Abstract
For over decades now, since the ascendency of neoliberalism from 1970s onward, the overall thrust has been characterised by a range of adverse processes for indicators typically associated with well-being of workers, be it employment and livelihood generation, wages and labour incomes, forms of contract, etc., to name only a few. In general, the trajectories of transition have generated huge concerns, if not despair, for large swathes of working people. Although the broad trends since the 1970s have been characterised by a degree of unevenness, inter-temporally and spatially, important adverse outcomes such as growing inequalities and declining share of labour incomes, increasing job and remuneration polarisation, accelerated dilution of standard employment relations etc. have been near-universal across countries, including in the advanced ones. There is indeed a large body of incontrovertible evidence and burgeoning literature, documenting and analysing these and other pitfalls pertaining to transformation trajectories in the world of work. Apart from brief introductory remarks, and some concluding observations, this chapter has two substantive sections. First of these flags a couple of major markers central to contemporary neoliberal capitalism and sketches out, conceptually their implications in reconfiguring the material and socio-political prospects for labouring women and men, particularly in the Global South. The subsequent section outlines the core of an analytical framework to comprehend the world of work in general and seeks to bring in sharp relief its implications and linkages for labour questions at the current juncture; in other words, this section underscores the significance and urgency of getting back to the drawing board yet again.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth recalling Karl Marx’s well-known statement on some of the powerful and rapacious mechanisms associated with early capitalism: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c” (Marx 1887 [Reprint 1995–1996] p. 533).
- 2.
For some of the major contributions, supporting such a conclusion, see Samir Amin (1973, 1976), Amiya Bagchi (1982, 2005), Paul Baran (1957), Eduardo Galeano (1973), Peter Magubane (1979), Irfan Habib (1995), Eric Williams (1966), Walter Rodney (1972), Joseph Inikori and Engerman, ed. (1992), Prabhat Patnaik (1995, 2009), and Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (2016).
- 3.
- 4.
Epstein offers a simple and useful definition: “Financialisation means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of domestic and international economies” (Epstein 2005 p. 3).
- 5.
Empirical measures of financialisation are tricky, complex and controversial. However, there are relatively simple estimates which are robust indicators of the phenomena. One such measure is the ratio of the value of global financial transactions to the value of transactions in global trade. As per a recent estimate by Thomson and Dutta, this ratio was 2:1 in 1973 and increased to a whopping 90:1 by 2004. As per the same estimate, for the year 2017, value of the global trade for the entire year happened to be USD 17.88 trillion, whereas valuation of daily financial transactions in the same year stood at USD 5.1 trillion (Thomson, et al., 2018).
- 6.
As Patnaik puts it, “The new finance is not separate from industry, since even capital employed in industry is not immune to the quest for speculative gains, but industry does not occupy any special place in the plan for this finance capital…. This is basically what the process of financialisation involves, namely an enormous growth of capital as finance, pure and simple and its quest for quick speculative gains” (Patnaik 2010).
- 7.
As Patnaik notes, a fundamental difference contemporary globalisation compared to the earlier phases is “the fact that the current episode is characterised by a mobility not just of capital-as –finance across the globe but also of capital-in-production” (Patnaik 2016a, b p. 3). He goes on to suggest that had such a feature (e.g. direct investment from the North to the South) characterised earlier episodes of globalisation, “the division of the world into an advanced and backward segment would not have occurred” (Patnaik 2016a, b).
- 8.
Adam Smith had emphasised the ‘division of labour’ as among the most important contributor to the wealth of nations; whatever be the merits of his claims, for an enthusiastic Smithian on this matter the current state of the division of labour, going beyond the firm, far and wide across the world, would be a dream come true!
- 9.
As John Smith notes, “In 1980s half of the world’s industrial workers lived in Europe, Japan, and North America, i.e. the imperialist nations. Since then, in just three decades, their numbers have declined in absolute terms by around a quarter, while the export-led expansion of the industrial workforce in low-wage countries has grown rapidly and now comprises 80 percent of the world’s industrial workers” (Smith 2013).
- 10.
- 11.
