Current late
capitalist domination has so atomised the working class that we now no longer
have a proletariat, a class for itself but only a precariat with little or no
class consciousness as a prelude to organising for a revolutionary
transformation to a more socio-economically just dispensation. Under the
circumstances just fighting for better working conditions and wages will not
only be difficult but will not achieve a progress towards revolutionary
transformation. Consequently, there is a need to fight for a universal basic income
as well as will be argued in this note.
1.
Primitive Accumulation
Karl Marx had
in Das Kapital defined primitive accumulation as a pre-capitalist phenomenon
that led to the initial accumulation of capital on the one hand and the
creation of wage labour on the other hand, resulting in the establishment of
capitalism in England in the eighteenth century (Marx, 2016). Marx, critiquing
Adam Smith’s earlier assertion that the process was a peaceful one in which
some labourers through their hard work had accumulated capital (Smith, 2018), contended
with evidence that peasants were driven off the land, on which they were serfs
or petty producers and even the commons were enclosed, through extra-economic
means such as arbitrary violence and laws enacted by the state. However, Marx
himself said that while this was at that time a one-off process in England, it
was not so in the colonies where petty agricultural producers continued to be
there in large numbers providing rent to the colonisers, who sent the surplus
so extracted back to the imperialist countries for expansion of capitalist
production there. Rosa Luxemburg, too, argued that the existence of a
non-capitalist space was necessary for the realization of the surplus component
of the value of a capitalist commodity as well as for primitive accumulation
from exploitation of labour and natural resources from the colonial periphery
for the continuance of capitalist development as capitalism internally would
not be stable (Luxemburg, 2003).
Later, Louis Althusser
argued that primitive accumulation has been an integral part of capitalism
because even after capitalism was well established in Europe and America in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it continued to extract surpluses by
extra-economic means from the colonies and later the nominally independent
nations of the post World War II era (Althusser, 2006). The onset of the
neo-liberal era from the 1990s onwards, led on the one hand to a withdrawal of
welfare benefits and union rights which had been gained by the working class
through hard fought battles in the industrialised capitalist countries of the
West and a dismantling of the socialist apparatuses of the USSR, China and
Eastern Europe on the other. Many Marxian theorists argued that this was a
revival of primitive accumulation within the capitalist system since it
involved the exclusion of a vast number of people from the social commons which
provided free education, health and unemployment benefits combined with the
squeezing of wages through outsourcing of jobs and the handing over of public
enterprises to private capital (Harvey, 2003, De Angelis, 2004). Moreover, tax
breaks and subsidies were given to corporations which led to their increasing
profits further reducing the funds available for maintaining the socio-economic
commons. The huge dominance of finance capital globally and the use of
international financial organisations like the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund to impose cuts in public welfare spending in the developing
countries and the transfer of the surpluses from them to the banks of the
developed countries through debt and interest repayment were also considered to
be extra-economic dispossession of the people of those countries and so a form
of primitive accumulation.
This analysis
has been cogently extended by Prabhat Patnaik to the case of India since the
1990s when neo-liberal policies were introduced in this country (Patnaik,
2017). Patnaik writes –
“The
neo-liberal regime, has increased the tendency to inflict primitive
accumulation upon third world petty producers. In the name of free trade, this
sector, and above all peasant agriculture, is now exposed to world market
fluctuations, which bring ruin to large sections of the peasantry. In the name
of bringing about fiscal rectification, input subsidies to this sector,
including cheap credit, are withdrawn. International agri-business and domestic
big capitalists are able to squeeze the peasantry.
The second
way in which primitive accumulation is carried out is in the name of
‘development’ itself, peasant lands are taken over for a ‘song’ for industrial
and infrastructural projects. Not only is the peasantry, that legally owned
this land, squeezed in the process, but also the entire group of tenants and
agricultural labourers whose rights on the land are not even recognized when
such take-over of land occurs.
The third
way of primitive accumulation is increasing the tax-burden on petty production.
Take the case of the uniform Goods and Services Tax, under which, all products
are taxed, including the products of the petty producers that had not been
taxed earlier, on a par with the products of big capitalists. This has,
needless to say, the effect of squeezing this sector.
