Anandi Sharan
Small and marginal farmers, sharecroppers, landless labourers and other farm and forest workers in India are the single largest natural resource being exploited for capitalist accumulation in India.
The market pays the manual work of those who produce their own food and that of others at below social reproduction cost.
This is a fundamental market failure in relation to the majority of human beings in India. The manual labourer in India is given rations in the form of Public Distribution Service food by the State in order that capital is free to take everything from the land and people and grow at the cost of everything else.
The growth of capital is at the cost of the humans who work with their hands, as well as at the cost of animals and plant biodiversity.
100% of biota today is appropriated by capital. There is no wilderness. The number of mammals has reduced by 70% in the last 50 years. What remains are workers, the last bio-mass of any mass other than ants on earth, to be exploited for capital in its latest avatar of globally networked electronic-financial-exploitation-machines run on algorithms to maximise the financial income of the capitalists sitting at the centre of the web.
An association of independent producers generally has a vision of a market that serves the producer, allowing her to retain at least enough from her surplus production of food, wood, etc to earn money and save wood enough build an own home within five years of starting work. She rightly should be able to expect to contribute to a network of such producers in her region to allow her to buy the services of transport systems that allows her to visit relatives and friends within India and abroad from the income earned from her productive work at least a few times a year. Other basic needs can be added to the list of minimum expectations any producer should be able to work towards in her life and work. This matriarchal vision is that all human beings should, according to the paradigm of the unilateral drawing from the world that a mother does when she nurtures her children, be able to draw what she needs from the world to create the world anew everyday in full harmony with others and her surroundings. But the vision is the opposite of the reality.
The exploitative nature of the Indian State is illustrated by the plethora of laws passed by the Indian Parliament that protect banks rather than agriculturists. Instead of protecting the market for the work product of Indian agricultural and forest workers, the State protects the profit of banks. To avoid mass starvation deaths as a consequence of this capitalist legal framework, the majority of Indians are given food rations by the State in order to keep us as a reserve army of labour for global capital. Indian capital itself is created by commercial banks owned majorly but not exclusively by the State for the benefit of global capital. Indian capitalists must pay 12% to borrow money to hire workers. Indian agriculturists must pay the same interest rate for working capital, or more in case they are not “bankable”. And the solution to this totally anti-worker money system of high interest and debt in India according to the United Nations, the Group of Seven, the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, and all the other institutions of the Washington consensus, including the Indian Finance Ministry, Niti Aayog, and the Reserve Bank of India, is for India to borrow part of the 76 trillion US dollars swirling around in the global economy at interests rates lower than Indian ones. And this is what is going on. The Modi Government like the Manmohan Singh Government before it has an economic policy based on the import of capital into India, with the attendant outflow of repayments and interest and loss of monetary sovereignty of India. Fascist Governments such as these are in the ascendant across the world.
To conclude: the struggle for justice by agricultural workers and unemployed labourers in India in our demands for economic and political arrangements that meets our needs within the framework of the Indian constitution, is the sine qua non of the survival of the human species and most other higher living organisms on earth.
Trees will survive and thrive when capitalism ends no matter what. But unless we humans overthrow capitalism and put the peace, happiness and harmony of each and everyone of us at the heart of our economic and political actions, most of us will die very unhappy, and ill, and malnourished in the coming decades.
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