tom brass reply to jairus banaji

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Why Unfree Labour is Not‘So-Called’: The Fictions ofJairus BanajiTom BrassPublished online: 05 Aug 2006.

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Debate

Why Unfree Labour is Not ‘So-Called’: The Fictions of Jairus Banaji

TOM BRASS

In a recent critique of the deproletarianization thesis, which links thereproduction of unfree labour mainly – but not only – in Third Worldagriculture to class struggle prosecuted by capitalist producers,Banaji maintains in effect that there is no such thing as unfreelabour. Equating the latter with nineteenth-century liberal ideasabout freedom as consent, he conceptualizes all historical workingarrangements simply as ‘disguised’ wage-labour that is free, atheoretically problematic claim first made during the Indian mode ofproduction debate. Such a view, it is argued here, ignores the factthat unfree workers get paid and also appear in the labour market,but not as sellers of their own commodity. Moreover, by abolishingthe free/unfree labour distinction, and adopting instead the view thatall rural workers are simply ‘disguised’ hired labourers who arecontractually ‘free’, Banaji aligns himself with anti-Marxist theoryin general, and neoclassical economic historiography in particular.

‘The analysis of the commodity constitutes the starting point of the Marxistsystem. Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism is primarily levelled against thisanalysis.’ – Rudolf Hilferding, Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx.

‘A Spanish hacendado in Oaxaca locked his Yaqui serfs up at night in oneroom so small they had to sleep on top of each other. With revolution, theynailed him to the door of his beautiful mansion.’ – The acceptability of debtpeonage to rural workers in late nineteenth-century Mexico, as recounted byBeals [1932: 306].

Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at the University ofCambridge, UK. E-mail address: [email protected]

The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.31, No.1, October 2003, pp.101–136ISSN 0306-6150DOI: 10.1080/0306615031000169143 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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INTRODUCTION

Of the many theoretical issues raised in the course of the 1960s/1970sdebate about the mode of production in Indian agriculture, the nature of thecapitalism/coercion link remains not only unresolved but perhaps also themost contentious.1 The two following decades saw a welcome re-engagement by development studies generally, and Marxist approaches inparticular, with what used to be one of their central theoretical concerns: theissue of unfree labour.2 This re-engagement has, however, not been withoutits problems: free labour continues to be equated unproblematically withcapitalism, and conversely, where this is not the case, there is frequently atendency to overlook prefiguring arguments concerning the fact of, andreasons for, a capitalism/unfreedom link. In the 1980s, mine was virtuallythe only voice arguing from a Marxist viewpoint that unfree labour was notonly unfree but was – and is – a relation of production that capitalists findvery acceptable.3 Suddenly, however, it seems as if everyone is not onlywriting about the way in which unfree labour is still very much with us, howcontemporary forms of unfreedom are sought out and reproduced by capital,but also claiming to have ‘discovered’ this capitalism/unfreedom link in thefirst place.4 Some even maintain, incorrectly, that this is what they haveargued all along.5

Others, by contrast, refuse to recognize the existence of a connectionbetween capitalism and unfree labour. According to this view, the presence ofunfree production relations stemmed from a failure of capitalism to develop,the assumption being that once the latter process got under way, unfreeworkers would everywhere and always be replaced with hired labour that wasfree. Between the 1960s and 1990s this interpretation amounted to orthodoxy,and its adherents included not only most bourgeois economists but also somevarieties of Marxism. Among them were exponents of the semi-feudal thesisand the articulation of modes of production framework, who interpret unfreelabour as a non- or pre-capitalist relation of production. Both these viewpointsperceived unfree relations as a sign of economic backwardness, irrationalobstacles to growth, and thus incompatible with capitalism. Such relationalforms were accordingly contrasted to free wage-labour which becametheoretically both a precondition for an economically dynamic commercialagriculture, and thus evidence for a transition to capitalism. One of those whosubscribed to this epistemology was Jairus Banaji, who participated in theoriginal debate about the mode of production in Indian agriculture, and hasnow tried to resuscitate this argument in the course of criticizing my theoryabout deproletarianization, to which this is a reply.6

What follows, therefore, is in an important sense fallout from the modeof production debate that took place three decades ago, in the form of an

102 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

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attempt by one of the participants to reassert the validity of his – and its –dominant theoretical framework (wage-labour = hired labour = capitalistrelation, therefore paid labour = free wage-labour). Coercion is ubiquitous,maintains Banaji, and has been applied historically to all known forms ofworking arrangement. For this reason, he argues, no distinction has existed– or can exist – between free and unfree labour. Because in his opinion I am‘unsure’ as to whether hired workers have been, are or can be unfree, heaccuses me of failing to recognize that the debt bondage relation is nothingother than free wage-labour . This – together with myriad other issues suchas the fact that capital exploits kin workers in the peasant household, thatcapitalist regulation operates at the level of the employing class and not theindividual employer, and the significance of the formal/real subsumptionargument – escapes my notice, and is missing from the analysis containedin my book. The latter, according to him, subscribes to the idea of‘consent’/contract embodied in the nineteenth-century liberal notion of freelabour. Needless to say, the reality is not merely different from the one hedescribes, but much rather the opposite of what he claims to be the case.

The many assertions made by Banaji, about my work and his, are quitesimply wrong. Not only does he ascribe to me views that I do not hold, buthe then presents against me the very arguments that I myself have madepreviously, the inference being that these are issues about which – unlikehim – I have nothing to say.7 Conversely, the positions he now criticizes arefound not in my work but his. This is not the first time Banaji hasmisunderstood/misrepresented the arguments made by those he challenges,a fact that emerges clearly both from the retractions contained in thefootnotes of his published articles and the comments by others on the wayhe caricatures arguments made by those with whom he disagrees.8 To thisalready extensive catalogue of errors are now added the inaccuracies,distortions and misrepresentations set out below.

As interesting theoretically is the political identity of those Banajisummons in defence of his argument. The real point of substance betweenus – his insistence that no difference exists between free and unfree labour,and that this is a Marxist view – is one that he defends by invoking theauthority of anti-Marxist neoclassical economic historiography andpostmodernism. This is not accidental, since both the latter have one thingin common with Banaji: an attempt to banish the concept of unfree labour,by claiming that it is nothing other than a form of free wage-labour. Thereason why he finds himself in the company of neoclassical economichistorians such as Steinfeld is not difficult to discern. Hence the focus ofBanaji is on the wage, from which he concludes that all relational formsinvolving payment are nothing more than ‘disguised’ wage-labour, to whichhe frequently and contradictorily appends the term ‘free’. The result is an

103WHY UNFREE LABOUR IS NOT ‘SO CALLED’

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essentialist and a-historical approach that in effect collapses both therelational and systemic differences between ancient society and moderncapitalism.

By contrast, my focus is on the way the distinction between free andunfree labour informs and shapes class formation and class struggle, adynamic whereby deproletarianization is one method of workforcedecomposition/recomposition used historically by capital to restructure itslabour process. Unlike Steinfeld, on whose interpretation of contract Banajibases his own view, for me the element of freedom lies not in the fact of thecontract itself, but rather on the ability of workers to exit from these samerelations subsequently – that is, the retention/reproduction of the capacitypersonally to recommodify their labour-power. Because he says little aboutclass struggle, Banaji fails to understand fully the central role in the latterprocess of unfree labour, capitalist restructuring and deproletarianization. Itis equally clear, moreover, that the all-embracing notion of coercion utilizedby him is one that he does not problematize, nor is it applied by Marx to freelabour. Not only is the free/unfree distinction important, therefore, butwithout it a Marxist theorization of a systemically and historically specifictransition from capitalism to socialism remains impossible.

MUCH ADO

To say, as Banaji does, that I am ‘unsure whether wage labourers can beunfree’, and that consequently I ignore or am unaware of the connectionbetween wage-labour and unfreedom, is palpably nonsensical.9 Theabsurdity of this claim is evident from even a cursory glance at what I havewritten, since issues such as the wage form itself, the payment of wages toand receipt of wages by unfree labour feature throughout my book.10 Thusthe focus of the first chapter, dealing with the definition of unfreedom, islargely on the link between worker indebtedness and the wage form/level,and how in particular the object of decommodifying labour-power is(among other things) conceptually to separate the worker from the notion ofa wage and the value he/she produces.11 When considering gender and agespecific forms of unfree labour, a central issue for me is the fact that wagesare paid not to women and/or child labourers but to senior kin.12 Similarly,my analysis of the methodological difficulties in identifying the existence ofunfree labour simply from official wage data is based precisely on the factthat undisaggregated wage levels fail to indicate who appropriates (andwhy) from the workers concerned [Brass, 1999: 24–7].

The same is true of the chapters presenting case-study materials fromPeru, Bihar, Punjab, and Haryana, where I document ad nauseam instancesof wages received by unfree workers [Brass, 1999: chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, and


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7]. How, otherwise, would it be possible to characterize unfree labour inthese (and other) contexts as cheap, without addressing the issues of wagesand wage differentials between it and free labour?13 Moreover, how can I beaccused of failing to take into account unfree wage-labour when one of theforms of unfreedom (= reverse bondage) considered by me is precisely thewithholding of wages, or the keeping back of payment owed by employersto workers, a practice whose object is to prevent them from leaving andsimultaneously to compel them to borrow for subsistence purposes?14 Eachcase study in my book makes it clear that wages are paid to all those whomI classify as unfree labour: indeed, in extending the concept of unfreedomthe way I do, to cover non-permanent forms of agricultural worker (migrant,seasonal, daily) who are not able personally to commodify their labour-power, it would be impossible not to address the issue of unfree wage-labour. So much for Banaji’s claim about my ‘being unsure’ as to whetherwage-labourers can be unfree.

The fact that many of the arguments made now by Banaji have beenmade before, not by him but by me, does not prevent him from attemptingto convey the opposite impression. Hence the claims that unfreedom iscompatible with capitalism, that exponents of the semi-feudal thesis arewrong for not recognizing this, and that debt-servitude is a method ofcontrolling workers, all made by Banaji as though no one else had realizedthem, are not only central to my own case about deproletarianization (seebelow) but also ones that I have made repeatedly over the years ineverything that I have written on the subject.15 When observing that ‘amajority of Marxists are probably still reluctant to abandon the comfortingidea that slavery precludes capitalism “because” capitalism is founded onfree labour’, therefore, Banaji manages to convey a doubly misleadingimpression [Banaji, 2003: 81]. First, that this is a view with which Idisagree (I don’t), and second, that it is his view (it isn’t: see below). Thesame applies to his assertion about the cash advances made by employers toworkers not being interest-bearing debt but rather a method of keepingwages low, a view that is in fact no different from mine.16

Equally odd is his inference that kinship is a dimension missing from myanalysis of the way in which capital exploits rural workers. When Banajistates that ‘the liberal conception of capitalism which sees the sole basis ofaccumulation in the individual wage-earner conceived as a free labourerobliterates a great deal of capitalist history, erasing the contribution of[family] units of labour-power’, therefore, he creates a doubly inaccurateimpression: namely, that he himself addresses the class position of kinlabour within the peasant household whilst I by contrast fail to do this[Banaji, 2003: 82]. Needless to say, the situation is not as Banaji describes:it is he, not I, who has failed hitherto to problematize both the class position


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of and the control exercised over kin labour within the peasant household.Again, the connection between kinship and class (= kinship-as-class) hasbeen central to all I have written about unfree labour, my argument beingthat one of the most effective ways for capital to enforce debt-servicinglabour obligations is through the formal/informal control embodied inactual/fictive kin ideology exercised through kin networks. Not only do thelatter correspond to class relationships, therefore, but such pressure can besustained even when workers migrate and where unfree labour is illegal.

