India after Naxalbari. Bernard D'Mello
on those who are already employed. The threat of unemployment and underemployment hangs like the sword of Damocles over the heads of all those who work for a wage under capitalism, and this is the real source of capitalist efficiency, the real means of increasing the rate of exploitation of the active army of labor. As Marx put it in chapter 25, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” in Capital, Volume 1:
The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital.…
… The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works [my emphasis]. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital.
Marx categorized the reserve army in normal times into three components—the floating, the latent, and the stagnant—and added on those engaged in illegal activity, more generally, the lumpenproletariat. Leaving aside the lumpenproletariat, for which we do not have reliable estimates, let us estimate the size of each of these components of the reserve army of labor in the Indian context in 1973.
The floating component is composed of workers who are chronically unemployed. But then, with no social security, many of these persons will not be able to survive if they remained unemployed. They desperately do what they can to earn a living, so the actual number of such chronically unemployed persons has been much lower, 1.61 percent of the “usual status” labor force of 240.1 million persons in March 1973, in absolute numbers, 3.9 million persons.38
The latent component of the reserve army of labor in the Indian context includes those who work for subsistence on own-account (as petty commodity producers/service providers) in the workforce, including in agriculture itself, as well as the other members of their families who chip in as unpaid workers, the proportion of which goes up in times of economic distress. In March 1973, the proportion of the self-employed in the usual status labor force was 61.4 percent of the usual status workforce of 236.2 million persons, in absolute numbers, 145.1 million persons. Roughly 50 percent of this number were petty commodity producers/service providers, 72.5 million persons,39 constituting the latent component of the reserve army of labor in March 1973.
The stagnant component of the reserve army of labor is composed of those regular and casual workers who only manage to find extremely irregular employment (at best they are intermittent workers). In the Indian context, a significant proportion of casual wage laborers, including agricultural laborers, would be in that category. In 1972–73, 59 percent of the 50.24 million casual workers in rural areas and 61.6 percent of the 4.85 million casual workers in urban areas were intermittently unemployed and either sought or were available for work, in all, 32.6 million persons. Besides these casual wage workers, 4.2 million regular wage/salary workers, farm and non-farm, despite being designated as “regular”—that is, received their wages/salaries on a weekly or monthly basis—sought work or were available for work. The sum of these two categories of wage workers, 32.6 million persons plus 4.2 million persons, 36.8 million persons, constituted the stagnant component of the reserve army of labor in March 1973.
With a 3.9 million “floating” reserve, a 72.5 million “latent” reserve, and a 36.8 million “stagnant” reserve, the size of India’s reserve army of labor in March 1973 was 113.2 million persons.40 The active army of wage/salary-based labor in the same year was 54.4 million persons, the sum of employed casual wage and regular wage/salary earning “usual status” workers who were not seeking nor available for work. Thus the size of the reserve army of labor was 2.1 times that of the active army of wage/salary-based labor, and the former constituted the “pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour work[ed],” serving to restrain the rise of real wages. Inclusion of the petty commodity producers/service providers as part of the reserve army of labor is necessary because they are subjected to appropriation (by mercantile, credit and semi-feudal capital) of the profit, interest, and rent (in the case of tenancy in agriculture) respectively in the value added by their economic activity, and are left to extract their own “wages,” which, invariably, turn out to be a pittance. Moreover, they suffer considerable underemployment and are therefore available for employment as wage laborers, though many of them may have given up seeking such work.
Now on the assumption that each person in the reserve army supports one dependent, then the size of the reserve army and its dependents would have been 226.4 million persons, 39.4 percent of the country’s population in March 1973. By adding to this absolute number the number of “usual status” employed casual wage workers who were neither seeking nor available for work and their dependents (2 × 22.5 = 45.0 million persons, again assuming one dependent per casual wage-worker), the total becomes 271.2 million persons, or 47.2 percent of the population. In essence, no sharp divide between the casual wage worker and the petty commodity producer is posited. The only major difference is that a significant part of the business risk is borne by the latter.
Looked at in the light of a Planning Commission estimate of the head-count ratio of poverty for 1972–73 of 51.5 percent of the population,41 this suggests that, in 1973, those who were robbed of access to a minimum nutritional diet in terms of calorie intake extended far beyond the reserve army of labor and its dependents, and even beyond the range of the employed casual wage workers not intermittently unemployed and their dependents.
Overall, with a labor market pivoted upon a reserve army of labor 2.1 times the active wage/salary-earning army of labor, the sharp class polarization that one encountered—islands of wealth, luxury, and civilization in a vast sea of poverty, misery, and degradation—was a ramification only to be expected. There were a relatively small number of owners/controllers of Indian big businesses and multinational corporate affiliates, beneficiaries of the skewed distribution of surplus value, at the apex of a steep social-class hierarchy, at the bottom of which were the massive reserve army of labor and the remaining casual wage workers. In between, at different distances from the apex and the base of the social-class pyramid, were the political entrepreneurs, the semi-capitalist landowners, the SME capitalists, the merchant and moneylending classes, the administrative, professional, scientific & technological sections of the middle class, the labor contractors/jobbers who recruit and manage gangs of unregistered wage workers, and the regular wage workers.
One aspect of India’s underdevelopment has been its backwardness—a low level of development of the forces of production (the material means of production and labor-power) in significant parts of the economy, with these spheres dominated by mercantile, credit, and “semi-feudal” capital. Indeed, there has been a political and commercial alliance between the “semi-feudal” landowning classes and mercantile-cum-credit capital that has preserved the status and prerogatives of both. This, and the preservation of the large mass of oppressed peasants and other petty commodity producers/service providers, has been at the core of India’s underdeveloped capitalism. Importantly, this state of affairs has been concomitant with backward capitalist political, ideological, and cultural traits.
The huge reserve army of labor not only circumscribes the wage and other demands of the regular and casual wage workers, but also moderates the producer prices of the petty commodity producers/service providers in the overcrowded and intensely competitive supply-side of the markets in which the latter find themselves. Thus, without mincing words, it is possible to surmise that here was an underdeveloped capitalist system that enabled labor exploitation of criminal proportions, utterly denying the rights of hundreds of millions of human beings to even a bare subsistence.
SCOUNDRELS IN PATRIOTIC GARB
But, even while reflecting on the Indian system’s principal economic “crime,” there is a need to get back to the dreadful political crimes being committed, when MISA and DIR gave the government extraordinary powers to deal with not merely external threats but also what it perceived to be internal intimidation affecting its