[4] Cedric Johnson. 2020. ‘The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption’, nonsite.org (Posted June 9, 2020). Accessed on June 15, 2020.

[5] Adolph Reed, Jr. 2016. ‘How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence’, nonsite.org (Reposted June 9, 2020). Accessed on June 15, 2020. 

[6] Karl Marx. 1976. Capital. Volume 1, (Trans. Ben Fowkes). London: Pelican Books, p. 866.

[7] Ibid, p. 797.

[8] Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, p. 28.

[9] Critical Resistance Publications Collective, ed. 2000. Critical Resistance to the Prison-Industrial Complex. Special Issue of Social Justice 27(3). 

[10]Johnson, op. cit.

[11] Reed, op. cit.

[12] Pasolini, op. cit., p. 156. 

India Unlocked: World’s “Biggest Lockdown” and Workers’ Long March


“… never torment a creature for sport,
for it might be loaded.” – Ernst Bloch

At times, states compete to showcase merchandise and relative productive capacities. Other times, many of these states sell misery to gain access to economic packages, charities and loans. Today is the time when they compete to show off their capacity to impose the most efficient lockdown on their citizenry. Of course, the priority is to make this imposition consensual, because that would showcase the self-discipline of the national workforce. But if that doesn’t work, then the dosages of coercion are streamlined to measure the states’ disciplining capacity. The Narendra Modi government’s chest-thumping claim to run the “world’s biggest lockdown” was to showcase the realisation of the neoliberal ideal of a “strong state” in India — the carrots-and-sticks hidden behind the quinine-and-quarantine lockdown. 

The Story of India’s Lockdown

With the absence of any coherent public health system, in the nationalist war against the “Chinese virus”, India has been relying on the dedicated medical workforce of much maligned public hospitals fending the virus without sufficient protection and supplies. Of course, popular pseudoscience is also there, factoring in a hot summer and the cumulative impact of other vaccines etc, along with the placebo effects of the homeopathic recipes. 

Even with regard to the so-called practice of “social distancing” and its generalisation through the lockdown, much was left to the play of the complex and sinister traditional divisions — such as caste and communal divides among others — within the Indian society. One can speculate that this factor might have played a role in the slow expansion of the pandemic in India. 

However, it goes to the credit of supposedly the most vulnerable in India who called the Indian state’s bluff, making its rhetoric of a successful and strong lockdown evaporate into thin air. The migrant’s faint cry to be allowed to go back home became a collective roar, and a long march in defiance of the strictures and coercive forces ensued.

We are witness to a process of how the vulnerabilities of the weakest become their strength; how their weak actions lead to a legitimation crisis of the state (and also at many times capitalist crisis in general). It is not very difficult to see how existential defiance of India’s migrants and the working class in general unravelled the neat choreography of the lockdown, making it meaningless. The exodus of internal migrants (India’s “biggest intangible assets” and “India’s real economic dynamo: a silent force“) and the anticipated volatility in the labour market have made capital jittery. 

The Narendra Modi government, with President Trump’s encouragement, was already planning to catch companies flying away from China. The labour laws were being derailed to clear the way. But nobody heard the plates shifting — the lockdown just couldn’t lock the workers in! Their footlooseness, which was the biggest asset, has become a great liability now.

The Liberal Politics of Victimhood and Representation

The tremors were felt everywhere. The state was trying to control the damage desperately by providing buses, rations, and identifying potential stars in children, cycling hundreds of miles carrying their parents. On the other hand, the sensitive gentry could see the faces of orphans whose parents died in an accident while cycling 750 kilometres back home, or see blood splattered on the railway tracks.  

In a recent article in The Indian Express, one of the most sensible political scientists in India, Suhas Palshikar, expressed the angst of the majority of the self-acclaimed politically conscious people on the side of left and liberals. He lamented “the incongruous image of the politicians and the political party” — they talk of the people but “betray an instinctive choice of ‘law and order’ and a techno-bureaucratic idea of governance”. It seems they are “on a holiday” and abstaining from politics. At the time when the central government is “caught in the trap of regulation and denial,” and “beset with uncontrollably delusional self-belief”, the opposition forces should have taken the initiative to  “come up with a robust alternative route to governance” (of course, Kerala is already showing the way!). 

According to Palshikar, there should be “a political response to the pandemic,” for which “resumption of democratic contestation is a must”, since “politics alone can be survival therapy for democracy.” He advises the Congress and its leadership to ask the party workers “to hit the roads, talk with suffering workers, walk with them”, only then they would “realise that taking a stand also means mixing with the people.” 

Palshikar’s plea for the “resumption of democratic contestation” may seem inspiring at the time when there are so many people who are left uncared-for during the pandemic. It might motivate the opposition to see a political opportunity here, and the government too might see their pragmatic mistakes. But there are many assumptions on the basis of which such a plea is made. It seems Palshikar and, with him, most liberals and leftists in India assume that there is never a democratic agency of those who are surplused by the system, as there is no political agency beyond the legitimate state apparatuses — institutional and ideological. 

With the WHO’s recognition of Covid-19 as a pandemic, the governments did what they are always good at when they are forced into action, i.e, to reach out for coercive measures. In the absence of vaccination and any understanding of the infecting germ, these measures take the form of imposing ancient “tribal traditions” of prevention (as J.D. Bernal used to call them) —social distancing, isolation and quarantine. But the liberal conscience, represented by Palshikar and others, demands an official opposition which will act as a corrective to this coercion. 

The Real Opposition beyond Spectacular Politics

What happened instead is something, which, though, is not very uncanny in history, but, generally, goes unseen and unrecognised. It is accounted only in a retrospective reading of the people’s history. It happens beyond the spectacle of formal politics, which doesn’t have any category to capture this phenomenon in its positive grammar, except as a subaltern that never speaks. 

The wails of pain, agony and anger of India’s internal migrants and workers in general have shattered the adamantine chains of the lockdown. The lockdown was never successful except in the ritualites of the already cocooned little bourgeois within everyone (meaning, everyone individually or as an aggregate of individuals). We found the appropriate nuclear environment of safety and discipline, and sang the “Middle Class Blues”: 

“The streets are empty. 
The deals are closed. 
The sirens are silent. 
All that will pass.” (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) 

Among the working masses, the lockdown as a generalisation of “social distancing”  was anyway meaningless, and its imposition amounted to an outrage. They felt what they are —surplus-ed and other-ed

There are talks about the consolidation of the state and the rise of authoritarianism, but it is seldom recognised that this is a result of the exposed weakness of the state, its inability to regulate workers’ self activities and, especially, the panic and fear that they instill among other classes. Those who see these workers only as victims, which they are in the legitimate framework of political economy, are unable to see the organic resistance of the workers to the systemic regulation. 

What argumentative liberals and online radicals couldn’t achieve was accomplished by the synergistic effects of the “weapons of the weak”. In fact, they are still waiting for the powers who imposed the lockdown to end it, so that, once again, they are able to lead these victims of the system back to the normal systemic cycle —some want them to fulfil their duties, and some, mainly those who are on the side of the left, would want them to struggle for their rights. What an irony!

There is nothing to celebrate here, but everything to understand — in order to imagine a new politics organically grounded in the everydayness of working class resistance.

Brecht and Workers’ Self-Inquiry


The lucidity of Brecht’s journal entries is remarkable. He is a master of aphorisms, yet he never allows forms to stifle the richness of content. The meaning overflows through the pores of the condensed entries of his journals. Every entry is a bombshell, which fractures appearances and reveals the structure of the real, putting it into a crisis.

In 1936 he wrote an entry in which a worker’s almost instinctive refusal to work and the right to leisure are articulated. It shows that “incipient class consciousness” is already there among workers in work relations and the feeling of solidarity emerges right there.

The worker in this entry is Brecht himself. He is working as a scriptwriter in London, where he came to “learn to write for films”, but he ends up “learning something different”.

Although his boss or superior treats him as “an absolute equal, the nature of the work” is such that he feels “like an employee”. But a worker’s refusal is not about unfairness, or even formal and informal inequality at the workplace. It is about work itself. “i have not chosen the subject i am working on for myself, i can’t relate to it and i don’t know what will happen to my work when it comes on the market. i only have my labour to sell, and what is done with it afterwards has nothing to do with me.

But it is also not just about being disinterested towards the subject. Work is the whole material structure of work relations which is intrinsically class polarised. Workers’ interests are totally opposed to the efficient functioning of this structure. Hence, the refusal to work. “my interests are quite opposed to those of my employer. since i am on a weekly wage, it is not good for me if the work progresses quickly, quite the contrary.