As strange is his opinion that I subscribe to a nineteenth-century liberalnotion of consent embodied in the free labour contract. About this it ispossible to make the following observations. To begin with, Banaji not onlymisrepresents my views but does so by placing them in the wrong category.Marx, Banaji accepts, uses the term in two specific ways: ‘free labour isboth defined historically and contested ideologically’ [Banaji, 2003: 74].Put slightly differently, for Marx free labour is a relation that for a varietyof non-free workers (slaves, serfs, etc.) is an achievement historically, butan achievement which nevertheless does not signal the end of struggle,merely a new phase: within capitalism, and this time for socialism. Thesetwo distinct and contrasting aspects of freedom are free labour as the apogeeand thus the legitimation of capitalism, and free labour as both the outcomeof class struggle under capitalism and simultaneously a precursor andnecessary condition of a transition to socialism. Whereas the first meaningcorresponds to ‘consent’ as understood by bourgeois economics, the secondby contrast informs Marxist theory about continuation of class struggle inorder to transcend capitalism. Whereas Marxism and liberalism bothprivilege free labour, therefore, each draws a very different conclusion fromits presence. Rather than connecting my arguments to the second of thesetwo meanings – where they belong – he wrongly links them to the first.

The same is true of ‘consent’: here, too, Banaji is simply wrong tomaintain that I perceive free labour as a ‘voluntary’ contract.17 Much ratherthe opposite, since I equate contract with unfree relations (e.g., recruitmentby labour contractors) and make clear that it signals the presence of aproduction relation which deprives the labourer of consent. Contrary to hisassertion, I do in fact problematize the liberal interpretation of ‘consent’:indeed, how could I not, given that my critique is aimed specifically atneoclassical economic historiography?18 Neither is it correct that I perceivethe worker simply as an individual (= nineteenth-century liberal view) asdistinct from class: once again, the exact opposite is the case, since – likeMarx – I maintain that the worker is an individual who is also andsimultaneously a member of a particular class.19 My argument is that oneimportant object of deproletarianization is precisely the attempt byemployers to shift the identity of the worker from one (= worker-as-part-of-


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a-collective) to the other (= worker-as-individual). Nor is it true that I‘conceive capitalism entirely from standpoint of individual capital’, thereby‘ignoring the fact that the logic that regulates capitalist economy is,necessarily, that of total social capital’. Indeed it is, and I make just thispoint: hence my argument concerns the need of capitalists as a class tocontrol workers as a class. This is exactly the reason why I take issue withneoclassical economic historians who question the feasibility of inter-employer collusion – i.e., an agreement among employers not to poach oneanother’s workers – where clearly this would be contrary to the interests ofindividual capitalists. Against this, I have argued that they refrain fromdoing so precisely in order to maintain the unity of capitalists as a class, andstop wages rising.20

Significantly, Banaji remains silent about the fact that many of thepositions he now criticizes are found not in my work, as he maintains, butrather in his. One would not guess, for example, that a free labour contractis a concept to which he himself subscribes (see below). Nor is theremention of the fact that this nineteenth-century ‘liberal/individualist notionof wage labour’ is one to which he also adheres. First, when describing the‘specifically capitalist’ characteristic of what he terms ‘disguised’ wagelabourers as being that they were ‘not free to dispose of their crop as theychose’ [Banaji, 1978: 387]. And second, when observing that ‘J B Smith,orthodox Free Trader and president of the Manchester Chamber ofCommerce argued that the Indian peasant was not a “free agent” but in thrallto moneylenders’, a view that according to Banaji was ‘fundamentallycorrect’ [Banaji, 1978: 414]. He also fails to point out that the case about theepistemological link between liberalism and unfree labour has been madeearlier, and better, by Kerr [1997] and Rao [1999].

The attempt to present arguments I have made as though I have not madethem remains wholly bizarre and – until linked to both the analogousexclusion by Banaji of my contributions from the debate about formal/realsubsumption, and his correspondingly partial account of the latter –inexplicable.21 Hence the assertion that between 1979 and 1990 ‘[o]ver adecade passes without any substantial theoretical discussion of these issues’is not just incorrect, but one that he must know to be incorrect.22 In makingthis claim, therefore, Banaji manages to overlook the numerouscontributions by me to this discussion that appeared throughout the 1980s.23

All the latter used a Marxist analytical framework to explain theacceptability to capitalism of unfree labour, arguing that far from attemptingto eliminate unfree relations that were invariably characterized in theliterature about economic development as ‘pre-capitalist’ archaic remnants,capitalist producers in many Third World countries actually preferred anunfree workforce, because it was easier to control and thus cheaper.24 For


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this reason, I argued, the incidence of bonded labour was increasing, andthus much greater than generally supposed.

That Banaji’s account involves not just omission but also commission isevident from his observations about the work of Mundle, which managessimultaneously to combine silence about my earlier defence of the latterwith claims about his own non-existent and/or problematic support for thesame work. In defending Mundle against the criticisms made byRamachandran in 1990, therefore, Banaji conveys the impression that untilhis own principled championing of Mundle’s work, no one apart from himhad noticed it, let alone defended it against critics. Such a claim fails tomention that I, too, have defended the views of Mundle, both earlier andagainst exponents of the semi-feudal thesis.25 Also omitted is the fact that,until now, Banaji has made no mention of Mundle, let alone defended thelatter against the criticisms made of his work. It is clear, moreover, that hisdefence of Mundle is nothing more than self-endorsement, since he claimsthat Mundle’s work is based on his own.26 For Banaji, the real missing heroof this debate is not Mundle – whose work on bonded labour is reduced toa subsidiary role, its author depicted as a ventriloquist dummy merelyrelaying the words of another – but Banaji himself.27 The inaccurate, not tosay condescending, nature of this claim is evident from a number of things.First, the fact that the text which Banaji identifies as the source of Mundle’sarguments about bonded labour has nothing to do with unfree labour, a pointits author has himself conceded.28 Second, and linked to the foregoing, theanalysis by Mundle of the connection between unfree labour and the processof formal/real subsumption is obviously based on Marx, and makes nomention of Banaji.29 Third, when Mundle cites Banaji he also cites theunpublished thesis by Arvind Das as an equally influential source, a co-starring role about which Banaji remains curiously silent.30 And fourth,unlike Banaji, Mundle does not regard bonded labour in relational termssimply as another form of hired labour, nor does he subscribe to Banaji’sproblematic view that no difference exists between free and unfree labour.31

Why Deproletarianization Matters

On the face of it, it is difficult to understand why Banaji should attempt bothto misrepresent my views about unfree labour and to exclude them from thedebate about this subject. Over the years I have argued at length and inmany different publications that in the course of class struggle capitalrestructures its workforce by replacing free labour with unfree equivalents,a process of workforce decomposition/recomposition I termdeproletarianization. The latter entails both economic and ideologicaldecommodification, since preventing workers from selling their labour-power also conceptually devalorizes the wage form.32 For this reason, the


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free/unfree distinction is not only important, but its significance extendsbeyond the usual restriction of this transformation to a particular ‘moment’of historical transition – from feudalism to capitalism – and locates it not asa ‘moment’ but as a process within capitalism itself. Theorized thus,unfreedom becomes a crucial and twofold part of the class struggle wagedby capital to ensure the reproduction of the capitalist system. On the onehand, therefore, workforce restructuring involving the replacement of freeworkers by unfree equivalents, or the conversion of the former into thelatter, enables capital to combat economic crisis by cheapening the cost oflabour-power. On the other, this same process of workforcedecomposition/recomposition permits capital to restructure class relationsin its labour process, the object of deproletarianization being either toundermine or to pre-empt working class consciousness/solidarity andagency based on this.33 To both these ends, capital decomposes theproletariat and similtaneously recomposes its workforce as unfree labour –with or without wages and contract.

The historical and contemporary significance of deproletarianization,and its implications for the direction taken by class struggle, as capitalismbecomes global, is not difficult to discern. As Marx himself pointed out, itis precisely in the existence of a space between unfree and free labour –dismissed by Banaji as ‘formalism’ – and the desirability not just of atransition from one to the other but also the reproduction of proletarianselfhood once achieved, that workers are afforded the opportunity andpossibility of a shift in and retention of a specifically working classconsciousness, through the realization of the fact of the appropriation fromthem of value they produce.34 Hence the more perceptive observers note thatin the UK and Germany during the 1930s capitalist crisis the replacement offree wage-labour with unfree workers was designed both to lower wagecosts by restructuring the capitalist labour process and simultaneously toweaken trade union organization and break down working classconsciousness/solidarity.35 The freedom secured by foreign migrants inGermany at the end of the First World War was short-lived, and unfreelabour which re-emerged at the beginning of the 1930s increased fromvirtually nothing to around 43 per cent of the workforce during the mid-1940s.36 Fascism merely represented the culmination of and continuity withthe more general process of capitalist response to crisis, and an importantreason for the deployment of unfree labour (low-paid foreign workers,concentration camp prisoners) was to undermine working class resistance torestrictions on mass consumption, thereby permitting capital investment inrearmament [Roth, 1997]. In a context where full employment mightotherwise generate pay increases, deproletarianization enabled capital tomaintain wages at the level of the 1930s Depression.


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Much the same is true of late twentieth-century capitalism in the so-called Third World, where a consequence of the rising incidence oflandlessness is that the labour force is increasingly composed of workerswho sell not the product of their labour but rather labour-power itself.Accordingly, unfree labour of one sort or another can be introduced orreintroduced by industrial capitalists, agribusiness enterprises and/or richpeasants, all of whom employ it in preference to existing free wage-labour.This has occurred not only in the United States (prison labour and peonagein the American South, migrant farm workers from Mexico and CentralAmerica, H-2 contract labour from Jamaica employed in the Floridasugarcane industry, workfare schemes, sweatshops) and South Africa (theapartheid system), but also in India (debt bondage) and Latin America (theenganche system).37 Where such workers, who earlier have personallycommodified their own labour-power, subsequently become unfree (theirlabour-power either ceasing to be a commodity, or being commodified bysomeone other than themselves), what has occurred is a relationaltransformation that corresponds to deproletarianization. These workers arestill landless, they still work for someone else on a permanent, seasonal orcasual basis, they can still be employed in conjunction with advancedproductive forces, they still receive cash wages, they may be migrants orwork locally, and (under the control of a contractor, or in the form ofchanging masters) their labour-power can still circulate in the labourmarket, but – and this is the crux of the issue – they are no longer ablepersonally to sell their own labour-power. This is a theoretical position thathas remained constant for the past two decades, and has been defended byme against numerous critiques by neoclassical economic historians,postmodernists, and exponents of the semi-feudal thesis.38

ABOUT NOTHING?

Rather than attempting an in-depth examination, both of my argumentsabout unfree labour and the data presented in support of them, Banajimerely restates his own (much criticized) position developed some threedecades ago.39 There he attempted to differentiate what he claimed was the‘authentic’ meaning of wage-labour, the one that Marx used, from thosedefinitions he dismissed as ‘inauthentic’ and ‘vulgar marxist’. CriticizingDobb for arguing that the mode of production is deducible from relations ofproduction, Banaji accused him of equating coercion simply with feudalismand serfdom, the inference being that consequently Dobb was unable tomake the epistemological connection between unfreedom and accumulation[Banaji, 1977: 6]. The definition to which Banaji objected then, and objectsstill, is the view of wage-labour as a commodity that results from separation


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from the means of production (= dispossession), a conceptualization hedismisses as a ‘simple category’ and thus un-Marxist.40 In its place, heproposes a concept which in his view not only operates at ‘a deeper level ofabstraction’, where ‘wage-labour [is] capital-positing, capital-creatinglabour’, but is one to which Marx himself adhered.

