Dispossession Without Development by Levien Michael;

Author:Levien, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

One would be hard pressed to identify a less promising form of economic growth for rural India than “knowledge-intensive” services. As a sector requiring education and skills that are in short supply in India’s villages—a product of woeful investment in rural education over six decades (Dreze and Sen 2013)—and that is incapable of generating the sheer number of jobs required for pulling a growing rural population out of agriculture, India’s much heralded IT/ITES economy is an exceedingly poor basis for broad-based “development.” We have seen that it has almost entirely bypassed Rajpura, where even the most educated youth are still considered “unemployable” in its core jobs. Dispossessed for an enclave of India’s “knowledge economy,” Rajpura’s farmers were superfluous to its labor requirements. Because of India’s “footloose” migrant labor system, even the vast majority of construction jobs went to “outsiders.” A small minority found temporary and subcontracted support positions as security guards, gardeners, drivers, and janitors. These jobs in no way compensated for lost land and livestock, a reality illustrated by the fact that a job as an Infosys security guard paid less than the monthly income from two buffalo (and had a much shorter lifespan). Social welfare programs—though welcome while they were running—did little to replace land as a basis of household reproduction and security against a hostile labor market. Dispossessed of their land and livestock for real estate and knowledge-intensive growth that required their land but not their labor; dependent on the market for consumption at a time of drastic food inflation; confronted with the beating back of a major social welfare program that could have moderately cushioned the blow; Rajpurans became the object of Corporate Social Responsibility. These CSR initiatives represented, at best, a complete misreading of the village’s socio-economic hardships. Vocational training had no chance of bridging the gap between Rajpura’s youth and the core jobs in the SEZ, and the promotion of self-help and entrepreneurship as a path to “self-sufficiency” was a cruel joke in the wake of being dispossessed of their productive assets. So, while real estate speculation ultimately differentiated the fates of Rajpura’s residents, knowledge-intensive growth was almost uniformly exclusionary.

Marxists have historically seen dispossession as the process of creating a class of wage laborers. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, this functionalist logic takes the consequences of dispossession for its cause. Contemporary land grabs are driven by advanced capitalist demands for land. And in India, as in many parts of the Global South (Li 2010b), accelerating land dispossession is accompanied by decelerating labor absorption in the context of an already massive oversupply of labor. By the mid-19th century, Marx had already observed the tendency of capitalism to progressively displace labor with technology and thus generate an ever-expanding “population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements” (Marx 1977: 982). This “relative surplus population” could be augmented in “the more striking form of the extrusion of workers already employed, or the less evident, but not less real, form of a greater difficulty in absorbing the additional working population through its customary outlets” (1977: 983).

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