The subjectivity that takes shape in this atmosphere is spontaneous. “already i even catch myself taking out my watch as evening approaches; i want to get away, it’s time for real life to begin.” But his urge to escape is not because he is looking forward to something. “real life is quite separate, and incidentally quite unappealing.” He is not falling for the fetish of “own time”. It is simply a space-time where he is not thinking about work. “but in ‘my own time’ i don’t waste a single thought on my daily work.

It is this refusal that makes a worker relate and empathise with other workers and build horizontal relations. “i leave with the little englishman who works alongside me as translator and we strictly avoid touching anything that might remind us of work. i feel a sense of total solidarity with him when he refuses to work on sundays.

The building of such relations cannot remain hidden, it disturbs the whole segmentation that constitutes these relations. It makes superiors (in work hierarchy – supervisors etc) suspicious, and they try to regain confidence of workers by making a common cause against employers. But workers are aware of the tactic, yet they know its possible need too, so they remain silent. “kortner seems to have noticed this incipient class consciousness, for he often says on the phone, when he is cancelling an appointment, that with his job he has work to do – just as any boss might.” whenever he can, he makes mock of his employers, points out their inferiority and laziness, whereupon we are both silent.

When Brecht eats his lunch at his superior’s place, it is in the company of the latter’s wife who “is very nice” that “it all stops and i am the great poet once more.” He also has “the privilege of being able to take a nap, but then, after coffee, the situation changes once more.

And as a finale, Brecht ends, “the paper i am using to write this is from work: i pinched it.”

Visit: Brecht on “the Concept of Class”

Brecht on “the Concept of Class”


8 Jan 42

the concept of class too, perhaps because it has come down to us as it was framed in the last century, is used much too mechanically today. there is nothing to be derived from a purely statistical concept of a german working class nowadays; yet such a concept is deep-seated. trade-unions and political parties are accustomed to count members. the political concept is devalued too, since it presupposes organisations and ‘democratic forms of state’, a ‘free interplay of forces’ which can be steered by the ruling class. the closure of the labour market in the interests of the war economy has damaged the term ‘class’ as an economic concept. what remains is the class itself. it, happily, is not just a concept.

the fact that wars cannot be waged without the proletariat (as the productive force) does not mean that a war which is disagreeable to the proletariat cannot be waged. a revolutionary situation only comes into being when eg it takes the individual initiative of the proletariat to fight a war that the proletariat favours, or when a lost war can only be liquidated by the proletariat. etc etc.

In this entry from his Journals 1934-1955, Brecht captures the complexity of the class question. The “coming down” of this concept as “framed” in a particular phase in history leads to its devaluation in another phase in history. The statistical, political and economic conceptions were all devalued in the phase of the war economy, but what remained was the class itself, which “happily, is not just a concept.” In this note, he implicitly advances the need for the movement of concept to capture the reality of class.

In the second para, he brings out the reality of the proletariat of which Marx and Engels talked about in their Communist Manifesto – of the dialectic of class formation. Marx and Engels achieved this by critiquing the political economic logic of competition and cooperation as foundational to the formation of classes and class struggle in capitalism. They showed how the negation of classification is immanent in the process of classification. This dialectic recurs in Brecht’s writings at numerous occasions. As an example, we can cite one of his most used and abused poem, General, den Tank, or even his War Primer. In fact, that is why montage is central to his creative writings which captures the dynamics of internal relations that constitute the real, thus reclaiming “the genuine reality [that] has slipped into the functional”. The problem of the proletariat as the “productive force”, as a reification that constitutes capital, as being complicit in wars does not do away with the proletarian initiative. In fact, it is this initiative or art that interrupts the normal exposing what has been functionalised, thus generating “a revolutionary situation.”

This note can be posed as an answer to the dominance of the analytical tradition within the progressive (including the Marxist) circle in our times, which can be broadly divided into two complementary sections. On the one hand, there are those who immediately deploy the analytical concepts trying to straitjacket the concrete to suit those concepts, while on the other, there are those who in reaction stoop down to radical empiricism proclaiming the death of the grand narrative (including class), worshipping relativism. The poverty of both these sections is their tendency to reduce concepts to mere descriptive categories. It is in this regard that we can combine them under the identity of (post) structuralism.

In the above note, what Brecht achieves philosophically is an articulation of the distinction, yet necessary and problematic relationship between the real and the conceptual – “the class itself” and “the concept of class”.

On Rights Politics and Migrant Workers


These notes were prepared for a discussion in Delhi on a report on the condition of migrant workers in Delhi, Uttarakhand and Tamil Nadu (October 6 2017).

REFORMS & REVOLUTION

1. The two significant aspects of demand and right politics are – firstly, they are grounded in the immediate social needs that are framed within a structure. Secondly, they are attempts to establish a discourse with the state machinery – hence they are discursively circumscribed within the field of social relations. Thus, they are necessarily reform oriented, but they need not be reformist. The questions of rights, reforms and demands are unavoidable guerrilla struggles, which build the capacity of workers to organise larger movements. But do these struggles mean deferring the final movement that targets the very structural and superstructural setup that give language to those social needs? No, because they also test the vulnerabilities of the system and can become endeavours to burrow through it the final escape or emancipation. Every moment is a moment for both reform and revolution, and also reaction. When a movement is able to transcend its initial demands, to go on to attack the present social relations and to reorganise them then it becomes revolutionary. When the movement attempts to take the leap, but fails, then reaction happens. When the movement is not ready to take any leap beyond or reneges at the last moment, reform and/or reaction can happen, depending on the level of crisis in the system.

2. However, because the rights politics in itself is concerned with achievements of the rights and demands, at its own level will be geared towards negotiations and bargains, and impressing upon the state machinery, rather than changing the social relations themselves. Even the trade union politics is embedded in this kind of relationship. There is nothing in these forms that makes them question the structure of that relationship between workers and capitalists, or in the former case between workers and the state. The danger of reformism comes from this. But once again, as a conscious part of the larger movement against the structure of present social relations they play a crucial role of waging guerrilla struggles. But what does this signify? Then how do we define the working class politics? Also what will be the organisational question which balances between reform and revolution?

3. When we talk about workers’ politics, it is grounded in the dialectic of competition and collectivity. Marx captured this very aptly, when he said: “Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association.” The politics that is premised upon the segmentation of the workers vs the politics of ever-expanding combination and association, that is grounded in the everyday interaction among workers. The latter is not a mechanical aggregation or unity of isolated workers with similar grievances or demands, but a combination or network that is built in their daily conflict with state and capital. Only an expansion of this network has the capacity to refuse to be subsumed by capital and its network. In this, demands are definitely raised but are incidental. In this framework, demands and rights play the role of testing the system’s vulnerabilities and the organisational strength of the expanding combination.

ON MIGRATION

4. Migration is not just a fact, but also an act. It is not fully incidental that a word for migration in Hindi is पलायन (the more formal word is प्रवास). The former is very rich, often used as a stigma – one of its meaning being running away or an escapist act. In my view, it is this sense that renders the act of migration politically rich. Migration is not just a spatial fix, a response of the weak to the immediate contingencies of life. It is also a rebellious withdrawal, an escape, a long march against “the current state of affairs.” It is an act of refusal, non-acceptance of the lot. As an immediate spatial fix it demonstrates the weak agency of the migrant – a weakness in mastering the system. But it also has a utopian element that makes any human agency restless, that may come one time as an escape, another time as an emancipation, especially when individual weakness becomes a ground for collective subjectivity. Wasn’t this Ambedkar’s intention when he advised dalits to escape villages?

5. Legal Unionism is bound to consider migrant and mobile workers unreliable for their purpose – it simply cannot rely on them. On the other hand, social unionism which seeks to overcome the limits of traditional unionism is caught up in the discourse of non-conflictuality and negotiations with state (which in turn is problematically conceptualised). Hence for this school too it is always about accommodation – creating space for the migrants, not about problematising the whole space itself which is the etatised field of labour-capital relations. Therefore the vagrancy and mobility of proletarians are something to be shed off, not to be made a ground to imagine an overhauling of social relations and ideologies. Hence migrants as migrants are suspects, to be always put in the peripheries of organised politics. But different revolutions have shown how it was mostly settled workers’ organisations, afraid of losing their accumulated privileges, developed petty bourgeois tendencies and were unable to go beyond the legal fights when required, unless workers revolted and autonomously organised themselves.

6. Right from Karl Marx, Marxists have understood the relationship of workers mobility and their political consciousness. Lenin provides an insight into the poltical meaning of migration and demonstrates how to think about workers beyond their victimhood and our philanthropist vanguardism:

“There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations. Emancipation from the yoke of capital is impossible without the further development of capitalism, and without the class struggle that is based on it. And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth.”