About these definitions, and their ‘authenticity’/‘inauthenticity’ in termsof Marxist theory, the following comments can be made. In support both ofhis own conceptualization, and also of his criticisms of what he deems theincorrect view, Banaji invokes the authority of what Marx himself wrote onpage 463 of the Grundrisse.41 The latter page, however, contains things notmentioned by Banaji. There Marx states quite clearly that free labour is interms of a consciousness of labour as the property of the self animprovement (= ‘advance’) over the way this relation is perceived by unfreeworkers.42 On the same (and the following) page, moreover, it is statedunequivocally that – in addition to the separation of the worker from ‘themeans of existence… the means of self-preservation of living labourcapacity’, a capacity of capital to reproduce both the existing and surplus‘living labour capacity’, and value creation – a workforce composed ofwage-labour is premised on the existence of ‘a free exchange relation’ and‘not on the master-servant relation’ between it and capital [Marx, 1973:463–4]. Neither is it true – as Banaji asserts – that Dobb equates compulsionwith pre-capitalist relations of production, since the latter recognized that,even in metropolitan capitalist contexts (the US, Europe) during the mid-twentieth century, capital has imposed unfreedom on labour where marketconditions favoured workers and not employers.43 Similarly, in invoking theauthority of Lenin, Banaji fails to mention that he, too, subscribed to thefree/unfree labour distinction.44

This in turn highlights the problematic notion of class that Banajiinherits from his earlier theoretical flirtation with the semi-feudal thesis andthe ‘colonial’ mode of production.45 The difficulty lies not with theperception of the moneylending rich peasant as capitalist but rather with theway he categorizes those at the other end of the agrarian class structure, thecolonial workforce.46 The latter, according to Banaji, were what he termed‘disguised’ wage-labour, a working arrangement whereby smallholders inthe colonies continued to operate their own labour process, but no longer asindependent units of production. The reproduction of such units wasgoverned by capital, and when the simple commodity enterprise operated inthis fashion, it no longer had its ‘own laws of motion’ but was instead ‘aquasi-enterprise with the specific social function of wage labour’ [Banaji,1977: 34]. The price which the producer received for the enforced sale ofhis/her crop was now ‘a concealed wage’, since ‘disguised’ wage-labourworked mainly on its own land and not that of – or for – others. For Banaji,


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therefore, rural households are not differentiated internally along class lines(= peasants-as-workers), composed of family members who in the mainactually sell their personal labour-power to others. Rather, he perceives therural household mainly as a unitary form (= peasant-as-cultivator),composed of family members all of whom receive a ‘hidden’ wage forgrowing crops on their own land.47 In nineteenth-century colonized ‘peasantnations’, therefore, capital integrated peasant economy into commodityproduction ‘by a process called “forced commercialization”’, which did notrequire dispossession of the direct producer, since s/he continued to work onhis/her own land.48

Why Every Relation is Not ‘Disguised’ Wage-Labour

The resulting problems Banaji has with the existence of historically specificcomponents of a working class, and where capitalism is present hisreduction of them all to ‘disguised’ wage-labour, are fourfold.49 First,because he perceives rural households as cultivators who are not in the maindispossessed, and as such cultivate produce for capital, Banaji dismisses theneed for capital either to dispossess producers or to form a labour market.50

Second, he fails to recognize that ‘forced commercialization’ of peasantcultivation is not the same as bonded labour.51 Whereas debt bondage entailsthe appropriation by capital from indebted workers of surplus-value, forcedcommercialization can involve the appropriation of surplus product byagribusiness from what are in fact other small agrarian capitalists.52 Third,notwithstanding that the ‘disguised’ wage-labour is that of smallholdingpeasants, such cultivators are termed by him a ‘proletariat’, despite the factthat they are separated neither from the control of a particular employer –they are unfree as a consequence of being indebted to ‘monied capitalists’ –nor from their means of labour (land).53 And fourth, because he is unsure asto whether or not debt bondage is actually a capitalist relation, Banaji’stheory is unable to account for the fact that rich peasant households can anddo become accumulators of capital using intra-kin coercion.54 Rather thanoriginating externally and affecting all household members uniformly,therefore, such compulsion operates from within the peasant householditself, and affects only the landless members of these same units.

The difficulties to which his kind of theorization (= a proletariatcomposed of peasants) give rise are evident from Banaji’s confusion aboutthe historical development of capitalism in India and its connection with theexpansion of the working class, a lack of clarity shared by Breman.55 Havingproclaimed confidently that a ‘rapid growth of [India’s] working classduring the First World war and its aftermath was co-terminous with anexpansion of national capital’, Banaji subsequently admitted that ‘asubstantial modern proletariat would emerge only after Independence, with


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the new period of capital expansion that started in the [nineteen] fifties’.56

Significantly, the concept of peasant-as-cultivator is also a legacy of thesemi-feudal thesis: for exponents of the latter, therefore, although capitalreproduces the peasant household economically, it nevertheless remainsexternal to it. Another legacy, shared by semi-feudalism and the ‘colonial’mode of production alike, is the view of the colonial state as the mainexploiter of the Indian peasant, albeit ‘mediated’ by ‘monied capitalists’[Banaji, 1978: 364, 379].

What all this suggests is the following. Disclaimers notwithstanding,therefore, that Banaji has still not broken completely with the mainassumption of the semi-feudal thesis to which he originally adhered, in thathis ‘disguised’ wage-labourer remains a cultivator working on his/her ownland, albeit at the behest of capital. During the course of the earlier mode ofproduction debate, Banaji changed his mind not once but twice. Havingbeen an enthusiastic supporter of Utsa Patnaik (then as now an exponent ofthe semi-feudal thesis), he then changed his mind and became an opponentof her views.57 The same is true of his initial endorsement of the concept‘colonial mode of production’, which he also jettisoned subsequently, butthis time rather more surreptitiously.58 In reality, the theoretical gap betweenon the one hand Banaji’s smallholder as a ‘disguised’ wage-labourer, and onthe other Patnaik’s ‘pauperized’ peasant is vanishingly small. An apparentdistinction does, however, exist. Exponents of the semi-feudal thesis definesystemic differences in terms of production relations: bonded labourtherefore feudalism, wage-labour therefore capitalism. Banaji maintains theopposite, and defines production relations by means of the economicsystem: if capitalism, then all relational forms necessarily correspond towage-labour, which itself designates the workforce as a proletariat. In theend, both these approaches are not only the same, in that the wage formsignals the presence of capitalism, but break with Marx, who maintainedthat capitalism could and would utilize a variety of relational forms for thepurpose of accumulation, a position consistent with my own view aboutdeproletarianization, or accumulation on the basis of unfree labour.59

In many ways, Banaji’s epistemology is the mirror image of mine:whereas I argue that in the course of class struggle capital attempts toreplace free labour with workers that are unfree, he by contrast maintainsthat the free/unfree distinction is non-existent, and that all workers in receiptof a wage are simply hired labour. What Banaji has done, in short, is tofetishize the wage, the presence or absence of which for him determines thenature of every and any historical and contemporary relation. Notsurprisingly, this unambiguously procrustean theoretical procedure resultsin a certain amount of confusion: having accepted that capital can and doesuse a variety of relational forms (my argument), he immediately qualifies


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this, then contradicts himself in order to reassert the validity of his claimthat all relational forms are nothing more than variants of (‘disguised’)wage-labour.60 Both the epistemological tentativeness of this procedure, andthe recognition that it breaks with Marxist theory, are evident from the raftof qualifications accompanying the claim (‘it would surely represent anadvance in Marxist theory to think of capitalism working through amultiplicity of forms of exploitation based on wage labour’ – originalemphasis).

Having essentialized hired labour in this manner, Banaji no longer has toprobe beneath the surface existence of any other relational form.61 Ratherthan problematize unfree labour, he undertakes what might be termed a‘semantic readjustment’, asserting that – wherever it occurs – coercion issimply evidence for the presence of free wage-labour. The kinds ofcontradiction to which this gives rise are evident from the followingjuxtaposition encountered in his recent book. At the outset, he proclaimsconfidently both that ‘no evidence survives as to the kind of contractsthrough which these rural labourers were “attached” to their employers’,that ‘binding peasants to the soil’ was unnecessary and unconnected withagricultural production, and that workers employed in this were free[Banaji, 2001b: 5, 90, 93]. Subsequently, however, it transpires not only thatbig landlords ‘wanted lifelong control over [labour with] skills which mayhave been in short supply’, that ‘the reason why landowners felt it wasnecessary to bind workers through a [contractual] clause of this type maywell have been their…mobility between several jobs (different estates) inthe course of the year’, that ‘[i]t seems likely that these were bonds whichemployers used to tie labour down or strengthen their own control over itsexertion – a common feature of rural labour markets’, but also that ‘[d]ebtwas the essential means by which employers enforced control over thesupply of labour, fragmenting the solidarity of workers and “personalizing”relations between owners and employees’.62 All the latter statements mighthave been written by me, since they make exactly my point: the object ofdebt bondage, in other words, is precisely to curtail the freedom of theworker to change jobs – that is, to sell his/her labour-power elsewhere. Tryas he might, Banaji cannot in the end deny that what he essentializes as‘free’ wage-labourers were unfree workers.63

Not the least of the many difficulties that result from this failure toproblematize unfreedom is his mistaken assumption that any/every kind oflabour-power that receives wages must as a consequence be free, therebyfailing to realize that unfree labourers also get paid and appear in themarket, but not as sellers of their own commodity. In doing this, Banajiignores a number of crucial issues. First, Marx did indeed say that capitalused previous relational forms in the accumulation process, but he did not


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say that these forms became free wage-labour as a result. Plantations in thesouthern US and the Caribbean were indeed capitalist enterprises, but theworkforce deployed on them was not composed of ‘wage labour’,‘disguised’ or otherwise. Historically and contemporaneously, therefore,many different kinds of worker – slaves, indentured labourers,sharecroppers, labour-service tenants, convicts, smallholders – have beenand are paid a wage, which of itself indicates neither that the workersconcerned are the actual recipients of the payment made, nor that they arefree, and become thereby a proletariat. Second, the fact that Marxismdefines class not in terms of the presence/absence of a wage but rather interms of relations of production, an important aspect of which is whether aworker is able personally to commodify his/her own labour-power. Andthird, where his argument differs from mine, it is in many respects nodifferent from that advanced not by Marxists but rather by anti-Marxists,such as neoclassical economic historians and postmodernists. Thiscontention can be demonstrated easily, by examining the politically andtheoretically contentious sources he invokes in support of his case, aproblem which can in turn be attributed to an understandable (andforgiveable) lack of familiarity on Banaji’s part with the debate about unfreelabour.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

Not the least significant difficulty faced by Banaji is a failure to question theeither the theory or the methodology of the sources he invokes in support ofhis claims about wage-labour. Consequently, he accepts the arguments ofthose such as Steinfeld, Breman, McCreery and Bauer at their face value,without asking about the way in which these are constructed and whattheoretical assumptions inform and what political discourse accompaniestheir epistemology.64 Although like Banaji they misinterpret as free what isactually unfree labour, it is their reasons for doing so that are of particularinterest. Theorizing unfreedom as a form of equal exchange, or a benign(and thus tension-free) arrangement to the benefit of all parties to therelation, non-Marxists like Breman, anti-Marxists like Bauer, andpostmodernists like McCreery, maintain that others wrongly interpret asunfreedom what in their opinion is the voluntary entry by rural labour into‘reciprocal’ and essentially desirable work relationships which provide thelabourer concerned with economic security in the form of a ‘subsistenceguarantee’ or ‘employment insurance’.65 The debt component of indenture,peonage, contract or bonded labour relations is accordingly recast by themas evidence not of the coercive power exercised by employers but muchrather of the enhanced bargaining power exercised by workers.66


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Much the same views are expressed by neoclassical economichistorians, for whom silence on the part of the worker is interpreted asassent: having banished coercion, neoclassical economics is left with a formof market essentialism, whereby all worker/employer relationshipsnecessarily involve harmonious and voluntary exchanges between choice-making subjects.67 For exponents of this view, slaves were attracted to andwillingly remained on the antebellum plantation, because in the lattercontext they enjoyed cultural autonomy, a high standard of living, usufructrights to land, good incomes, and were not maltreated or overworked, norwere their families split up and sold.68 The antebellum plantation can nowbe doubly redefined: as a non-coercive and thus a capitalist unit, employinga workforce that corresponded in everything but name to free labour.69 Inthis way, slavery is recast as empowering, and both the plantation systemand capitalism itself are rescued from the taint of compulsion andsimultaneously declared economically efficient, the subtext being thatsystemically it cannot be transcended – hence the need and desire forsocialism are eliminated. Not only is class and class struggle abolished bythe neoclassical concept of an employer/worker equilibrium, but wage-labour becomes – like capital (= ‘saving’) itself – an ever-present (and thus‘natural’) category, a pan-historical form that underlies all known workingrelations/arrangements, and now features in the economic transactions ofthe trinity formula merely as one ‘factor of production’.70 All these pointshave been made before, by those opposed to Marxism: what is unusual,therefore, is not that they are made again, but that they are made now bysomeone who claims to be not just a Marxist but a Trotskyist, and moreoverone who cites neoclassical economic historians in support of his case.

