Abstract
Introduction: Quo Vadis, Domine?
What makes labour-power unfree, and whether or not such production relations are compatible with economic growth, are political issues that have a long historical lineage, particularly where the focus of debate has been on the development of capitalism. It is precisely in the course of the latter process – the struggle between capital and labour – that the free/unfree distinction becomes significant, not least for Marxist analysis of what nowadays is categorised as ‘globalization’. 1 Although never dormant as an issue, unfree labour re-emerged to occupy centre stage in the debate about rural development during the years following the end of the 1939–1945 war, when a political concern of Keynesian theory was not just economic reconstruction (mainly in Europe and Asia) but also planning (in the Third World).
A crucial aspect of the ensuing discussion concerned the extent to which different relational forms constituted obstacles to capitalist development, and why. Central to these deliberations was the link between capitalist development and modern forms of unfree labour (peonage, debt bondage, indenture, chattel slavery). From the 1960s to the mid-1980s, neoclassical economists generally, and a specific form of Marxist theory (the semi-feudal thesis) asserted that, as unfreedom and economic development were – and are – incompatible, accumulation in Third World contexts would be accompanied by the spread of free labour. From the 1980s onwards, however, this claim was disputed by an alternative Marxist interpretation (the deproletarianisation approach).
About the importance of this debate, both in terms of political economy generally, and more specifically development studies, there can be no doubt. Where unfreedom has been reintroduced into a labour process that is capitalist, political economy teaches that such a development corresponds historically to a regression. This is because so much – politically, ideologically and economically – hangs on whether or not worker emancipation has been achieved. During the post-war era, therefore, the connection between forms of labour-power that were unfree and capitalist accumulation was a central aspect of two academic disputes. The latter involved rival explanations as to the nature of the labour regime not just on the plantation system in the American South but also structuring the mode of production in India. 2
Originally confined largely to discussions about Third World countries, the capitalism/unfreedom debate has shifted, and now includes developments in the labour regime of metropolitan capitalist nations. Looking at the way unfree labour as a concept has been constructed and then reinterpreted over time, it is clear that in terms both of its desirability (working arrangements good for the worker) and of its systemic efficacy (working arrangements good for business), each of these views not only conflict but also invoke the same primacy of national economic needs and objectives (good for the country at large). Equally clear is the fact that, as the debate unfolded, a whole swathe of academic commentators, especially in the field of development studies, has been wrong-footed as a result of endorsing unexamined assumptions structuring the discussion. First in the 1960s, and then again in the 1980s, the upshot was over-optimistic prognoses about the trajectory or meaning of unfree production relations.
This wrong-footing occurred for two reasons. First, a consequence of mislabelling unfree labour as pre-capitalist (‘feudal’ or ‘semi-feudal’) residuals, and then insisting on the necessity of their demise together with the inevitability of their replacement by free equivalents. And second, equally incorrectly misrecognising such labour-power as nothing more than benign/voluntary forms of ‘traditional’ culture. It is argued here that both these interpretations of unfree labour-power, either negatively, as a form of worker disempowerment that is destined to vanish as capitalism spreads, or positively, as a ‘from below’ form of empowerment, are wrong.
Since theoretical inconsistences resulting from unannounced changes of mind affect not just the trajectories and chronology of the capitalism/unfreedom debate but also have political consequences, it is further argued such instances are not – and cannot be dismissed as being – of little or no significance. For this reason, the focus here is on the contributions and disagreements, over specific conjunctures after WWII. In part, this conspectus is a necessary corrective to a recent and problematic attempt at reviewing Marxist contributions to the debate, an intervention that succeeded only in misleading because of a failure adequately to comprehend past and present discussion vis-a-vis Marxism and unfree labour. 3
To this end, the commentary traces the capitalism/unfreedom debate across three conjunctures: 1950–1980, 1980–2000, and 2000–present. In each of these periods, contributions to the discussion are examined in terms of epistemological consistency and influences, together with their respective theoretical and political implications. A final section considers the adequacy (or otherwise) of the way in which the whole debate has been reviewed, plus issues raised by the connection between methods and theory.
