Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour

Case Studies and Debates

Dr Tom Brass, Tom Brass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780714649382
• eBook ISBN: 9781317827351
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Many works about agragarian change in the Third World assumes that unfree relations are to be eliminated in the course of capitalist development. This text argues that the incidence of bonded labour is greater than supposed, and that in certain situations rural employers prefer an unfree workforce.

1

Towards a Definition of Bonded Labour

About the central historical role of free labour in the process of economic development, political economy generally has been unambiguous. In the course of its transformation into a commodity, labour-power becomes doubly free: free from access to land, and free from the control of a particular employer. It is the first of these two freedoms which is generally identified as the obstacle to the complete proletarianization of a workforce engaged in agricultural production. Hence the unwillingness of rural workers to be separated from their means of production, together with a corresponding inability of agrarian capital to effect this separation, is seen as the principal barrier to the formation of a market in free labour and the concentration of landownership, both the latter being regarded as the prerequisites to the development of an efficient and large-scale commercial agriculture.

This book will focus on the second of these two unfreedoms and its role in the accumulation process. It will be argued, by contrast, that resistance to proletarianization derives not from the ‘innate conservatism’ of a rural workforce that wishes to remain or become a peasantry, but rather from the specific conditions of capitalist accumulation. Against the view that characterizes it as a pre-capitalist relationship, unfree labour is regarded here as a crucial aspect of class struggle between capital and labour in specific agrarian contexts, and as such may be introduced (or reintroduced) by employers at any historical conjuncture: either to pre-empt the political consequences of proletarianization in situations where a proletariat is in the process of being formed, or to re-impose capitalist authority over the workplace in cases where a proletariat already exists.

A corollary of this view is that unfree labour is not only compatible with relatively advanced productive forces but also fulfils the same role as technology in the class struggle: capital uses both to cheapen, to discipline, or as substitutes for free wage labour. Accordingly, it is precisely when rural workers begin to exercise their freedom of movement or bargaining power to secure benefits such as higher wages, better working conditions, shorter working hours, etc., in the course either of the formation or the consolidation of a market in free labour that capital attempts to shift the balance of work-place power in its own direction once again by restricting labour mobility.

Employer response to worker mobility and/or militancy consists of either importing labour which is already unfree (chattel slaves, indentured or contract workers) or converting free workers into unfree labour. Compulsory work in India and Peru takes many forms (not all of which possess mutually exclusive characteristics), extending from customary labour, communal labour to varieties of labour-rent paid by tenants and sub-tenants. Here it is intended to focus on one form only: bonded labour, an unfree relation constituted by the debt bondage mechanism which involves cancelling cash or kind debts with compulsory work. The three main claims reiterated throughout this book are: first, that contemporary bonded labour is a modern form of unfreedom; second, that in the contexts under consideration this relation is an important method whereby capitalist farmers and rich peasants increase their control over and simultaneously reduce the cost of their workforce; and third, that this process corresponds to deproletarianization, the ‘other’ of proletarianization.

I

Any definition of what constitutes an unfree production relation has to begin by focussing on the labour-power of the subject as private property, and hence as an actual/potential commodity over which its owner has disposition. Unlike a free labourer, who is able to enter or withdraw from the labour market at will, due to the operation of politico-ideological constraints or extra-economic coercion an unfree worker is unable personally to sell his or her own labour-power (in other words, to commodify it), regardless of whether this applies to employment that is either of time-specific duration (for example, contract work, convict labour, indentured labour) or of an indefinite duration (chattel slavery).¹

1.1 Debt Bondage, Decommodification and Unfreedom

A useful way of approaching the conceptualization of unfree labour is to begin by defining it negatively: in terms of its ‘other’, a free production relation. In order to be regarded as free, therefore, a worker of whatever kind must have unconditionally and on a continuing basis the capacity to re-commodify fully his or her own labour-power. Whether or not a worker actually exercises this capacity is irrelevant, since the categorization of labour as free depends on an act of commodification/recommodification which – if the workers so wishes – he/she must be able to put into effect. For the purposes of this definition, therefore, a worker is free in the sense that he/she possesses an ability personally to commodify or recommodify labour-power at any moment in agricultural cycle, an ability which the worker in question must retain throughout the whole agricultural cycle itself. Where such a capacity is constrained, either wholly or in part, because of debts owed to his/her employer, the worker in question cannot be considered to be free.