The fourth
mechanism of primitive accumulation is through the privatization of essential
services like education and health that the neo-liberal regime effects, which
raises the prices of these services. Since the new service providers belong to
the capitalist sector, such a rise in price is analytically analogous to a rise
in the ‘degree of monopoly’ (Kalecki, 1971), which clearly has the effect of
compressing the real income of the petty production sector and of the workers
of the capitalist sector itself.”
Patnaik,
however, does not mention above the most important means of primitive
accumulation, that of non-payment of statutory minimum wages due to extra
economic pressure exerted on the workers, leading to huge extraction of surplus
value. This is even more of a problem in India than in the developed countries
because the statutory minimum wages are themselves very low in most states in
this country (The statutory minimum wage is 15 Purchasing Power Parity dollars
a day on an average in India as opposed to 120 dollars per day in the USA). Marx
showed that the exchange value of goods and services produced, depended on the
socially necessary labour time required to produce them (Marx op cit). This
social determination of labour time is not simply a function of supply and
demand but is also dependent on negotiation between the working class and the
capitalists. Thus, over time the proportion of the value created that would be
given to the workers in the form of better wages and working conditions, was
decided by contestation through trade unions between the workers and
capitalists and increasing workers’ power resulted in the State also
legislating to provide for regulation of the capitalists. Consequently, the
absence of unionisation in the large informal sector or the roll-back of unionisation
from the formal sector as has happened since the 1990s all over the world and
in India, mean that there is extra-economic extraction of surplus value from
workers within the capitalist system and this is a basic feature of primitive
accumulation.
2.
Labour Situation in India
The fact is
that industrialisation in India has from the beginning been fuelled by
primitive accumulation based on cheap labour resulting from state policies to
prevent unionisation and keep down wages and through dispossession by
displacement (Basu, 2008). Education, health and employment for the masses have
never been provided adequately by the State unlike in the developed countries
and so the vast majority have had to remain unskilled, unhealthy and
underemployed providing a large industrial reserve army who can be cheaply
employed by the capitalists. Attempts by labour to organise and get better
wages and working conditions are met with state repression. The most infamous
example of this in recent times is the state repression of the workers of the
Maruti Suzuki Car factory in Haryana (Deshpande & Haksar, 2023). The State
has enabled this exploitation as labour laws have been implemented only for a
miniscule proportion of the total workforce that is formally unionised. Whereas,
there were 11124 registered trade unions in India, only 2311 of them filed
returns and the total membership of the latter was only 6,181,731 (GoI, 2022). We can safely assume that those trade unions
that are not filing returns are defunct and so given the industrial workforce
in India to be about 130 million or about 25 percent of the total work force
(CEIC, 2023), the effectively organised industrial workforce is just 4.6
percent of the total. Thus, the overwhelming
majority of the workforce, being not only unorganised but also prevented from
organising, are being paid much less than the statutory minimum wages which are
themselves very low.
Moreover, from
the time of independence the draconian but now repealed colonial Land Acquisition
Act 1894, the Indian Forest Act 1927 and later the post-independence Wildlife Protection
Act 1972 have been used to dispossess millions of peasants, especially
tribespeople, from their land for development projects like dams, steel plants,
mines and industrial areas without adequate compensation or rehabilitation
(Basu, op cit).
A major labour phenomenon
in India has been circular migration, which by definition, is a transitory
phenomenon but it has been a long-standing feature of industrialisation right
from its inception. Incipient industrialisation in the nineteenth century attracted
migrants from rural areas. In the case of the jute mills of Bengal these were
workers mostly from the rural areas in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and also from Odisha
and Andhra Pradesh (De Haan, 2022). The cotton mills of Mumbai also had migrant
workers from Ratnagiri to the south of the city and from Uttar Pradesh
(Chandavarkar, 1994). These workers were men who lived alone and maintained
close relations with their families back in the villages. Industrial or other
urban jobs gave these migrants an opportunity to supplement meagre family
incomes and farm livelihoods but did not result in a permanent transition from
rural to urban life. It was only later in the twentieth century and especially
after independence that the migrant workers settled down in cities as
industrial growth spurted with greater public investment under the Five Year
Plans and the need for permanent skilled labour increased (Joshi, 2008).
