STR, modern industry and some basic questions about production and labourprocesses

(Abstract of Paper for Workshop on India’s Path to Socialism, 27-30 December 2011,

Hyderabad)

Anil Rajimwale

Abstract

1. The STR and ICR have gained momentum in the last two decades in India. Consequently, they are the basic production and labour processes of capitalist mode of production. It is becoming increasingly essential to examine these processes in the context of India, and they can no more be ignored as something ‘foreign’.

2. Karl Marx in his great work Grundrisse has analysed many of these possibilities for the future and has visualized the results of automation. He has differentiated between production and labour processes, which identical and simultaneous in many aspects, begin to separate out from each other in the conditions of STR.

3. Consequent upon automation, the labourer in Marx’s visualization stands out of production process and stands besides the production. At this point of development, one needs to redefine production, labour and work. The labourer is more an overseer than a labourer.

4. What happens when more and more commodities are produced with less and less labour, going towards zero? What then is the value of commodity? Does the labour theory of value apply here?

5. Electronics is a means of production which is qualitatively different from that existing so far in the history of humankind. It creates conditions where virtually no labour is necessary to produce ‘commodity’, which now converted into ‘goods’. A new mode of production begins to take shape, which can only be explained by the concept of the ‘post-industrial’ society.

6. The value of the commodity is moving towards ’zero’, even in our country, which is not isolated from international economy.

7. While on the one hand problems like unemployment and capitalist crises are exacerbated, on the other outlines of new mode of production, distribution and services are visible.

8. We need lot of empirical data to further confirm these conclusions.

(The author has raised these questions in his book, in Hindi, on STR and Post-Industrial Society, published in 1997. He has been repeatedly raising these questions and presenting concepts accordingly. The subsequent developments broadly confirm the trends and concepts, as also the questions raised and the answers given. The trends and formulations need further serious study and discussions. —-AR)