It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
-Com. Joseph Stalin
While the ruling party and their supporters are celebrating the building of a temple on the ruins of a Masjid, the citizens of our country are willing to take jobs in Israel despite knowing there’s an ongoing war and that their lives are at stake. While it is being portrayed as everything is best in our country, there are hundreds of youth lined up (some even postgraduates) in Haryana to get jobs as construction workers in Israel. Prime Minister Modi came to power promising the citizens of India 1 crore jobs every year. After winning he rather promoted selling pakodas as a job. Even the farmers who were already self-employed don’t want to farm anymore as there is no profit in agriculture with an all time rise in price of seeds and fertilisers leading to heavy debts.
The situation is not just sad. There’s a positive side to it too. But not for the working class people, for the ruling classes. “While 12.2 crore people lost jobs, Indian billionaires grew richer by 35% during lockdown”, says the Oxfam report, 2021. It means more jobs were lost in just a few months than what was promised 10 years ago, as the dear friends of Modi became richer.
It may seem that the government doesn’t care about jobs, but it’s the opposite. The government wants people to be unemployed so that they can be forced into becoming cheap labourers who can serve the ruling classes and help them increase their revenue even more. Increase in unemployment is an inevitable part of the design of a capitalist society intended to keep the reign of wages in the hands of the owners of the means of production. Thus they can be forced into any kind of oppressive work with bare minimum or no benefits. If they don’t want to work in that oppressive environment, there’s always a reserve army of workers to take their place. In this way they don’t have to give better wages or decent working hours to their workers because there is an abundance of workforce ready to work at any wage they get. The contradiction between capital and wage labour continues to be one of the fundamental global contradictions. The increasing unemployment figures reflects a sharpening of this contradiction.
In this era of Artificial Intelligence, even white collar jobs are not safe. Pearson report says that there is a threat of 46% jobs being taken up by AI. The use of technology was supposed to give people greater hours of leisure. Capitalism uses it to reduce its labour force.
Let’s see how the people who have jobs are doing. 80% of the workforce in India earns less than Rs. 15,000 per month. If you earn more than Rs. 25,000 a month then you are in the top 10% of the total population. “It would take an unskilled labour 10,000 years to make what businessman Mukesh Ambani made in an hour during the pandemic”, says the Oxfam report. Post the neoliberal economic reforms of the 90s, there has been a sharp increase in informalisation and contractualisation of jobs leading to greater precarity for workers. The upcoming labour codes are
meant to tighten the iron fist of capital around the necks of workers. The NEP 2020 has been designed to churn out cheap labourers. Be it the introduction of vocational courses from an early age, the multiple entry-exit system, or the privatisation of education, every move goes against providing the masses with a dignified life.
So, what are these unemployed people doing? They either remain at home and struggle to get their stomachs filled or become part of mobs, demolish mosques, hoist saffron flags on top of churches, join political rallies for petrol or alcohol worth a hundred bucks. They kill and get killed in the name of religion.
In the past month two things happened- one, the inauguration of Ram Mandir and two, the celebration of Republic Day. On day one, mass killings of thousands of people were celebrated and on the other, the government promoted a picture of the Preamble without the words ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’. At least, they are being honest about it. They should be even more honest and remove the words ‘justice’, ‘equality’, and ‘liberty’ from it because I don’t see any justice in wanting to work in a country where a war is going on and you can die because your own country is incapable of providing you basic dignity. I don’t see equality either where the majority of a population loses its jobs but the billionaires become 35% richer. Echoing Com. Stalin, in no way can I imagine the kind of liberty any unemployed person may have.
