Acceptance Speech for World Marxian Economics Award (IV)

Abstract

June 17, 2016Ladies and gentleman, delegates and students,I feel honored to receive this award. I also take this opportunity to congratulate the other awardees. I do not however see this award as a celebration of me as an individual. Every individual is constituted by a certain set of influences, by people around him with whom he shares his thoughts. I have been fortunate that in the university where I teach, namely the Jawaharlal Nehru University, I have been able to interact with a large number of outstanding colleagues and students. I am grateful to them and this award belongs as much to them as to me.I think when we talk about globalization, there is only one aspect of it that is usually discussed, namely, the opening of doors by different countries to the free flow of commodities and capital. There is however another aspect that is scarcely ever talked about, namely, the withdrawal of the State from its role of supporting, promoting and protecting petty production, including peasant agriculture. As a matter of fact, with the pursuit of neoliberal policies, everywhere in the world we find that the profitability of petty production has come down, including of peasant agriculture, which undermines its viability. We have effectively seen what Marx had called a process of primitive accumulation of capital in the form of a squeeze imposed on the incomes of petty producers.I had the good fortune to work at the Kerala State Planning Board between 2006 and 2011. When I was there, we made a simple calculation. Suppose we look at the entire traditional fishing sector and assume that every fisherman gets the statutory minimum daily wage fixed by the government, then it turns out that the sector will have a negative surplus. This basically means that the entire traditional fisheries sector survives because the fishermen accept a daily earning that is below the statutory minimum daily wage.That is the kind of the squeeze we find on petty production. In peasant agriculture, the impact of this squeeze has been evident in the very large number of peasant suicides in India, over two hundred thousand in the last fifteen years, which shows no sign of coming down. Under the neoliberal policies being pursued, there has been a withdrawal of government subsidies which were being given earlier, resulting in a rise in costs, including in the cost of credit, and this has happened even as the earlier system of government price support for peasants' crops has been dismantled. Banks, including even the nationalized banks which still constitute the dominant segment of Indian banking, no longer provide subsidized institutional credit to the peasants which they are statutorily required to do. The peasants therefore are forced to borrow from a newly created class of private moneylenders who give them loans at exorbitant rates of interest.As the viability of petty production, and of peasant agriculture in particular, is undermined by neoliberalism, many peasants continue to stay on where they are; but many flee to cities in the hope of finding a job. Such jobs however are not being created in adequate numbers. According to the National Sample Survey (NSS), the growth in employment, in the sense of decent or proper employment, is not large enough to absorb the natural increase in the workforce, let alone the displaced petty producers flocking into urban India in search of work. We find therefore, under neo-liberalism, a swelling of casual employment, intermittent employment, and disguised unemployment.All of this actually constitutes a swelling of the ranks of the reserve army labor, which in turn means that even the real wages of organized workers do not increase. As a result the entire working people, by which I mean the peasants, the petty producers, the agricultural laborers, and the urban blue-collar workers including even the organized workers, experiences an absolute decline in its standard of life. …