The Normative Inappropriateness

These lines seem inappropriately appropriate. Appropriate owing to the condition of times and inappropriate owing to its barrenness. It is also appropriate because the inappropriateness seem appropriate to many and inappropriate to some. It is not the appropriateness in the first sense of the term that causes wary, it is rather the latter. The normalisation of the latter inappropriateness is based on constructing the class's habitus as meant to be. It is meant to be unfed so that its exchange value does not increase. It is meant to die early because it is the only class that has to replenish itself by sacrificing its own.[2]

It is meant to remain unrested so that we can rest. It is meant to bleed so that we may thrive. This meant to be discourse is not just any dominant narrative, it is hegemonic to the extent that even workers have accepted their meant to be status. This piece reasons that in a post-ideological society the Constitution, being plagued with bourgeois benevolence, is obsessively constitutive of individual rights thereby disabling the proletariat from transcending their meant to be habitus. 

Michel Foucault locates the socio-political importance of the pandemic in granting the power-knowledge discourse aimed at docility-utility, its orgasmic epitaph - the location of bodies.[3] It enables the blatant display of power which is aided by para-active and passive docile subjects who has internalised discipline only succumb without any resistance.  This relationship of power and plague is a historical reality which repeats itself every time the latter finds itself meandering near the former thereby categorising any authors of resistance intersecting with existing enemies, as authors of abnorm.[4]

Within this discourse, are created certain standards albeit bourgeois in its understanding of rationality, yet applied universally - social distancing, community spread, etc. The bourgeois content of such standards terraforms the meant to be discourse an abject reality for the worker. These categories are indifferent to the division of labour within the society of the worker and operate on the universal application of division of labour persistent in the society of the bourgeois.

The inevitable happens - when we suffer from our own constructs they suffer because of their very existence. Hidden in such constructs are phenomena which led Marx to write in his 1844 Manuscripts that the interest of the society is never against the interest of the worker but the interest of the worker is always against the interest of the society.[4] Such rational bourgeois standards like social distancing mandates that there is a social and within the realm of this social, distancing is possible.

But if we look at the (un)social of the worker, their deconstructed reality, we shall find crumbs of what unchecked capitalism can lead to, where such bourgeois standards are impossible - clustered habitus, cultural negation of health, different representations of menstrual hygiene etc.

In similar fashion, what was the only adhesive among this class (its coherence) is deconstructed, now to mean something that has to be corrected, in order to save it but really to save the bourgeois, as community spread has greater probability within the (un)social of the worker owing to its strong cohesion. Similar to this are the constructs of prevention of the spread which is implemented universally yet bourgeois in every sense of the term - N95 is in the realm of abstraction for the worker and in the realm of the real for the bourgeois.

Engraved within this same bourgeois discourse is thus engraved the possibility of saving these workers from their meant to be. It is doubly hypocritical because the same constructs which creates these conditions for the workers enables the bourgeois to save them which is obtained through the normative engendering of constructs which re-construct this class of people as the ab-norm, a threat to be tackled, as that liminal part of the Other which can never adhere to the norm because they are meant to be ab-norm.

Pandemic, Capitalism And Labour

Pandemics are caused due to the unchecked commodity exchange logic.[5] In other words, they are caused due to unrestricted capitalism. Be it a scientist investigating in a lab or huckster selling bats, in a bourgeois society, i.e. a society of commodity owners, all     relations are clothed with the principles of commodity exchange.[6] Only the former cloaks its motif under the garb of benefit of all humanity. The evangelical character of the commodity and its permanence in possible aspects of life lets the meant to be be. It penetrates at every point which is profitable from a bat to a lab and until air can be sold at a price just above marginal cost it shall let it be. Albeit, it penetrates the worker only when s/he is a worker and till s/he is a worker.

This why when the worker is not a worker i.e. during times such where there is no werk, capitalism leaves the worker be because it is not meant to be, meaning the meaninglessness of the worker in the absence of work. In trying to regulate this meaninglessness, the State in a para-active bio-politcal democracy fills the void owing to its conscious experience of  a history that has remained witness to the threat animal actions of the vagabonds can pose to the human bourgeois. In this pandemic, specifically in the absence of work (a human action conditioned by constructed reason), the State is aware of the greater propensity of illegalities (an animal action rooted in baser instincts free from hedonism) that is a direct result of the absence of the human action and its socio-political relevance.      

