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