That bourgeois economists seek to defend the capital/labour relation bydehistoricizing it is unsurprising: what does require explanation, however,is why Banaji uncritically replicates so many of their views. Not only didhis earlier interpretation of feudalism lean rather heavily on that of Kula,whose Chayanovian and marginalist assumptions were convenientlyoverlooked, and like him privilege consumption and demographic variablesover production and class, but Banaji’s a-historical concept of (‘disguised’)wage-labour is not unlike that deployed by neoclassical economic theory.71

Hence the enthusiastic citation by Banaji of Steinfeld, another anti-Marxistexponent of neoclassical economic historiography.72 The extent of overlapbetween their arguments about wage-labour and unfreedom is bothremarkable and significant. Like Banaji, Steinfeld maintains that, as duringthe nineteenth century ‘neither wage labour nor contract labour had a fixedcontent’, wage-labour was essentially no different from contract labour, andconsequently no real difference existed between wage (= free) labour andcontract (= unfree) labour.73 Again like Banaji, Steinfeld both complains that


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wage-labour is not viewed as unfree, and erases the difference between freeand unfree labour on the grounds that all employment is to some degreeregulated.74 Steinfeld then goes on to argue that the free/unfree labourpolarity is a false (= non-existent) dichotomy, since both free and slavelabour possess the same ability to choose to work.75 Not only does thisdifference-dissolving claim overlook abundant evidence to the contrary, butthe categorization of both free and unfree labour as ‘choice-making’ isredolent of the concept ‘subjective preferences’ at the centre of neoclassicaleconomic theory. And yet again like Banaji, Steinfeld argues that whetheror not coercion exists is ultimately a question of law (economic coercion isgoverned by law).76

Steinfeld’s argument about labour being free despite the presence ofcoercion only works if one accepts his legalistic definition of contract, asBanaji clearly does.77 Freedom of contract for Steinfeld means quite simplythe ability of workers to enter working arrangements: that they aresubsequently unable to withdraw from them without the consent of theiremployer does not affect his meaning.78 In this he is no different from otherneoclassical economists, such as Bardhan, who similarly classify suchrelations as ‘free’ solely because workers may enter them ‘voluntarily’.79

Together with Bardhan and Banaji, therefore, Steinfeld’s assumption is thatworkers against whom contractually binding stipulations were enforcedonce employed somehow remained free (and retained their identity as aproletariat), when the latter term covers only their entry into and not thepossibility of exit from the relation in question.80 It is from thisepistemologically inconsistent approach – restricting the conceptualizationof the working arrangement to the manner of its inception (= entry into), andconsequently excluding the conditions governing the reproduction of thewhole relation (entry into + exit from) – that all their difficulties andresultant confusions stem.81 Adopting their partial definition, for example, itwould be possible to explain neither the act of self-sale into slavery duringperiods of famine nor the process of transformation occurring over timewithin the same production relation, whereby an initially free workingarrangement becomes unfree (and vice-versa).82

By contrast, it is this aspect – the incapacity of a worker personally tocommodify or recommodify his/her labour-power – that for Marxism definesthe relation as unfree, and distinguishes it from those relations whereworkers retain this capacity of commodification/recommodification.83 Theassertion by Banaji that Marx did not conceptualize wage-labour as free orlabour-power as a commodity at the level of the individual worker, fails tosurvive even the most cursory examination. Marx himself insisted that thetwo defining and interrelated characteristics of wage-labour under capitalismare that it must be free, for which its owner must have and keep the ability


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personally to commodify his/her labour-power.84 Not only did Engels holdthe same view, but he made it clear that he did so in the very same reviewof Capital I that Banaji cites as evidence for the contrary.85 The centrality tothe wage-labour relation both of the freedom on the part of the workerconcerned to sell labour-power, to sell it personally, and to retain this ability(= ‘the absolute right of commodity owners to dispose of theircommodities’), is also evident from what other Marxists have written.86 Incases where labourers possess this capacity, and indeed exercise it byentering a relation from which they are unable to exit, such workers have inMarxist terms been deproletarianized: they were free, but are unfree. LikeSteinfeld, however, Banaji disguises the existence of this problem bydoubly redesignating workers: an initial category ‘wage labour’ thenundergoes a surreptitious metamorphosis, and becomes ‘free wage labour’.Symptomatically, both Steinfeld and Banaji avoid this difficulty in exactlythe same manner, simply by changing the way in which labour ischaracterized, and shifting their description from a worker/employerrelation to the fact (undeniable in itself) that the work done is paid for.Although at the outset both Steinfeld and Banaji – like Fogel and Engerman– dismiss the free/unfree distinction as unimportant, therefore, eachnevetheless subsequently relabels wage/hired labour as ‘free’.87

That the wage ‘contract’ once entered into must by definition be free(‘entry into’ = ‘choice’) is accordingly central not to Marxism but to theanti-Marxist framework of bourgeois economic theory. Hence the view ofSteinfeld – internally consistent for a neoclassical economist but from aMarxist perspective contradictory – is that it was by means of contractenforcement that nineteenth century employers made ‘freer labor markets’work [Steinfeld, 2001: 318]. For exponents of bourgeois economics, such asSteinfeld, ‘contract’ is not just voluntary, but a reciprocal exchange agreedbetween capital and labour, each of which is perceived as equal.88 It is in thisconceptualization, not that of Marx (or me), that free labour is imbued withthe additional notion of ‘consent’.89 Marxists, by contrast, see no such thing,and argue that the wage relation is not given (= ‘contract-as-agreement’) –let alone ‘eternal’, ‘reciprocal’ or ‘equal’ – but rather the object of struggle(= disagreement), and under capitalism the object of class struggle. Thisneoclassical economic historiography denies, since it does not recognize theexistence of class, let alone class struggle, each of which is politicallyincompatible with discourse about ‘contract’ based on ‘reciprocity’,‘equality’ and ‘consent’.90 Moreover, formal conditions governing ‘contract’say nothing about the reality on the ground, which again focuses on classand class struggle, or the differential capacity of each party either todisregard or to enforce contractually binding legal conditions.91


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Why All Roads Do Not Lead to Rome

Most importantly, the pan-historical category of wage-labour (= ‘contract’)which Banaji shares with neoclassical economic historians such as Steinfeld– together with its attendant confusions and theoretical implications – cannow be found in late antiquity, which is precisely where Banaji encountersit.92 It comes as no surprise that his claims about the prevalence of freelabour in the eastern Mediterranean countryside in the period between thefourth and seventh century project backwards – and simultaneouslyreplicate the mistaken assumptions – of neoclassical economichistoriography. When observing that slaves worked as hired labourers, onnineteenth-century cotton plantations no less than in ancient society,therefore, Banaji makes a common methodological error, and assumes thatthe sale of labour-power by slaves was no different from that by other wageworkers.93 Like Shlomowitz and other neoclassical economic historians,however, Banaji fails to distinguish between a free market in labour, and afree labour market. Whereas the latter involves labour-power that has beencommodified personally by its owner (= hired labour that is free), theformer by contrast incorporates labour-power (= indentured workers,slaves, bonded labourers) that has been commodified by a different subject,someone in other words who is not its owner.

Because he denies that the concept of economic freedom is premised onthe concept of labour-power as the property of the worker, Banaji fails todifferentiate the latter from property in the labour-power of the worker,which by contrast is at the root of economic unfreedom. It was the sale oflabour-power by other than its subject that lay at the basis of the slave trade,and slaves in the antebellum American South were no less such for beingleased out by their owners to other employers. Long ago, for example,Joseph Clark Robert made the same kind of mistake, and argued that theemployment of slaves in the antebellum factories of Virginia constitutedevidence both for the growth of free labour and (thus) for the pre-abolitionpresence of emancipatory/empowering trends in the south.94 It transpires,however, that what was categorized by Robert as ‘free Negro labor’ isactually composed of plantation slaves leased by their owners to tobaccomanufacturers, the wages paid by the latter going straight back to theslaveholder.95 In other words, and as de Ste. Croix pointed out with regardto ancient society, in this situation what appears as ‘free labour’ masks whatis actually unfree labour.

Not the least of the many ironies is, firstly, that Banaji’s argument aboutthe preponderance and economic role of free labour in late antiquity isvulnerable to precisely the criticism that he himself made against Dobbsome three decades ago. Namely, that because of a ‘failure to understand


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“wage labour”’ Dobb would ‘be compelled to argue that when some of themost deeply entrenched feudal estates of thirteenth century England oftenbased their production mainly or entirely on paid labour (“wage-labour” inDobb’s sense), specifically capitalist relations of production wereestablished’ [Banaji, 1977: 7]. Secondly, having relied on legal sources foran understanding of modern unfree labour, Banaji then proceeds to criticizeprecisely these same sources as a method for accessing unfree labour in lateantiquity.96 And thirdly, having adopted an historically ubiquitous concept ofwage-labour, Banaji criticizes Bhaduri for categorizing peasant debt asprecapitalist, on the grounds that the monetization of such relations isindicative of their capitalist nature [Banaji, 1978: 410]. On the basis of this‘logic’ one could argue that wherever peasant debt takes a specificallymoney form, there too one finds capitalism – which is in fact the positionBanaji now appears to hold.

What, finally, are the political implications of locating in late antiquity apan-historical category of ‘contract’ that is ‘free’ wage-labour? How canworkers fight to become free labour, a proletariat in the full sense of theterm, if that is what they already are and always have been? Conversely, anystruggle undertaken by the relationally distinct components of a ruralworkforce (tenants, sharecroppers, artisans, lumpenproletarians) subsumedby Banaji under the historically ever-present category of ‘free wage labour’is not conducted by a proletariat (class-in-itself) to realize itself as such(class-for-itself) but rather by diverse elements of a socio-economicallyheterogeneous workforce unconnected with working class politicalobjectives (e.g. tenants wanting to convert usufruct rights intolandownership, rich peasants wanting lower input and labour costs, reducedtaxes, and/or higher crop prices). If there is no longer a concept of class,other than one that is so all-encompassing as to be meaningless, then theconcept of struggle to realize class identity so as to transcend capitalism iscorrespondingly impossible.

CONCLUSION

I am accused by Banaji of that most heinous of intellectual crimes: namely,of unknowingly adhering to the argument I criticize, in my case nineteenth-century liberal notions of ‘consent’ embodied in free labour. Along with theother issues supposedly missing from my book – that I am ‘unsure’ if wage-labour is unfree, that I overlook the way in which capital exploits kinshipand regulates at the level of class, and that I regard free labour as‘voluntary’/‘contract’ – all this suggests is that prior to criticizing a text it isalways a good idea to acquaint oneself with its contents. If I regard freelabour as ‘much more’ than unfree equivalents, then not only did Marx


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himself, but so does Banaji (and indeed Steinfeld) when he agrees with methat capital does indeed utilize unfreedom in order to exercise better controlover labour-power. More importantly, and contrary to what Banaji infers,my argument is not and never has been that free wage-labour is an end initself. What I have said is that conditions where wage-labour is free arebetter – and perceived by workers themselves as such – than where it is not(a point which both Banaji and Steinfeld accept). This in turn enablesworkers to organize in furtherance of their class interests – as a proletariat,in other words – which for Marxists is a necessary first step on any road tosocialism. Were this not the case, it would obviously be possible to havesocialism in ancient society where unfree relations of production werewidespread, since the latter situation would pose no obstacle to therealization of a socialist transition! Given his views about the ubiquitousand non-specific nature of ‘free’ wage-labour, one cannot be entirely surethat this is not what Banaji actually believes.

