Problematizing the Notion of Resistance in the context of Post-Reforms India: Revisiting the Concepts of Formal and Real Subsumption of Labour under Capital from Marx’s Capital

Following the classic Foucauldian argument that resistance is not exclusive of power, but is rather constitutive of it, this article in the same vein analyzes contemporary forms of resistance in its specificity of relation to neo-liberalism, with special focus on post-Reforms Indian economy. In the last thirty years, the forces of privatization, liberalization and globalization has contributed to an increasing informalization of the Indian economy such that, as per NCEUS reports (2007 and 2009), 93% of the total population in India today find conditions of work and survival in the informal sector across agriculture, manufacturing and services exhibiting diverse organizations of production that cannot be termed as capitalist. Rather, self-employment, different putting-out systems and sub-letting of labour characterize the Indian economy today which are in turn provided with conditions of existence by merchant and rentier capital, middlemen and other intermediaries. This article poses the question: is self-employment a form of resistance against capitalist production? Or is it a disguised form of wage-labour? Is there a hidden dependency for this vast pool of self-cultivators in agriculture and petty independent artisans of the informal sector marked by asymmetric market-power, dominance of piece-wages and varying degrees of separation of means of production and labour? Is this seemingly non-capitalist sector in actuality organized by global capital (productive and finance) via complex networks of value-chains based on outsourcing and subcontracting? This article attempts to answer these questions by concentrating on forms of labour and organizations of production in the informal sector in terms of the categories of formal and real (and hybrid) subsumption of labour under capital by reading from the Appendix of Marx's Capital (Vol. I). Subsumption is understood here in terms of the extent to which labor is integrated into the capitalist production process (and not as successive stages of a teleological, unilinear view of capitalism) and is utilized to reveal how labour (both formal and informal) has responded to the new processes of appropriation and exploitation by adapting and resisting at the same time to the dictates of freely mobile global capital resulting in heterogeneous combinations of different forms of subsumption. The different specificities of labour-capital struggle, i.e., class struggle point to the fact that it is mediated by cultural histories, geographical locationalities and other factors like state intervention which is brought out in this work by citing concrete examples of production and exchange relations in Indian agriculture and informal manufacturing.