“Thus, Russia is punished everywhere and in everything for her backwardness. But compared with the rest of the population, it is the workers of Russia who are more than any others bursting out of this state of backwardness and barbarism, more than any others combating these “delightful” features of their native land, and more closely than any others uniting with the workers of all countries into a single international force for emancipation.

“The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavour to keep them disunited. Class-conscious workers, realising that the breakdown of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to enlighten and organise their fellow-workers from the backward countries.”

7. In recent years, Negri (and Hardt) repeats the same in the language of our times:

“Traditionally the various kinds of migrant workers, including permanent immigrants, seasonal laborers, and hobos, were excluded from the primary conception and political organization of the working class. Their cultural differences and mobility divided them from the stable, core figures of labor. In the contemporary economy, however, and with the labor relations of post-Fordism, mobility increasingly defines the labor market as a whole, and all categories of labor are tending toward the condition of mobility and cultural mixture common to the migrant. Not only are workers are forced to change jobs several times during a career, they are also required to move geographically for extended periods or even commute long distances on a daily basis. Migrants may often travel empty-handed in conditions of extreme poverty, but even then they are full of knowledges, languages, skills, and creative capacities: each migrant brings with him or her an entire world, Whereas the great European migrations of the past were generally directed toward some space “outside,” toward what were conceived as empty spaces, today many great migrations move instead toward fullness, toward the most wealthy and privileged areas of the globe…

“Part of the wealth of migrants is their desire for something more, their refusal to accept the way things are. Certainly most migrations are driven by the need to escape conditions of violence, starvation, or depravation, but together with that negative condition there is also the positive desire for wealth, peace and freedom. This combined act of refusal and expression of desire is enormously powerful…. Ironically, the great global centers of wealth that call on migrants to fill a lack in their economies get more than they bargained for, since the immigrants invest the entire society with their subversive desires. The experience of flights is something like a training of the desire for freedom.

“Migrations, furthermore, teach us about the geographical division and hierarchies of the global system of command. Migrants understand and illuminate the gradients of danger and security, poverty and wealth, the markets of higher and lower wages, and the situations of more and less free forms of life. And with this knowledge of the hierarchies they roll uphill as much as possible, seeking wealth and freedom, power and joy. Migrants recognize the geographical hierarchies of the system and yet treat the globe as one common space, serving as living testimony to the irreversible fact of globalization. Migrants demonstrate (and help construct) the general commonality of the multitude by crossing and thus partially undermining every geographical barrier.”

Mapping the Footloose



1

The word “mapping” in the phrase “labour mapping” is a combination of its cartographic (map-making) and mathematical usages. On the one hand, it is an attempt to accomplish typological cataloguing of labour in local economies, representing the diversity of labour processes coexisting at a given time and place. On the other, it is an exercise to trace the movement of labour in the geography of socio-economic dynamics and to follow the steps of the footloose labour affected by the push-and-pulls of the neoliberal economic structure. To put it more simply, we locate and name the points on the map keeping in mind their interrelationships and mutual positioning.

We define “labour mapping” as a method of locating labour in the value chain that constitutes the geo-economy. Of course, when we talk about such a value chain, it is unlike separate value chains that are linked with individual commodities or services. It is not even the sum of these individuated value chains. It is literally a whole that is far more than a sum of its parts. It is the value chain that constitutes the social factory. Now what is the social factory? It can thus be defined or rather contextualised, as Mario Tronti does:

“The more that capitalist development advances, that is, the more the production of relative surplus value penetrates and extends, the more that the circle-circuit production-distribution-exchange-consumption is necessarily closed. That is, the relation between capitalist production and bourgeois society, between factory and society, between society and State achieves, to an ever greater degree a more organic relation. At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation is transformed into a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society is turned into an articulation of production, that is, the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society.” (“Factory and Society”)

If we refer back to Marx’s conceptual ammunition, the concept of “social factory” seems to be a derivative of his concept of social capital or capital in general. It is the no-escape real subsuming of living labour and social relations by capital throughout the economy. The formal autonomy of particular labour processes is allowed to the extent that they help identify exploitable resources for further exploitation and accumulation.

Like in cartography, conceptual mapping too requires a definite purpose that helps to arrange the perceived hyper-chaos of the appearance. Hence, labour mapping can be called an attempt to sketch the design of the ever-evolving social factory for the purpose of locating or enumerating various existent labour processes. Further, as labour is always relational at diverse levels, the task extends to include these relations in which labour constitutes itself.

“Before the worker had sold the disposition over his labour capacity, he could not set the latter in motion as labour, could not realise it, because it was separated from the objective conditions of its activity. This separation is overcome in the actual labour process. Labour capacity now functions, because in accordance with its nature it appropriates its objective conditions. It comes into action because it enters into contact, into process, into association with the objective factors without which it cannot realise itself. These factors can be described in entirely general terms as means of labour. But the means of labour themselves fall necessarily into an object which is worked on, and which we want to call the material of labour, and the actual means of labour, an object which human labour, activity, interposes as a means between itself and the material of labour, and which serves in this way as a conductor of human activity.” (Marx, Collected Works, Vol 30: 55-56)

However, as Marx, stresses, “The means of labour, in contrast to the material of labour, comprise not only the instruments of production, from the simplest tool or container up to the most highly developed system of machinery, but also the objective conditions without which the labour process cannot occur at all…” While enumerating “the objective conditions”, Marx restricts himself to mention material objects like houses or agricultural fields, that do not directly enter into the labour process. This restriction is apt to the extent that Marx is enumerating all possible “means of labour.” However, “conditions” of labour need not just include “objective” ones or material objects, but social relations too that compel or induce workers to engage in particular labour processes. So, we must take into account these actuating conditions of labour in our exercise of labour mapping. But labour itself is relational, a social relation in itself, on the basis of which the structure of the whole society is established. It is what produces and reproduces the society itself. Thus, labour mapping is not just about enumeration and even description, where just the detailing is important. On the contrary, its main focus, as far as it is concerned with the praxis of the working class, is to comprehend the structure of labour relations with internalised segmentations and hierarchies. It is not a two-dimensional mapping that treats all variables and their inter-relationships horizontally, rather it is their multi-layered ordering.

So far so good. But as labour activists, why do we need to engage in such research? We engage with real workers and real problems. Why do we require to abstract ourselves from them and talk about labour in general? Where do their self-activities fit in?

Labour mapping, as we define it, is a two way affair, where the cartographic abstraction is an attempt to generate a model of the dynamic concrete in which individual workers find themselves. Concrete is not just an appearance, but a structure that is composed of diverse levels of interdependent sub-structures. Now, the theoretical blindness of immediate practice that activism many times displays keeps it mired in localist bias and fetishisation of self-activism, misreading its specificities as un-subsumed, accidental and, thus, emancipatory, in a messianic sense. The flip side of this blindness is vanguardist conservatism that in its attempt to avoid the uncertainties of class self-activism, try to straightjacket them in accordance of the “historical and organisational lessons” of the movement. The practice of labour mapping helps activists transcend the oscillation between celebration and denigration of class self-activism, locating it in the structure of dynamic concrete and historicising it as a new ground for re-envisaging emancipatory class politics. It establishes a bridge between theory and practice – giving legs to the former and eyes to the latter, so that purposeful action emerges out of the everyday reactions to drudgery and doom.

2

Capitalism has always thrived on insecurity of labour. Labour rights are secured to the extent that they don’t infringe upon capital’s control over labour. If these rights are results of labour struggles and meant to empower workers, they are also mobilised by the ruling class and the state as instruments to ascertain a certain structure of the labour market to satisfy the production function appropriate to a particular constellation of technologies. Labour laws are institutional mechanisms through which this structure is formalised. The filters that these laws provide to regulate entry and exit segment workers, creating a field for division and competition among them. Of course, when these laws are not enough to ensure a required structure, an informal regime develops to secure labour demands of capital. This informal regime becomes a benchmark to propose labour reforms. It is interesting to see how the persistence and expansion of this informal regime controls the efficacy of the trade union movement, as the latter is always relegated to a defensive position and a reactive mode. Ultimately, it appears as a conservative force, accused of sticking to an irrelevant labour regime and of not being up-to-date in their understanding of labour-capital relations. In fact, so far as it represents the interests of particular organised segments of workers, who constitute its stable membership, it views other unorganised segments as threats. These threats are of course to be minimised either by sealing them off or, in the end, by attracting them to its fold. This leads to an aggregative strategy that does not question the structure of the labour market. This strategy might succeed temporarily in sustaining a corporatist truce between various segments, but is meaningless in challenging the hegemony of capital, as it refuses to confront the segmentation among workers that reproduces this hegemony. In fact, this corporatist truce normalises this structure and nurtures sections among workers who have interest in its reproduction, thus ultimately become agencies of capital internal to the labouring classes.