Not only is his accusation that I adhere to nineteenth-century liberalnotions of freedom and ‘consent’ untrue, but on closer inspection it turns outto be a more accurate description of the views held by the accuser himself.Since he conceptualizes wage-labour as ‘contract’, Banaji unwittinglyimbibes from bourgeois legal and economic theory the view that a workarrangement is defined simply by the act of recruitment (‘entry into’). Thiscontrasts with Marxist theory, for which a work arrangement is defined bya process: the reproduction of the relational form (‘entry into’ + ‘exit from’),as embodied in the ability of a worker personally to commodify andrecommodify his/her own labour-power. Because it has nothing to do withMarxism, bourgeois ‘contract’ theory licenses the claim made about thefree/unfree distinction by two kinds of anti-Marxist theory: a-historicalpostmodernism and neoclassical economic historiography. The latter, likeBanaji, abolishes the free/unfree distinction, in order to be able to argue –wrongly – that every form of paid labour is and always has been the same,is based on ‘consent’ and is therefore ‘free’, and thus empowers the subjectconcerned. As no work relation is disempowering, it follows thatconsequently there is no need (and no desire on the part of the workforce)for socialism. In effect, Banaji ends up by standing Marx on his head:whereas Marx argues that the wage relation under capitalism must be free,Banaji by contrast maintains that wherever the wage relation occurs it mustalso be free, and thus historically there too is found capitalism. Whether ornot he recognizes this, Banaji is now in the camp of those who assume thepermanence and immutability of capitalism, its ‘eternal’ and non-transcendental character.


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NOTES

1. The most useful accounts of the mode of production debate remain Rudra et al. [1978] andThorner [1982].

2. Among the more recent monographs by Marxists, or edited collections containing Marxistanalyses, about historical and contemporary forms of unfree labour are de Ste Croix [1981],Miles [1987], Lichtenstein [1996], Blackburn [1988; 1997], Brass and van der Linden[1997], and Brass [1999].

3. This is not to say that other theoretical analyses written from a Marxist viewpoint did notappear in that decade, those by Miles [1987] and Cohen [1987] being of particular interest.Such analyses, however, continued to regard the presence of unfree relations in the capitalistlabour process as in some sense ‘anomalous’ (see the critique by Brass [1988]). Hence thetheoretical framework deployed by Miles was the articulation of modes of production, inwhich free labour is equated with capitalism and unfreedom with non-capitalist modes. Hisargument was that capitalist producers resorted to coercion only reluctantly, and then incontexts where labour was scarce.

4. Where the capitalism/unfreedom link is concerned, therefore, the list of those who have beenunable to distinguish between a personal voyage of discovery and the existence of a well-travelled route includes not just popular journalism (for example, Bales [1999], and Klein[1999]) but also texts by those with more serious intellectual pretensions (for example, Bush[2000], and Harriss-White and Gooptu [2000]).

5. This was the subject of an exchange between Amartya Sen and me in July 2001. Objectingto my observation [Brass, 2001: 174 note 48] that he had ‘suddenly discovered – rather latein the day – that bonded labour had not vanished’, Sen insisted that he had written aboutbonded labour ‘for a great many years’. In my reply to him I pointed out that the latterjustification avoided the issue in question, which was not the fact of having mentionedbonded labour but what he actually said about it, adding that, until very recently, Sen – likemany others – had dismissed bonded labour as a residual form, and thus peripheral to thedevelopment debate. I continued by noting that in his initial work on famine and entitlements[Sen, 1980; 1981], there was no mention of bonded labour as the outcome of famine in India(a well-documented phenomenon), and it was only much later that the existence of this linkwas even acknowledged, and then only in passing. Now, however, unfree productionrelations were regarded by Sen [1999] no longer as a residual category but much rather as‘common in many developing countries’, and as such loomed large in his analysis ofdevelopment problems. My final comment was that this was a welcome development indeed,but nevertheless (as I had said in the review article) a veritable discovery on his part.

6. The texts in question are Brass [1999] and Banaji [2003]. This reply was submitted toHistorical Materialism, the journal in which the critique by Banaji appeared, but the editorsin effect refused to publish it (thereby replicating a previous episode, outlined in Brass [2000:139–40 note 4], when the right of reply to criticism – a usual and unproblematic procedurein most academic journals – was denied). The reason for this was, perhaps, two things inparticular, each of which occasioned some embarrassment to the editors of what claims to bea Marxist journal. First, their failure to spot that what they had regarded as a ‘Marxist’analysis of wage-labour turned out to be nothing of the sort, being much rather an anti-Marxist analysis, premised on neoclassical economic theory. And second, that this fact – andconsequently the problematic nature of their original judgement – was evident from the casemade in the reply.

7. Indeed, I am presented with the wholly bizarre situation whereby arguments I have made inthe past, and texts I have cited in support of these arguments, are now quoted back at me byBanaji purportedly as evidence of my being unaware of these very same arguments/texts!

8. Enforced retractions scattered throughout the footnotes and/or postscripts of Banaji’s ownpublished writings, coupled with serious criticisms about misrepresentation levelled at himin the writings of others, are difficult to avoid. Having confidently proclaimed that ‘[m]anyof Chattopadhyay’s criticisms of U Patnaik spring from a failure to understand this position[= the conceptual relevance of the ‘colonial mode of production’] or indeed its theoreticalsignificance’, therefore, Banaji [1972: 122; 1977: 38 note 15; 1978: 418 note 24]


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subsequently confessed that ‘I would now repudiate completely my critique of[Chattopadhyay] as badly misdirected’ (original emphasis), and that ‘[t]he characterizationof the mode of production as “colonial” [is one] which I myself accepted earlier, much toohastily’, etc., etc. Elsewhere, and in a similar vein, he [Banaji, 1980: 264] rescinds an earlieropinion, accepting that the latter was ‘subjectivist’ and a-historical. Hence ‘the notion thatPermanent Revolution formed a historically viable alternative programme [in pre-independence India] would have to be drawn out and re-examined much more critically’, and‘a properly historical Marxist analysis would have to probe much deeper to draw outphenomena …connected with the historical constitution of the [Indian working] class andwith the specific features of this process that were determined by the general evolution ofcapitalism in India and by the nature of the sort of capitalist democracy that evolved post-1947.’ (original emphasis). Replying to an accusation by Omvedt [1991: 138] of ‘carelessuse of data about actual rural struggles and agrarian relations’, exemplified by hismisattribution of a quotation, Banaji is once again compelled to retract his originalattribution, and admits that ‘I was clearly wrong to attribute the phrase “lamb in the stomachof the tiger” to [Sharad Patil]’, while failing to identify his critic [Banaji, 1990: 297; 1995:240 note 8]. Banaji has also been accused of a ‘caricatured representation of Dobb, Laclauand others’ by Wolpe [1980: 31].

9. This oft-repeated claim [Banaji, 2003: 74, 78] takes on an almost mantric significance.10. That Banaji may not actually have read my book is further suggested by the fact that his

references to it – see Banaji [2003: notes 28, 44, 94, 95 and 96] – encompass all of eightpages (out of a book of nearly 400 pages), mostly those corresponding to the Index entrieson ‘wages’. Clearly, Banaji thinks that this category is by itself sufficient to provide him withall the information he requires in order to possess a thorough understanding of what the bookis ‘about’. This is a position that does not depart from the ‘conclusion’ he reachedimmediately after having received a copy of the book itself, when he complained to me that‘I notice that in the Index to the book there is scarcely any reference to “wage labour”’.Communication from Banaji, 24 June 2001 (emphasis in the original), a point repeated inBanaji [2003: 74]. Since the Index contains no entry for unfree labour either, by this oddlogic I could be accused of ignoring unfree labour in a book specifically about unfree labour!

11. See Brass [1999: 12ff., 30ff.]. The absurdity of the claim that I fail to consider theunfreedom/wage-labour link is evident from the following exerpt [Brass, 1999: 16]: ‘Andjust as “high” wages may not indicate worker advantage or freedom, so low wages do notnecessarily signal the presence of bonded labour. Although low wages for all forms of labourmay be both the effect and the intention behind the operation of the debt bondagemechanism, it is nevertheless the case that not all low-paid workers are themselves unfree tosell their own labour-power to the highest bidder. A low wage is an effect of economicunfreedom, and hence not of itself constitutive of the debt bondage relation’.

12. Brass [1999: 22, 37 notes 31 and 32]. Indeed, one of the sub-headings in the first chapter(‘Work Intensity, Wage Levels and Unfreedom’) actually specifies the existence of anunfreedom/wage-labour connection [Brass, 1999: 24]. Clearly, Banaji overlooked this.

13. Wage differentials between – and thus the ‘waged’ nature of – both free and unfree labourare mentioned throughout the book [Brass, 1999: 62, 78–9, 85–6, 89–90, 92, 96, 103, 119,176ff., 199, 203–4, 214, 215, 220, 225, 228, 250]. Just why Banaji picks up so manyreferences equating wage labour with unfreedom in books/articles other than mine, yetmanages to miss the abundant references in my book making precisely this same connection,is a matter for conjecture.

14. The connection between withholding wages and unfree labour is outlined clearly, andunmissably, in Brass [1999: 5, 12, 27, 40, 41ff., 60, 84–5, 103–4, 124–5, 126, 129, 140ff.,159ff., 176, 190, 207, 254, 296]. Exactly the same mechanism is considered by theneoclassical economic historian Steinfeld [2001: 16], except that for him withholding wagesfrom a worker does not make the latter unfree. Significantly, this view is shared by Banaji[2001b: 198], who evades the obvious difficulties it poses for the categorization of suchworkers as free by observing merely that ‘these types of coercion are true of labour marketsthroughout the world and are scarcely a distinguishing characteristic either of the Romanworld or the late Roman period’.


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15. It is impossible for Banaji to claim that he is unfamiliar with my views about semi-feudalism,since he described an article by me criticizing Utsa Patnaik, an influential exponent of thesemi-feudal thesis, as ‘not only devastating but enjoyable as well,’ adding ‘I wonder what shethought of it’ (original emphasis). In fact, Banaji liked that critique so much he asked toinclude it in a festschrift then being prepared by him for the eminent Indian Trotskyist, A.R.Desai. These observations were contained in a communication from him dated 24 October1995, and the article in question was my reply to comments by Patnaik on an earlier text byme (for this exchange, see Brass [1994], Patnaik [1995], and Brass [1995]).

16. Banaji [2003: 85–6]. Compare Banaji [2003: 87], ‘the depiction of wages as loans is simplya device to control labour in conditions where the competition for labour is likely to drive upthe bargaining power and wages of workers’, and Banaji [2001b: 199], ‘[the object of] aconsumption loan, [or] the advance payment of wages is…to strengthen the employer’scontrol over the employee (the employer becomes a “creditor” but his essential interest is inthe exaction of labour)’, with Brass [1999: 12]: ‘The object [of an advance payment or loan]is to ensure the availability to the creditor-employer of the worker thus indebted, theideological decommodification of the wage, and ultimately to reduce the price of labour-power…. In ideological terms, therefore, a bonded labourer works to pay off a debt ratherthan for a wage’.

17. Nowhere do I endorse an interpretation of free wage labour as being based either on contractor on consent. My references to free wage labour as consent are made precisely in order tocriticize such a view, held by neoclassical economic historians.

18. This is evident from, for example, Brass [1999: 149–50]. The issue of ‘consent’, as projectedin bourgeois economic discourse about the ‘voluntary’ nature of work relations, is consideredin more detail below.

