To read the pervasive commentary in the economic sections of the world’s newspapers on what the globalising neoliberal turn in political economy has wrought in the last four decades or so in the Global South, one would think it has all been for the good—their economies have been uniformly growing, as has their middle class, and their poverty has been reduced. In the case of India, there is constant talk of it as poised to become a great economic power in the near future, to say nothing of its prestige on the international canvas as a nuclear power.
Yet, serious economic analysis has fundamentally challenged this as, in one crucial respect, downright false. Measurement of poverty in India, by criteria that are sound rather than skewed, points to increased immiseration of the worst-off in numbers as large as ever, despite a swelling middle class.
A puzzle arises then as to why, given this growing immiseration, there has been no explosion of social unrest. A familiar answer points to how populations are deflected from their suffering by the politics of identity, Hindutva politics in India being a conspicuous example. There is, no doubt, some truth in this. But deflections of that sort cannot for long prevent the intolerability of the suffering—especially if it is as extreme as studies have shown it to be—from prompting popular anger and agency. So, the puzzle remains.
In recent years, the influential work of economist Kalyan Sanyal implies a different explanation. Its argument in summary form is this. Capitalism in recent decades in countries like India dispossesses the peasantry from their land but cannot absorb them in industrial labour, as was done in Europe in earlier centuries (nor even in what Karl Marx called the ‘reserve army’). It thus creates a very large population that is outside of the corporate capitalist political economy, hence unable to morph into a unified class formation with the familiar potential for forging the agencies of resistance attributed to the ‘proletariat’ in an earlier phase of capitalism.
But, Sanyal argues, at least in democratic societies, the State cannot ignore their condition to the point that they simply will perish in large numbers. Invoking ideas from philosopher Michel Foucault, Sanyal suggests that in our neoliberal times various ‘governmental technologies’ respond to the demands made in a very disaggregated form (there being no unified proletariat with the cement of internal solidarities) by different sections of this immiserated population—some seeking shelter as squatters, as it might be, others seeking loans till they are able to find some work, yet others seeking cash transfers or direct delivery of food to meet the most elemental needs.
These are, essentially, ameliorative accommodations that various state institutions—national or regional—make when the demands for them from one or another section of the population seem unignorable and, qua accommodations, they are not always subsumable under the framework of what the law permits. It may often be that the State’s motivations for these arrangements are to gain electoral favour from that particular demographic.
Such claims for ‘governmentality’, thus, can be seen as directly addressing the puzzle I have raised. But it is important to find the right description of the model it posits, and not to see it as claiming more than it does. If these ameliorations end up being too big a strain on capitalist accumulation, they may well be withheld by the State and the capitalist economies that States by and large serve in democratic societies. (Indeed, we might view Donald Trump’s deportations of immigrants today as seeking to reverse the previous governments’ accommodations of undocumented immigrants—a case of finessing the law, which the model recognises—claiming that they are a drain on capital accumulation, removing which would accrue more benefits for citizens ‘proper’.) The model is thus delicately poised, a sort of equilibrium fulfilling opposing demands—of capital and those that capital renders most abjectly immiserated.
What would be wrong are the descriptions often given of the model as representing a critique of neoliberal capitalism. A highly deprived population group can resist the worst effects of neoliberalism by demanding and getting such accommodations; but that resistance does not amount to a critique of neoliberalism. There can be no notion of a critique of x that does not propose some method that can at least constrain—and perhaps, if the constraints are recursively developed, go on to undermine—x. But Sanyal describes accommodations within a neoliberal political economy. Constraining or undermining is not so much as sought.
No doubt, this modesty in what is sought owes to the fact that capital in our time is able to constantly destabilise more ambitious efforts of States to constrain capital so as to provide the most basic necessities to their citizens. It is not in the nature of capitalism to tolerate such constraints for very long.
Yet, we might ask, is it so unredeemably utopian to aspire to a regime of fundamental economic rights—to food, housing, health, and extending to work and education—to tackle the immiseration? I say fundamental rights—and mean it. I don’t mean policies devised by a cabinet and their routine ratification in legislatures. I mean rights inserted in the core of the Constitution that cannot be overturned by anything less than a re-formation of a constituent assembly. Rights in this fundamental sense possess a feature that speaks directly to the tendencies of capital to destabilise the constraints on it.
They are commitments in a very special sense, they are Ulysses-like. Recall that Ulysses’s commitment to Penelope was such that he tied himself to the mast so that even when he was seduced by the sirens’ song, he was compelled to keep his faith. If economic rights were commitments in that stable sense and, if in order to implement them, one has to put certain constraints on capital, then those constraints would, eo ipso, have a transitive stability.
I can almost hear the protest: “These are outdated ideas, the Indian economy cannot afford the expenditures required to meet such commitments.” But sober and careful estimates of the financial resources needed have suggested that it can be raised by imposing only two taxes on only the top 1 percent of the population: a 2 percent wealth tax, and an inheritance tax of one-third on whatever annual sums are involved in the transfers specified in wills.
To call this a utopian proposal is, quite literally, to perceive a molehill as a mountain. What it needs is the political will to propose it and to construct an appropriate public discourse by which the electorate can be persuaded to adopt it. There is nothing intrinsically heroic—neither Herculean, nor Promethean—about the tasks themselves. But in the current ideological climate, it does take common humanity to summon the will to pursue them and then to stay the course in their pursuit when the hegemon of globalised finance puts obstacles in their path. Is the INDIA bloc listening?
Akeel Bilgrami | Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, and Professor, Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University
(Views are personal)