However, even
after independence matters did not improve much because the nascent capitalist
class drew up a plan for economic development of India based on primitive
accumulation that is known as the “Bombay Plan” after the industrialists from
Bombay who conceived of it (Thakurdas et al, 1944). This plan envisaged the
rapid development of basic infrastructure through heavy state spending garnered
from exploitation of the labour of the masses and the vast natural resources.
It specifically mentioned that the state must intervene to maintain law and
order and restrict individual freedoms given the possibility of dissent from the
masses against such a policy and the new independent Government in India
followed this path of development.
Consequently,
the new Indian Constitution adopted in 1949 did not give fundamental rights
status to the rights of education, health and employment and instead put them
into the section on Directive Principles of State Policy which are
non-justiciable. In fact, the Constitution was largely a copy of the colonial
Government of India Act of 1935 and mirrored its anti-people provisions. So much
so that G.D. Birla the doyen of the Indian capitalists gloated at the time,
"We have embodied large portions of the 1935 Act, as finally passed, in
the Constitution which we have framed ourselves and which shows that in the
1935 Act was cast the pattern of our future plans" (Birla, 1968). The Five
Year Plans that were implemented from the 1950s, followed the anti-people
guidance of the Bombay Plan. So, right from the time of independence people
have been displaced from their land and have been forced into increasing the
industrial reserve army, mainly as migrant labour. The state has actively
promoted this policy. As a result, the unionisation of labour has always been
weak in India and been restricted to a few big private firms, government
departments and the public sector enterprises leaving the vast majority of
workers at the mercy of primitive accumulation. Unfortunately, the Governments
in the states and the centre which are mandated to enumerate the number and
type of migrant workers as a part of the regulatory provisions of the
Interstate Migrant Workmen Act 1979, do not do so. Therefore, there are no reliable
estimates of migration in India apart from the Census data, which are both
suspect and outdated. The Labour Bureau under the Ministry of Labour and
Employment is conducting a large sample survey covering 1.2 Lakh households but
the results have not been published as yet. According to one estimate there are
140 million migrant workers which amounts to about 27 percent of the total
workforce (Ajeevika Bureau, 2023). Assuming that 25 percent of these migrant
workers are working in industries, this comes to a fairly large number of 35
million and they are overwhelmingly unorganised.
Thus, migratory
labour, continues to be of relevance and constitutes a large part of India’s
urban workforce as was vividly shown by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic when
hundreds of thousands of workers returned to their villages from the cities
(Khan and Arokkiaraj, 2021). Migratory labour is preferred by employers because
of their lesser ability to unionise and demand better wages and working
conditions as compared to local labour and so they are the mainstay of
primitive accumulation in India. This process has been further enhanced with
the spread of outsourcing and the gig economy in the neo-liberal era (Madan,
2023).
3.
Characteristics of Late Capitalism
The
working class globally and in India received a major blow from the 1990s
onwards as computerisation and the internet made it possible to outsource
manufacturing to anywhere in the world where labour supply was high and state
regulation was low and consequently wages too were low, so as to facilitate
primitive accumulation. Not only did manufacturing shift out of the western
capitalist countries but even in countries like India it shifted out of
traditional manufacturing centres and even in those, contractual labour was
used in large numbers. Moreover, in India, to further avoid the possibilities
of the unionisation of workers, local recruitment of workers was reduced and
migrant workers were brought in. This huge migrant work force is invisible
simply because there are no records of their migration with the government or
the employer industries as they are employed informally by contractors. They
did become visible for some time during the initial Covid Pandemic in 2020 but
they have once again become invisible.
This
is a global phenomenon and so it is not possible for workers to fight for their
rights locally beyond a point. Simply because a company that does not adopt
these practices of primitive accumulation will go out of business as it will
not be able to compete with others which are practising primitive accumulation
elsewhere. States too are wary of regulating the capitalists because they will
just pack up and leave as it is very easy to relocate manufacturing with the
new technologies that are available. India, in fact, has seen a progressive
whittling down of workers’ rights so as to increase the ease of doing business
for capitalists (Jenkins, 2004).
