Abstract
This chapter discusses in the framework of Marx’s concept of living labour the postcolonial context of informal conditions of work and migration. The discussion of postcolonial labour begins with reflection on the process of primitive accumulation as a feature of the postcolonial situation where labour migrates from work to work. The footloose postcolonial labour situation is also a consequence of international investment chains in production of commodities, which are overwhelmingly export-oriented, with production sites often being special zones. Wages are low, the work force is markedly female and labour-supervision rules are strict and characterised by violence. Another aspect of the same scenario is the supreme logistical sites, which require and create footloose labour. In this circuit of commodity circulation, capital will continuously change form, and value-producing labour will be more and more distant from the final stage when profit will be realised from the capital invested, and the revenue shared. In the postcolonial world this, then, is the milieu of living labour, which precisely through its footloose life proves itself also as abstract—ready to be deployed for any productive activity.
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- 1.
For, after all, life and labour still remain organically connected under the postcolonial condition, while elsewhere capitalism succeeded to a considerable extent in separating the two, where life denotes leisure, creativity and culture, and labour seems to signify routine, draining and obligatory aspects of life. The social world of labour has been disconnected from the productive world of labour, whereas in the postcolonial world the two worlds seem to connect to each other more and more. In some way a shoe-worker’s son, Harry Braverman, anticipated this contradiction in Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, 25th anniversary edition (1974, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998). Braverman noted the contradiction between “descriptions of scientific-technical revolution and increasing division of work into petty operations” (p. 3). Braverman set his findings in the context of contemporary euphoria over capitalism enabling greater leisure for the working people because of industrial advance. New technology had raised levels of skill and responsibility. New wealth and leisure meant increased well-being rather than increased misery, and industrialism was pluralistic and power was diffuse (pp. x–xi). But, importantly, Braverman did not argue that the average level of skill in society would decline as a result of further division of labour under capitalism but with new machines the gap between “the scientific and educated content of labour” and the average worker would increase; thus it was not a “question of averaging but polarising” between scientific knowledge and skill embodied in the new machines and the routine, fragmentary operations embodied in labour needed for the former. (pp. 294–295)
- 2.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), Chapter 25, section 3: “Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus Population or Industrial Reserve Army”, p. 446.
- 3.
See, Michel Foucault , The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), Part V, “Right of Death and Power over Life”, pp. 133–159. Foucault explained biopower there in this way: “This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes… what occurred in the eighteenth century in some Western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism … was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques… If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life…” (pp. 141–142).
- 4.
Michel Foucault , Society Must be Defended, Lectures at College de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 249.
- 5.
Michel Foucault , Birth of Bio-politics, Lectures at College de France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008).
- 6.
Yet these decades were also of neocolonial wars and plunder. Precisely at this time when neoliberal thought was taking shape, Paul Sweezy and Paul A. Baran wrote Monopoly Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), and Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff wrote, The End of Prosperity (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).
- 7.
Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (London: Polity Press, 2014); also David Chandler and Julian Reid, The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).
- 8.
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts—El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002).
- 9.
Thus in the famous “Three Figures of the Circuit” Marx presented the ghost of consumption in various sectors, which would mean consumption at one level but at another level investment as the circuit takes alternating figures, and the productive and consuming forms of economy come to a head-on clash—Capital, Volume II, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1992), Chapter 4, pp. 180–199.
- 10.
Capital, Volume II, p. 208.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 209.
- 12.
Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labour and Capital: A Study in International Investment and labour Flow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Chapter 5, “The Rise of Global Cities and the New Labour Demand”, pp. 126–170.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 31.
- 14.
David Harvey , Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999); see Marx, as in n 9.
- 15.
Marx explained the conundrum of capital in this way: “In a constantly rotating orbit, every point is simultaneously a point of departure and a point of return. If we interrupt the rotation, then not every starting point is a point of return. Thus we have seen that not only does every particular circuit presuppose the others, but also that the repetition of the circuit in one form includes the motions which have to take place in the other forms of the circuit . Thus the entire difference presents itself as merely one of form, a merely subjective distinction that exists only for the observer. In so far as each of these circuits is considered a particular form of the movement in which different individual industrial capitals are involved, this difference also exists throughout simply at the individual level. In reality however, each individual industrial capital is involved in all the three at the same time. These three circuits, the forms of reproduction of the three varieties of capital, are continuously executed alongside one another… The reproduction of the capital in each one of its forms and at each of its stages is just as continuous as the metamorphosis of these forms and their successive passage through the three stages. Here therefore the entire circuit is the real unity of its three forms.”—Capital, Volume II, p. 181.