19. For the incorrect accusation that I ‘conceive capitalism entirely from the standpoint ofindividual capital’, see Banaji [2003: 80, original emphasis]. That this assertion is wrong isevident from the following [Brass, 1997a: 22–3]: ‘[W]hat is so wonderful about being a freewage labourer in a neo-liberal capitalist context? What – if any – benefit accrues to theworking class (as distinct from individual labourers or categories of labour) from freedomachieved under capitalism? [My view] is that freedom has to be considered on a collective(= workers-as-a-class) basis under socialism and not simply in individualistic terms (=workers-as-individuals) under varieties of capitalism. Hence the understandablescepticism…about the theoretical and political closure implied in both the fact and thedesirability of a transition from unfree to free labour; as long as the latter is confined to (anddefined theoretically in terms of) a capitalist mode of production, the true achievement andextent of worker emancipation must remain problematic’. The expression of a similar viewin Brass [1999: 264–5] merely serves to underline the suspicion that Banaji may not actuallyhave read my book.

20. On employer collusion, see Brass [1999: 20, 34, 93, 121, 138, 218–19, 248, 252].21. This exclusionary approach contrasts with my supportive references to the endorsement by

Banaji of the real/formal subsumption argument, which specifies how in particularcontexts/conjunctures capital utilizes relational forms that are not free wage labour.However, the erroneous conclusion Banaji draws from this – that all relational formsdeployed by capital are by definition wage labour, and thus evidence for proletarianization –is not one shared by me.

22. Banaji [2003: 72]. This period is the one between the publication of Mundle [1979] andRamachandran [1990]. Banaji’s ire at the failure of the latter to mention him isunderstandable. Unlike Banaji, however, Ramachandran was aware of my arguments: notonly does he cite my work [Ramachandran, 1990: 238] but he also clearly took account ofcriticisms I made of his theoretical framework when this was presented to a seminar inCambridge during late 1986.

23. Throughout the 1980s my arguments about the fact of, as well as the reasons for, thecapitalism/unfreedom link appeared in a wide variety of academic journals, connecting thespread of unfree labour to capitalist development, class struggle and workforce restructuringin Latin America (Peru), India (Punjab, Haryana) and the Caribbean. These publications arelisted in Brass [1999: xii, 308].


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24. Hence the process of workforce restructuring, whereby employers either substituted unfreelabour for free equivalents, or converted the latter into the former. That thecapitalism/unfreedom link was presented by me specifically in terms of formal/realsubsumption [Brass, 1986: 56–7] would have been difficult for Banaji to miss, since he wasthen on the advisory board of the journal – this one – in which this discussion appeared.

25. A defence of Mundle is found in articles by me published during the 1980s (see, for example,the ones which appeared in vol. 11, no. 3, and vol. 14, no. 1 of this journal). Since these samepoints in defence of Mundle are contained in Brass [1999: 111, 130, 169, 170, 172, 247], itis something of a mystery as to how Banaji could possibly be unaware of them.

26. According to Banaji [2003: 72 note 24], therefore, Mundle [1979: 92ff.] is simply ‘taking up’Banaji [1978].

27. Ironically, Banaji [2003: 72, 78] exhibits the very same condescension towards Mundle ofwhich he accuses Ramachandran.

28. Banaji accepts that ‘my Deccan peasantry piece [i.e., Banaji, 1978] actually has nothing todo with the issue of free and unfree labour’ (personal communication, 24 June 2001).

29. This analysis appears in Mundle [1979: 82–96], the source for which is identified – rightly– as the ‘Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ [Marx, 1976:948–1084], and not Banaji, whose article is cited at the beginning of the following chapter,on p. 97.

30. Mundle [1979: 97 note 1], where the reference to Banaji [1978] is also found.31. See, for example, Mundle [1979: 94], where it is plain that – in contrast with Banaji’s view

– the capacity of an agricultural labourer freely to commodify his/her labour-power on apersonal basis is regarded as important.

32. This point was not lost on rural capitalists and their representatives. In the case of latenineteenth-century Mexico [Beals, 1932: 307], for example, ‘[t]he Governor of Coahuilareported the farm-workers, who received three to five dollars a month, as being “tooproletarian”’.

33. Although he objects to my applying the term ‘restructuring’ to the process of replacing moreexpensive forms of labour-power with cheaper equivalents, Banaji fails to point out that heis a recent convert to this very view (see, for example, Banaji [2001a]).

34. Hence the view [Marx, 1973: 464–5]: ‘What the free worker sells is always nothing morethan a specific particular measure of force-expenditure [Kraftäusserung]; … He sells theparticular expenditure of force to a particular capitalist, whom he confronts as anindependent individual. It is clear that this is not his relation to the existence of capital ascapital…Nevertheless, everything touching on the individual, real person leaves him a widefield of choice, of arbitrary will, and hence of formal freedom. In the slave relation, hebelongs to the individual, particular owner, and is his labouring machine. As a totality offorce-expenditure, as labour capacity, he is a thing [Sache] belonging to another, and hencedoes not relate as subject to his particular expenditure of force, nor to the act of living labour.In the serf relation he appears as a moment of property in land itself, is an appendage of thesoil, exactly like draught-cattle. In the slave relation the worker is nothing but a living labour-machine, which therefore has value for others, or rather is a value. The totality of the freeworker’s labour capacity appears to him as his property, as one of his moments, over whichhe, as subject, exercises domination, and which he maintains by expending it’ (originalemphasis).

35. ‘The freedom of mobility has been taken away from labour to a degree which makes onequestion whether one can really still speak of a proletariat such as we have known since theIndustrial Revolution’, notes Kuczynski [1939: 42], adding that ‘[o]ne can speak of theGerman worker only in a very limited sense as a “free-wage worker”, free to sell his labourwhere he gets the least lowly price for it.’ The same point was made by Wal Hannington, ofthe Unemployed Workers’ Movement, who rightly identified the role of residential ‘training’camps in the Distressed Areas of 1930s Britain as an attempt by the state to unmake theworking class (= ‘outclassed’, ‘de-classing’), using the cheap unfree labour of theunemployed to undermine trade union opposition to wage cuts. This strategy, he noted[Hannington, 1937: 112–13, 114], ‘is the sort of thing that tends to make the men feel thatthey are being outclassed; that they no longer belong to the wage-earning class… The mental


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effect of such a system is likely to produce a slave psychology… the tendency will be forthem to regard themselves as fortunate if they can get an ordinary job at wages far belowtrade union rates… We must resist any scheme which has the effect of de-classing theunemployed. When work is available, whether it be for a private employer or for theGovernment, the unemployed should be entitled to receive proper payment for that work andso be restored to their normal position of wage-earners’.

36. See the important analysis of unfree labour in Germany by Roth [1997].37. For these and many, many other instances of capitalist restructuring involving unfree labour,

see Brass [1988:183–97; 1994: 269–74, notes 33, 34, 35, 38], and also Brass [1999: Chapters2, 3, 4, 6 and 7]. Confident pronouncements about what the enganche relation is or is not –see, for example, Banaji [2003: 86 note 95] – mask the fact that their author has not actuallyundertaken fieldwork in rural Latin America. Indeed, it is not at all clear that he has everconducted research on unfree labour anywhere, even in India. This absence contrasts with theapproach of Marx himself, who in 1880 published A Workers’ Enquiry – see Marx [circa1930] – setting out guidelines for investigation of labour’s experience of capital in thecapitalist labour process, plus the kinds of consciousness and agency generated by existingworking conditions – in short, a questionnaire designed to elicit the ‘concrete’ situation oflabour, and how this gives rise to class formation and class struggle.

38. This theoretical defence against these critiques is set out clearly and unmistakably in Brass[1999].

39. Hence the reference by Banaji [2003: 80 note 56] to his earlier argument contained in Banaji[1977], and the redeployment of the latter in Banaji [2003: 80 passim]. Among those whohave criticized the views to which Banaji adhered during the 1970s are Chattopadhyay[1978a; 1978b], Wolpe [1980], and Rudra [1990].

40. Banaji [1977: 6–7]. Those dismissed as adherents of the ‘inauthentic’ view include not justDobb but also Sweezy.

41. Not the least of the many oddities characterizing this attempt by Banaji [1977: 6–7] both toreconceptualize wage-labour and to attribute the result to Marx is the scattered nature of thetextual evidence invoked. Whereas references to ‘capital-positing, capital-producing labour’are found on page 463 of the Grundrisse, evidence for the concreteness of the resultingcategory is sought from a section of the text some 363 pages earlier! Using this methodology,it would be possible to concoct almost any kind of concept and then to ascribe it to Marx.Given what else is found on page 463, Banaji’s resort to such procrustean methods is in asense necessary and understandable.

42. The relevant text [Marx, 1973: 463] is as follows: ‘The recognition [Erkennung] of theproducts as its own, and the judgement that its separation from the conditions of itsrealization is improper – forcibly imposed – is an enormous [advance in] awareness[Bewusstsein], itself the product of the mode of production resting on capital, and as muchthe knell to its doom as, with the slave’s awareness that he cannot be the property of another,the existence of slavery becomes a merely artificial, vegetative existence, and ceases to beable to prevail as the basis of production’.

43. ‘In American mining towns’, notes Dobb [1946: 14], ‘it is common for the company to ownpractically the whole town, sometimes not excluding the magistrates and police. Where thisoccurs, the employee may be prevented from transferring to alternative employment orrefusing to accept the employer’s contract for fear of losing his home, or in the other case hewill be prevented from spending his wages in the cheapest market by the manner in whichhe is paid. Many of the schemes to lessen the “labour turnover” and tie the worker to aparticular firm, of which much is heard in America, tend to have a similar effect’ (emphasisadded). Much the same is true of Britain in the period 1939–45, about which Dobb [1940:332] observes: ‘The crucial limit seems to be…full employment in the labour market to raisewages to such an extent as to precipitate a sharp shrinkage of surplus-value, andconsequently to change the value both of existing capital and of new investment. Soabhorrent and unnatural does such a situation appear as to cause exceptional measures to betaken to clip the wings of labour – even…to curtail the normal working of competitive forces– whenever labour scarcity shows signs of becoming an enduring condition in the labourmarket’ (emphasis added). It is perhaps examples like this that Wolpe had in mind when he


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accused Banaji of caricaturing Dobb’s arguments (see note 8 above).44. As with Marx (see above), this information is found on those pages of Lenin cited by Banaji.

Thus the resort by capitalist producers to bonded labour is described by Lenin not only as‘preventing him from changing his “master”’ – that is from personally commodifying his/herown labour power, but also as a situation whereby ‘the producer is…tied to a definite placeand to a definite exploiter’. These references are encountered in Lenin [1960a: 216; 1960b:484], the same two pages cited in Banaji [1977: 8].

45. References to what is termed the ‘colonial’ mode of production are found in Banaji [1972;1973; 1977; and 1978].

46. Banaji [1977: 33, 36]. Class and class struggle were categories absent from the very start.Symptomatically, when considering the rival approaches of Beidelman and Dumont to thejajmani relation, widely recognized as the locus classicus of bonded labour in rural India,Banaji [1970a] does this in terms of hierarchy and status, and fails even to mention class andclass struggle. Nor is the absence of the latter from British social anthropology mentioned byhim [Banaji, 1970b] as being among the causes of its crisis.

47. See, for example, Banaji [1973: 394], where it is stated that ‘[i]n the colonies whichcapitalism subjugated [it] did not eradicate tribal modes of production [sic]…[t]hepopulations it encountered consisted largely of peasants and far from uprooting their existingforms of production through their expropriation and conversion into wage labourers, so as tolay the foundations for an internal expansion of its own mode of production, capitalismimparted a certain solidity to those forms and even extended them…’ (original emphasis).

48. See Banaji [1972: 2499; 1977: 35], and Banaji [1978: 381–2, 385] where it is stated clearlythat ‘this represented the necessary forms of appearance of capitalist relations in theconditions of a small production economy where the process of labour remained the processof the small producer’ (emphasis added).

