Ashok Desai & Punjab's petty-prole revolution

 Forty years ago, Ashok V Desai- a contemporary of Manmohan and Bhagwati at Cambridge- wrote in the EPW- 'the strongest political force in the country, even more powerful than the kulak

who pushed the Government for agricultural subsidies and higher procurement prices- e.g the Jat farmers of Punjab who will probably force the new AAP administration down the same path of cutting infrastructure investment to keep electricity and other subsidies

 and the bourgeoisie

who wanted protection for manufacturing and financial services but then transitioned to using Nationalized Banks as a private piggy bank to accumulate assets abroad

 is the petty-bourgeois haute-proletarian with a little education and less property.

Ouch! That's us, right enough. Intellectual coolies rattling chains of inherited racial, religious, and cultural grievance.

 It was this class that inherited power from the British. 

Because it was this class which came to power in Britain in 1945. It may be that Churchill could have found some way to transfer power to Princes and landowners and Industrialists in the Cities. But that would have involved a Malaya type counter-insurgency. If Desai is right, then it was the breakdown in law and order during the Quit India movement which led to the rise of a footloose class of unemployable 'andolanjivis' running around like headless chickens trying to overthrow a colonial regime which had disappeared and wreck a type of capitalist economic regime which had scarcely taken root. 

It is members of this class who flock the unemployment markets and who have required the proliferation of the public enterprises and the small enterprises. 

I suppose Desai means 'required overmanning in public enterprises' and the reservation of markets for micro-enterprises. Desai's suggestion would only make sense if Indians have a strong preference for leisure and social intercourse while at work but not otherwise. It must also be said that in India people join politics or become film stars so as to spend more time with their families. 

The high capital-output ratios are one of the results of the petty-proles trying to squeeze, in ever-increasing numbers, into an industrial base that is not growing fast enough. 

Actually, it is an artefact. Overmanning works like 'efficiency wage'. If there are too many people doing your job, you understand you are fundamentally worthless and thus spend more time socializing at work so as to add a sort of psychic value. 

There is hence a situation which is incapable of expansion, as the petty-proles have a minimum-work ethic and absorb all the meagre surpluses through wanting and exacting jobs. They are the ones who form the main youth axis of any agitation in the country. When finally the system grinds to a halt where government investment can just maintain the industrial base but cannot expand industrial employment, the petty-prole class will rise in revolt against a system that employs them but fails to exploit them. 

Desai readily confessed to being a member of this class himself and made a joke about the desirability of a 'one handed Indian economist'. On the other hand, it was obvious that crazy labor laws and the wholly delusional licence permit raj and 'export pessimism' would prevent the expansion of the modern sector. Economists pride themselves on counter-intuitive results and thus had to babble nonsense of various sorts. The truth is men didn't matter. Either India got rural girls into giant factory dormitories or large parts of it would remain shitty. Desai was a sensible man and made sensible suggestions which, quite naturally, everybody ignored. The truth is poverty is produced by rural girls having babies. Get them out of the countryside and make a profit on their labor. They will escape within five years but will only have one or two babies. Boys- unless supine- need a spell in construction or some other field where they can beat and knife each other rather than gang up on management. Higher Education should be on the basis of 'sandwich courses' such that all students gain work-skills they may otherwise lack. For those weak in English, work-training could be in sectors where they pick up idiomatic usage and social confidence. For those from privileged backgrounds- a spell in the villages would be a tonic. It would immunize them to the lure of Grievance Studies and virtue signalling. Everybody should have a chance to develop basic commercial skills involving numeracy and a practical knowledge of how the law works. There may be a case for giving some students longer to finish their first degree. But post-graduate work must be linked to research financed by an industrial partner. Otherwise the curse of the unemployable PhD seeking a job as a peon will remain to haunt us and to feed the ranks of the ' petty-prole' class who will latch on to every and any agitation. Of course, it may be that the AAP administration in Punjab may find an innovative way to put that great State back on the path to prosperity. But, if history is any guide, the thing is unlikely.