In a sub-field of Marxism, A.G. Frank and E. Laclau debated the intricate details of Frank's critique of the “dualist thesis”. That thesis argued that capitalism failed to overcome feudalism in its colonial adventure; Frank argued that to posit the duality between capital and feudal forms does violence to the structural integration of feudal forms into the logic of capital. Frank's critique, however, remained wedded to a level of abstraction which was unable to reveal the full implications of his suggestions. In this essay, I attempt to show that the logic of capital during colonial rule produced a municipal sanitation regime which relied upon the control over the labor of manual sweepers mediated through jobbers, overseers and contractors. Far from being the embodiment of “tradition”, the sweepers since colonial India bear on their bodies the marks of capital. This essay reveals those marks as well as demonstrating the integral relation between the logic of capital and barbaric colonial rule.

The West Virginia Miners engaged in remarkable inter-ethnic rebellions in the early twentieth century, against the “feudal” conditions in the Mountain State's coalfields. This paper challenges the view that these actions were backed by an equally radical and class-conscious language based on Americanism. It shows how due to various barriers, ranging from ethnic differences to electoral interference, political involvement on the part of the miners was sporadic and unsuccessful, and they were unable to form a common, coherent political identity. Instead they articulated a broad and ultimately ambiguous appeal to “American” rights and values, which focused on the exceptionalism of West Virginia, and took the interpretation of Americanism to be self-evident.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or “Wobblies”, represented a transitional stage in Mexican labor movement history. The Wobblies enjoyed support from workers because their philosophy corresponded to the Mexican labor movement's deeply-rooted anarchosyndicalist traditions. While cooperating with Mexican radical labor organizations, the IWW advocated workers' control, better pay, conditions, and union recognition. In mining and petroleum, the IWW built upon the earlier organizational efforts of mutual and gremial organizations. And, although the Wobblies failed to establish a permanent foothold inside Mexico, their efforts resulted in the eventual organization of industry-wide unions.

The proposition is not new that the freedom of labour is not a necessary accompaniment of the growth of capitalist production; and that conditions of non-market duress upon labour ranging from outright slavery to indenture and restrictions on mobility have been a typical feature of the world-wide growth of capitalism. Indeed the very title of Eric Williams' seminal book Capitalism and Slavery, which explored the interlinkages between the rise of capitalist manufacturing industry in Britain and the exploitation of the slave labour-based plantation system of the West Indies, exemplified this understanding. Ernest Mandel in his Marxist Economic Theory, which in fact dealt as much with historical description as with theory, also analysed the role of duress in the operation of the colonial system, as did P. A. Baran in his Political Economy of Growth. To the present author who shares Williams's perception, in particular that the colonial system and the later working of imperialism were crucially dependent on the imposition of unfree conditions upon Third World labour (particularly wherever labour migration was induced), Tom Brass's general emphasis on the lack of correspondence between capitalism and freedom of labour seems quite unexceptionable.

In her comments on my article, Utsa Patnaik makes a number of interrelated claims. First, that I unjustifiably characterize the “semifėdal” thesis as revisionist. Second, that my view about the existence of a link between capitalism and unfree labour is commonplace. And third, that I fail to differentiate unfreedom in terms of its implications for and effects on metropolitan capitalist countries on the one hand and developing ex-colonial countries on the other. According to her, this difference arises from a situation in which surpluses generated by Indian agriculture during the colonial era were exported to finance industrialization in metropolitan contexts, resulting in forced commercialization by landlord, trader and usurer; in short, a process which failed to eliminate semi-feudal unfree agrarian relations and consequently to develop capitalism in colonial countries, and thus promoted in these contexts not proletarianization but pauperization.