I: 1950–1980
Throughout the period up to and following the 1960s ‘development decade’, contributions to the capitalism/unfreedom discussion linked to modernisation theory, the semi-feudal thesis, and the mode of production debate, all followed colonialism in seeing unfree labour as obstacle to economic development in newly independent Third World nations. This was the orthodoxy that dominated the conjuncture: those who maintained that unfree production relations were incompatible with accumulation included not just bourgeois modernisation theory but also some Marxists writing about development in Third World countries. Eradicating unfree labour was for modernisation theory part of a larger package of reforms aimed at ending pre-capitalist tenure in the agrarian sector. 4 This, it was argued, would permit economic growth, and contribute thereby to a capitalist transition in the underdeveloped nations of the Third World. For modernisation theory, the desired objective was, amongst other things, to enable the formation of a labour market composed of free workers, providing local employers both with a workforce to produce commodities and simultaneously a domestic market to consume manufactures.
Like bourgeois modernisation theory, Marxist adherents of the semi-feudal thesis also maintained that eliminating unfree production relations was necessary in order to generate economic growth. The object, again one shared with modernisation theory, was that abolition would lead in turn to the next stage, as exponents of the semi-feudal thesis saw it: a transition to what for them was a still-absent capitalism. For this variant of Marxism, therefore, accumulation was incompatible with the presence of unfree production relations, a view upheld at this conjuncture by many of those engaged in the study of development both in India (among them Terence Byres, Jan Breman, Pradhan Prasad, Amit Bhaduri, Utsa Patnaik and Jairus Banaji) and in Latin America (Ernesto Laclau and Eric Hobsbawm). 5
During the 1970s, two additional and important contributions to the capitalism/unfreedom debate emerged from non-Marxist sources (neo-classical economics, world systems theory). Although each of them recognised the existence of a positive connection between capitalism and labour that was not free, both nevertheless stopped short of claiming that accumulation in the advanced capitalist economies of developed countries depended substantially on the employment there of workers who were unfree. For its part, cliometric historiography accepted that plantations in the antebellum south were capitalist, and thus economically efficient, but was as a result compelled to recast slavery as non-coercive. 6 This enabled cliometricians to argue that as a slave was essentially a choice-making subject, voluntarily opting to remain on the plantation, the workforce in the latter context was akin to free wage-labour. Consistent with a neo-classical economic approach, therefore, the plantation could be declared a capitalist enterprise.
The second major intervention in the capitalism/unfreedom debate at this conjuncture was that of world systems theory, a dualistic approach that maintained that although unfree labour continued to exist, it was a coercive relational form confined to the underdeveloped periphery. 7 In the advanced capitalist nations at the core of the global economy, however, those employed consisted of free workers. According to the dualism of world systems theory, because coercion applies to those engaged in peasant smallholding agriculture, unfree labour remains external to capitalism proper of the kind found in metropolitan capitalist countries. For cliometric historiography, therefore, the presence of capitalism was accepted, but this required in turn that unfreedom be denied. By contrast, in the case of world systems theory, it was unfreedom that was accepted, but only on global periphery. That unfree production relations, although epistemologically drawing ever closer to the accumulation process, might actually be central to the reproduction of the economy within the metropolitan capitalist heartland itself (= capitalism proper) was at this point an argument yet to be made.
II: 1980–2000
From the 1980s onwards, the global spread and integrated nature of capitalism undermined claims by the semi-feudal thesis that accumulation was incompatible with unfree production relations. In methodological terms, semi-feudalism thrived during the 1960s, when social scientists were engaged in trying to explain why economic development had seemingly bypassed rural areas in the Third World. This generated the notion of non-capitalism (at village level) in the midst of capitalism (the city), a form of dualism common then (particularly for those discussing the mode of production) but untenable now. 8 Recognition of this fact during the 1980s saw yet another paradigm shift in the debate about labour regimes. From that conjuncture onwards, therefore, the hitherto orthodox view that capitalist development required the eradication of unfree production relations was challenged by the Marxist deproletarianisation framework. 9
The latter showed, much rather, the opposite to be the case: in many instances, producers were restructuring the labour process by replacing free workers with unfree equivalents. In a global economy where producers have to become increasingly cost-conscious so as to remain competitive, therefore, enterprises reproduce, introduce or reintroduce unfree relations in preference to labour-power that is free, a process of workforce decomposition/recomposition. As such, deproletarianisation is part of the way class struggle is waged ‘from above’. Along with downsizing/outsourcing, this is a method whereby nowadays capital restructures its labour process, cutting costs so as to maintain/enhance profitability.
An expanding industrial reserve army makes this kind of restructuring not just possible but also necessary, enabling multinational corporations, rich peasants, and commercial farmers to compete with rival enterprises. Whereas in the past the colonial state in India attempted to eliminate debt bondage and similar unfree working arrangements there, because they were thought to be obstacles to economic development, currently the neoliberal state (lip-service apart) is content to see them continue – and even flourish – as they contribute to profitability.