49. Having criticized Patnaik for what he dismisses as ‘verbal contortions’ (‘proto-feudal richpeasantry’, ‘proto-bourgeois rich peasantry’), Banaji [1978: 397, 399, 400, 410]unknowingly deploys some ‘verbal contortions’ of his own: namely, ‘semi-wage labourpeasantry’ and the unintentionally humorous ‘disintegration of an independent middlepeasantry into the ranks of a depressed, capitalistically exploited lower middle peasantry’.

50. Banaji [1977: 36]. As always, it is necessary to introduce a caveat, since in the case ofnineteenth century Deccan he maintains [Banaji, 1978: 377, 393, 395, 396, 401–2, 404] thatpeasant dispossession, land transfers and labour market formation all occurred.

51. Further details about this are contained in Brass [1999: 16, 31–2 note 10].52. Hence the forced commercialization of tenant produce by landlords in the Peruvian province

of La Convención during the late 1950s resulted in the unfreedom not of the tenantsthemselves, who were rich peasants, but rather of poor peasant sub-tenants and/oragricultural labourers employed by these same rich peasants to meet their own labour-serviceobligations. This case study is examined in Brass [1999: Chapter 2].

53. For the equation of peasant smallholders and artisans with a proletariat, see Banaji [1978:365–6, 368, 385, 401, 406–7]. The kinds of theoretical contortions to which this gives riseare evident from his palpable confusion in categorizing the georgoi of late antiquity as bothlandless workers and ‘substantial peasants’. [Banaji, 2001b: 192]. That a proletariat iscomposed of the ‘disguised’ wage labour of peasants, and the resulting idea that allproduction relations are capitalist, is firmly anchored in his original conceptualization of themode of production as ‘colonial’. According to Banaji [1972: 2500], the difference betweenthe capitalist mode of production in metropolitan and colonial contexts is that, unlike thelatter, in the former accumulation was based on advanced productive forces. In the colonies,therefore, accumulation took place on the basis of ‘an immense super-exploitation of variablecapital’ – i.e. not machinery but labour-power. There are enormous difficulties with this view.To begin with, it implies that in metropolitan capitalist context no equivalent process ofsuper-exploitation of labour-power is to be found, which is wrong. As the examples ofagriculture in the southern US and Germany during the 1930s, and the current economicimportance in Europe and America of the informal sector (= sweatshop industries), all attest,accumulation in metropolitan contexts also involves super-exploitation. Equally problematicis the fact that the metropolitan/colonial dichotomy, overlaid as it is with an additional


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mechanized/labour-intensive polarity, creates a space for the argument made by exponents ofthe semi-feudal thesis that unfree labour occurs in colonial contexts because it isincompatible with advanced productive forces, which of course is also wrong.

54. On the question of whether or not bonded labour is a capitalist relation, Banaji [1978: 387–8,392, 410, original emphasis] offers diametrically opposed views, both in the same text. Atone point, therefore, he states: ‘The peasants whom Norman saw [in 1874] were not “bondedlabourers” of any variety…the compulsion or element of unfreedom that this assistantcollector saw pertained specifically to the fact that the small peasants…were not free todispose of their crop as they chose, so long as they were bound by a capitalist who year afteryear paid their subsistence-costs (their wages) and to one extent or another controlled theirmeans of production. That is to say, in these relationships there was “no fixed political andsocial relationship of supremacy and subordination” of the sort that characterizes the feudaleconomies of Europe’. Later on, however, we are informed both that rich peasants ‘regularlyutilized permanent farm-labourers on the labour-mortgage system [= bonded labour]’, andthat ‘the tying of labour to this or that individual capital (landowner) does not in the leastalter the content of the social relation as one of capitalist domination…such forms ofbondage are precisely a characteristic of the formal subordination of labour to capital, that is,of a system in which capital retains its individual capital’.

55. Not the least of the many ironies informing Banaji’s current argument is his invocation ofBreman in support of his own ideas. Not only is the latter an exponent of the semi-feudalthesis, but he is also clearly confused on issues of theory. For the different historicalconjunctures at which the ‘pre-capitalist’ hali system in Gujarat is said by Breman to haveended, and thus accumulation based on the presence of capitalist production relations to havebegun, see Brass [1997b: 342, 351 note 15]. Moreover, from around 1990 onwards Bremanhas himself changed his mind about the nature of the rural workforce, and relabelled as ‘neo-bonded’ labour what he previously categorized as a ‘landless proletariat’. On this volte face,see Brass [1997b and 2000].

56. Cf. Banaji [1980: 214, 264].57. As one noted commentator [Thorner, 1982: 1998] on the mode of production debate

observes, ‘[w]here Banaji had earlier intervened as a supporter of Utsa Patnaik, he nowclasses her…as a practitioner of “extreme formalism”’.

58. Having noted his earlier enthusiasm for the ‘colonial mode of production’, the samecommentator then observes of a subsequent contribution by Banaji to the debate that ‘thistime he also eschews any reference to a colonial mode of production’. On this particular volteface, see Thorner [1982: 1965, 1998].

59. That Banaji [2003: 80] still shares with exponents of the semi-feudal thesis the view that thewage form necessarily signals capitalism is evident from his assertion that ‘the real issue oftheory here is whether we can sensibly visualise the accumulation of capital being foundedon unfree labour… And the obvious response is, no’. The same is clear, for example, fromhis claim [Banaji, 1978: 387–8] that in mid-nineteenth century Deccan the domination by‘monied capital’ over smallholding peasants did not correspond to bonded labour, becausefor him the latter relation is a characteristic of European feudalism.

60. See Banaji [2003: 82–3].61. The conflation of all relational forms, and the consequent idea that essentially no difference

existed between wage labour and slavery, was one that Engels [1907: 211–12] himselfmocked in the following fashion, when it was deployed by Eugen Dühring: ‘And when he[Dühring] explains that our modern wage slavery is only a somewhat transformed andameliorated inheritance of chattel slavery and not to be explained from itself (that is from theeconomic laws of modern society) it only signifies that wage slavery, like chattel slavery, isa form of class domination and class subjection as every child knows, or it is false. So wemight with the same right maintain that slavery is only a milder form of cannibalism, theestablished original method of disposing of conquered enemies’.

62. Banaji [2001b: 186 note 108, 191, 204, 205]. The latter are just a few of the many examplesfound in Banaji [2001b, Ch. 8] that confirm labour-power was unfree.

63. The reasons why Banaji subsumes unfree workers under the rubric of ‘free’ labour, why theresult is not merely not Marxist but anti-Marxist, and in whose political company he finds


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himself as a consequence, are considered below.64. For endorsing references to texts by Bauer, Breman and McCreery, see Banaji [1977: 26] and

Banaji [2003: 79 note 46, 87 notes 103 and 105]. Paradoxically, one of the more appropriatesupporters invoked by Banaji [2003: 87ff.] in furtherance of his argument is Sartre, that well-known commentator on the relational intricacies of the agrarian labour process in LatinAmerica and India. Sartre, of course, was not well informed either about the empirical dataor the theory concerning the substance of and transformations in the agrarian structure ofThird World countries, points which emerge clearly both from his exchanges with the FrenchTrotskyist Pierre Naville on the subject of existentialism and Marxism [Sartre, 1947: 65ff.],and from his introduction to the populist Third Worldist text by Fanon [1963].

65. For details see Brass [1999: 223ff., 260ff]. Even an uncritical ‘analysis’ of Breman’s views– such as that by van der Linden [2003: 249ff.] – accepts that these are the arguments hemakes. Significantly, perhaps, Banaji’s objections to my views first surfaced at a 2001conference paying homage to Jan Breman, whose confused and mistaken views about unfreelabour I have criticized extensively [Brass, 1994; 1997a; 1997b; 1999; and 2000]. The claimby Banaji that at the conference his ideas went unchallenged (personal communication, 6June 2002) is contradicted by the conference report, which states [Kannan and Rutten, 2002:1982] ‘it was argued during the discussion that Banaji seems partly to ignore the present-dayreality of unfreedom of labour imposed by the capital of multinational corporations; there isa tendency to control labour through the informalization of the formal sector within thecontext of globalization and liberalization’. Not only does this raise once again theproblematic issue mentioned above (see note 8), but it also suggests that the critique made atthe conference of Banaji follows along the same lines as that made by me here.

66. See Brass [1999] and also Brass [1997b and 2000]. Like Breman, McCreery has changed hismind about the nature of bonded labour, but in the opposite direction. Whereas Bremanreintroduced the element of coercion into his analysis of the rural work force in Gujarat (seenote 55 above), McCreery’s conversion to postmodernism has resulted in his decouplingpeonage and coercion, and recasting the debt bondage relation as an ‘empowering’ form ofcultural ‘otherness’.

67. This is the much criticized revisionist argument made by Fogel and Engerman [1974], andFogel [1989], about antebellum plantation slavery.

68. The assertion by cliometricians that slaves were attracted to the antebellum plantation is infact replicated by Banaji [2001b: 188], who maintains that permanent (= unfree) labour was‘attracted to the estate [in late antiquity] by the prospect of stable long-term employment’.Like cliometricians, moreover, Banaji provides no evidence for this view, in terms of howthe workers themselves perceived their situation. That claims made by Fogel and Engermanabout the empowering situation of slaves under a benign plantation regime havesubsequently been shown to be false does not prevent other neoclassical economic historiansfrom continuing to defend them. One of these is Steinfeld [2001: 6–7, 24 note 50, 317],whose arguments Banaji finds so appealing.

69. Hence the claims made by Steinfeld [2001: 7, 8] that ‘[t]he dynamics of slavery have begunto look a little more like the dynamics of wage labor… [t]his changed picture of slaveryreveals that slavery shared certain basic dynamics with wage labour…[w]e have to give upthe idea that so-called free and coerced labor inhabited completely separate universes and tryto understand both in terms of a common framework’.

70. It is impossible to improve on Sweezy’s [1946: 6–7] description of the a-historicismstructuring marginalist economics: ‘[T]he particular concept “wages”, which plays a role inall modern [bourgeois] economic theories…is taken from everyday language in which itsignifies the sums of money paid at short intervals by an employer to hired workmen.Economic theory, however, has emptied out this social content and has redefined the word tomean product, whether expressed in value or in physical terms, which is imputable to humanactivity engaged in a productive process in general. Thus Robinson Crusoe, the self-employed artisan, and the small peasant proprietor as well as the factory labourer all earnwages in this sense, though in common parlance, of course, only the last-named is properlyto be regarded as the recipient of wages. In other words, “wages” becomes a universalcategory of economic life (the struggle to overcome scarcity) instead of a category relevant


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to a particular historical form of society’ (emphasis added). A similar critique of marginalisteconomic theory is found in Bukharin [1927].

71. The influence of Kula is evident in Banaji [1977]. As a review of Kula [1976] in Capital andClass 2 (1977, pp. 147–8) long ago pointed out, the book is ‘based on microeconomic theorywhich is predominantly marginalist (and sometimes explicitly Chayanovian)… an analysismore concerned with the study of markets and circulation than with surplus appropriationand disposal’. The neoclassical economic concept of ‘disutility of labour’ is echoed inChayanovian theory of peasant economy as the ‘drudgery of labour’ structuring thelabour/consumer balance on the peasant family farm. Even exponents of the semi-feudalthesis – such as Patnaik – not only recognize Kula’s Chayanovian epistemology but alsocriticize Banaji for his procrustean attempt to synthesize Leninist views about the peasantrywith those of Chayanov [Banaji, 1976; Patnaik, 1999: 2 note 1, 63ff.].

