[PEN-L:28702] Re: Kerala (was Re: Vandana Shiva)

[Ben Day <day@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 04:38 PM 7/26/2002 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I completely agree with that. But to do all these things, you need more
> industry, and more industry means transforming the division of labor and
> socializing production now done in the household. You can do the good
> things that Kerala did, but Kerala is still poor. The only way to make
> India less poor is to industrialize somehow. I don't think Shiva, or her
> fans in the West, agree.
>
> Doug

Well, Kerala was also the only Indian state, to a great extent, to
successfully implement land reform. This seems to me a basic prerequisite
of industrialization of any sort, but almost impossible elsewhere in India
since the Congress Party - like the parties that drove independence and
dominate the political landscape in so many developing countries - is
inextricably bound up with landed elites. Kerala was able to carry out land
reform due to the strength of its two Communist Parties (but particularly
the Communist Party--Marxist, which split from the CP during independence
when Stalin backed Nehru, and the rest of the CP followed the Moscow line
by taking an accomodationist tack with the Congress Party), and the fact
that labor unions (most affiliated witht he CPM) had great success
organizing agricultural labor, particularly in the informal sector (this is
a rare form of success, in any country). So, although we usually single out
Kerala's welfare policies, and the debate over the "Kerala model" in
developmental economics hinges on whether a welfare state is a viable (or
more importantly, a sustainable) road to development - I think we tend to
miss Kerala's real accomplishments, which involve the successful
commodification of land and labor. Most developing countries have, or are
gaining, at least /nominally/ capitalist relations - capitalists and wage
labor. But wage labor here is embedded in despotic social relations, and
extensive power inequalities, that function to tie labor to the land.

Or, in Marxist terms, without effective land reform most agricultural
production attempts to improve productivity by increasing absolute surplus:
producers in the informal sector, facing a supine working class, and
essentially beyond any meaningful regulation by the state, will tend to
improve productivity through labor-squeezing tactics (driving down wages,
extending the working day/week/year, etc.). With less unequal power
structures governing the wage relation, with greater labor mobility, and a
state presence in the labor market (e.g. the ability to enforce national
minimum wages), producers are more likely compete by introducing new
technologies, or other means of increasing "relative surplus." Of course,
neoliberals tend to target State intervention in developing countries'
markets, but the bulk of most developing countries' economies are informal,
and growing even more informal. The informal sector is characterized in
most places by extreme LACK of unregulation - usually without even the
enforcement of existing laws governing market interactions, and accepted by
most neoliberal theory as fundamental for the preservation of markets.
Neoliberal developmental economists have a tendancy, I think, to myopically
focus on the formal sector in justifying policy prescriptions.

The east asian tigers - who have had the greatest success in industralizing
- were able to carry out land reform successfully due, in large part, to
their top-heavy State apparatuses (the legacy of colonialism) and weak
social classes - there was no landed elite strong enough to resist land
reform imposed from above. But this solution is simply not viable for most
developing countries, either because of the third wave of democratization,
or due to a state implicated in the interests of landed elites. And even if
it were, this model's reliance on fairly autonomous State control and weak
social classes has its own problems of long-term sustainability. So I think
Kerala presents a viable model of development "from below" in this respect.

This doesn't exactly explain why Kerala is still poor though (and, in
particular, with lower per capita income than the average in India). It's
clear, though, that international markets have punished Kerala for its
labor militancy, as has the national State in India. There is also the
issue of time, suggested by Ulhas, and I think there's a good case to be
made that Kerala is in a better position to grow than most developing
states (or States) in a similar position.

In any case, if any of you haven't heard of or had the chance to read
Patrick Heller's _The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation
of Capitalism in Kerala, India_ (Cornell UP, 1999), I'd highly highly
recommend it, and my comments above are basically a regurgitation of some
of the theoretical backbones of his historical narrative and analysis.

-----Ben