The 1990s also saw the entry into the debate of postmodern theory, which – following in the footsteps of pro-slavery discourse in the antebellum south – recast unfree production relations as part of traditional culture. 10 Just as antebellum pro-slavery discourse indicted the capitalist North as representing an alien systemic form, in the process disregarding the presence in the South of the same accumulation process, so British colonialism is incriminated by postmodernism as the harbinger of capitalist penetration of the Indian countryside. Not only does this similarly overlook the existence there of accumulation, but it also enables postmodernism to argue that it was a foreign colonialism that was responsible for privileging free labour as the ‘other’ of bonded labour and/or slavery. Rejecting a political economy approach founded on whether the rural workforce was free or unfree, postmodern theory emphasises instead the ‘cultural’ formation of labour. 11 Again like antebellum pro-slavery discourse, bonded labour in India is depicted by postmodernism as an essentially benign arrangement, a form of landlord patronage that is described as ‘the economy of gentleness’ based on the provision of subsistence guarantee, whereby both the unfree worker and his the family were ‘certainly never in want of food’. 12
If unfree labour is neither an ‘economy of gentleness’ nor a pre-capitalist remnant, but in many cases a coercive relation of choice where capital is concerned, used as much by a national bourgeoisie as by a foreign one, then it is difficult to see how entering alliances with the employing/owning class within the nation to further the cause of capitalist development there is still on the political agenda of workers’ organisations. This suggests that it is socialism, not a progressive form of capitalism, which should be the objective of any ‘from below’ political mobilisation and programme.
Furthermore, the use of these kinds of unfree production relation tends to hinder and/or undermine the formation of class consciousness among labour, particularly when they involve the recruitment of migrants (who are unfree and thus cheaper to employ) in order to displace unionised and politically militant workers (who are free and thus more costly to employ). Since employers benefit from unfreedom, and consequently the state permits its continuance, abolition of such oppressive/exploitative forms will be achieved only by a working class organised in pursuit of socialism.
III: 2000–present
Since the class struggle argument based on deproletarianisation amounted to a rather more negative appraisal of the way a capitalist labour regime was developing, it caught off-guard those overoptimistic prognoses that earlier had proclaimed the necessity to the accumulation process of labour-power that was free. Having been demonised by many in the sphere of development studies, the view that capitalism was compatible with unfree labour quickly – and in several cases unaccountably – metamorphosed from a heterodox theory to a new form of orthodoxy. This, in turn, generated the proliferation of claims to have ‘discovered’ the compatibility between unfree labour and capitalism, some of which were then mistakenly endorsed in subsequent reviews of the debate. One outcome, therefore, was that some contributors who had merely taken up what earlier analyses had already established, or indeed had never said anything about this issue, were suddenly and unaccountably lionised as a result.
Accordingly, some exponents of the semi-feudal thesis dismissed the deproletarianisation argument on the grounds that it was a departure from theories about development – especially Marxism – premised on the view that accumulation necessarily and always required a workforce composed of free labour-power. 13 Other exponents of the same thesis, by contrast, having attacked the deproletarianisation approach, then adopted it, either deploying the framework under a different label or arguing implausibly that it was an interpretation to which they had subscribed to all along. Understandably, such claims, involving as they did unacknowledged changes of mind, triggered confusion and chronological inconsistencies in later attempts to construct a theoretical lineage for the whole capitalism/unfreedom debate.
