Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTOne of many fracture zones in the right‐less workforce is between wage labour, disguised wage labour (DWL) and petty commodity production (PCP) — between the formal and real subsumption of labour to capital. When the polar classes of capitalism leave much lying between them under conditions of generalized commodity production and circulation, where expansion is driven by multiplication of tiny units of production and trade rather than, or as well as, accumulation, what is to be done? In response to Saumyajit Bhattacharya's charge (in this issue) that the discourse used to explore PCP can support the de‐legitimation of labour politics, this essay examines the definitions of, evidence for, and interpretation of DWL and PCP in the Indian case. It then addresses the theoretical and practical importance of PCP, its persistence, problems of its legal status and its politics.

The starting point of this essay is with some findings on employment in the South Indian city of Coimbatore which we reported in an earlier paper (Harriss, 1982). There we described the principal social characteristics of broad groups of workers, defined after categories proposed by Bromley and Gerry (1979)—those of 'permanent wage work', 'short-term wage work', 'casual work' and 'self-employment' or 'dependent work' in petty production and trade. We established that in Coimbatore there is little movement of individual workers from other forms of employment into permanent wage work and also that it is unusual to find households with members both in permanent wage work and in other forms of employment. These findings prompt the question whether or not there can be said to exist a 'labour aristocracy' in the city of Coimbatore. More broadly they suggest questions concerning forms of social organization and class formation amongst urban workers. We will take up these questions here complementing our earlier studies of small-scale production and the relationships between different levels of production in Coimbatore, and so contributing to the rather limited literature on the lives and work of the urban working poor of India. A further part of our purpose is thus to describe the backgrounds, conditions of work, residential communities and organizations of this important group of people.

In 1986 the International Activities Committee of the Economic and Social Research Council decided to undertake reviews of progress in 'area studies', and to do this by means of small, inter-disciplinary conferences. A review conference on South Asian studies was held in Cambridge, and attended by forty-one scholars from different disciplines and from India, France, Holland and the USA as well as from Britain. The purpose of the review was understood to be a 'stock-taking' in different fields of research, intended to identify conceptual, theoretical and substantive issues at the frontiers of enquiry; and to examine the implications and contributions of research on South Asia for historical research and for the social sciences in general. In the pursuit of these objectives the conference had three components. First came sessions in which two economists (Toye and Chaudhuri), two historians (Tomlinson and Washbrook), an anthropologist (Fuller) and a sociologist (Hawthorn) presented views of 'progress and problems' in their fields. Then came two pairs of concurrent working groups on broad themes, drawing partly on the earlier papers and discussions; and finally three panelists (Bharadwaj, Breman and Lipton) offered commentary on the proceedings. The review papers by Toye, Tomlinson and Washbrook appear in this issue of Modern Asian Studies. What follows here is a commentary on some of the themes that emerged in the papers and discussions.