Wage Labour And Unfreedom In Agriculture

Focusing on an area in the vanguard of agricultural development in Southern India, this book questions how growth and technical change can take place in agriculture and yet leave the position of the labourers relatively unchanged.

This book addresses the question of how so much growth and technical change has occurred in Indian agriculture while the position of agricultural workers has remained relatively unchanged. Focusing on the employees, this study describes an area in Southern India which is known for agricultural development. The author discusses the increase in numbers and proportion of agricultural workers, the stagnation and marginal decline of wage rates and earnings, the property-less status of agricultural workers, consumption, and indebtedness. An original contribution to the study of markets and development studies, this work shows how limited the changes in agriculture are in India.

Historical debates about capitalism, unfreedom and primitive accumulation suggest Marxism accepts that, where class struggle is global, capitalists employ unfree workers. Labour-power as commodity means the free/unfree distinction informs the process of becoming, being, remaining, and acting as a proletariat.

While there has been a perceptible increase in per capita income and expenditure and possibly some decline in the incidence of poverty in India, what till remains is massive and will not be remedied quickly. Even with radical policies, to effect a large change in the shifts in income and occupational structures will take more than the rest of this century. In the welter of recent exchanges between the government and the oppostiion as well as between planners and market advocates on the strategy of growth, these issues have been largely obfuscated. This selection of articles from Economic and Political Weekly on different aspects of poverty, unemployment and income distribution will stimulate fresh discusssion of the many methodological and policy questions that remain unresolved.

There is a striking scarcity of work conducted on rural labour markets in the developing world, particularly in Africa. This book aims to fill this gap by bringing together a group of contributors who boast substantial field experience researching rural wage employment in various developing countries. It provides critical perspectives on mainstream approaches to rural/agrarian development, and analysis of agrarian change and rural transformations from a long-term perspective. This book challenges the notion that rural areas in low- and middle-income countries are dominated by self-employment. It purports that this conventional view is largely due to the application of conceptual frameworks and statistical conventions that are ill-equipped to capture labour market participation. The contributions in this book offer a variety of methodological lessons for the study of rural labour markets, focusing in particular on the use of mixed methods in micro-level field research, and more emphasis on capturing occupation multiplicity. The emphasis on context, history, and specific configurations of power relations affecting rural labour market outcomes are key and reoccurring features of this book. This analysis will help readers think about policy options to improve the quantity and quality of rural wage employment, their impact on the poorest rural people, and their political feasibility in each context.

Jan Breman analyses labour bondage in India's changing political economy from 1962 to 2017. Focusing on what has happened since Independence, he argues that colonial rule changed the country's agrarian economy. Capitalism has led to progressive inequality, lack of welfare and the exclusion of the dispossessed from mainstream society.

The twelve essays in this book demonstrate the importance of bringing history back into historical materialism. They combine the discussion of Marx's categories with historical work on a wide range of themes and periods (the early middle ages, 'Asiatic' regimes, agrarian capitalism, etc.).