Roots of the Leading Slum City, Colombo
The British and the WEST collectively, who, for almost five centuries have drawn the resources of this isle in to their own blood spilled lands and created much internal subjugation and ethnic segregation within the country. The riots of 1815 against the militarist acquisition of agricultural land by the British, was a materialisation of oppression in its rapture of form, where its intended content was obliteration of vandalism. The answer in reply to the mass congregation by the British was the systematic killing of all, of the national, ethnic and religious identities, namely, the answer by the British, was Genocide. The human residue spared by the massacre was driven by their unintended subconscious to scatter among the solidified marshlands of the island, where they begot a new civilisation of wrack and ruin; a new species of human beings which formed a distinctly separated class from the rest (“the tourists”) solely through the estrangement of them from their labour; a genesis of a population of non-labourers who provide rigorous labour but merely sell their means of subsistence for the sake of their subtle subsistence.
Subsequent to the expansion and fortification of the Victorian economy, the imperials influenced the new local colonists to expose the economy of this isle and enter it to the so called, “highly competitive global economy”, in there the products of our local farmers and manufacturers failed to challenge the low exchange rates of the products of the WEST, solely due to their invasion and pilfering of the local resources for centuries, through which, they expanded and embraced their service sector and ultimately their monolithic lives. For an example, the European Union is presently pledging a US$ 360 billion subsidy for their agricultural workers, thus no one from the so called “third world” (earlier known as British colonies, presently ideological WEST colonies) can compete with their ultimate market exchange rates.
Thus, accompanying the central contribution of our own local whites, the vastly formidable agricultural sector of the island was swiftly made to suspend itself by the post-imperialist globalizers, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) through their self-imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). The repercussions of SAPs manifested itself in the form of a cultural eradication embedded with the means of fulfilment of natural needs and in the form of a general evacuation of an entire civilisation. Every day people were driven in to the city of Colombo, where their new feeble ambition was directed by the same forces which scavenged upon them for centuries in the past and for centuries in the future, as planned by the “grand tourists of capital”.
The novel objective for the displaced farmer and own account worker were created within the city, where their new ambition was to find a means of mere subsistence, and it existed in its most obtuse form in the urban territory rather than within the devastated lands beyond the suburbs of the metropolises since the residue begot of the inclusion of the local economy in to the global market was established in Colombo… By absolute terms, all of the mega-cities, metropolises and cities of the oppressed countries have metamorphosised themselves as the epicentres of the future political opening, in the Earth’s crust, fuelled with resisted oppression, a mountain created by declaration and accumulation of materials ejected from a vent in a central crater of militarist vilification of indigenous culture.
This has created a scenario within the city. A large proportion of the city, currently two third of the population is earning their daily income by disseminating, transporting and selling the products which are largely, imported in to the country from the “global market”. Their labour is not used to initiate production, but is being exploited for the dissemination and distribution of imported and already manufactured products, around various parts of the country. Is this not deracinated labour, where the workers are not engaged in the national manufacturing process but are engaged in lifting, carrying and placing products which are being imported by spending their own tax money, where the tax money would be the invisible exploitation of their labour, the raw component of global and local parasitism, in other words the accumulation via imperialism in a monetary figure. The local power merchants, the Government officials and policy makers have successfully maintained this “egalitarian-system” for their individualistic advancements.
“The natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully adequate to our subsistence; we can neither be clothed, lodged nor fed but in consequence of some previous labour. A portion at least of the society must be indefatigably employed …. There are others who, though they ‘neither toil nor spin,’ can yet command the produce of industry, but who owe their exemption from labour solely to civilisation and order …. They are peculiarly the creatures of civil institutions, which have recognised that individuals may acquire property by various other means besides the exertion of labour…. Persons of independent fortune … owe their superior advantages by no means to any superior abilities of their own, but almost entirely … to the industry of others. It is not the possession of land, or of money, but the command of labour which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of the community …. This [scheme approved by Eden] would give the people of property sufficient (but by no means too much) influence and authority over those who … work for them; and it would place such labourers, not in an abject or servile condition, but in such a state of easy and liberal dependence as all who know human nature, and its history, will allow to be necessary for their own comfort.” [1]
The relative surplus-population exists always in three forms, the floating, the latent, the stagnant.