In recent years, in India too there has been a growing demand to liberalise labour regulation to induce investment. What does it really mean? Has the labour market been very regulated, as some of the Western economies? Those who have not even read “economics for dummies” would know it was not the case. There has always been a vast reserve of unskilled labour force, which was never secure and persisted in the seamlessly deepening informal and relatively small-scale economies. Many pro-labour legislations that we find in India today were either products of the competition between British and Indian manufacturers when the colonial state was forced to favour the former by blunting the competitive edge of the latter, which was based on cheap natural and human resources. Others were products of the stage in economy when there was a need to secure skills for industrial development, as there was a scarcity of skilled labour. Since the 1970s, however, there has been a call and endeavour to remove this security because the overall technological development, along with educational and training investments have removed this dearth, and now, in fact, there is a supply surplus. It is this surplus that nurtures the so-called dualism in the labour market and industrial composition. In fact, with the help of this surplus the structure of employment becomes multilayered, which can thus be diagrammatically expressed:

Employed——Underemployed——Unemployed

Underemployment in the garb of self-employment and other kinds of work arrangements that don’t fit in classical wage relations is what characterises the informal economy. Jan Breman clearly puts,

“rather than generating more work of higher quality, as the proponents of unrestrained flexibilisation would have it, informality is a mode of employment meant to exploit and marginalize labour. The promise of inclusion notwithstanding, the informal workforce is used as a reserve army of labour floating around between town and countryside and sectors of the economy in search of meagre livelihood.” (pp 7)

The said dualism between formal and informal is never a Cartesian one, rather formal and informal work processes are mutually embedded. The dualities in capitalism are actually representative of its transitoriness and dynamics. The posing of antagonism in the apparent shape of duality gives capitalism a means to be resilient, a mechanism to determine the internal course of development in productive forces – technological and managerial. All the stages of capitalism are chracterised by combinations of absolute and relative surplus value extractions (characterising labour-intensive and capital-intensive labour processes), on the one hand, and, on the other, of formal and real subsumption of labour by capital (the informal economies of diverse kinds networked through finance, and modern capitalist industries). But these combinations actually are not dualistic ones, where the simultaneity is contingent. Rather, they are organically combined or dialectically united. They form a structure. The spatial distribution of these elements creates an illusion of separation and disunity. It definitely creates a segmented consciousness among labourers, competing to survive.

3

Paraphrasing Marx, we can also assert that, in late capitalist countries the dead feeds on the living. In other words, capital in these countries profits on the dead by using it to feed on the living. Thus, in India, if we see “vestiges” thriving, it is not in spite of capitalism, but due to capitalism. It is the specific nature of the logic of capital to historicise itself in particular scenarios by mobilising or accumulating local structural resources. The colonial foundation of modern capitalism in India that we see post-1857 provides a unique ground. As many historians have pointed out, direct colonialism in India negated the possibility of capitalist accumulation based on and geared towards local markets. It was globalised from the beginning.This definitely added some unique features to Indian capitalism.

Marx while summing up colonialism’s contribution provides a panoramic view of global capitalism, pointing out the locations of colonial powers, colonies and their interrelationships. He says, ‘A new and international division of labour, a division suited to the requirements of the chief centres of modern industry springs up, and converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying the other part which remains a chiefly industrial field.” (Marx, Collected Works, Vol 35 (Capital):454) But he had expressed already in his 1850s writings on India, other aspects of colonialism as specification of capitalism as “the living contradiction”.

Of course, it was for his extractive needs that the British created a whole structure of government in which the natives were accommodated. The subsumption of local ruling interests in the hegemonic colonial designs led the lawmakers to innovate an elaborate centralised structure of political economic management where interests themselves were passively revolutionised. The land tenurial systems that were introduced on the lines of various European systems were, according to Marx, forms of agrarian revolutions and “distinct forms of private property in land — the great desideratum of Asiatic society.” (Marx, Collected Works, Vol 12, 218) But they were “abominable” and “made not for the people, who cultivate the soil, nor for the holder, who owns it, but for the Government that taxes it.” (Ibid, 214) These land tenure systems emerged as “many forms of fiscal exploitation in the hands of the [East India] Company.” It was the contradictory character of various changes effected by the colonial system that led to the manifestations of diverse interests in the First War of Independence in 1857.

This war politically materialised a cacophonous solidarity against “the solidarity of human woes and wrongs.” It was only with the industrial classes, which slowly emerged via contradictory processes that Marx so aptly described in his writings on India, that nationally coherent interests that could challenge the British powers emerged.

All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people….The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. (Ibid, 221)

While explaining the political economy of endowing India with railways, he reiterates the exclusive extractive intent of the English millocracy. But as a revolutionary, he was more interested in understanding how these “crimes of England” were founding the material premises for social revolution in Asia. “The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.” (Ibid, 132) So he thus notes the chain effect of the introduction of railways,

“I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindoos are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude for accommodating themselves to entirely new labor, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery.(Ibid, 220)

The unevenness or socio-spatial hierarchy (the division of labour represented spatially), that colonial capitalism’s articulation with local realities generated, perpetuated differential inclusion. It identitarianised the inter and intra class struggles on regional, communal and caste lines. Decolonisation did not do away with this hierarchy. The scale to which it persisted was a challenge, or perhaps, even a barrier for capitalist expansion. But, as Marx says, “since capital represents the general form of wealth— money—it has a boundless and measureless urge to exceed its own limits. Every boundary is and must be a barrier for it.” (Marx, Collected Works, Vol 28: 259) These barriers specifies or historicises capitalist development and expansion. It is interesting to see how capital in its “urge to exceed its own limits” instrumentalises political agencies that profess to go against capital.

Coming back to what has happened after decolonisation in India, we find a continuity which gave a specific trajectory to capitalist expansion locally. Even though the focus changed to reconstructing the national economy, the domestic industrial, agrarian, financial and mercantile interests that constituted the capitalist class (despite their inherent contradictions) were so strong and hegemonic to political processes at the time of independence that it would be delusional (rampant among the statist left) to imagine any autonomous capacity of the Indian state to choose development strategies, like in South Korea and other economies, where the so-called developmentalist states emerged.

When Marx talked about the territorial “division of labour” he was taking it as a necessary outcome of how interactions – both competitive and collaborative – between industries took place. The predominance of particular kinds of industries in a location determined its relations with other locations, having different composition of industries. But these relationships constantly shifted due to both local and trans-local factors. The loci of agriculture and other extractive industries in the overall value chain determine the status of the geographical regions where they are located. The intra-industrial hierarchy of produces is also significant, and so is the hierarchy of forms of production, in determining this status.

4

The division of labour between formal and informal sectors too must be understood in this perspective. However, as mentioned above, this complementarity works more as a means to regulate the labour market or flow of labour power. That is why we find this division multidimensional and operational at diverse levels – intra-industrially (within industries) and inter-industrially (between industries), within firms and among firms, within jobs and between jobs. Hence, informality is better understood in terms of a process, as informalisation. As Jan Breman has explained, “informality is a mode of employment meant to exploit and marginalize labour.” He further defines the whole informal economy “as a regime to cheapen the cost of labour in order to raise the profit of capital.” (pp 1) However, this definition does not really help in pinning down the exclusivity and specificities of the informal economy. Every regime of capitalism is concerned with the need to decrease the necessary labour time that determines the resource allocation to variable capital which is utilised to reproduce labour power in the society. A decrease in variable capital can have multiple significance:

  • it can mean an absolute wage squeeze by giving less wages.
  • it can mean the squeezing of variable capital relative to the sum of constant capital and surplus value. But this too can be achieved through two different means: by increasing the length of the working day (absolute surplus value) or by mechanisation that increases the surplus labour time within the same working day, thus decreasing the necessary labour time (relative surplus value)
  • it can mean cheapening of wage goods necessary for the reproduction of labour power, which again depends on absolute and relative surplus value extractions in the industry that produce these goods.
  • it can mean subsidising of wage goods by allowing their non-capitalist production and distribution. As it happens in many economies, this is accomplished by the state becoming a buffer between producers and consumers instead of allowing the market to regulate this relationship. Alternatively, non-capitalist production of these goods can also help in accomplishing this purpose, as cost of production in this economy is not determined by capitalist calculation. This economy involves mainly self-exploitation or pre-capitalist labour processes formally subsumed by capital.