For many writers on the subject, the unfreedom inherent in chattel slavery derives from property rights exercised by one person over another. All forms of work relationship that do not entail ownership of persons are consequently regarded as free. Such a view, however, overlooks additional forms of unfreedom which occur in situations where labour-power is prevented from entering the labour market under any circumstances (in which case labour-power ceases to be a commodity), is prevented from entering the labour market in person (labour-power remaining a commodity in such circumstances, but is sold by someone other than its owner), and is permitted to enter the labour-market in person, but only with the consent and at the convenience of someone other than its owner. It is precisely these kinds of unfreedom which arise in the case of bonded labour.

In general terms, therefore, the debt bondage relation may be said to exist in circumstances where cash or kind loans advanced by a creditor (usually – but not necessarily only – a landlord, a merchant, a moneylender, a labour contractor, or a rich peasant) are repaid in the form of labour-service, by the debtor personally and/or by members of his domestic/affinal/fictive kin group (poor peasants or landless labourers plus spouses, sons, daughters, co-parents and godchildren). Where the creditor does not personally own land (merchant, moneylender, labour contractor), the labour-power of a debtor may be profitably leased to a third party that does. In contexts where the lender is only or also a proprietor who hires in workers (landlord, rich peasant, a landowning merchant/moneylender/labour contractor), the labour-power of debtors will be employed on those holdings under his control (land owned or leased).

Two apparently contrasting forms of initiating debt bondage may be identified. The first occurs when an individual voluntarily seeks a loan which he or she is unable to repay subsequently. Thus loans taken for non-recurrent items of expenditure, such as the purchase of medicines for illness, the finance of important life cycle ceremonies (such as marriage or death rites) may result in the labour-power of the debtor being acquired by the creditor. Because the advance is requested, this form lacks the coercive appearance of bonded labour: the worker becomes indebted and exits from the free labour market ‘voluntarily’. Perhaps the best example of ‘voluntary’ recruitment coupled with an unfree production relation is famine slavery, a work arrangement which arose historically in times of great scarcity, when self-enslavement was the only alternative to starvation and death.²

In the second form a loan is neither sought nor is the necessity for doing so present initially. Indebtedness is involuntary, and furthermore appears as such. It follows from a situation in which payment due a worker at the end of his contract is withheld by the creditor-employer precisely in order to retain his services, the resulting period of unpaid labour (engineered by the creditor-employer) necessitating recourse to subsistence loans on the part of the worker. Though different in appearance, both these forms are in substance the same, and initiate the cycle of debt-servicing labour obligations which constitutes bondage.³

Like chattel slavery, this relationship entails the loss on the part of a debtor and/or his kinsfolk of the right to sell their labour-power at prevailing free market rates during the period of bondage. Unlike chattel slavery, however, where the person of the slave is itself the subject of an economic transaction, in the case of a bonded labourer it is the latter’s labour-power which is bought, sold, and controlled without the consent of its owner. Hence the frequent conflation of bonded labour with the free wage relation, notwithstanding the fact that while a free wage labourer may personally dispose of his or her own labour-power (by selling it to whomsoever s/he wishes, or withdrawing from the labour market altogether), neither a chattel slave nor a bonded labourer possesses this right. Both the latter may appear in the free labour market, therefore, but not as autonomous sellers of their own labour-power.

Although many local variants of bonded labour exist, each possessing historically specific oral or written contractual obligations (stipulating the form and level of remuneration, the duration and type of work, etc.), the core elements of the debt bondage mechanism as this occurs in India and Latin America consist of an advance payment (or loan) together with a prohibition on working for others without the consent of the creditor so long as the debt remains outstanding.⁴ The object of this unfree relation is to ensure the availability to the creditor-employer of the worker thus indebted, the ideological decommodification of the wage, and ultimately to reduce the price of labour-power itself.

An important effect of the economic decommodification of labour-power is the ideological decommodification of the wage form itself, a process whereby labour-power is separated conceptually from the value it produces (analogous to the conceptualization of payment received by female workers as ‘pin money’). In ideological terms, therefore, a bonded labourer works to pay off a debt rather than for a wage. When reinforced by kinship authority (see below), the process of ideological decommodification is particularly marked. The kinds of struggle generally pursued by unfree workers are also correspondingly distinct in terms of their political implications for an employer. Whereas resistance by bonded labour – when this occurs – usually takes the form of individual flight from the place of work, opposition by free wage labour not only entails a collective response in the form of trade union organization, but also remains within the labour process itself, and hence affects its reproduction.