- 16.
In Capital, Volume II, Marx explains the entire concept, which cannot be understood without reference to the circuits of capital, particularly when discussing Adam Smith’s idea of total national labour—pp. 214, 453–454, and 460–461.
- 17.
Limits to Capital, p. 141.
- 18.
On this see the interesting discussion by Vinay Gidwani, Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and Politics of Work in India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Chapter 1, “Waste”, pp. 1–31.
- 19.
J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of the Thing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); see also Friends of the Earth Report, The Policy Study Report on the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (2011)—https://www.foe.co.uk/…/report-influence-eu-policies-environment-9392 (accessed on 13 March 2016); J. Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2013); S. Graham and N. Thrift, “Out of order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance”, Theory, Culture & Society, 24 (3), 2007, pp. 1–25; J. Lepawsky, “Composing Urban Orders from Rubbish Electronics: Cityness and the Site Multiple”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39 (2), 2014, pp. 185–199; and the significant essay on labour and waste, N. Rossiter , “Translating the Indifference of Communication: Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China”, International Review of Information Ethics, 11, 2009, pp. 35–44.
- 20.
One report from Bangladesh states, “Sixty per cent of iron used in the construction business in Bangladesh comes from the ship-breaking industry, earning the state-capitalist apparatus annual revenue of US$900 million. It employs 30,000 people directly and 250,000 people indirectly. Yet the labour laws in the sector are not applied to protect the workers from grievous injury. In the last decade 250 workers have died and more than 800 have been handicapped for life. Hulking steel remains of ships that took part in maritime trade across the earth’s ocean spaces in the last century undergo radical transformation, reverting from ship back to steel. The process of breaking down the massive ocean liners uses a mixture of acetylene and muscular power. Within the rusting structural frames lie the secrets of steel reclaiming its form. Here is the inverse of the shipyards of northern maritime powers, where steel, through the power of capital infrastructure , was reshaped into objects that would produce the conditions for capital to reorganize itself. The long stretching beach and the bay provide the scenography as the labourers struggle to dismember rusting leviathans in the oily mud. The bosses of the ship-breaking yards of Chittagong have an appalling human rights record despite global media coverage and impose a notorious no-photography rule…”—Nabil Ahmed, “Entangled Earth”, Third Text, 27 (1, pp. 44–53), January 2013, p. 50.
- 21.
Figures taken from John Clarke, “Looking the Basic Income Gift Horse in the Mouth”, The Bullet, 1241, 1 April 2016—http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1241.php (accessed on 20 July 2016).
- 22.
See the discussion on the exceptionality of capital’s circuit as commodity in Roman Rosodolsky , The Making of Marx’s “Capital”, trans. Pete Burgess (London: Pluto Press, 1977), pp. 142–143.
- 23.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), 1857–58, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 620; also Capital, Volume II, p. 357.
- 24.
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), in Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 6 (Moscow: Progress, 1976), p. 176.
- 25.
The classic instance is the case of the general strike in the Indian Railways in 1974, which laid bare various contradictions in the Indian economy dating back over the previous ten years (1965–74); yet, strangely, Indian economists never cared to delve into the interlinked dynamics of the general strike of 1974 and the crisis in the Indian economy. For an analysis, Ranabir Samaddar, The Railway General Strike of 1974 and the Rank and File (Delhi: Primus, 2016), Chapter II, pp. 25–49.
- 26.
Capital, Volume III, “In so far as the labour process is a simple process between man and nature, its simple elements remain common to all social forms of development. But each particular historical form of this process further develops its material foundations and social forms”—p. 1023.
- 27.
Grundrisse, p. 235; See also, Marcello Musto’s discussion on the double nature of labour, “History, Production, and Method in the 1857 ‘Introduction’” in Marcello Musto (ed.), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 3–32.
- 28.
For instance, Alpa Shah and Barbara Harriss-White commented few years back, “with the rise of the critique of village studies, the problems of categorising ‘modes of production’, and the push for scholarship to move to urban studies and address the urgent problems of liberalisation, in-depth research and reflection on the agrarian economy declined”.—Alpa Shah and Barbara Harriss-White, “Resurrecting Scholarship on Agrarian Transformations”, Economic and Political Weekly, xlvi (39, pp. 13–18), 24 September 2011, p. 13.
- 29.
