The Trinamool Congress has posted a list of some 70 odd industrial units which have been closed during the life and times of the CPM in Bengal. This is a snide comment on the supposed promise to give jobs made by some CPM leaders as part of their election promises. What job would they provide when these were the very jobs their trade union militancy had taken away? CPM sympathizers have now said but what about Tata and Singur, did not Buddhadeb Babu go back on his mistakes and corrected his course? Let us examine the case of Bengal industries.

The demise of the Bengal industries started with the Nehruvian policy of mass industrialization. Industries of Bengal were by nature patent driven innovative ventures which were not conducive for mass production. Unfortunately, for the Dutt Committee Report, the insistence was on heavy industries making some reservations for the small-scale ones, mostly homegrown in deference to the democratic principles in the ownership of capital. But the industries which were founded upon high technology and filed patents went completely unrecognized. The industries for mass production swept out the ground for the innovation led industries through the purchase of large-scale machinery often from Soviet Russia, USA, or European countries. The technology was confined only to the machine and hence it was imported. Industrialization grew by import substitution that often meant the reproduction of the imported machines at home. The infamous “jugaad” is part of the effort at imitating imported machines from the west. Such a model of industrialization was thus only imitative and reproducing what already existed rather than what industrialization ought to have meant, namely innovations. Were the Bengalis recognized and encouraged for their innovations, the Indian industry would perhaps also have grown by innovations and thus lay the foundation for a more genuine industrialization than a merely imitative one.

In the imitative industrialization, the need for technical knowledge is low. Joseph Schumpeter mentions that such technology plateau an happen also when technologies stop growing. It is thus, at the close of the capitalist cycle that the real “dead labour” rises in the form of the machine, reduces labour to a mere cog in the assembly line and separates the labour and capital for good. The intervening role of the manager comes in, not as perhaps Daniel Bell observes as a dilution of the labour and capital divide but possibly as a reinforcement of the same. The alienated labour who is now an automatoned guy is stoned into repetitive jobs and develops deep resentment towards dehumanization. As his powers of creativity are done into redundancy, the worker becomes a zombie desperate for meaning in life. Such are the real moments of the strike. Strikes demand humanization. Democratic politics is often a euphemistic moment of the mob attacks by men and women thus demhumanized by processes over which they have no control. The slew of strikes in Bengal is therefore a strike against dehumanization; such militancies masked the larger battle of the poor, the less educated, the lower culture class to belong at par to the elite. This may explain the rise of the communist party as a recalcitrant power in Bengal, a weapon of the dehumanized culture class of the underbelly rather than being only about labour and capital.

However, when industries really went away, the people were distraught, migrating across the country and living under harsh conditions, dehumanized than ever before. It was through the experiences of the migrant worker that Bengalis learnt to be slaves, taking the torture in the bargain of making a living, realizing that one must live on.

The CPM suddenly woke up to a deindustrialized Bengal, changed its veneer and posed as a pro industrial state and invited the Tata Motors to set up an automobile pant in Singur. The land acquisition proved disastrous as the Tatas were keen to acquire the fertile and well irrigated lands on the left bank of the highway rather than the slightly depressed non irrigated lands on the right. This land was cultivated mainly as kitchen gardens and subsistence rice farming. Mayhem broke at the destroying of livelihoods. When I went to Singur for my field work, farmers were clear that in today’s day and age of high technology, jobs would not be created for them and the only employment they would have been that of a guard. While the farmers saw no future for themselves in industrialization, they treated industries as a direct assault on their livelihoods and security.

A quick background check on the farmers of Singur revealed that these families were not traditionally farmers but in fact retrenched factory workers from the closed jute mills of Bengal. Farming was the subsequent stage in their lives which gave them the security that the industries did not. Similarly, when I asked a guava seller in Dhakuria what kind of industrial training he would have liked to get a job in the factories, he retorted that he had lost his job as a floor supervisor in Bata Shoes. The Bengal story is replete with retrenchment of workers owing to closed factories. Hence, industries and jobs do not seem to be too connected to each other in this state. Politics around factory jobs do not do well among the Bengalis living in Bengal. While Bengal has a large proportion of migrant workers across the country, working as housemaids to labour force in the small and medium industries, and is also home to the highest number of MSME units in the country, large and heavy industries with slew of factory workers stepping inside the gates at the sound of the siren seems to be a thing of the past.

The Bengali is therefore not willing to offer himself as an industrial labour and hence the lowest labour productivity in the country. This is the real reason for the lack of heavy industries in Bengal. If we go by the theory of economics, then labour is the ultimate producer of value; the bargaining power of labour goes down against capital is the component of value addition as the ratio of gross value is low. Labour militancy is often a sign of unsuitability of the type of industries set up in a society. Labour militancy represents the point beyond which movement along the diagonal of the Edgeworth box curve is not possible, negotiations have broken down. Bengali workers’ bargaining point is at a much higher point into the profits of the company; they would work only when wages are much higher. Companies do not wish to provide wages at such rates due to the low productivity of the worker, which in turn is withdrawal of labour for the prevailing rates of wages.

The Bengali who does not wish to work for wages in Bengal is also the same worker who will work much better for less money outside the state. Thus, industries anywhere is good for he Bengali who can migrate easily and adapt well into various weather conditions. Within Bengal, the worker, who probably has come from a rural background into the city would like to pretend that he is a “Babu” and hence must get a commensurate lifestyle as that of a city middle class. As a migrant worker, he is anonymous among a people who do not count but among his own, he would not want to be shown as a lesser being. The concerns of social status for a Bengali is detrimental to his work culture.

If Bengal has to industrialize at all then we should industrialize with labour intensive high technology industries in which skills should be the principal demand. Large mass scale industrialization with labour lined up against the assembly line, hierarchically organized would lead to bitter battles over dehumanizing; constant demand for higher wages and lower productivity pertains are symptoms of alienation.