For a sample of recent important contributions, interested readers may refer to several articles by Foster and his colleagues in Monthly Review. Further, there are quite a few impressive books engaging with this theme during the last two decades; Samir Amin (2010 and 2011), (2010; 2011) Ernesto Screpanti (2014) Immanuel Ness (2015), Intan Suwandi (2019), John. B. Foster and Robert McChesney (2012), Stephanie Barrientos (2019) and Dev Nathan et al. (2016), are among persuasive and easily accessible treatments of the subject, most of these within Marxist Political Economy.
- 12.
As noted by Stiglitz, for a male worker in the United States, real wage over a period of more than five decades (between 1968 and 2011), did not increase, which is indeed one of the starkest indicators of the increased pressure on workers at large in economically the most powerful country in the world (Stiglitz 2013).
- 13.
Highlighting the tendency of the growing hiatus between the ‘vectors of world real wages and productivity’, Patnaik notes, “A rise in the share of surplus in total output has the effect ceteris paribus of reducing aggregated demand….for a simple reason highlighted by authors like Michal Kalecki (1954), Josef Steindl (1976), and Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran (Sweezy and Baran 1966), namely that the consumption-income ratio is higher for wage-earners than for surplus-earners. Such a shift therefore has the effect of reducing aggregate consumption, and hence aggregate demand for any given level of investment” (Patnaik 2016a, b p. 9).
- 14.
For a good overview of the relevant trends, implications etc. interested readers may refer to Inception Report for the Global Commission on the Future of Work (ILO 2017).
- 15.
As the 2017 ILO report observes, “while the prevailing evidence of past technological developments suggests that waves of technological change result in short-term job destruction followed by the creation of jobs, today’s technological advances are emerging at an unprecedented rate and changing work in ways not seen before” (ILO 2017 p. 10).
- 16.
- 17.
To quote Marx: “But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalistic basis, this surplus population becomes conversely the lever of capitalist accumulation, nay a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army that belongs to capital as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of humans always ready for exploitation” ((Marx 1887 [Reprint 1995–1996] p. 444) emphasis added).
- 18.
We have discussed these issues briefly in an earlier work (Jha et al. 2017).
- 19.
Marx’s well-known and much discussed proposition in Chapter 25 of Capital Volume 1 that, “in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” (Marx 1887 [Reprint 1995–1996] p. 451), is an obvious and clear statement beyond a simply construed material conception, and hints at his deep and abiding engagements with issues of alienation, conditions of freedom etc. as critical constituents of human poverty. In fact, contrary to popular perception, that capitalism is conducive to realisation of individual freedom, whereas socialism is antithetical to it, Marx’s claim is exactly the opposite; rule of capital, for him, was “the most complete suspension of individual freedoms” (Marx, 11857–61 [Reprint 1993] p. 652).
- 20.
In his 1867 address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, Marx refers to the unchecked functioning of “the iron rule of supply and demand” (read as spontaneous capitalism) reducing the “producers of all wealth to a starvation diet”. Likewise in his Inaugural Address to the First International in 1864, reflecting on the situation of the English industrial working class, Marx says, “it is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivalled for the development of its industry and the growth of commerce” (Marx 1864).
- 21.
Drawing on an impressive array of scholarship on the English experiences, Ranadive notes that, “not only was there a qualitative deterioration over 1795–1840 in the living standard of workers, but relative to other classes in English society, the deterioration stood out in sharp contrast….While the deterioration set in after 1770, the critical year was 1795 when the ‘battle of the loaf’ started with the labourer being driven from a wheaten, to a potato diet” (Ranadive 1987 p. 45). In a recent and very impressive contribution to theorising imperialism, Patnaik and Patnaik (2016), highlights absolute worsening in the plight of working people with reference to accessing even minimum nutrition norms in the countries of the South at different junctures.
- 22.
- 23.
In case of India, for instance, within the so-called formal sector, there has been a huge increase in the share of officially defined informal workers.
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Jha, P., Yeros, P. (2021). Labour Questions in the South: Back to the Drawing Board, Yet Again. In: Jha, P., Chambati, W., Ossome, L. (eds) Labour Questions in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4635-2_2
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