72. For endorsing citations of Steinfeld [1991; 2001], see not only Banaji [2003: 70 notes 2, 5and 6, 71 note 20, 79 note 52, 88 notes 107 and 111], but also Banaji [2001b: 208 notes 108and 113]. Ironically, Steinfeld [2001: 13 notes 22–6] not only attacks Marx for adhering tothe free/unfree distinction, but also for using the same definition as do I (and other Marxists).It is equally clear that Banaji’s views are acceptable to those who use a marginalist analysisto examine employment relations. Thus the influence of Banaji is evident in a confused andderivative account by Harriss-White and Gooptu [2000: 94ff.] of coercion and debt-bondageas a form of contract. Not only is the usual theoretical framework of one of the two authorsa neoclassical economic one, but the input to the analysis of Banaji himself is acknowledged[Harriss-White and Gooptu, 2000: 111]. Most significantly, however, his view about‘disguised’ wage labour is reproduced verbatim: hence the claim [Harriss-White and Gooptu,2000: 96, emphasis added] that ‘small peasants and landless agricultural labourers [who] areobliged to work… by debt [and] by the coercive power of dominant landowners [are]effectively reduced to being wage-workers in thin disguise [sic]’.

73. Steinfeld and Engerman [1997]. Steinfeld’s views are no different from those of his co-author Engerman, whose marginalist economic framework informed the conservative andhighly influential revisionist account of antebellum plantation slavery as non-coercive/‘benign’/‘mild’. See Fogel and Engerman [1974], and the critique of theirneoclassical economic historiography in Brass [1999: 6, 7, 20, 34, 74, 145ff., 163ff., 255ff.,299ff.]. That Banaji is unaware of this connection and common epistemology, as also of itspolitical implications for his arguments, suggests once again a lack of familiarity both withthe debate about unfree labour and the contents of my book.

74. Steinfeld [2001: 12]. In order to arrive at this view, Banaji occasionally engages in what canonly be described as a linguistic sleight of hand. Having noted that a Revenue Departmentreport of 1879 described the relation between moneylenders and smallholders as onebetween ‘masters and…their slave’, he glosses this relation as wage slavery [Banaji, 1978:388–9, 424 note 84].

75. That the epistemology informing neoclassical economic historiographic view about unfreelabour – it is ‘voluntary’, and therefore in a sense ‘free’ – finds echoes in the justification ofslave labour advanced by defendants at the 1945 Nuremberg Trial [HM Attorney-General,1946: 189] may or may not be significant. Hence the view that ‘[w]hilst admitting thedeportation to Germany and the utilization for the war industries…of millions of workersfrom the occupied territories, [Plenipotentiary-General for the employment of labour] Saukeldenied the criminal character of this action, affirming that the recruitment of labour wasallegedly carried out on a voluntary basis’.

76. Steinfeld and Engerman [1997]. Significantly, Banaji [2003: 70 note 8, 72 notes 21 and 22]eschews specifically Marxist analyses of legal theory, such as Renner [1949] and Pashukanis[1978], preferring instead to base his case about contract on impeccably bourgeois sourcessuch as the Yale Law Journal and Harvard Law Review. The extent of this influence isevident from the fact that many of the legal sources and case studies that appear in Banaji[2003] are found originally in Steinfeld [2001]: thus, for example, Duncan Kennedy, andRobertson v. Baldwin – cited endorsingly in Banaji [2003: 70 note 5, 71 note 19, 72 note 21]– are also encountered in Steinfeld [2001: 22 note 44, 25 note 52, 72 note 113, 189 note 65,and 270ff.].


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77. For earlier references to the existence in nineteenth-century India of what are termedvariously ‘wage contracts’ and ‘labour contracts’, see Banaji [1978: 393, 409]. The same istrue of the eastern Mediterranean during late antiquity, where according to Banaji [2001b:198]: ‘[o]ne can speak of a “labour market” wherever labour was recuited through contracts,regardless of the nature of those contracts or the terms and conditions of employmentembodied in or entailed by them, and thus of the coercion and domination of labour whichsuch agreements may have represented’ (emphasis added).

78. All these claims are found in the symptomatic series of observations by Steinfeld [2001: 9,13] that: ‘…the criminal enforcement of labor agreements was an integral aspect of the firstblossoming of free contract in labor markets. Freedom of contract implied that workersshould not be constrained to enter only revocable agreements but should be free to bind theirlabor irrevocably as well… In the case of wage workers under short contracts, criminalpunishment was…nothing more than a contract remedy to enforce certain kinds of voluntaryagreement’. This is a view that Banaji [2003: 77] wholly implausibly ascribes to Marx.

79. In making the bizarre claim that I criticize Bardhan – a neoclassical economist whoseconcept of unfree labour is shared not only by Steinfeld but also by Fogel and Engerman –for regarding labour as ‘choice-making’, a view which in Banaji’s opinion is no differentfrom mine, the latter typically misrepresents (or misunderstands) my argument. What Banajifails to realize, therefore, is that my criticism of Bardhan is much rather that he holds theopposite view to mine. Hence my objection is that Bardhan regards attached workers as freebecause of his belief – wrong, in my view – that they choose to enter bonded labour relations.Cf. Banaji [2003: 78 note 44] and Brass [1999: 224].

80. Among the neoclassical economists adhering to the same view of contract are Drèze andMukherjee [1987], two of the many bourgeois economists whose views Banaji [2001b: 200,203, 208 notes 63, 88, 108, 113] cites with approval. That Banaji [2001b: 197, 198] separatesthe entry into work relationships from a capacity to exit from these subsequently is embodiedin his distinction between ‘the forms in which employers recruited labour’ and ‘the methodsof control which they used to regulate [workers once recruited]’ (original emphasis). Thelabour market, he then adds, is defined simply by the act of recruitment, or ‘entry into’ workrelations. Given his insistence on the all-embracing nature of coercion, informing free andunfree relations alike, it is indeed ironic that Banaji misses the significance for his argumentof the inability of a labourer to exit from a work arrangement s/he entered ‘voluntarily’.

81. In claiming that Polish workers in Germany were merely free workers ‘subjected…torepressive forms of control’ Banaji [2003: 79] forgets one crucial point. As the sources hehimself cites make clear, although foreign migrants were free when recruited in Poland, oncein Germany they were controlled by means of work permits. The latter remained in thepossession of employers to whom such workers had been allocated, and without them it wasimpossible for them to seek alternative and better-paid jobs. In short, Polish workers werefree but became unfree. This relational transformation is one that escapes not only Banaji but– as is outlined in Brass [2002] – also Byres, an exponent of the semi-feudal thesis.

82. The historical link between famine conditions and self-sale into slavery, a ‘voluntary’ act thatdoes not negate the unfreedom of the subsequent relation, is found not just in ancient Romebut also in Africa, Russia, Latin America, and India, where specific categories of famineslave – such as anákála bhritta (= a person ‘maintained in famine’) – exist. Fordetails/sources, see Brass [1999: 11, 30 note 2] and de Ste. Croix [1981: 169].

83. That this is the case is evident not just from Chapter 6 (‘The Sale and Purchase of Labour-power’) in Capital I [Marx, 1976: 272] but also from the manuscript for A Contribution tothe Critique of Political Economy [Marx; 1988: 37–8], written in the period 1861–63. Thelatter contains the unambiguous observation [Marx, 1988: 111, 135, emphasis added] that, soas to confront capital as wage labour, ‘[t]he worker must be free, in order to be able todispose of his labour capacity as his property, he must therefore be neither slave, nor serf,nor bondsman. Equally, he must on the other hand have forfeited the conditions for therealization of his labour capacity. He must therefore be neither a peasant farming for his ownneeds nor a craftsman: he must have altogether ceased to be an owner of property… By wagelabour we understand exclusively free labour which is exchanged for capital, is convertedinto capital and valorizes capital’.


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84. It is clear from Marx [1976: 271] that to be free, a worker did not just have to have but hadto retain – i.e. to be able to recommodify – the capacity to sell his/her labour-power: ‘He [=the free worker] must constantly treat his labour-power as his own property, his owncommodity…[in] this way he manages to alienate (veräussern) his labour-power and toavoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it’ (emphasis added). It is precisely theseaspects – the ‘constant’ ability to recommodify labour-power, and the non-renounciation ofpersonal ownership rights to the latter – that break with bourgeois legal and neoclassicaleconomic notions of ‘contract’.

85. Banaji [2003: 71 note 18] cites Engels [1985a: 255] in support of the contention that wagelabour is not and cannot be free. However, in that same review Engels [1985a: 244–5] –citing Marx [1976: 270–71] – writes as follows: ‘But in order to enable the owner of moneyto meet the labour-power as a commodity in the market, several conditions have to befulfilled…labour-power can appear as a commodity, in the market, so far only as it is offeredfor sale, or sold, by its own owner, the person whose labour-power it is. In order to enableits owner to sell it as a commodity, he must be the free proprietor of his labour-power, of hisperson. He and the owner of money meet in the market, and transact business, as each other’speers, as free and independent owners of commodities, so far different only that the one isthe buyer and the other the seller’ (emphasis added). For more along the same lines, seeEngels [1985b: 289].

86. Thus, for example, Kautsky [1936: 59–60] notes: ‘Labour-power has to appear in the marketas a commodity. What does this mean? …the exchange of commodities is based on theabsolute right of commodity owners to dispose of their commodities. The owner of labour-power, the worker, must therefore be a free man, if his labour-power is to become acommodity. His labour-power must remain a commodity; consequently, he must not sell itoutright, but only for definite periods, else he would become a slave, and be transformedfrom a commodity owner into a commodity’ (emphasis added).

87. See Banaji [2003: 79–80] for evidence that what starts out as the relationally non-specificcategory of ‘wage labour’ is subsequently relabelled by him as ‘free’. The same procedure isfound in Banaji [2001b].

88. The bourgeois legal theory structuring neoclassical economic claims about the wage relationas ‘contract’ being ‘free’ despite the inability of an indebted worker to exit from it is outlinedin Pawate [1953: 6]: ‘Thus in a contract the assent of the promisor is at the root of the matterand the apparent fetter or bondage that has sprung from the root of free assent cannot beanything but an aspect of the promisor’s own freedom. The promisor would be lacking infreedom were he not free to bind himself by his own will’.

89. That Banaji criticizes others for espousing a discourse about ‘consent’ when it is in fact hewho subscribes to a theory about ‘contract’ in which this very same notion of ‘consent’ isimplicit, requires no further comment.

90. At times Steinfeld [2001: 317, 320, 321] comes close to recognizing this. Withoutmentioning class struggle, therefore, he accepts that employers ‘were using forms of legalcompulsion to tie workers to jobs for longer or shorter periods because they hoped to reducelabor costs by taking these steps… Only when American labor became better organized afterthe Civil War…was legislation passed that cut back contract remedies even further… In bothEngland and the United States a broad suffrage, together with a well-organized labormovement and a set of arguments that resonated widely because they drew on fundamentalvalues, seem to have been crucial for establishing a contracts policy that imposed strictlimitations on [employers]’.

91. For an example from nineteenth-century Brazil of the gap between what the law states andwhat happens at the grassroots, see da Cunha [1985].

92. The questionable claim made in Banaji [2001b] is that late antiquity not only saw theemergence of a ‘new’ aristocratic elite that invested in agricultural production, but – andmore problematically – that such landlords utilized a workforce composed of hired workers(‘free wage labour’, in other words).

93. See Banaji [2001b: 217 and note 21].94. See Robert [1938: 198–9]. The teleological link between slave-as-‘hired labourer’ and claims

about emancipatory/empowering trends can be gauged from the assertion [Robert, 1938: viii]


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that ‘[t]he broad privileges granted the factory bondsmen broke with tradition and indicatedan evolutionary movement away from slavery, a movement which, had it not been for thecataclysmic changes of the 1860s, might have resulted in the peaceful granting of Negrofreedom’.

95. Such slaveowners were, unsurprisingly, much in favour of ‘higher wages’ paid to slavesleased to factories, since these increases went to them and not the unfree worker employed.

96. Compare Banaji [2001b: viii], where he criticizes what he terms ‘a traditional picture of lateantiquity’derived from legal sources, with his obvious enthusiasm for the latter in Banaji [2003].

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