Class struggle and the deproletarianisation of agricultural labour in Haryana (India)

Abstract

This article considers the way in which labour attachment is theorised, both in the 1950s Agricultural Labour Enquiries, and subsequently in the work of Rudra, Bardhan, and Breman. Common to all these texts is a positive conceptualisation of attached labour, and consequently the elimination of its element of unfreedom. Instead, the relation is presented in terms of a materially reciprocal exchange between landholder and worker, a transaction which from the viewpoint of the latter corresponds to a much sought‐after form of job insurance or subsistence guarantee. By contrast, it is suggested here that attachment constitutes de‐proletarianisation undertaken by capital in the course of class struggle, and that in Haryana the agricultural work‐force strongly dislikes this kind of employment.

Notes

Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RQ, UK. This article is taken from a much longer text, Unfree Labour and Agrarian Development in Post‐Independence India: A Comparison of Haryana and Bihar (December 1987), an unpublished research report based on fieldwork carried out in India during 1987 and funded by a research grant from the New Delhi office of the Ford Foundation. The writer wishes to thank Ramaswamy Sudarshan for encouragement, and in particular for his support on a point of principle, and also D.R. Chaudhary, Director of the Centre for Haryana Studies, Rohtak, for hospitality. Neither of the latter is responsible for the views expressed here.