Background
The following ten-point framework of Marxist economic theory needs to be kept in mind in order to understand Kalyan Sanyal’s argument:
1. Capital has a universalizing tendency, i.e., a tendency to make labour a universal identical commodity, i.e., it reduces all labour to a standard output fully exchangeable between one labourer and another. It does this concretely through mechanization of production, simplification of labour, stripping the labourer of all specific skills. It eliminates all relations of production in favour of the pure economic relation between capitalist and wage-labourer.
2. Thus, capital tends to proletarianize, to absorb and subjugate all labourers as sellers of a single identical form of unskilled wage labour. The theory of human labour as an abstract, simple commodity reflects the concrete lives of labourers stripped of all features.
3. Capitalism will swallow up the entirety of social labour to meet its insatiable appetite for surplus value so that it is re-invested in industry.
4. Capitalism proposes a chimera of universal human right (fundamentally to property) as the foundation of the freedom of the individual to pursue wealth in its economic system. However, this bourgeois notion of a human right that is available to a few is based on the subjugation and exploitation of the unfreedom of most wage-labourers.
5. Capitalism begins its epoch with primitive accumulation which violently appropriates all forms of property, wealth, obligation and customary right that existed in the preceding (feudal) period.
6. Mature capital creates wealth for investment through the generation of surplus value within its own system. Primitive accumulation is left behind as a necessary transitional phase in the prehistory of capital.
7. This total absorption and uniform exploitation of wage labour will result in the proletariat which begins to think and act as a class-for-itself that recognizes its common interest and unity. Thus, the proletariat will be the first to conceive the true universality of society in the fundamental equality of its members.
8. The unequal distribution and concentration of wealth in mature capitalist society will also result in a crisis in political economy due to cyclical overproduction. This is matched by an impoverished proletariat that is unable to meet its needs, is conscious of its exploitation, and has a vision of equality which ultimately drives the proletarian revolution.
9. The revolution will in theory produce true universal right and well-being where all human beings can access what they need.
10. There are variations in this basic theoretical framework, especially with Gramsci, but in general the theory of transition and universalizing drive of capital are central to Marxist theory.
The problem with this universal theory of economic transformation is that it doesn’t describe what happens in Third World nation states. Such a transition has also not occurred in many First World nation states. Theoretical studies of the economic transition (in relation to agriculture), especially in relation to First World nation states, are being presented in other articles and summaries in this broadsheet. In addition, the broad debate of the transition in agriculture in India is also being discussed at length in the summary of Praful Bidwai’s review of the mode of production debate in India. This essay will deal with Kalyan Sanyal’s own important critique of Indian Marxism’s theoretical assumption of post-colonial economic transformation of feudal conditions of obligation into capitalist wage labour.
There have been several variants and theorizations within and after Marxism which try to deal with the complexity of the problem of capitalist transformation in Third World, postcolonial nation states. All these, Sanyal argues, depend on some underlying assumption that a capitalist transition takes place here too. Thus it is assumed that the labour force is absorbed into a universal exploitative relationship thus forming the basis for a proletarian transformation of Third World economies and societies. If the idea of a proletarian revolution has worn thin, there remains the hope/promise that the labour force will be fully absorbed and live a better life than under feudal conditions.
What would be the theoretical and practical implications if such a universal absorption and transition to capitalism does not occur?
First observations
Sanyal quotes Ignacy Sachs’ observation regarding Brazil’s economic scenario, that
…Brazil was transformed into a BELINDA – a Belgium in the middle of an India, with parts of the [northeast] comparable to a Bangladesh. Industrialization had the opposite effect to that anticipated by Arthur Lewis. Instead of gradually exhausting the reserve of unskilled labour by drawing it into the modern organized sector, it deepened the process of exclusion and social segregation. It created a huge surplus of underemployed labour in the cities, including … casual agricultural workers expelled from the rural areas by mechanization of large estates. (Sachs 1991: 99, cited in Sanyal 2007, emphases Sanyal, modified)
Sanyal suggests that there is a symptomatic, ugly stagnation of labour which is evident even in Indian cities and the countryside. This is best understood in a metaphor that refers to Michel Foucault’s work on madness in the sixteenth century, where he described the (European) Ship of Fools carrying madmen drifting from port to port, touching each city while never allowing them to disembark or escape. This was Europe’s way of expelling from society and yet keeping chained to its periphery its population of the ‘insane’, excluding, yet confining them. In Third World countries today, Sanyal argues, large populations are similarly kept apart from the development process. They are not absorbed as wage labour, yet not left alone to their devices, creating a large and permanent reserve army of the unemployed. Sanyal argues
Foregrounding of the phenomenon of exclusion and marginalization in the portrayal of the third world economies, for me, is a representational strategy. My picture is very different from the way the economic formation of the third world is represented in the dominant mainstream discourse of development. The mainstream discourse views underdevelopment as an initial condition waiting to be transformed in the process of modernization and development. It understands the persistence of underdevelopment as the reflection of insufficiency of development. This is seen as the inability of the modern sector to expand sufficiently and transmit its dynamic to the underdeveloped periphery; in other words, underdevelopment is the residual of the initial condition that the process of development fails to transform. (46-7, modified)
Having laid out the claim of the dominant discourse, Sanyal puts forward his own challenge to this view
In contrast to this, I see the representation of underdevelopment in terms of castaways of development. I.e., I see underdevelopment resulting from the development process itself. This, to me, signals a new theoretical space in which a radically new conceptualization of the post-colonial economic formation is possible. Such a conceptualization brings to the fore the phenomenon of exclusion and confinement as an essential condition of capital’s existence. It also makes visible the specific technology of power that helps create that condition. (47, modified)
Two questions need to be addressed: a) the theoretical implications of this perspective b) the practical mechanism of the process.