Perhaps the most curious of all these trajectories has been the sudden, unacknowledged, and complete reversal of opinion by Jan Breman, whose many interventions in the capitalism/unfreedom debate have been based on fieldwork in Gujarat, Western India from the 1960s to 2013. 14 Over this period, his views have changed dramatically: from his original pre-1990s claim, strongly made, that unfreedom is unconnected with debt and anyway declines as capitalism develops, to a post-1990 contention, also strongly made, that capitalists do in fact prefer bonded labour which is invariably the result of debt. Yet he persists – even now – in denying that such a volte face ever occurred. 15 However, that an about-turn has indeed taken place can be illustrated with reference to any one of the many pre-1990 statements by Breman to this effect, and contrasting it with what is said in everything he has published since. 16 The extent of this U-turn is clear from his latest book, where one encounters right at the start a forthright declaration that ‘bondage and capitalism are not mutually exclusive’, a construction repeated verbatim at intervals throughout; the conclusion ends similarly, with the observation that he has ‘substantiated the contention that capitalism and bondage are not mutually incompatible’. 17
Not the least problematic aspect of such unacknowledged U-turns is the way a Marxist agenda is replaced with a non-Marxist one. More recent contributors to this debate maintain – wrongly – that capitalism and its state can and will indeed eliminate unfree labour, thereby returning in part to the earlier claim that accumulation on a world scale can do without such oppressive/exploitative relational forms. 18 As problematic, therefore, is the absence of any mention about sudden and unexplained changes of mind, treated as unimportant, despite the fact that in particular instances such transformations entail an attempt to attach a non-Marxist political agenda to what was originally a Marxist one, an issue that is hardly of negligible importance. 19 Equally problematic is the corollary: the longer a socialist transition is postponed, by not putting this objective on a leftist political agenda, together with that of migration – free and unfree – and the industrial reserve army, the more workers will in periods of crisis move towards reactionary populist solutions which seemingly offer to protect their jobs, culture and livelihoods. 20
By shifting the emphasis from the economic role performed for capital by an expanding industrial reserve army of migrant labour to the attainment by the latter subject of citizenship in the receiving nation, this kind of reformism envisages only piecemeal changes to unfree labour and downgrades the importance of class struggle. 21 Significantly, therefore, it is in reviews of the capitalism/unfreedom debate that difficulties inherent in a return either to pre-capitalist social order or to nicer/kinder form of accumulation surface.
Reviews, methods, problems
In what purports to be a review of Marxist contributions to the capitalism/unfreedom debate, a new account by Rioux et al. displays a striking misunderstanding of this discussion and its political implications. 22 It privileges recent interpretations – in particular those by a co-author of the piece in question – and misrepresents, downplays or ignores earlier and more radical contributions to the debate. 23 Not only are a number of participants wrongly identified as Marxists, therefore, but Rioux et al. also fail to point out that what they term ‘a more faithful Marxist tradition’ is nothing other than the class struggle argument based conceptually on theory about deproletarianisation. Missing from the review is any reference to the crucial detail that some who have now joined ‘a more faithful Marxist tradition’ – rather late in the day – had earlier dismissed the very views they currently endorse. Frequent references to the publications of late adopters misleadingly convey the impression that they have always and consistently supported this view.
Moreover, the review also overlooks the additional fact that their claim about the longstanding neglect of unfree relations was an inaccurate accusation levelled by them at Marxist approaches. Not only do these late adopters receive a relatively privileged consideration in terms of weight given to their publications and arguments, therefore, but they all feature in the conclusion as representing the way forward in the capitalism/unfreedom debate. The Marxist who originally made the case about deproletarianisation (‘a more faithful Marxist tradition’), however, does not, despite having formulated many of the arguments subsequently taken up by the late adopters. Much the same kind of error pervades others contributing to the same capitalism/unfreedom debate, who either omit to mention deproletarianisation, or – like Rioux et al. – mistakenly insist that all those deemed to be the ones to carry forward the debate are the same ones who previously denied its central premiss – the class struggle argument based on which ‘a more faithful Marxist tradition’ is based. 24
A notable exception to this kind of criticism is an earlier and much better review of the same debate, by McCusker et al., whose discussion of labour regimes in general, and deproletarianisation in particular, is more informed – and thus more accurate – than the analysis provided by Rioux et al. 25 Accepting that ‘geography as a discipline has tended to sidestep issues of class in development and agrarian studies in favour of cultural and identity politics’, therefore, McCusker et al. intend to ‘pay attention to rural class formation’. Central to their argument is that deproletarianisation ‘has the potential to explain a great deal about rural livelihoods’, not least because the concept has been tested by ‘very detailed responses [made] to almost all authors who have critically engaged with [this] work’. 26 For this reason, McCusker et al. conclude that it is an approach that ‘deserves closer examination from a geographic perspective’.
In their conclusion to the review of the Marxist contributions to the debate, Rioux et al. emphasise the need to move beyond ‘theoretical and formal questions at the expense of studying the real world’, which conveys the impression that those who initiated the discussion about the acceptability to capitalism of unfree labour-power did so without ‘studying the real world’. This is a familiar trope invariably aimed at Marxists, and is quite simply incorrect when applied to deproletarianisation. The latter theory was – and is – based on fieldwork conducted in Peru and India, so the inference that this Marxist class struggle argument is not grounded in what happens in ‘the real world’ is palpably untrue. 27 When defending deproletarianisation, moreover, lots of the criticism made of other interpretations concerns not points of theory but rather aspects of ‘the real world’ that have been overlooked, misinterpreted or just ignored. As the following example indicates, this sort of problem highlights the vexed connection between methods and theory informing not just reviews but also contributions to any discussion about the capitalism/unfreedom link. 28
During the Indian mode of production debate, Purnea district in the north-eastern state of Bihar was invoked by one contributor to the debate as an exemplar of semi-feudal agriculture. 29 No tractors, no commercial agriculture, few markets, just a vast array of small peasants, engaged in subsistence cultivation and subordinated to traditional landlords by the debt bondage mechanism. Fieldwork conducted there in 1990 indicated things had changed. 30 Not only were there tractors and a thriving commercial agriculture, but landlords were now investing in tube wells, fertiliser and obtaining bank loans for agricultural improvements. However, smallholding agriculture remained, in that poor peasants not only retained access to land but were also bonded to commercial employers (= landlords).