In the centres of modern industry — factories, manufactures, ironworks, mines, &c. — the labourers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses, the number of those employed increasing on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the scale of production. Here the surplus-population exists in the floating form.
In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops, where machinery enters as a factor, or where only the modern division of labour is carried out, large numbers of boys are employed up to the age of maturity. When this term is once reached, only a very small number continue to find employment in the same branches of industry, whilst the majority are regularly discharged. This majority forms an element of the floating surplus-population, growing with the extension of those branches of industry. Part of them emigrates, following in fact capital that has emigrated. That the natural increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself. It wants larger numbers of youthful labourers, a smaller number of adults. The contradiction is not more glaring than that other one that there is a complaint of the want of hands, while at the same time many thousands are out of work, because the division of labour chains them to a particular branch of industry.
The consumption of labour-power by capital is, besides, so rapid that the labourer, half-way through his life, has already more or less completely lived himself out. He falls into the ranks of the supernumeraries, or is thrust down from a higher to a lower step in the scale. It is precisely among the work-people of modern industry that we meet with the shortest duration of life.
In order to conform to these circumstances, the absolute increase of this section of the proletariat must take place under conditions that shall swell their numbers, although the individual elements are used up rapidly. Hence, rapid renewal of the generations of labourers (this law does not hold for the other classes of the population). This social need is met by early marriages, a necessary consequence of the conditions in which the labourers of modern industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation of children sets on their production.
As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and in proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for an agricultural labouring population falls absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital employed in agriculture advances, without this repulsion being, as in non-agricultural industries, compensated by a greater attraction. Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat and on the look-out for circumstances favourable to this transformation. (Manufacture is used here in the sense of all nonagricultural industries.) This source of relative surplus-population is thus constantly flowing. But the constant flow towards the towns pre-supposes, in the country itself, a constant latent surplus-population, the extent of which becomes evident only when its channels of outlet open to exceptional width. The agricultural labourer is therefore reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism.
The third category of the relative surplus-population, the stagnant, forms a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working-class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterised by maximum of working-time, and minimum of wages. We have learnt to know its chief form under the rubric of “domestic industry.” It recruits itself constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and agriculture, and especially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows, as with the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus-population advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working-class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact, not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size of the families stand in inverse proportion to the height of wages, and therefore to the amount of means of subsistence of which the different categories of labourers dispose. This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down. [2]
The lowest sediment of the relative surplus-population finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the “dangerous” classes, this layer of society consists of three categories. First, those able to work. The quantity of paupers increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and are, in times of great prosperity. Third, the demoralised and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer; the victims of industry, whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, &c., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, &c. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus-population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus-population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working-class and the lower middle class.
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the Lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. All means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. [3].
“Thanks to the advance of industry and science,” says Sismondi, “every labourer can produce every day much more than his consumption requires. But at the same time, whilst his labour produces wealth, that wealth would, were he called on to consume it himself, make him less fit for labour.” According to him, “men” [i.e., non-workers] “would probably prefer to do without all artistic perfection, and all the enjoyments that manufacturers procure for us, if it were necessary that all should buy them by constant toil like that of the labourer…. Exertion to-day is separated from its recompense; it is not the same man that first works, and then reposes; but it is because the one works that the other rests…. The indefinite multiplication of the productive powers of labour can then only have for result the increase of luxury and enjoyment of the idle rich.” [4]
1 Eden, l. c., Vol. 1, book I., chapter 1, pp. 1, 2, and preface, p. xx.
2. “Poverty seems favourable to generation.” (A. Smith.) This is even a specially wise arrangement of God, according to the gallant and witty (Galiani, l. c., p. 78.) God ordains that men who carry on trades of primary utility are born in abundance. “Misery up to the extreme point of famine and pestilence, instead of checking, tends to increase population.” (S. Laing, “National Distress,” 1844, p. 69.) After Laing has illustrated this by statistics, he continues: “If the people were all in easy circumstances, the world would soon be depopulated.”
3. (Karl Marx: “Poverty of Philosophy” p. 116.)
4. Sismondi, l. c., pp. 79, 80, 85.
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