What the Opposition needs to do in 2022
Seek a deeper engagement with the central fault line in India’s political economy today: The growing conflict between big capital and everyone else
The year 2021 was perhaps the worst year for the communist parties in post-Independence India. When the West Bengal election results were declared in May, the communists did not have even one representative in the assembly. This is a state where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) ran a government for a record 34 years from 1977 to 2011. The 2021 wipe-out was the culmination of the atrophying of the CPI(M) and its allies in the state, which started with the eruption of farmer protests at Singur and Nandigram against land acquisition for factories in 2006.
Ironically, it was farmers again who gave reason for cheer to not just the communists but also a wider spectrum of the Left-leaning Opposition in 2021. Faced with a spirited mass protest by farmers on the borders of the Capital, the Narendra Modi government announced a repeal of three controversial farm laws in November. This is a remarkable retreat, not just on the part of the government, but also a first since 1991 when a key “economic reform” has been rolled back in the face of popular resistance.
Whether the farmers’ protest inflicts political damage on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the forthcoming assembly elections is beside the point. The success of the protests signifies a growing challenge to what can loosely be described as a State-facilitated expansion of the footprint of big capital in the economy. What the farm laws sought to achieve — the policy was at least partly aimed at a growing corporate footprint in agriculture — is just one example. This is a trajectory that can be seen in many areas of the economy. Wholesale trade, especially in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), is one such, where a technology-driven model threatens to disintermediate the traditional wholesaler out of business. There are increasing reports of conflicts between traditional traders and FMCG companies.
This is capitalism at its destructive best if one were to use the concept of creative destruction advanced by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Big capital with the aid of big-tech is increasingly moving into businesses that were erstwhile outside its realm. The only difference is that this time, there might be nothing creative about the destruction. While everyone, from the government to markets, is celebrating the start-up boom in India, not enough questions have been asked on what this means for mass employment generation prospects, especially when it comes to the quality of jobs being created. For instance, there is now growing global recognition that the much-celebrated gig economy is increasingly becoming a cesspool of overworked, underpaid, and vulnerable workers.
While commentators and policymakers might not have noticed this, those at the receiving end are beginning to feel the pinch. The growing disillusionment with the promise of the new economy might have played an important role in attracting young people towards the farmers’ protests, as has been pointed out in an insightful paper published in the Journal of Peasant Studies by Satendra Kumar. The next generation of workers is increasingly realising that many new opportunities in the urban economy are not generating enough income to lead even a basic lifestyle. Home delivery workers are a case in point.
Marxists will describe this process as a renewed effort towards primitive capitalist accumulation where big capital increasingly dispossesses small capital in the garb of formalisation. Primitive capitalist or socialist accumulation is critical to the economic transformation of traditional economies into modern ones, where capitalists or the State invested the appropriated capital and the dispossessed were gainfully employed. But with technology becoming more capital-intensive, those who are at the receiving end of this process today do not have many job opportunities.
There is another key difference to this process in India, as far as the communists are concerned. Some of those losing out in this realignment of economic fortunes are the traditional “enemies” of the Indian communists (landlords and traders).
The future of the class struggle in India will not be how the old Left wanted it to be; best characterised by the “land to the tiller” slogan or labour strikes. It will also not be about giving everyone a government job. India is increasingly becoming a country where growth and inequality have swapped their desired trajectories. The former is experiencing deceleration, while the latter, in all likelihood, has gained momentum.
India’s Opposition has not given the class question any serious thought in decades. Post-reform regimes always believed that the key to achieving mass well-being was achieving a high rate of growth. If the United Progressive Alliance-era growth faltered on an unsustainable debt-driven boom, the current regime seems to have damaged the economy – this is even before the pandemic struck – in an unprecedented rush to achieve formalisation.
What we have seen so far are attempts to mitigate economic pain through cash transfers and an effort to resurrect redistributive politics in the social rather than economic realm. The demand for a caste census, aimed at diluting the 50% cap on reservations, is the biggest example of this. Not only are such attempts unlikely to pose a serious political challenge to the BJP, they will also ensure a diversion of precious fiscal and political resources, which need to be channelised if India has to overcome its long-term challenges at this critical juncture.
“To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter,” Karl Marx wrote in 1844. If there is one resolution the Opposition needs to make in 2022, it should be to seek a deeper engagement with the central fault line in India’s political economy today: The growing conflict between big capital and everyone else.