Where is the informal economy placed in this multi-layered structure of cheapening labour? Till recently, the division between informal and formal was understood in their exclusivity, not just in their internal structuring, but also historically – one was considered primitive, archaic or at least transitional. Therefore, capital and labour in the informal economy were considered to be waiting to be absorbed in the “formal” setup. However, such discourse was frustrated with the advent of post-fordist or neoliberal labour regime, when the economic processes became evermore hyper-intensive with financialisation taking control. Still, “all that is solid melts into air”, but this melting is so quick that form-ality has no real significance – and it is informality that is generalised and becomes the organising principle, the benchmark to define work processes most responsive to the supply and demand in the product and labour markets. Stability and permanence are considered conservative and against the spirit of market and capitalism. Informality that depends on the footlooseness of workers allows the automatic entry and exit principle (hire and fire in the labour market) that capital seeks to nurture for its accumulative needs. Flexibilisation is worshipped under neoliberalism.

From the perspective of labour, we can claim that informal economy harnesses the labour power of footloose labour and reserve army of labourers. Their footlooseness allows capital to practice use and throw quite easily without any legal obligation to sustain the workforce even when not in “use”.

“Forced to remain footloose, they drift along a large number of worksites without undergoing the steady rotation of employment as a drastic change. To their mind, all those instance are concerned with majuri kam, that is, unspecified, unskilled, and occasional jobs that tax the body and sap the energy to exhaustion.” (pp 46)

It is this labour which Italian Marxists in the 1960s-70s termed “mass worker” and “social labour” toiling in social factory that we defined in early pages. Our labour mapping concerns this entity as her whereabouts and self-activism approximate the expanse of capital which has subsumed the whole society and all social relations, and is very unlike the formal labour which could easily be traced in workshops. The conceptualisations of these Italian Marxists played a powerful role in placing those workplaces and work processes which were not considered significant in economic discussions and which were hidden from apparent capitalist subsumption in the centre of political mobilisation. The questions of the reproduction of labour power and the locus of reproductive labour were considerably important in defining this labour. These questions provide a key to understand labour segmentation and the significance of hidden, informal economy in the overall capitalist reproduction.

5

Labour mapping must not be reduced to a survey if the purpose is to understand the “autonomy of labour”, of class activism and struggle. Workers are not mere elements of production, like land, machines and raw materials as the classical trinity formula or the managerial notion of “human resources” seeks to project. They are not just reactive agencies or passive recipients of capital’s onslaught, as the voluntarist political activism of both radical and NGO varieties makes them to be. If we take the self-emancipatory mission of the working class seriously, it is necessary to assess its capacities and self-organisational ability.

However, these class capacities are not an aggregation of individual capacities of workers. Wright defines class capacities as the “social relations within a class which to a greater or lesser extent unite the agents of that class into a class formation.” (Quoted in Savage:40)This definition if deployed in isolation is not sufficiently explanatory. It reduces this concept to a mere introvert description of class, which is itself reduced to relationships between its individual agents. In fact, the working class can never be comprehended inwardly, it is always found in its relationship with capital. Even “social relations within a class” are structured by this congenital relationship. In other words, capital and labour are “internally related.” This relationship finds expressions at two levels. At the first level, working class collectivity directly confronts capital at various points of value production and distribution. At the second level, agencies of capital become internal to the working class through segmentation and competition among workers. Hence, capacities of the working class must be grounded in this relationship between the collective worker and capital – which can never be externalised. Class capacities depend on the degree of heat in this relationship. It is pertinent to mention that in the vanguardist trade union movement the internalised capitalist hegemony is rarely confronted, the working class unity is not envisaged through this internal struggle. It is systematically avoided in the name of unity, and any anti-segmentation endeavours are considered divisive.

In simpler terms, the purpose of labour mapping for us is to assess the degrees of class capacities by tracing the composition and recomposition of the working class in its confrontation with capital. We can say that “social relations within a class” are established in this conflict, aligning the agents of that class to transform the everyday experiences of their confrontation with capital into class antagonism – transforming the technical composition of labour that capital institutes to subsume labour into a ground for a class recomposition that poses a revolutionary challenge against capital. It was this aspect of class formation that Marx captured in his famous manifesto when he talks about how “the isolation of the labourers, due to competition” is replaced “by the revolutionary combination, due to association.”

Labour mapping is an attempt to capture this dynamics of political recombinant and recomposition. But this cannot be accomplished in a neutral survey, that is undertaken in the name of objectivity and science. It can only happen in the practice of social transformation – co-research and workers’ inquiry which are rightly termed as “militant investigations.” They take the relationship between capital and labour as congenitally conflictual. In other words, they refuse to position workers as mere victims and even reactive, reacting to capital’s acts. The critical ‘scientific’ understanding behind this is obviously that it is capital’s problem or crisis to subsume labour, not vice versa. Tronti termed this as Copernican inversion of the “common sense” of the official vanguardist understanding within the workers’ movement:

“It is the specific, present, political situation of the working class that both necessitates and directs the given forms of capital’s development”. (“Lenin in England”)

6

Below we present a typological exercise on occupations that footloose workers undertake to survive. This inquiry was accomplished in one village each in three districts of Odisha – Angul, Dhenakanal and Keonjhar. Since the participating organisations in these districts are mainly working with indigenous communities, we chose those villages which were exclusively tribals. Although, we emphasised on the methodologies of co-research and workers’ inquiry, which take workers as agencies of self-organisation and activism, it was difficult to convince activist-researchers not to take the exercise as a survey, i.e., just taking account of the plight of workers in various work-processes. And in this regard, we will say that this exercise was severely handicapped, as it was difficult to break the barriers that old modes of organisation and activism have perpetuated. Even though these activist-researchers were workers themselves and were internal to the local communities, the methodology that has till now informed their activism makes them ineffective to confront the challenges that footlooseness of labour poses. The workers in their everydayness are far more advanced, experienced and knowledgeable of new work processes than the organisations and activists who want to straightjacket them in the archaic identity of poor victimised half-peasant workers, suddenly thrown in the labour market.

Agricultural Labour As expected agricultural labour is the most prevalent form of wage labour in rural areas. The extent of its prevalence is such that often it leads to an erroneous image of rural workers as synonymous to agricultural labour. Since paddy cultivation is predominant in the region, its work process includes ploughing, seed sowing, transplanting, weeding and harvesting. Further, harvesting includes cutting, carrying to the harvesting yard and final harvesting. These jobs are available in villages mainly during a particular season, i.e. June to December. The labourer starts looking for work in his own village and nearby villages. Many times landowners themselves try the mobilise labourers for work on his fields. As there are plenty of labourers in the village and due to lack of irrigation facilities, it is generally single crop farming in most of these areas, the demand for labour is very low. Therefore labourers do not get job always in the village. Wages in agricultural work are very low in comparison to other jobs. Sometimes they get only Rs.40/- per day. Working hours too are comparatively more and not fixed. Sometimes workers have to wait for months to get their wage dues. Child labour (12/13 years) is quite rampant in agricultural work, and child labourers are rarely paid monetary wages for their work, mostly they are given just food.

Timber logging or harvesting As these areas are occupied by forests, logging in forests and private lands is another important job available. This work involves tree felling, cutting timber logs into planks and in sizes so that they can be used in house construction and furniture purposes. Sometimes private owners of the dried trees hire these skilled labourers for cutting logs into different sizes. Many times labourers themselves cut timbers in forests secretly with the help and also encouragement from forest officials. This work depends on the local demand for construction work which is never very high. As there are risks in doing this work they are not easily obtained. Very often workers work on contractual basis and suffer tremendous work pressure with highly irregular remunerations. As mentioned, forest officials and the local police exploit these workers, threatening them with penal charges, siphoning away a major share of whatever remunerations they are able to secure. Since much of these jobs is illegal, they are very often undertaken in dense and deep forests, and during very odd hours – woods are carried to the villages early in the morning or in late afternoon hours.

Construction work Road construction (both kuccha and pakka roads), bridge construction, house construction. In this there are jobs of diverse levels of skills involved – skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled, for which different individual workers are hired. Some of the specialised works can be identified as masonry, labour, helper, carpenter, pitching, rod binding, centring etc. Most of the time, contractors hire different workers specialising in one or more skills on daily/weekly wage basis for these works. But many times these workers approach the contractors for obtaining jobs. Sometimes but very rarely, they get hired in villages for house construction. The daily waged labourers do not get these types of work during the rainy season. During this period they are compelled to remain unemployed or partially employed in agricultural fields. The contractors do not pay regularly. Sometimes labourers lose their payment if they leave that contractor. The contractors always keep a portion of their payment to avail the same labourer again. The labourers have to work for 10 to 12 hours. Their dues are not calculated properly. Sometimes for theft of any material, labourers are charged.

