MOVEMENT of people under capitalism is related to the structure of capitalist accumulation. This entails a complex process of creating new images of modernity, creation of new spaces, consumption of new goods and habits and new areas of commodification and production. Reproduction of capital relations and the ever expanding circuit of capital overcomes its own boundaries and finds new places amenable to surplus production and exploitation.

There are two apparently different but structurally linked processes involved in this accumulation and that is one, a creation of relative surplus population in centres of production and the other is the continuous supply of labour actualised by a protracted process of dispossession of direct producers from their ownership of means of production.

Migration can be located in this dual process of dispossession and apparent redundancy. This creates a perpetual anxiety within the migrant, an entity pushed out from its habitat while a new identity yet to be realised. This anxiety and lack of community makes the migrant vulnerable to accept lower wages and exploitative working conditions. But this is at the same time a boon to capital.

Employing migrant workers instead of locals has become the preferred alternative in the neoliberal corporate labour regimes. International migration has increased by 45 per cent in the past two decades. Migration from the global south to the north is constituted by two major streams: highly skilled professionals moving to the north for better fortune and the second one involves construction workers, domestic help, care workers, sex workers, those employed in low paid service jobs. Internal migration, however, has much larger share in total migration. In India also intra-state and inter-state migration has increased in the past three decades. It is generally referred to increased mobility in a liberalised regime but this mobility comes with increased vulnerability for the working people.

The reality of dispossession and lack of belongingness of migrants within the urban centres of India was manifested crudely during the pandemic when thousands of people had to walk down hundreds of miles to find a place of their ‘own’.

DISPOSSESSION AND RESERVE

ARMY OF LABOUR

Capitalism creates dispossession in order to convert resources owned by communities into private capital. This is not a one-shot game and need not be always executed by explicit force. It continues through the past and present of capitalism and can be both like a forcible encroachment or a protracted process which gradually pushes people out from their own localities in search of a livelihood elsewhere. This is the story of migration of India as well. People do not leave their native places happily but such a move is often prompted by dispossession and misery at the present and a hope for the future.

Capitalism entails uneven development where growth centres emerge amidst darkness and migrants flock to such urban centres that might offer better opportunities. The supply of labour increases in these metro cities and everyone crammers to find a place in these centres of ‘good fortune’. Capitalists find this quest for betterment very useful.

 People uprooted from their native places, delinked from their larger community and ecosystem, isolated from friends and relatives, exist as a packet of labour power unknown, unnamed and unarmed at the same time. As more people joins the reserve army of labour, employers enhance their bargaining power and can hire new workers at a lower wage. This also creates pressure upon the existing workers who find it increasingly difficult to retain their wages and terms of employment. On the top of that, most of the migrant workers in India could not afford to bring their families to cities where they hardly could lead a respectful life. The families staying back in villages can live a better life at a much lower cost. Hence the labour exporting regions of the country in a way help containing the cost of social reproduction of the labouring population of the country. Workers having their families in native villages may agree to a lower reservation wage compared to that demanded by a resident worker of the host region. On the top of that, the ‘insider/outsider’ division is consciously reproduced to divide the working people economically as well as culturally. One’s own identity drawn from the past confronts with the alien new world and the discontent and resistance against oppression often manifests in the form of asserting cultural symbols that are nothing but reminiscent of the past. The residents of the host region are often blown with superiority, either they deny doing jobs that migrants do or are paid more for the same job. The division of wages and entitlements and rights are culturally maintained even if they are not separated by geographical boundaries.

MIGRATION UNDER

NEOLIBERALISM

The process of globalisation includes relocation of production and relocation of people. These are applicable for international as well as internal movements. The relocation of production particularly that of manufacturing and standard services facilities from global north to global south was primarily driven by the motive to producing in places where labour and nature are relatively cheap. But production also involves diffusion of knowledge and hence global corporates are careful in retaining control and property rights on the knowledge used in production. Hence there are limits to relocation. It is also important to note that MNCs prefer to substitute labour by capital in the home countries using new labour displacing technologies that may allow them to reduce production costs in the long run. But substitution of labour by capital also has certain limits as it is not always possible to replace labour by machines. These segments of production are particularly relocated to the global south to take advantage of cheap labour.

The other way of using labour arbitrage is to facilitate a flow of labour from the global south to global north particularly to employ them in production of goods and services in the host country. These jobs are mostly those that the resident labour would not generally be opting to do and employers are also not ready to pay wages at the standard rate usually paid to host country workers. Migrant workers are used in such segments and often denied rights applicable to resident citizens. Hence they would be paid lower wages, have to work longer hours, wouldn’t be eligible for welfare provisions, may not even have legal identity to lay claims to justice and all these deficits add to the advantages of the employer who can squeeze the migrant workers more compared to the resident worker. Hence in the same place of work different wages exists for workers and that is maintained and articulated by untold norms of power. Such differences also exist between states and regions within countries facilitating internal migration. Shortage of labour of one kind is made up by such migration flows while the shortage itself might be the result of another kind of out migration. Therefore, labour is in a state of flux in this era of globalisation.

The flow of capital determines the broad contours of the sectoral and spatial location of emerging opportunities and migrants follow the possibilities of good fortune. Migrants as individuals might be earning more compared to their native places but this whirlpool of labour systematically enriches capital by enabling them to lowering wages of migrant workers as well as of those competing workers in the host countries.