Capitalism divides people into capitalists, who own and profit from the means of production, and the rest who work for them in order to survive. Under capitalism, a society is a class society. Class Notes is a column of commentaries by Critique Collective from an unapologetically partisan class perspective. It attempts to analyse topical issues from the point of view of long term interests of the working people of India


Indian Farmers Take a Stand Against Neo-Liberalism

Critique Collective


Rather than submitting to markets thrust from above, farmers are articulating a conception of economic life in which people who work get a decent return for their efforts. .. Any policy which has the potential of increasing hunger, immediately stands delegitimised in this framework, no matter what market logic can be given in its favour. This proto-socialistic moral vision should be distinguished from the social welfare model of state power, or ‘concern’ for the poor shown by the privileged.

For more than two months thousands of farmers from north-western states of India are camping with their tractors, trollies, and community kitchens on highways entering the national capital. They are agitating against the three farm laws passed recently by the Modi government. The agitation however has taken on meanings going much beyond the immediate context of these laws. Its inner strength and popular support are primarily due to the fact that its moral arguments, cooperative sociality, and organizational strategies also challenge the neo-liberal world view of Indian ruling classes. The working people of India need to contribute to and strengthen all strands of popular opposition to neoliberalism. Only then can they hope to defeat this latest form of capitalist class rule.

Neo-liberalism denotes a set of political economic practices that aim to enhance the power of capitalist class by expanding the domination of private property and markets in social lire. Along with practical steps, it includes ideological attitudes with deep political implications. Devaluation of social relations, fetishisation of humans as individuals with a right to ‘choose’ (presented as freedom), naturalization of bourgeois entrepreneurship as the primary character of human economic agency, and popularization of the idealized life-styles of the rich are neoliberal strategies whose effects can be seen in mass politics, social psychology and popular culture. At the level of lived experience, neoliberalism valorises contractual market transactions as virtuous in themselves, which also entails indifference to human consequences of such transactions.

All Indian governments since nineteen nineties have followed neo-liberal policies. Modi government has succeeded in marrying the neo-liberal economic agenda with a neo fascist politics of majoritarian nationalism. Propertied and professional ‘savarna’ caste Hindus form the core of this political economic project, giving it a hegemonic heft. This has allowed Modi government to pursue neo-liberalism with exceptional aggression.

The three farm laws of the Modi government are a multi-pronged strategy to open up Indian agriculture and food economy to unregulated markets. Farmers in India are already tied up with markets for inputs, credit and the sale of their produce. Similarly, the food economy of the country is also market based. However, these markets exist under de-jure regulations which vary from state to state. Whereas the small trading and industrial capital of the local and regional economies work within these regulations, or have found ways to overcome these de-jure regulations through informal practices, as long as these regulations are on books the national level large capital finds it difficult to tap the agrarian and food economy of the country. The chief purpose of these laws is to satisfy this need of the large capital. 

 


Banners at farmers’ protest showing the government as tied to large corporates, and asserting peasant power.

Neoliberal Tricksters

Modi government, and neoliberal ‘experts’ of course don’t openly admit this primary aim of the three laws. Instead, they advertise these as offering real ‘choice’ to farmers to sell their produce to anyone they wish for better return. Their claim is that the crisis of agriculture is due to the lack of private investment and value addition in more diversified set of farm produce. According them state actions regarding agrarian inputs and regulation of agricultural markets are trapped in a non-functional regime of wasteful subsidies. These are seen distorting demand signals, and resulting in a harmful over production of wheat and paddy. Available state resources are claimed to be cornered by a small number of better off peasants. Current protests are declared to be limited to these farmers, while the new laws are said to be good for all farmers, big or small. Even the emerging ecological crisis due to excess ground water withdrawal and fertilizer consumption in areas of Green revolution is thrown in for greater effect.

The lived reality of farming in India, which informs farmers’ protest is very different from the neoliberal discourse about it. The Green Revolution package of the pre-liberalisation era was a state led project that deepened capitalist production relations in agriculture. A class of capitalist farmers emerged who, on the back of input subsidies and assured markets, hired labour to increase production, and reinvested surplus to further increase the scale of production. At the other end, rural proletarisation increased. However, the state institutional structure which gave a fillip to capitalism in agriculture, was also available to medium and small farming and slowed their disintegration. Land and productive resources have not passed under the exclusive control of capitalist farmers. Small and medium farming remains preponderant, both in numbers as well in production. Production changes in the neo-liberal era like bio-technology, GM crops, expansion to horticulture, vegetables, etc. have been market led. Agricultural households are now more integrated into private markets, for production and sale of their produce, for essential requirements like health, and education, as well as. Agrarian life has increasingly come to depend upon the character of encompassing market network, which under neoliberalism is determined by the requirements of the large capital. This network is a giant sucking machine structured like a pyramid, which transfers larger and larger share of social produce to higher levels as profit. This is the cause of obscene levels of inequalities, which have become so glaring that even mainstream media and status quoist intellectuals have started talking about it. A small number of capitalist farmers have prospered under neoliberalism by branching into new avenues. However, more than ninety percent of farmers are petty commodity producers who are just about managing to survive. According to the 2013 NSSO survey eighty-seven percent agricultural households owned less than 2 hectares and their average monthly income was Rs 5,240, which for a household of five persons amounts to Rs 1048 per capita. This included income from non-agricultural sources. The per capita monthly income for the country that year was Rs 6,250.  This means that 87% of farming households that year were surviving at about one sixth the national average.

