Unfree labour and capitalist restructuring in the Agrarian sector: Peru and India

Abstract

Based on fieldwork in La Convención, Peru, and the Indian Punjab, this article examines the contribution of unfree labour to capitalist restructuring in the agrarian sector, a process whereby free wage labour is replaced by bonded labour. Debt bondage is analysed in relation to class struggle in these labour‐scarce contexts, specifically with regard to its utilisation by capitalist producers to lower the cost and simultaneously maintain control over both the migrant and local components of their workforce. The economic and extra‐economic modes of compulsion required to enforce labour‐service obligations incurred as a result of indebtedness are also considered, in particular the role of kinship. Since this kind of agrestic servitude involves the attachment through debt of workers not so much to land but to an individual employer, contemporary bonded labour is theorised as a form of modern slavery.

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