Thus,
the situation has changed drastically as there is no more a proletariat – a
working class that is assured of its jobs and only has to fight for better
working conditions and wages. Instead, what exists now is a precariat – a
working class that is not assured of employment in addition to suffering from
bad working conditions and wages due to extra-economic pressures. Organisation
work requires money which traditionally used to come from the contributions of
the workers who were assured of their jobs. However, now with workers not being
assured of their jobs and mostly working on contract as migrants, not only are
they unable to make contributions to their unions but they are also fearful of
losing whatever low paying jobs they have by unionising. The new Labour Codes
that have been legislated by the Union Government and whose implementation is
presently stalled, not only do away with many protections that were there in
the earlier laws but in the case of the unorganised sector and migrant workers,
leave them high and dry without any social protection (WPC, 2020).
Expectedly
Industry associations like Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry (FICCI), Conference of Indian Industries (CII) and Associated Chambers
of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM) have welcomed the reforms resulting from
the new Labour Codes, since they facilitate industrialists to further casualise
the workforce in their factories and reduce the workers’ collective bargaining
powers and dilute the state’s regulatory institutions. The removal of the protective
framework of labour rights and entitlements will result in further
informalisation of the already small organised workforce in the country and
reduce the possibilities of formalisation of the informal workers and
especially migrants (Shyam Sundar & Sapkal, 2020). Thus, the whole project of organising workers in trade
unions has been rendered very difficult. It has become even more utopian than
it used to be earlier to propose the formation of a class for itself organised
into a party of the working class seeking to overthrow the capitalist order
beginning with the formation of trade unions.
Matters
have been compounded by the fact that consumerism is being aggressively
promoted among the workers also and so they are more interested in working long
hours to earn more money to satisfy their consumerist desires rather than
organise to improve their wages and limit primitive accumulation. Moreover, whatever
little organisation there is, is being diabolically deflected into sectarian
conflicts between different castes and religious communities further dividing
the working class and preventing mobilisation for workers’ rights.
4.
Universal Basic Income
This increasing tendency of primitive
accumulation is difficult to roll back in the present milieu of late capitalist
dominance in which neither are states prepared to uphold workers’ rights and
nor are the workers in a position to agitate for them on a sustained basis. This precarity of the working class can
be countered only by ensuring that they have a universal basic income (UBI)
from the state given that welfare measures like free education and health that
form part of the social commons have been cut back in recent decades (Gentilini
et al, 2020). The state has to step in and provide a life long universal basic income to all adults so
as to both provide a dignified life to workers and shore up the demand in the
economy. The eternal problem for capitalism is that even after primitive
accumulation and even more so because of it, crises of over production will beset it from time to time
as there is not enough demand for the goods and services that are produced due
to the poverty of the vast majority (Marx, op cit). For instance, in India the
per capita annual income is dismally low at $ 2400 and 70 percent of the
population earn less than this and so there is always a recessionary trend
despite high overall growth in GDP which gets aggravated from time to time, as
is currently the case, with high inflation. From the 1930s onwards, capitalist
states have adopted welfare measures, the social commons, to counter this.
However, these have been progressively dismantled over the last three decades
of neo-liberal economic policies. Consequently, the social commons have to be
restored through a new welfare measure like UBI. This will also enable the working class to organise for
their rights as they will have some funds instead of being on the economic edge
as they are now. As opposed to the utopian programmes of organising the
fragmented working class to become a class for itself, the fight for an UBI
holds more promise though it too is utopian given the present capitalist
control of the world.
The resources for the UBI will come
from a tax on all financial instruments and transactions that there are, most
importantly the huge international trade in currencies which is not being taxed
at all at present. The trade in currencies is more than twenty times the value
of the trade in goods and services and is totally speculative in nature. It
goes on 24 x 7 across the world and its profits come from exploitation of
labour through primitive accumulation. So on the one hand labour is not being
paid a living wage and on the other currency trading which is profiting from
this is not being taxed at all in a blatant show of power by late capitalism.
Therefore,
the working class movements the world over and in India will have to bolster
their local battles for better wages and working conditions with a wider battle
to put pressure on the state to provide a universal basic income so as to
restore the social commons that has been whittled away. This will considerably
reduce the precarity of the working class and allow it to once again organise
not only for better working conditions and wages but also for a revolutionary
transformation to a more just and inclusive socio-economy.
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