The persistence of ‘debt bondage’ in India has long mesmerised the progressive intellectuals and activists, a vast majority of who still consider its existence as a reminder of the amphibian (semi-feudal, semi-capitalist) character of India’s political economy and its underdevelopment—overloaded with pre-capitalist ‘vestiges’. The booklet under review drastically differs from such understanding of bondage. It does not view bondage as ‘a unique system’; rather, it views bondage as a form of employment relationship institutionalising labour vulnerability through debt. “Bonded labour is primarily a social relationship and all those labour relations where the vulnerability of the workers is institutionalised through debt could be described as bondage.” (p. 6) Further, bondage is “a flexible and adaptive system of labour exploitation.” (p. 8)

With the development of capitalist relations in India, bondage has increasingly lost its earlier permanent and generational nature, and has become more and more temporary, seasonal and individualised. The public policy and legal state machinery that are in place to identify and ‘eradicate’ bondage are unable to record and influence its reproduction in the era of globalisation. Informalisation—contractualisation and casualisation—of the work process that characterises the neoliberal regime of accumulation has increased labour vulnerability tremendously leading to a system of ‘neo-bondage’, as Jan Breman calls it. Debt and bondage are most rampantly used as mechanisms to mobilise cheap labour from the hinterlands and ensure migration (seasonal or long-term) for labour supply in the industries in which India has a comparative advantage. In fact, “with respect to bonded labourers, debt is always a precondition for entering the labour market and in establishing an employer-employee relationship”. (pp. 80-81)

The report, based on extensive studies throughout India, maps the institutionalisation of labour vulnerabilities through various forms of debt bondage in contemporary India. With the help of many case studies, it shows how debt posits an element of liability on the part of the worker in the employment relationship, thus reinforcing and consensualising the subjugation of labour under circumstances and conditions on which the worker has a lesser control than otherwise. Advances or debt shapes “the situation of being employed”. It reconfigures an employment relationship as that of between the debtor and the creditor, thus reducing the “agency of labour” and alienating the rights and entitlements of workers that characterise the ideal contractual relationship. However, the liabilities in the relationship or general costs of labour are accumulated and bestowed on the worker. The report understands that the role of debt in bondage “is not as an element of an agreement for which there are separate rules and practices of enforcement, but rather... to construct how the claims of workers will be interpreted and treated”. (p. 20)

The third chapter of the report assesses the interventions of the state and other agencies to eradicate bondage and rehabilitate the bonded labour. It details the provisions of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976 and the subsequent judicial, legislative and executive activism. It enumerates the discrepancies in its implementation. The chapter also examines the intervention of NGOs. A significant conclusion in this regard is that it was the mobilisational and organisational efforts that were most effective in bonded labour eradication.

The report establishes that bonded labour too has contributed to “India shining” and its globalising aspirations. In fact, bonded labour is not just an input in commodity production; rather, workers in the relationship (conditioned by advances or debt) are essentially sellers of their labour power. “They are controlled by the employers in lieu of an advance or delayed payment or non-payment of minimum wages.” (p. 82) Wages in such conditions are squeezed not only through depressed, delayed and deducted payments but also via uncontrollable interest rates.

It is important to understand Marx’s concept of “wage slavery” here. The use of this phrase was not at all allegorical or rhetorical, as many tend to believe. It conceptualised the ‘unfreedom’ or coercion inherent in the dual freedom of labour (from physical compulsion and from the means of production). On the one hand, this dual freedom creates an ambience that compels a labourer to sell his/her labour power. On the other hand, once labour power is sold for a period, the labourer has no control over its expenditure for that duration. It should be remembered that although the custom is to pay wages after labour-power is exercised, wages are, in fact, already advanced prior to the labour process not only for the purpose of records, but also as capital required for production—that is, it constitutes variable capital that is required to buy labour-power and put it to work. In the circuit of Capital (c) given below, Money (M) is advanced to buy Means of Production (MP) and Labour Power (LP) before Production (P) can take place.

MP

M                 C                  ...P...C`                   M`

LP

In fact, “whether money serves as a means of purchase or a means of payment, this does not alter the nature of the exchange of commodities.” (Karl Marx, Capital, Penguin, pp. 279) As “a means of purchase”, money is advanced to the sellers of labour power prior to production, whereas as “a means of payment”, it remains as the worker’s “credit to the capitalist” until production is completed, to be paid as wages afterwards. Functionally it hardly makes any difference. “This does not alter the nature of the exchange of commodities.” And both institutionalise labour vulnerabilities in their own way—advance (partial or whole) can easily be transformed into debt creating liabilities that shape bondage whereas wages can be delayed or even lost (when the capitalist goes bankrupt). In fact, the delay in receiving wages is a significant reason for indebtedness among workers. If in Marx’s England, debt played a part in tying the worker more to a shop as a consumer, or to sustain the “truck system”, it can instigate other systems too, to institute labour vulnerabilities. Ultimately, the purpose is to increase these vulnerabilities and, thus, reproduce the hegemony of capital over labour. The report remarkably succeeds in showing how this is done in various parts of India through debt bondage.