Debt bondage has been – and continues to be – regarded as a form of unfreedom associated with serfdom, an involuntary agrestic servitude arising from the attachment of an individual to land through debt. Although this form is still important, as the examples of poor peasants in Peru and sharecroppers in Bihar confirm, it is argued here that contemporary debt bondage increasingly involves the bonding of landless labour, and on this criterion is more accurately viewed as a modern form of unfreedom amounting to deproletarianization.

1.2 Bonded Labour as Deproletarianization

Generally speaking, deproletarianization (or the economic and politico-ideological decommodification of labour-power) involves workforce restructuring by means of introducing or reintroducing unfree relations, a process of class composition/recomposition which accompanies the struggle between capital and labour.⁵ In contexts/periods where/when further accumulation is blocked by overproduction, economic crisis may force capital to restructure its labour process either by replacing free workers with unfree equivalents or by converting the former into the latter.

The economic advantage of deproletarianization is that such restructuring enables rural employers first to lower the cost of local workers by importing unfree, more easily regulated, and thus cheaper outside labour, and then to lower the cost of the latter if/when the original external/local wage differential has been eroded. In this way it is possible either to maintain wages at existing (low) levels or even to decrease pay and conditions of both components of the workforce, thereby restoring/enhancing profitability and with it the accumulation project in (or linked to) the capitalist labour process.

In ideological terms, the object of the deproletarianization/decom-modification of distinct forms of labour-power employed by capital is either to prevent the emergence of a specifically proletarian consciousness or to curtail the latter where it already exists. There are numerous instances of racist responses on the part of an existing agrarian workforce displaced by the nationally/ethnically/regionally specific labour-power of cheap/unfree migrants recruited by planters, landowners or rich peasants engaged in the restructuring of the labour process.

Where an initially progressive proletarian class struggle shows signs of being/becoming effective, the attempt by capital to demobilize it by means of workforce restructuring may convert what is an actually or potentially revolutionary situation into a politically reactionary combination of nationalism and racism. Accordingly, in such circumstances the form taken by class struggle waged from above in turn affects the form taken by class struggle waged from below. Although it may continue to reproduce itself in economic terms, therefore, and thus constitute a (segmented) class-in-itself, working class recomposition takes the all-important form of class-for-itself only where/when such politico-ideological division is transcended.

That the experience of the proletarian condition does not automatically generate an immediate, unambiguous or exclusive class consciousness on the part of workers, therefore, may in given circumstances be a consequence of the fact that the aim of deproletarianization is precisely to prevent, deflect or distort the development of just such a consciousness of class. For this reason, the experience of becoming a worker in the employ of capital, or the change from class-in-itself to class-for-itself, has crucial implications for the self-perception and the perception-of-others on the part of the labouring subject, as well as the forms taken by any resulting political action. Viewed thus, unfree relations of production are an integral part of both class struggle and capitalist accumulation in the context of much Third World agriculture.

II

It is important to make clear what such a definition of bonded labour excludes.⁶ Apart from those analyses which recognize both the existence and the unfree component of debt bondage, approaches tend to adhere to one of three interpretations. The first denies that bonded labour exists any longer, a position which constitutes the most fundamental non-recognition of the relation. The second recognizes the presence of contemporary debt bondage, but disputes its classification as a form of unfreedom: the element of coercion is replaced by a concept of ‘reciprocity’, ‘subsistence guarantee’ or job security. The third recognizes neither the existence nor the unfreedom of bonded labour, and unproblematically elides it with free wage labour. For reasons which are examined in the second part of this book, bonded labour is regarded by exponents of the last two views as either economically or culturally empowering for the subject concerned.

1.3 What Bonded Labour Is Not

Among the more common causes of misrecognition are the following. Some texts dealing with bonded labour tend to confuse economic immobility with physical movement, concluding (wrongly) that evidence of the latter disproves claims about the presence of unfreedom. As not only the migration of slave and indentured labour but also the inter-employer transfer of debt (= ‘changing masters’) confirm, however, unfreedom is indeed compatible with the process of physical movement on the part of its subject, either on an individual or a collective basis.⁷ Hence the occasional escape of an ‘absconding’ bonded labourer is not of itself a problem for the definition of debt bondage, any more than the occasional escape of a chattel slave has been a problem for the definition of slavery. Of equal significance in this regard is the fact that debt bondage is not incompatible with a technologically advanced labour pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Towards a Definition of Bonded Labour
• Part I Case Studies
• Part II Debates
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index