Under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) a family obtains a hundred days of work. The works are generally related to construction (Road, bridge, ponds, irrigation dams etc.), and plantation. Though the Act envisages an employment which is free from the exploitation of workers by middlemen and contractors, but there are hidden contractors in this work who manage job card holders in such work. The work provided under this programme is not regular and it does not operate during the rainy season. To get job through the panchayat office is a tedious process, that encourages people to prefer obtaining work through a contractor. This preference is further induced by severe irregularities of payment for the job obtained under MGNREGA. Sometimes it takes months to get the wages. Receiving money through bank or post office is also another problem for the illiterate tribals. The hidden contractors take a portion of the wages from the labourers. The contractors also maintain fake job cards for such work and employ labourers on a considerably lower wage rate.

Animal Husbandry This mainly involves keeping goats and poultry. They are kept at home in which family labour is engaged. Their products are undervalued, as this work is generally undertaken due to poverty this job and severely lack bargaining power

In occupations like forest produce collection there are tremendous difficulties. These are seasonal jobs and production varies year to year, Most of the times collecting workers indulge in overexploitation of their physical energy, and what they get by selling the produce is much lower than the wages they would have earned if they had engaged themselves in some other jobs for the same amount of time. As poor forest dwellers have kuccha houses and lack any specialised storage space, very often their collections are damaged even before they are able to bring them to the market, There are some products which must be dried before preserving it and in the absence of any technology any unfavourable changes in the climate drastically affect their income. Due to poverty these workers sell their products during the harvesting time when market rates for these produces are terribly depressed, and they lack any power to bargain which traders exploit to their full advantage. Very often they are indebted to these traders-cum-moneylenders or mahajans whom they are obliged to sell these products at whatever rates they are offered. Sometimes while collecting forest produces these collectors are attacked by wild animals in the forest. There is rarely any state-owned collection centre for forest produces which would have provided them remunerative prices and a freedom from the greedy clutches of these local petty traders.

Preparing & selling liquor The production and selling rice beer (Handia and Rasi) and mahua (madhuca longifolia) liquor is quite prevalent in these areas. These are prepared at home and require access to nearest streams or other water sources. Liquor producers are highly vulnerable. Since liquor production is considered illegal, it is secretly undertaken by bribing the local police. Sometimes locally influential persons or goons collect liquors from these poor sellers by threatening them. The excise department sometimes raid villages and destroy facilities of these liquor sellers. Handia selling is generally done openly, but selling mahua liquor is done secretly by bribing the police, excise and forest department officials. Sometimes penal cases are lodged against liquor sellers and they are arrested.

Brick kiln work Preparing clay, shaping it into brick-blocks, drying them in the sun, putting them in the kiln for baking, and preparing them for shipping. The work in a brick kiln is occasional and done on a contract basis. Workers skilled in these tasks have to work as agricultural labourers on other days. As payments in a brick kiln is very irregular and are piece wages, workers tend to work for unspecified hours without any compensation for overtime.

Loading and unloading labourers This work generally involves loading soil, stones, sand, cement, rods, bricks etc. on tractors and mini trucks in the village, and unloading them. Labourers for this jobs are hired by contractors who get these jobs from various clients. Sometimes labourers themselves approach a contractor and/or tractor/truck drivers for such jobs. As the supply of labourers in these areas for such jobs are very high, many times labourers fail to obtain them or do them on payments far lower than the prevalent rates.

Transportation (Drivers and Helpers) Generally, tractor owners in the locality hire these drivers, not necessarily in their own villages. As there are less tractors in the area in comparison to the number of drivers, most of the drivers do not get jobs. They are paid on monthly/daily wage basis. But most of the times payment is irregular in both the cases. There are no holidays when a driver is hired on the monthly basis. He has to work for 10 to 12 hours in a day without having any overtime compensation for it. Sometimes if accidents happen damages to the vehicle are recovered from the salary of the drivers. At times, drivers get opportunities on small passenger vehicles (SUVs, etc). There is no fixed work-time in this work, and wages are quite low (at the most 4000/- per month).

Livestock grazing This job is mainly of two types. Firstly, in a village there are one or two families who do this job professionally. They take cows and goats from other families on a contract basis (Rs.20/- to 30/- per month per cow). Sometimes they collect food from hiring families. Secondly, some rich families in the village hire individual workers for the job on an annual contract, who look after their cows and do other jobs of these families. This job is not readily available in the village. Many times these people do not pay the agreed amount to cow grazers, . There is also irregular payment in this job. The amount they get is very low in comparison to the amount of their work. The annual contract labourers are exploited in many ways (no fixed time of work, unhealthy conditions of staying in the houses, low quality of food given to them, sometimes they are charged for theft of goods and damages etc).

Cooks in schools This is one of the rarest jobs in the village. This is obtained by lobbying with the elected members of a panchayat or legislators, government officials etc. They even have to indulge in bribing the officials for getting these jobs. Sometimes conflicts happen in the villages over obtaining this job position. They are not permanently aided jobs in the villages. They are posted on contractual basis and their salary is very low. They have to bribe even the school teachers or officials to continue the job and sometimes a part of their salary is siphoned away by the headmasters of these schools.

Anganwadi helper Only one person in a village gets this job. Their problems are similar to those of cooks described above. Most of the times, there are disputes in villages for getting this job. Their salary is very low and irregular. Anganwadi workers, supervisors and higher officials engage these helpers in other unrelated tasks and sometimes a part of their salary is kept by the anganwadi workers.

Carpenter A carpenter obtains work on a contractual basis, or on a daily wage basis generally by approaching the persons who require their work. Sometimes contractors and house owners hire these carpenters for construction and furniture making work. The demand for their labour is not always available in the village for which very often they have to remain either unemployed or engage as agricultural labourers. There is also an irregularity in payment for this work. Many times local forest officials take bribe from these carpenters.

As Migrants

As evident from the profiles for jobs available in the village given above, rural unemployment and underemployment are rampant phenomena, which lead workers to lead life in footlooseness and as migrant workers. Generally a part of family moves out seasonally, mostly male members, while others toil in the village. Our activist-researchers profiled the following jobs that rural workers undertake when they migrate.

Construction work The nature and problems of work is same as detailed above. Workers are either mobilised by contractors or through acquaintances who work with those contractors. Many times it is difficult for a new worker to get a job with the contractor, if he does not have proper contacts. The situation of masons is also similar – they obtain work through contractors and friends. Sometimes these masons have to work as unskilled labour in case of unavailability of work. Very often they remain unemployed during the rainy seasons, as construction work goes down during that time. But in recent days as industries are coming up in the proximity, construction workers are regularly engaged by companies through contractors. They work inside the campus of companies. Contractors hire workers from villages by sending vehicles. The wage rates are low in comparison to the amount and quality of work. Payments are irregular and a portion is generally kept by the contractors so that these labourers are readily available for subsequent days. Working hours are more than 10 hours. The journey from villages to the workplace is very risky and has to be done in overcrowded vans.

Brick kiln workers As we have already discussed the nature of work in a brick kiln, we would just mention that migrant brick kiln workers include those who cook for other workers. The contractor hires these labourers and sometime workers go in a group to other districts with their friends who work with particular contractors. Their working and living conditions are very low.

Security guard This involves watching the campuses of offices, companies, projects, petrol pumps, houses, construction sites etc. These jobs are obtained through friends working in the company and other sites. Sometimes workers have to appear for interviews to obtain such jobs. They do not get jobs easily. They have to wait for months in the town to get these jobs. They are paid less and irregularly. Their overtimes are not calculated properly. The supervisors and security officers exploit these guards. They are very often charged for theft of materials, which are then recovered from their salaries.

Sponge iron plant worker They get this job through their friends working in the plant. Only a few are able to avail these jobs. Although they are paid on monthly basis, yet they have to work for more hours. They do not get necessary support during accidents in the factory or for any health problems. They have to work for 10 to 12 hours daily for the same wages.

Plastic plant labourer They work there as construction workers or on some daily wage work of carrying load, packing etc. They get these jobs through their friends already working there. Only few get these jobs. They are paid on a monthly basis, but working hours are generally extended and not remunerated.

Dhaba work This generally involves working as a Dhaba boy – cleaning plates, supplying water by carrying it on the shoulders, killing and dressing chickens etc. Such job is obtained through personal contacts. Only few get this job as there are limited dhabas in the area. The wage rate is low and working time is more than 14 hours a day. The payment is also irregular. The conditions of staying are very unhealthy, dues are rarely cleared on time by the owner, who regularly mistreats the worker.