The differences that had emerged in Purnea during the intervening period were crucial. Poor peasants migrated, and the bonded labourers who remained behind to work for commercial employers were composed of females from peasant households. They paid off debts incurred for migration and were subject to coercion that prevented them from working elsewhere as long as money was owed to an employer, a commercial farmer. The role of money-lending had altered: instead of being a way in which unproductive landlords extracted rent from tenants, it was now a form of productive investment the object of which was to purchase labour-power through cash advances, thereby keeping wages low in an economic context where labour costs would otherwise rise.
When informed what had been seen in Purnea, the contributor to the capitalism/unfreedom debate who had conducted earlier research there responded unambiguously: ‘This cannot be, places like Purnea don’t change like that, they are still semi-feudal’. No amount of argument, data or photographic evidence (tractors, large work gangs in the fields, bursting grain-stores ready for market, etc.) to the contrary would convince him otherwise. And so it remained. The point in telling this story is that it illustrates where on occasion the problem lies: not in the fieldwork context itself, which changes, but in the reluctance of cherished and long-held interpretations to recognise this fact.
Conclusion
The capitalism/unfreedom issue has been a key part of the post-war debate about development, not just in Third World countries but now also – and increasingly – in metropolitan nations with a long history of accumulation that is well established. Outlined here, therefore, have been the many theoretical and political shifts in interpreting capitalism/unfreedom that occurred throughout this period. During the immediate post-war era, each of the dominant paradigms – modernisation theory, the semi-feudal thesis and cliometric historiography – addressing the issue of economic growth decoupled accumulation and unfree labour. The latter was seen as an obstacle to economic development, and consequently as a relational form to be abolished.
It could be argued that the politics of the semi-feudal approach were merely another way of postponing/abandoning socialism. This it did by maintaining – incorrectly – that as long as ‘semi-feudal’ relations were found anywhere in the countryside, on the agenda was a transition to capitalism (not socialism) and alliances with (not struggle against) a ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie in order to establish a benign capitalist democracy. However, recent writings about class struggle and unfree labour show that not just Marx and Engels but also Lenin, Trotsky and others all subscribed to the view that such relations were central to the way owners of the means of production organised and protected their accumulation process, and thus not part of any pre-capitalist system that such producers sought to discard. As such, they become a problem of capitalism per se, not an indicator that a benign form of the latter is still on the political agenda.
Accordingly, a paradigm shift took place from the 1980s onwards, when a Marxist interpretation argued that, because employment of unfree workers enhanced profitability, such labour-power was actually compatible with accumulation. Restructuring the labour process through decomposition/recomposition of its workforce, deproletarianisation – the Marxist class struggle argument – conceptually repositioned unfreedom within capitalism per se, not as an outlier found only in the periphery but present also in the metropolitan contexts of the core. Departing from the prevailing ‘whips and chains’ concept – whereby the presence/absence of unfreedom was associated simply with visual images of physical oppression – deproletarianisation also restored the sale/purchase of labour-power to definitions of work arrangements that were not free. Similar emphasis was given to unfreedom as characterised by the reproduction of the whole relation (entry into + exit from) rather than the manner simply of its inception (entry into).
Whereas for modernisation theory, the semi-feudal thesis, and neoclassical economics, the object of political struggle was to bring about a capitalism deemed to be absent, for deproletarianisation by contrast the struggle was about class, against capitalism, and to bring about socialism. Among other things, therefore, deproletarianisation has brought a more radical Marxist theory to bear on the discussion. However, subsequent contributions to the debate that adopted much of its approach, resurfacing under different labels, nevertheless discarded the link to a socialist transition, opting instead for amelioration within the existing capitalist system. The latter, in effect, remains intact, underlining thereby the political break with the more radical Marxist class struggle approach.
