Abstract
Interrogating Indian labour's political subjectivity through the lens of postcolonial Marxism during COVID times, this chapter draws on evidence from the ‘cyber-field’ to explore the fraught processes through which labour may ‘become’ working class. Reflecting on Marx's various writings on the formation of collective political subjects, the chapter traces the uniqueness of the Indian case and the ways in which such uniqueness has abruptly surfaced during the disruptions generated by the COVID-19 lockdown, which has suddenly displaced the lives of millions of migrant workers, forcing them on the move to reach their rural homes. The analysis also reflects on the merits and limitations of studying social processes from afar, using the cyberspace as a novel archive and fieldwork terrain.
Introduction: The Field and the Archive in COVID Times
On 25 March 2020, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared on national television at 8 p.m. and declared a complete and indefinite national lockdown in effect from midnight. This resulted in an immediate closure of factories, workshops, shops and all other sites of work, and also all vehicular, rail and air transport. Hardest hit were millions of labourers who migrate seasonally or for longer periods from some of India's most ‘economically backward’ regions to centres of high growth. From the announcement of the lockdown to now, images and voices of, and information on, migrant labourers have received extensive coverage in media and social media. While this is too immediate an event, and the experience, one could say, is too ‘raw’, this moment of rupture from the ordinary presents an opportunity to reflect both on ‘field-based research’ and on certain elements of Marx's writings as they relate to the collective political subjectivity of ‘labour’ becoming ‘working class’.
In ‘normal’, that is, pre-COVID times, questions on migrant labour, their relation to capital, to the state, to unions, their conditions of work, their contract, their social and everyday life, their relation to new technology, their migration itself and so on would have been investigated via ethnography and time spent in ‘the field’: However, ‘locked down’ indefinitely, the ‘field’ is not accessible to us for fieldwork or ethnography.