Drivers This is mainly for driving trucks, tractors and sometimes for driving small passenger vehicles. These jobs are generally availed through friends and acquaintances who are themselves involved in such jobs. Sometimes workers approach the vehicle owners personally, and not rarely, they are even promoted from being helpers to drivers on same vehicles or on other vehicles. As this is a skilled job, a few are able to engage in it. Getting a driving license is another problem for qualifying for this job. The payment is irregular and working hours are not fixed. They are charged for damages to vehicles in accidents etc. The owners very often misbehave with the drivers.

Work at Stone Crushers This involves carrying loads, breaking big stones, loading and unloading works etc. A crusher owner comes to the village for hiring labourers. Sometimes old workers at the crusher are sent by the owner to their own villages for mobilising labourers for the crusher. The crusher has limited capacity to absorb labour for which a few can get such jobs. Irregular payments, more working hours etc. are general problems.

Kabadi (scrap) collection This involves collecting kabadi materials for kabadi shopkeepers in townships and urban areas. Workers have to approach personally for this job. This is a rare job. Only one person in the areas surveyed has got the job. Although the payment is on a monthly basis, yet it is quite irregular. No fixed time for such work. The dues of the labourer is not cleared always.

There are other odd jobs that some workers from these villages have undertaken, like working in car painting workshops and in an Ashram’s cow shed. These jobs are obtained through contacts, have no fixed working hours, payments are very irregular and low. Workers work and stay in unhealthy conditions.

There are some cases of occupational hazards suffered by sponge iron plant workers, drivers, helpers and construction workers. For instance, there are two persons in the area who suffered injuries in sponge iron plants, one of them lost one eye and another suffered injuries in his leg. The worker who lost his one eye could only get Rs. 20,000/- from the owner and was sent back to the village. The other person got only Rs.10,000/- for his injury. More shocking fact is that due to illiteracy, these labourers do not know even the names of their companies where they worked. The drivers and helpers very often suffer accidental injuries for which they hardly get any proper compensation from vehicle owners. On the contrary, many times despite injuries suffered by them, any damage to the vehicles in these accidents are recovered from their salary. Some construction workers who suffered injuries did not get any compensation, except that they obtained some first aid help and were transported back to their respective villages.

References:

Jan Breman (2013) At Work in the Informal Economy of India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volumes 12, 28, 30 and 35, Progress Publishers, Moscow.

Michael Savage (1987) The Dynamics of Working Class Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Mario Tronti, “Factory and Society” (1962) & “Lenin in England” (1964), Available online on several websites.

The last section is essentially a joint work as it is the summary of a labour mapping exercise undertaken in a few extremely poor villages of Odisha in the year 2013, in which local activists linked with the network of Shramjibi Vichar Kendra Odisha were involved.

Proletarian class determination: epistemology or ontology?


“Class determination of knowledge means that we do not know whether determination actually takes place in reality as the proletariat depicts it, since this class only knows reality through that facet of the prism corresponding to its collocation in the social structure. In a sense, therefore, the proletariat imposes its view of reality upon this latter so that determination is first of all an epistemological concept rather than an ontological one. This, however, calls for neither idealism nor absolute relativism since, from the point of view of the proletariat, its view does come from (is determined by) concrete reality and has inherent in itself the possibility of knowing reality correctly, as shown by verification. In short, the point of view of the proletariat is that each class secretes its own knowledge (class determined relativism of knowledge) and that within this view only the proletariat has the possibility of gaining a correct knowledge of all (and not only some) aspects of reality because of this class’s position in the societal labour process (class determined supersession of knowledge’s relativism).

“We do not claim that the proletariat depicts real processes as they take place in reality (reflection). But we do claim that this class’s view has the objectively determined possibility of being correct, to find a ‘match’ with the reality it depicts. It is in this sense that determination can be referred to as an epistemological calling into existence. And, it is in this sense that our view differs from the ‘reflection’ theory and can be called non-reflective realism: knowledge is not determined simply by material transformation, but by this transformation immersed in specific social contexts, that is, by the real concrete.”
–Guglielmo Carchedi, ‘Problems in Class Analysis: Production, knowledge, and the function of capital

To be read, in my view, as a crucial theoretical explication of Lenin’s axiom of truth being partisan, and Marx’s Eleventh thesis on Feurbach. Particularly the latter, on account of it being much abused as a shibboleth by vulgar ‘Marxian’-pragmatists. Justice can be done to Marx’s privileging of changing the world over interpreting it only if one grasps this affirmation of world-change rigorously in terms of Marx and Engels’ concept of “the real movement” and Marx’s conception of “practical materialism” that he derives through his critique of Feurbach’s “contemplative materialism” in The German Ideology and Theses on Feurbach. Thus Marx’s critique of interpretation, which is basically a critique of materialism articulated in contemplative terms, is not only a rejection of the primacy of contemplation but is also, by the same token, a severe criticism of decisionist pragmatism, which is contemplation reconstituted at the practical level of abstraction. Clearly, Marx’s privileging of world-change over world-interpretation is a dialectical critique of contemplation by having the modality of contemplation brush itself against its own grain. A theoretical, and philosophical, move that does not abandon knowledge and epistemology but radically alters their conception and status. And in this regard, Althusser’s explication of “overdetermination” and “epistemological void” (in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’) and his conception of “limit-form” (in ‘Marxism is Not a Historicism’), together with Badiou’s concepts of “metaontology” (in Being and Event) and “politics-as-its-own-thought” (in Metapolitics) are also indispensable.

Labour Mapping through Workers’ Inquiry


(Preface to a report on labour mapping exercise in Odisha)

Here is a report of an exercise in labour mapping undertaken in specific regions of Odisha in the last couple of years. Over the years, committed indigenous and rural activists have seen a tremendous deradicalisation of the old modes of organising and mobilisation. They have been made complicit in ritualism and clientilism of competitive democracy. Neoliberalism that vows to counter an activist state has in fact further extended the ritualistic clientilist character of the state. It has accommodated private civil players in its network by putting out several state functions to them. The rampant localisation and ngoisation of activism is in fact one of the chief characteristics of the political process under neoliberalism – it minimises the state formation, but infinitely extends its magnetic impact.

The purpose of labour mapping has been to understand rural social relations in several districts of Odisha – Jharsuguda, Sambalpur, Dhenkanal, Angul, Cuttack, Jajpur, Jagatsinghpur, Nayagarh and Boudh – from the perspective of labour. The dynamics of rural transformation under neoliberalism has changed the character of rural struggles and there is a need to seriously engage in the task of programmatic refocusing of rural mobilisations. As rural Odisha is being transformed increasingly into a labour reserve, agriculture and other allied rural economic activities are now less concerned with their profitable nature, rather they are increasingly becoming means to sustain surplus population. In this situation, labour mapping becomes essential to reconnect activism with everyday struggles of the “rural” population – to visualise their footlooseness as a ground for new kinds of peoples’ struggles. In this report, workers, activists and researchers (in most cases all these identities converge in same individuals involved in this inquiry) have tried to trace self-activism and organisation in the everydayness of workers’ struggle for survival. The choice of population clusters for inquiry is made on the basis of their location in the organisational networks of these activists, so that self-inquiry becomes possible.

1

At the very inception, we should make it clear that this engagement was not a voluntary choice made by researchers to fulfil some project requirements. The aim and the means had roots in the exigencies of activism. It was a task that emerged out of the organic experience of activists who were involved in the mobilisation and struggles of indigenous population and oppressed communities in parts of Odisha since the late 1990s. At that time the entry point to grasp the everyday lives of these people was their identities.

One must remember that the 1990s was the period when throughout India the developmentalist politics around exclusion that had dominated the political discourse since independence, especially since the 1960s, suddenly encountered the neoliberal novelty of network, that changed the character of socio-political discourse overnight. Now nothing seemed to be excluded, rather everything was found differentially included. Activists became less concerned with a share in the pie, rather they found themselves confined in its sticky layers. But as they struggled more and more to free themselves from this mire, witnessed in the numerous spirited struggles against primitive accumulation, to preserve indigeneity against global corporatist onslaught, to maintain and increase the distance, the novel networking of neoliberalism revealed itself by subsuming their moves as mere means of determining the levels of differentiality in its global system of inclusion.

The very entry-point to grasp the everyday lives of the indigenous and backward class population seemed superfluous. It is not that the specificities collapsed, but specifics became mere shades in the constitution of the general. Those who remained stuck to this entry-point, they succumbed to existentialist politics – either trying to survive in marginality, as voices helping or forcing the system to develop checks and balances, or by accepting the role of agencies of inclusion as neo-elites within respective communities. Identitarianism lost its critical edge; in fact, it affirmed the rainbow configuration of neoliberalism.