Farmers from the north-western states of Punjab, Haryana and Western UP, who according to Modi government are now protesting to protect their privileges, are only little bit better off. Wheat and paddy productivity in Punjab is not only highest in India, but is comparable to the best in the world. However, increased productivity has not brought prosperity. According to the same NSSO data, the average monthly income of agricultural households in Punjab was Rs 18,059. Hence, in this agriculturally most productive region of India, an average farming household lived at about 40% less income than the national average. Per farmer debt here is close to Rs ten lakhs, which is more than three times their annual earnings. With practically nil savings from farm income, they see no way out of the debt trap. According to a study by public universities of the state, more than 16 thousand farmers committed suicide between 2001-2015. This amounts to nearly three farmers killing themselves every day.  

Even when farmers diversify their production to milk, vegetables, fruits, and animal products, as neo-liberal ‘experts’ say they should to increase their income, their precarity persists. In fact, the market value of milk, and of vegetables and fruits produced by Indian farmers now is separately more than the value of grains. Yet as travails of onion and milk producers in western Maharashtra (who many times have thrown their produce on roads to protest against crash in market prices), tomato growers of northern Karnataka, and cotton growers of Vidarbha and south Punjab show, as long as production is for markets driven by the logic of profit, there is no guarantee of a stable and decent income for farmers.

Nothing exposes the anti-human core of neo-liberal market ideology better than the claim that India is producing excess food grains because there are no takers for the stockpile of wheat and paddy with the Food Corporation of India. The real cause of FCI godowns bursting at seams is not that there is too much production, but that an average Indian is too poor to afford decent nutrition. The yearly availability of food grains per capita in India is about 180 kg. In Bangladesh it is 200kg. It is 450 kg in China, and 1100 kg in the US. In the global hunger index for 2019 India was ranked at 102 among a total of 117 countries. All countries of South Asia barring Afghanistan are better able to feed their people than India. Citizens of Nepal (rank 73), Bangladesh (rank 88) and Pakistan (rank 94) are better fed than Indians. The most recent family health survey has shown that close to one third of Indian children are malnourished, underweight and stunted. According to Swaminathan Commission it was estimated in 2005 that by 2015 India should produce 420 million tons of food grains. The production in 2019-20 was about 297 million tons. The contradiction between stockpile of grains on the one side, and widespread hunger on the other, can be easily resolved by universalizing the public distribution system and increasing the quantum of grain supplied. This however is precisely what the neo-liberal policy framework prohibits.

A Clear-sighted Protest

Modi regime’s agricultural laws are the next step in the strengthening of capitalism in Indian agriculture. Besides large corporates, rich capitalist farmers would also be their beneficiaries. Not only would they find newer avenues to expand, they would be the first ones to pick pieces of a disintegrating small and middle peasantry.

The small and medium farmers have seen through the game. They form the core of the opposition to these laws and have devised a protest strategy most conducive to their strength in numbers. They see Modi government as acting at the behest of large corporate houses. The conduct of the government in passing these laws during the coronavirus pandemic, and without any discussion with farmers’ organisations and in the parliament is highlighted to indicate conspiratorial intent. Their trope of profiteering corporates versus hard working farmers is a direct challenge to the neoliberal imagination of markets as the domain of freedom for everyone.    

One of their prime demands is a legal guarantee that anyone buying farm produce has to pay a publicly declared minimum support price based upon actual cost of production. Rather than submitting to markets thrust from above, farmers are articulating a conception of economic life in which people who work get a decent return for their efforts. This argument is extended to the entire food economy, when the three laws are also presented as an underhand means to dismantle the public distribution system, through which the poor in India get subsidised food grains. Any policy which has the potential of increasing hunger, immediately stands delegitimised in this framework, no matter what market logic can be given in its favour. This proto-socialistic moral vision should be distinguished from the social welfare model of state power, or ‘concern’ for the poor shown by the privileged.

The third challenge to the neoliberal model of society presented by farmers’ protest is its organization, which is based upon cooperative sociality. Even though every small and marginal farmer in India lives on the edge due to economic uncertainty, the current largescale protest is not a spontaneous phenomenon. This protest is not emanating from any perceived violations of a peasant specific ‘moral economy’. Nor its form is an ‘every day form of resistance’, or a ‘weapon of the weak’. It asserts itself without hesitation in a modern public domain with clear demands from the state authority. Rural Punjab, from where the largest contingents of protesting farmers have come, is saturated with peasant organisations having full time cadres. Many of these have roots in radical left politics and have grown organically by locally based organizing efforts and protests. Decades of hard work have built community linkages and trust that show up in the success of their mobilisation. Even though land owning farmers constitute less than 20% of state’s workforce, their mobilization has crossed a critical mass, so that people from all walks of life appear to have become active supporters of the agitation. This form of organized social action is anti-thetical to the market centric human subjectivity advocated by neo-liberalism.

Neoliberalism is a systemic force of current capitalism. It is buttressed by the economic power of capitalist class, and is thrust on society by the power of state. Hegemonic classes in India are standing behind it.  Farmers’ protest has no pretension of being a force for systemic change.  It has not yet even confronted internal contradictions within agrarian classes, for example between landless farm workers and land owning peasantry. In Punjab and Haryana this class contradiction is overlain by caste dominance, as most of the land is owned by Jat peasantry, while dalits form a landless proletariat. Some of the left leaning farmers’ organisations in Punjab have made useful breakthroughs on these questions, but much remains to be done. Nevertheless, to the extent this protest has managed to articulate a number of anti-neoliberal arguments and practices, it is going to have a lasting influence on anti-capitalist struggles ahead.