Theoretical shifts
a) In orthodox theory, primitive accumulation is, to recap, how early capital formation takes places. It is the process by which the pre-capitalist worker is “divorced from the means of production” (i.e., access to land, tools, skills, Marx 2010, 668). It is the process by which “great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour-market”. (ibid., 669). Primitive accumulation is the prehistory of capital. Once capital universalizes itself, primitive accumulation ceases to exist and all investment generation occurs through surplus labour within capital.
Sanyal’s proposition is that at the post-colonial margin, metropolitan capital depends on continuous primitive accumulation. Capital never comes fully into being on its own. It is constantly transforming itself without completing the transition. Hence the process of primitive accumulation is a continuous process that happens alongside perpetual capital formation. In other words, agricultural workers are constantly expropriated, their resources taken from them and they are cast out of their places of subsistence.
b) In orthodox theory, the workers who are expropriated are thrown, ‘unattached’ into the marketplace so that capital employs them as wage labour. This way, capital absorbs and exploits the expropriated workers, generating surplus value through this employment/exploitation. Capital also provides the socio-economic conditions of a universal exploitation that leads the proletariat to become conscious of its exploitation and develop a revolutionary consciousness as a being-for-itself.
Sanyal argues that in post-colonial development, those people thrown out of their traditional means of occupation are not absorbed. Thus, the possibility of wage labour as a means of subsistence after expropriation does not exist, and any development of their condition through proletarianization and progressive consciousness towards a being-for-self of the proletariat is not open to them. They are instead castaways who have no opportunity to enter the development process. They are thus excluded from development within the capitalist system.
The problem then is, how are these castaways maintained without being provided wage labour?
Practical considerations
Sanyal argues that once the subsistence workers have been expropriated by primitive accumulation, they are completely at the mercy of the elements. There is no inherent reason why the expropriated must survive, and the history of early modern Europe has many examples of the dispossessed perishing famines and epidemics. However, Sanyal continues, today it is no longer possible to let the jobless perish.
Discourses of democracy and human rights have emerged and consolidated themselves to form an inescapable and integral part of the political and social order. As relatively autonomous discourses, they have constituted an environment within which capital has to reproduce itself. A crucial condition of that reproduction is that the victims of primitive accumulation be addressed in terms of what Michel Foucault has called “governmentality”. These are interventions on the part of the developmental state (and non-state organizations) to promote the wellbeing of the population. What I identify as a reversal of primitive accumulation refers to this realm of welfarist governmentality; the creation of a need economy is an imperative of governance. (60, modified)
Thus, to support the expropriated, there must be a return flow of wealth from within capitalism to the outside, a reversal of the expropriation that is caused by primitive accumulation. Money thus flows out from the capitalist sector into the need sector, or the non-capital sector. This money is not in the circuit in which capital grows through reinvestment of surplus value. It is used by a non-capital need economy to sustain the expropriated through various marginalized forms of subsistence that do not contribute to capital. This reverse flow of capital occurs through the globally normative discourse and practice of development, which through state and non-state actors, channels and controls to an extent this reverse flow.
However, the moment any aspect of the need economy stabilizes and begins to grow through the normal processes of reinvestment, the capitalist economy will swoop down on these stabilized and growth oriented aspects and dispossess or expropriate the successful actors.
It is for this reason Sanyal adopts the Ship of Fools metaphor to describe the marginalized who are neither left to exit the system nor allowed to integrate—they are excluded and held close simultaneously.
Implications
There are different implications of Sanyal’s theoretical proposal:
- We can no longer look to capitalism to absorb all workers in its system thus creating a universal proletariat. There will always be the marginalized, eking out an existence, surviving on a minimal transfer of resources from the state to noncapital. Trademark slums and other telltale signs of dire impoverishment will remain part of the postcolonial landscape.
- The proletariat no longer has the potential to become a consciousness-for-itself which can represent a true universal human good. If the capitalism doesn’t absorb all labour and permits the existence of an army of the unemployed at the margin, a proletarian consciousness cannot be universal since even below them exist the permanent reserve army of the unemployed, who have no means to unite, no common ground to fight their battles against capital, which is from that point of view an unseen enemy.
- Capitalism is not an autonomous system, and is regulated by a state/non-state governmental process. If capitalism doesn’t absorb the entire labouring population, it can no longer function fully autonomously as a base upon which the superstructure of the state, law, education and other welfare institutions will rest. The state has to be a referee between capital and noncapital and will thus be beyond the grip of capital, and the latter’s hegemony will be compromised. This will mean that the state will offer a means to direct the functioning of capital to a degree.
- The notion of a socioeconomic transition through the force of a dialectic and through a process of sublated contradictions no longer holds. Once a marginalized population exists, the dynamics of the proletariat will not function and the process of a revolutionary transformation will not have its driving force.
- However, the autonomous structure of noncapital’s will to survive may frame a different form of a consciousness-for-itself of the marginalized unemployed. This is because there will be other modes of organization or conscientization that may open out as possibilities for the marginalized, and such new possibilities will dictate the forms of development of noncapital in the era of capitalism (and perhaps beyond).
- What the future holds is no longer clear, but is open to intervention and modification. This is because the internal dynamic of the Marxist dialectic, whereby the proletariat begins to represent consciousness of society as a whole, from the perspective of the exploited, cannot work. The proletarian consciousness is no longer the lowest one in the hierarchy. It cannot imagine an exploitation that is below slavery — exploitation of the very possibility of employment through denial.
1. This is a summary of the theoretical position developed by Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking capitalist development: primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalism, (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007).