In common parlance, this sector is marked by the absence of any form of contract and people moving from one state to another in search for jobs that are majorly sweat labour replete with the contingency of their existence. This contingency is further reconstructed only to deconstruct the proletariat as a worker, a migrant worker, a workman, employee and more often these ‘he' categories are unable to transcend to ‘her'. Positive enchantments like The Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service  Act, 1979 Act deconstructs the unity in plural essence of the  proletariat as a reified all encompassing divisive discourse - the migrant workmen.

The language employed by the Act in describing the conditional existence, i.e. as an inter-state migrant worker[7] enables the employer to conveniently exclude people who have moved voluntarily and have entered into the contract for employment in the destination state for work in the destination state shall strictly speaking remain out of the definitional ambit. Similarly, there are instances where the workmen do enter into a contract in one state to be sent to another contractor in a different state, who then parcels them to a principal employer who might not be in the same state as the sub-contractor (see Labourers Working On Salal Hydro Power Project vs. State of Jammu Kashmir and Ors 1984 AIR 177).

Their fate depends on judicial wisdom (read ideological preference) of individual judges in order to prevent such legislative meandering, only furthering the contingency of their already conditional existence. The crude nature of waged labour comes to light through the basic nature of these laws - raw and undead. If left unchecked the capitalist shall not even recognise the animal in the worker and the State aids in this deconstructing process through such meandering. In denying the worker even his animal rights, capital boils her/him to an inhuman existence, recognising him only as a docile surplus producing unit.

Such bourgeois benevolence remains a myth during times of economic exception, as capital does not see in this inhuman any profitability, and thus leaves it at the mercy of parallel process of alienation - medicine, state, family etc., whereby all these treat the subject as an object of saving, investing and nurturing for future returns, i.e. again when the economy grows. Contingency till the last spec of breath.   

Conclusion Of The Allegory?
This brings us to our next question. Is this a time to revolt against the status quo? Does the allegory of the free and fair society remain a myth for the proletariat owing to its verbose falsehood?  The allegory (the Constitution) bases its premise on a bourgeois legal subject with universal rationality unmindful to the objective disparity.[8] It premises on freedom for all when freedom of most is curbed under the garb of public interest as antithetical to freedom for all, where the latter in reality is nothing more than the freedom of few. It recognizes animal actions of the proletariat only to place them under reasonable restrictions.

They are reasonable only till they operate on bourgeois notions of rationality thereby implying reasonability in restricting trade unions, by placing them in contradiction to economic growth of all, because they are not meant to be. English trade union history is replete with common law judgements where barons explicitly recognise the rationale for incorporating unions - in order to hold them liable under compensatory laws initiated as a reaction to legitimate trade union activity (Baron McNaughten in Taff Vale Rly. Co vs. Amalgamated Trade Union Society)[9].

This personification through legal fiction aided in the regulation (read restriction) of animal actions of the collective. The inevitable prominence accorded to fundamental rights remains in their essential importance to the bourgeois and its occasional usage to save the proletariat, inevitably othering the directives, their realisation being contingent on the whims of the economy, making their actuation as contingent as the existence of the worker. 

This discourse was often engendered in the last three months - we need to save the economy and only then the worker will be saved. ‘Give money in the hands of the worker. They will spend and that will run the wheels of the economy'.[10] The hypocrisy of the liberal-communist (a misnomer) project lies in this that when capitalism recognises in all crudeness its character, the former hides behind the veils of benevolence only to save the economy.

In all of this the worker's existence as a human, let alone an animal, ceases when s/he is given money to spend s/he is recognised only as a consumer (again another abstract category), subjected to the whims of economy. Right to life and personal liberty remains a myth for a majority owing to the objective disparity it aims at clanking from the radar of visibility. Ideas like the aforementioned are dominant because in any epoch the ideas of the dominant class are dominant ideas.[11]

In the epoch where the division of power between the aristocracy, the bourgeois and the castle was a necessity, the doctrine of separation of power was necessitated. This allegorical document thus constituted has bourgeois origins.[12] An idea, which was beneficial for a particular class, used in order to overthrow the then ruling class and after the cessation of the revolution, gets universalised, but now is fine-tuned to the ends of the new ruling class.