It was this deficiency of identitarian politics in sustaining the task of anti-capitalist transformation that led many groups of indigenous and other social activists to grasp the limits of identity politics and endeavour a leap beyond. Activists who resisted succumbing to the lures of the system, were mostly those who already had found themselves engaging mainly with the ‘subalterns’ within the identities. Thus, objectively they had started finding identity politics insufficient in rendering meaning to their experiences. In fact, now the question of indigeneity too could not be explained in its own terms – in terms of its exclusivity, its internal culture and history. Rather, it became important to grasp how and why “the greatest leveller,” capital as social power, reproduced and instrumentalised such exclusivity. Now, it was important to grasp the question of indigeneity and other forms of identities in terms of social processes within capitalism.

The languages of subalternity, which were founded only in specificities of identitarian oppression and devoicing could not satisfy these new subalterns. In fact, those languages themselves became means of reification and labelling to fashion the general capitalist language of competition. Any attempt to restrict these subalterns to the discourse of identity became part of the general capitalist mode of increasing competition among the segments of the general class of new subalterns across identities, the class of workers, i.e., the working class. It was the social process of classification that broke open the reified homogeneities of competing identities. However, this process did not do away with identities, rather it provided them a new significance, a new role – of both waging class struggle and obfuscating it. That is to say, identities provided the hegemonic capitalist class a tool to compose itself through competition between particular (identitarianised) capitals where other classes are invested as supporting masses – thus constructing the field for democratic and political competitions, the heightening of which is war. This dampens the class struggle by decomposing the working class, by increasing competition among identitarianised segments of workers. But this dampening is what can be termed as “class struggle from above,” as this helps in reproducing the hegemony of capital. This way identity politics in fact contributes in constructing the terrain for class struggle and conflict, in shaping up capitalism’s superstructure. It further contributes in the political recomposition of the working class by politicising the intra-class inter-segmental relations. Thus, working class politics too could not be envisaged by avoiding differences and internal conflicts, which are invested as socio-technical composition of labour for capital accumulation. Any organisational effort to unite workers from outside by wishing away such composition, its inherent divisions and conflicts will reproduce the capitalist agencies within the class. The working class recomposes itself politically only through these conflicts, by utilising the fissures in the socio-technical composition of labour, by re-envisaging it as a new terrain of class struggle.

The crisis of identitarian politics against exclusion during neoliberalism led to a focus on the process of proletarianisation, even if the direct reference to the working class was and is still generally resisted. But the ideological legacy of identitarianism and its revalorisation in the capitalist polity tends to keep the understanding of the phenomena of dispossession, alienation, etc., at mere experiential levels, as invasion, colonisation and onslaught, not as part of the internal reproduction of capitalism through originary accumulation, not as continuously shaping the successive regimes of capital. The ideological baggage and objective advancement frequently come into conflict. The duality of exclusion/inclusion and politics around it are rendered asunder by this refocus, as the process of proletarianisation is both exclusion and inclusion. It is by excluding people from the ownership of means of production that they are included in capital relations. Honest activists in the resistances against primitive accumulation in the 1990s and 2000s without class focus found themselves now and then betrayed by the mainstreamisation of popular aspirations – which seemed to resist exclusion to bargain for better ‘inclusion’ or compensation.

It was around the mid-2000s that we see once again the struggle for entitlement, inclusion and compensation becoming attractive for NGOs and social activists. And this time the language of labour was found enticing but it was itself identitarianised in the process. This new discourse of labour was administered by various commissions, government pronouncements and legislations that sought to ready the neoliberal regime to face the effects of the global economic crisis with fragmentary dosages of age-old welfare state measures. Those who accused Marxists of talking about workers and not about other identities and small producing classes in rural India suddenly were engaged in organising workers – and the trick was done by various labour legislations for the unorganised sector that proliferated in the neoliberal era. These legislations were brought to help market forces to sustain labour supply – flow and reserves – in those sectors where demand and supply are always volatile. More than labour laws regulating employment relations, they were social laws that constructed welfare boards and other basic support system which in effect kept labour reserves and supply intact. Construction labour legislations, National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) etc came, in which essentially the role of organising and struggle was to register workers in the respective welfare boards, for provisioning of I-cards and tools and the functioning of schemes. It was really about endowments and entitlements of a class as a group of people but not at all about class struggle, not about the struggle of a class, which is congenitally bound in a conflictual relationship and exists only in the diverse strains of that relationship.

Any talk about labour politics and working class without grounding it in class relations and struggle amounts to a depoliticisation of these relations. It becomes all about individuated workers being endowed and exchange-entitled in accordance to their endowments. It is about the uplifting of those workers, giving them voice without allowing them to question the very structure of work relations in which they are workers. They are simply deconstructed into sections of population – social stratum with numerous sub-strata. And, everybody inches towards becoming closer to the ideal of an average man – generally referred to as a middle-class. The structure of work-relations are taken for granted. Specific relations are sometimes focussed only to ensure that they continue to sustain the fairness of exchange-entitlements.

2

The purpose of labour mapping in our case is to understand the digits of changes in specific work-relations, and how much their averaging is taking the shape of a generalised structure of fundamental social relations. It is a cartographic exercise to recognise on the one hand how elements of indigeneity and identity become specifications of the general structure in a particular socio-cultural context, i.e, how the dominant mode of commodity production and exchange is overdetermined by diverse modes and relations of production and exchange. On the other, it is a process mapping of the neoliberal network of production and exchange that subsumes and connects various levels of activities in which labourers are simultaneously and consecutively engaged. It is the cartographic tracing of the nomadic hordes of the (post)modern working class and accounting for its footlooseness. This perpetual footlooseness which was earlier considered to be a mark of an insufficient actualisation of the subsumption of labour by capital is valorised in the post-fordist regime of capitalism as an essential endowment of labour that could help sustain capital mobility and the flexibilisation of the work processes.

The task of labour mapping was undertaken to overcome the problems that neoliberalism posed before some of the peoples’ organisations and social movements in Odisha. Once it is realised that the rural indigenous population too is internally differentiated and sections are differentially included in the system, and that it is the mobilisation of labour through local state apparatuses and agencies of capital that has become central to the rural economy in Odisha, there is a strategic refocusing to overcome the existential crisis that the neoliberal regime of accumulation has created for older organisational forms grounded in perspectival dualism – exclusion/inclusion, we-don’t-have-this/we-want-this. It is a return to the original organisational principle that saw self-organisation as a multiple of conflictual relationships between labour and capital, on the one hand, and associational relationships among labourers, on the other. In other words, diverse organisational forms are found in the operation of these relations – which organisational form(s) will eventually succeed in constituting the revolutionary expression of the working class is the age-old question of class praxis and is an issue for militant investigations or inquiries.

This brings us to the notion of workers’ inquiry. Inquiry here is not an objectivist exercise by a sociologist which reduces workers to an object, ultimately resonating with the theories of human resource management and mainstream economics that reify workers simply as inputs in the commodity economy (thus, any activism on their part is a deviance to be controlled or managed). Rather, central to the notion of inquiry is the understanding of the workers as a subject-object. Therefore, inquiry is about developing “a reflective community of workers-organisers”. Operaismo (workerism), a major tendency within Italy’s workers’ movement in the 1960s-70s, saw the practice of workers’ inquiry as “joint research” between workers as militant researchers and workers in capital-labour relationship. For Operaistas inquiry was an antidote to the ossified vanguardist practices of the established organisations that throttled self-activism and self-organisational abilities of the working class. Antonio Negri, a prominent Italian Marxist, who was one of the major militants of operaismo, explains:

“The practice of joint-research was simply the possibility of knowing, through inquiry, workers’ levels of awareness and consciousness as productive subjects. If I go into a factory, get in touch with the workers and carry out with them an investigation into the conditions of their labour, the joint-research is obviously the description of the productive cycle and the identification of the functions of each person within that cycle. But at the same time, it is also a general evaluation of the levels of exploitation that each and every one of them suffers, of the workers’ ability to react in relation to their consciousness of exploitation in the system of machines and before the structure of command. This way, as the research advances, the joint-research creates outlooks of struggle in the factory and defines threads or devices of cooperation beyond the factory. Evidently, this is where the hegemony and centrality of praxis in research reside: this praxis helps our understanding of the cycle of production and exploitation and is enhanced when it determines resistance and agitation, which is to say, when it develops struggles. Thus, it is practically possible to constitute an antagonistic subject, because this is what the argument is about.”

The endeavour to map labour right from its initial mobilisation, in production and circulation spheres through workers’ inquiry is actually a recognition of the existential crisis of organisational forms sanctioned from above and an attempt to redefine social activism in the everydayness of class struggle, of struggle between labour and capital.