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Informal Capitalist Political Economy and Social Darwinism 1
I wish to briefly elaborate this aspect, particularly the nature of informal political economy in India and its impact on society. My argument is that the nature of capitalist political economy that has been developed and legitimised at the global level pushing human society towards a pre-enlightenment era of fatalism replacing “God” with Capitalism. This is what the dominant discourse is on the end of ideology and thereby history. Consequently, there is no alternative of capitalism for human civilization. The neo-liberal economy is a fait accompli. Some expect capitalism is benign and would eventually take care of rising inequality and insecurity. Following Keynesian’s model, it is hoped that the government would find out “appropriate fiscal and monetary policies to maintain growth and employment (Hossein Zadeh 2013). Or, for empiricist social scientists, in a given situation people would find out their own ways to cope with insecurity created by the system. With this hope, the proponents of the neo-liberal economy encourage and celebrate primordial bonds in the name of ‘community participation’ and ‘social capital’ as a social policy for development. In the situation of social insecurity that created by institutional and informal political economy, social capital I argue degenerates to chauvinism in the form of ethnicity, race, caste and nation.
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Ambiguities and Paradoxes of the Decent Work Deficit: Bonded Migrants in Tamil Nadu
This paper examines the brick kiln industry in Tamil Nadu as a case study to highlight the discrepancy between normative categories of decent work and workers’ experiences and subjectivities. It highlights the extreme vulnerability of circular migrants while stressing the diversity of circulation channels and how these are both shaped by and constitutive of distinct eco-type systems and village economies. The paper also shows how employers and labour recruiters exploit many different forms of agricultural decline, and how they influence and take advantage of workers’ constraints, expectations and aspirations. It is argued that debt bondage in the brick industry is supported by the decline in agricultural labour and lack of social protection but also partly by the growing consumption needs of labourers. Paradoxically, increasing aspirations for equality and integration are helping to reproduce the conditions for capitalist exploitation and extraction of surplus value
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With reference to original ethnographic and historical research on India, the papers collected in this forum suggest conceptual refinements that might re-centre the study of class in regional scholarship. Through discussions of class politics in industrial, construction and agricultural contexts, the authors interrogate the conceptual oppositions between stably employed fordist labour forces and the ‘working poor’ that have often constrained ethnographic and historical analyses of India's working classes. Inspired by Marxist historiography, this forum engages with the historically contingent emergence of Indian working classes through different types of labour, gender and ethnic struggles, and considers the complex political boundaries that are produced by such processes. Contributions by Geert De Neve, Jonathan Parry, Andrew Sanchez, Christian Struempell, Luisa Steur
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Dalits and Dispossession: A Comparison
Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2019
Widespread “land wars” in contemporary India have rekindled older debates over the implications of capitalism for caste, with some arguing that land dispossession for new economy projects may be liberating for Dalits. We assess this argument through comparative ethnographic and survey research into the consequences of dispossession for Dalits in the cases of two Special Economic Zones built during the 2000s. We advance three arguments. The first, methodological, is that approaching this question requires systematically comparing the outcomes of dispossession for Dalits relative to upper castes. The second, based on such an assessment, is that the interaction between exclusionary growth and caste-based agrarian inequalities has in both cases expanded socio-economic inequalities between upper and lower castes and left most dispossessed Dalits worse off in absolute terms. Third, the cases demonstrate important qualitative differences across generally bad outcomes for Dalits, which derive from the combination of project characteristics and pre-existing agrarian inequalities. While demonstrating how the exclusionary growth driving dispossession in contemporary India is generally unpromising for Dalits, we underscore the importance of comparative ethnographic research into the interaction between different forms of dispossession and specific agrarian social structures.
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This article analyses why informal labourers working ‘at the margins’ of global production networks lack ‘structural’ and ‘associational’ power. It does so in order to better understand potential changes in their material and political conditions, and as part of broader calls to put labour at the centre of development studies. The article focuses on rural-based labourers in south India who work relatively invisibly as agricultural labourers and informal factory workers, and on the construction sites of a ‘global city’ (Bangalore). It deploys a three-way labour control regime framework that encompasses (1) the macro-labour control regime, which is ultimately defined by capitalist relations of production, and characterised in India by particularly high levels of informality (precarious and largely unregulated work) and segmentation (due to the fragmentary impact of caste); (2) the local labour control regime, which refers to how class relations in specific places are shaped by patterns of accumulation and work (themselves shaped by differences in agro-ecology, irrigation, and remoteness from non-agricultural labour markets), distributions of classes and castes, and the uneven presence of the state; and (3) the labour process, which is increasingly marked by forms of ‘remote control’ marshalled by labour intermediaries. Debate on the macro-labour control regime and on the labour process is well established, but little has been said about local labour control regimes, which are newly defined here and discussed in terms of differences between ‘wetland/circulation zones’ and ‘dryland/commuting zones’. The article identifies locations where labour has greater potential structural and associational power. Increased worker organisation in these areas could have knock-on effects in more ‘obscure’ sites.
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