The Constitution is the inevitable culmination of such ideas and reflective of this thesis, is the transcendence of illegality of trade unions, only to be later recognised, because the bourgeois ruling class realised their growing political and economic semblance and thus, decided to chain them down through bourgeois benevolence.   
    
We are witnessing the end of labour laws (a misnomer) because they have served their purpose. They have successfully transformed an entire class capable of paralysing the status quo to docile para-active mechanised bodies now responding only as paralysed consumers. It is during times of exceptions, where all laws are suspended, that we witness the ultimate expression of the law - the law of capital. Every single phenomenon within this structure is either a cause of oppression or a result of oppression on the proletariat, premised on universalisation of bourgeois individual freedoms.

The constitution being no exception, the positing of individual rights under Article 19 is a depository of the bourgeois swooning over the ‘individual'. Recourse is taken to Derrida[13] whose insistence on unorthodox interpretations mandated the deconstruction of the positioning and language of articles in the constitution, for e.g. you shall never find death penalty posited near the right to life, the former being hidden somewhere in later parts.

Deconstructing article 19 one witnesses the wary which unions cause to the powers that be. In imposing reasonable restrictions, the proletariat collective can pose a threat to integrity and sovereignty of India or public order or morality, while the bourgeois capitalist can only be restricted in the interest of the general public and more specifically, in order to cater to the demand management role of the State thereby maintaining a constant influx of consumers in the market, the State can have monopoly over any trade or business etc.[14] The state is the bourgeois's keep. 

A hopeless existentialist and an ardent essentialist arrive in contradiction while penning the epitaph of this rather boring rant. In a world moving towards a consumer-commodity based relation, every other relation shall cease to exist. The only identity that shall posit the protection and recognition of the state is that of the consumer and all other identities shall cease because they are not profitable. It is more profitable for the image of the sovereign (in contradiction to other sovereigns) when workers, if NRI gets airlifted with all glory and selfies but if migrants, in order to stay true to their meant to be status, are parceled back home as freight. It seems that the invisible hand of Adam Smith hovers around and his face smiles because it has succeeded in commodifying the worker in all possible senses of the term.

End-Notes:

1. Poem-By an Unknown Proletarian, ‘We have Fed You All For a Thousand Years' in Manuel Gomez (ed), Poems for Workers An Anthology (1927)
2. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (first published in 1932, Progress Publishers 1959) 6
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (first published in 1975, Second Vintage Books Edition 1995) 135
4. The same is visible with the haunting of members of the tabliqui-jamat. The discourse created enabled the state, while enforcing bourgeois discipline, to locate the enemy who was also rendered the possible authors of the spread of the virus.  Third world state-capitalism has interesting ways to hide its failures
5. Jasmine Fox-Skelly, ‘There are diseases hidden in ice, and they are waking up' (BBC Earth, 4 May 2017) accessed 17 July 2020
6. Commodity exchange in the traditional sense of the term refers to the huckstering of commodities in order to earn profits. This exchange relation has gradually dominated each sphere of our lives. Our justice system is based on paying off our dues. The notion of an objective legal form was unknown to previous epochs. It had developed as the commodity moved from the realm of feudal inactivity to bourgeois dynamicity requiring greater protection of consumers.
7. Under Section 2(e) a migrant workman means any person who is recruited by or through a contractor in one State under an agreement or other arrangement for employment in an establishment in another State, whether with or without the knowledge of the principal employer in relation to such establishment
8. Evgeny Pashukanis, General Theory of Law and Marxism (first published in 1924, London & New York 1980)
9. 1901 UKHL 1 
10. Soutik Biswas, ‘Coronavirus Lockdown: Nobel Prize Economist says India must do more for poor' (BBC News, 24 April 2020) < www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52403589> accessed 17 July 2020
11. Karl Marx, A Critique of The German Ideology (first published in 1932, Progress Publishers 1968) 21
12. The Magna Carta is wrongly hailed as flag bearer of human rights. It was an agreement between the King and the barons. The most it should be credited for is subjecting power, which is not the same thing as having power over power. Power constitutes itself only when it sees there are benefits to be gained from it.
13. Jacques Derrida, Lectures on Death Penalty.
14. Article 19 of the Indian Constitution 1949.

Written By: Prakhar Ganguly - (Assistant Professor, Nalsar, Hyderabad)
(The views expressed are personal and the author can be reached at prakharganguly@nalsar.ac.in)