Extract
Unfree labour as primitive accumulation?
Introduction
Anyone writing about the shape of a 21st-century labour regime is faced with a rather obvious problem. On the one hand, much political economy insists that 'fully functioning' capitalist enterprises cannot operate efficiently, let alone profitably, without workers who are free. On the other, there are numerous instances of 'fully functioning' capitalist enterprises the world over that introduce, reintroduce or reproduce labour relations that are unfree. Among the many examples, not only in areas of capitalist agriculture but also in some industrial urban contexts, are the following: debt bondage in India and Latin America; the continuing use of peonage, sweatshops and convict labour in the USA; the offshore programme in Canada (migrants from the Caribbean); contract migrant labour in white South African mining and industry and the sunbelt states in the USA; a resurgent gangmaster system in UK agribusiness; unfree plantation workers in West Africa; and the existence of unfree industrial labour both in the brick kilns of Pakistan and in the export processing zones of China. (1) Although the fact of the link between capitalism and unfree labour is finally being recognised, what to do about this in political terms is the subject of debate. Some have objected to the current focus on unfree labour--by, for example, the ILO--as a distraction from the wider issue of worker exploitation by capitalism generally. (2) However, a focus on unfree production relations does not deflect attention from capitalist exploitation of workers that are flee, but rather the opposite. Criticism of bonded labour leading to its elimination would in effect knock away the bottom rungs of the ladder that is the labour regime. This it would do by making it costlier to employ the reserve army of labour on which agrarian capitalist profitability and competitiveness depends, as unfree workers were converted (or reconverted) into free equivalents. Once this relational and price differential was eliminated, it would be easier for workers of different ethnic/regional/ national identities to unite, organise and fight as aproletariat in the Marxist sense of the term. As is well established historically, this is the kind of outcome capital everywhere has always feared. Hence the importance of addressing the link between capitalism and labour-power that is not free. Both non-Marxist and Marxist political economy, so the argument goes, adamantly dispute the acceptability to capitalist producers of unfree labour, maintaining rather that a 'fully functioning' accumulation process cannot operate efficiently--let alone profitably--without workers who are free. While this may be true of the way non-Marxist theory perceives...See the full content of this document
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