For instance, see the study by Mithilesh Kumar, “Governing Flood, Migration, and Conflict in North Bihar” in R. Samaddar (ed.), Government of Peace: Social Governance, Security, and the Problematic of Peace (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 203–226; Manish K. Jha, “Disasters: Experiences of Development during the Embankment Years in Bihar” in R. Samaddar and Suhit K. Sen (eds.), New Subjects and New Governance in India (Milton Park and New Delhi: Routledge, 2012), Chapter 3, pp. 109–153; and Mithilesh Kumar, “Terra Firma of Sovereignty: Land Acquisition and the Making of Migrant Labour” in Amit Prakash, Ishita Dey and Mithilesh Kumar, Cities, Rural Migrants and the Urban Poor—III, CRG Research Paper Series, Policies and Practices, 74, March 2016, pp. 37–49.
- 30.
http://nceuis.nic.in/condition_of_workers_sep_2007.pdf (accessed on 12 October 2015).
- 31.
On this see the study by Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labour and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labour Flows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) even after nearly 30 years it remains instructive. See in particular on the feminisation of migrant labour, pp. 107–114; what was called two decades back the “Toyota economy” in South East Asia was one reflection of the global investment and labour chain.
- 32.
See Chapter 3, n 30.
- 33.
Indeed, the role of logistical initiatives, such as infrastructure building, make the circuits of capital more and more complicated, leaving the capitalist class with only aggregate calculations to decide how much of the said infrastructure building programme finally becomes profitable (after deducting all other forms of revenue including payment of salaries and wages). Two economists have noted, “Many of the recent infrastructure initiatives in Eurasia seem to treat connectivity gaps as a problem with an easy solution. For example, the ostensible purpose of China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is to direct large amounts of new credit toward infrastructure projects, suggesting that the problem is a ‘financing gap’. Yet international credit has been cheap for the better part of a decade, and institutional investors would happily lend money toward long-term projects offering a reasonable and reliable rate of return. Rather than a lack of lenders, a more pressing problem in Eurasia is mobilizing the resources to repay them. Infrastructure is funded in one of two ways: through use of public revenues (i.e., taxes) or through user fees (e.g., tolls). If the estimated infrastructural needs outweigh the resources available, the result is a funding gap rather than a financing gap, and it is the former that remains the more binding constraint in Eurasia. Funding shortages are only one of the many impediments to increasing infrastructure investment in Eurasia… Initiatives such as the Global Infrastructure Facility run by the World Bank and the G20-supported Global Infrastructure Hub are trying to address some of these constraints… (Besides China’s One Belt One Road project) Other initiatives, such as those proposed by Tokyo and New Delhi… are similarly driven by each capital’s commercial and geostrategic interests.”—Matthew P. Goodman and David A. Parker, “Eurasia’s Infrastructure Rush: What, Why, So What?”, Global Economics Monthly, 5 (1), January 2016, pp. 1–2; one can also note in this context the pervasive failure of postcolonial cities to build a durable infrastructural environment—in Gurgaon or Rajarhat in India, for example.
- 34.
On this, see the analysis by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
- 35.
Capital, Volume II, p. 417; also p. 427 when the circuit of capital is in the form of immediate production process, that is P…P,.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 573.
- 37.
In the discussion on the origins and meaning of abstract labour, Marx explicitly brought in the issue of mobility of labour in capitalism from one kind of useful labour to another. “Moreover, we can see at a glance that, in our capitalist society, a given portion of human labour is supplied alternatively in the form of tailoring, and in the form of weaving, in accordance with changes in the direction of the demand for labour. This change in the form of labour may well not take place without friction but it must take place.” —Capital, Volume I, Chapter 1, Section 2, pp. 134. In the next chapter we shall take up this point in detail. However, it is important at this stage that we take note of the relationship between mobility of labour and the emergence of abstract labour.
- 38.
S. Sassen, The Mobility of Labour and Capital and in Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2014). Saskia Sassen turns her analytical focus on subaltern labour in the developed capitalist countries, and attempts to place the phenomenon of massive migration of labour from the postcolonial countries to the developed capitalist countries in terms of a structural shift in the economies of the latter.
- 39.
Capital, Volume I, pp. 164–165; Marx wrote again in Capital (Volume III), “From the customary viewpoint, these relations of distribution appear to be natural relations, relations arising from the nature of all social production, from the laws of human production pure and simple”—Chapter 51, p. 1017.
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Samaddar, R. (2018). Living Labour I: Reproduction of Life and Labour. In: Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63287-2_4
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