Social Scientist

Over Exploitation and Overpopulation: The Proletarianization of Rural Workers

Author(s): Claude Meillassoux
Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 7, No. 6 (Jan., 1979), pp. 3-13
Published by: Social Scientist
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 CLAUDE MEILLASSOUX

Overexploitationand Overpopulation:
the Proletarianizationof Rural Workers

AS a result of the use by big capital of techniques of production

involving higher levels of productivity and the business concen-
tration which goes with it, a new level of capital is reached
with its corollary: an increase in relative overpopulation. Because
of its extension throughout the world and particularly in countries
dominated by international capital, the proletariat which had been
created in its specific present form by the demand of capital at its
preceding stages and which accumulated in the cities, is now ren-
dered excess. Underemployment is not any longer technological or
conjectural; it is structural. An important part of the population
of the dominated countries, separated from the means of rural pro-
duction, now find themselves without any means of subsistence
while capital refuses to take in charge the unemployed it had
created.
The Proletariatin the DependentCountries
In the industrialized cities of dependent countries, the pro-
letariat is characterized by a feeble integration into the capitalist
sector, that is to say, by the fact that the incomncfrom wages is
insufficient to ensure its physical reproduction. The degree of integ-
ration of workerswith the capitalist sector may be gauged by: 1) the
degree of stability and permanency of employment; 2) the mode of

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4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

remuneration (piecework, daily wages, weekly wages, or monthly

wages; 3) the access to complementary resources, such as social
security which take in charge the cost of maintenance and reproduc-
tion of labour power (family supplements, compensations during
unemployment, social security, retirement benefits and so on;
and 4) their capacity to organize themselves. A substantial section
of the proletariat in the cities does not enjoy security of employ-
ment or any indirect complementary wages; the direct wages only
cover bare sustenance (immediate reproduction). Illness, unemploy-
ment and old age, drive people back to the villages where their
progeny remain to be bred.
It is generally admitted today that one of the main advan-
tages derived by capitalism from the exploitation of rural depen-
pent countries rests in the possibility of extracting, in addition
to surplus value, a labour-rent through the exploitation of workers
living, directly or indirectly, off the production of the agricul-
tural domestic sector.1 To the extent that wage-earners either
produce part of their own subsistence by dividing their time
between employment in industry and the cultivation of their village
plots, or benefit from the agricultural labour of their relatives in
the village, they free a labour-rent equivalent to the value of the
products furnished in this manner. Under these conditions, wages
are considered by the employers to be a supplement and reduced
by an amount equal to the value which corresponds to this rent.
To the surplus value (realised by the exploitation of the labour
power paid theoretically at its cost of reproduction) is added the
value of what the worker and/or his family are producing for
themselves. In other words, the wages do not repay the necessary
labour.
Perpetuationthrough'Policy'
At a certain point, the extra profit gained from such exploit-
ation results in its perpetuation. By keeping wages below the level
of reproduction, by promoting precarity of employment and by
discouraging wives and children from coming to the urban zones
of employment, the employers force the workers to return periodi-
cally to their home in order to feed themselves partly on the dom-
estic sector and to make them dependent on it. This extra profit for
the capitalist, which was, at the origin, the result of circumstances
(preservation of the links between the workers and their rural milieu)
becomes a policy (the nonintegration of the workers into the capit-
alist sector) to maintain the conditions of formation of labour-
rent.

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 THE PROLETARIANIZATIONOF RURAL WORKERS 5

In its turn, what was a policy becomes an element of crisis

when the capacities of reproduction of the domestic sector fall be-
low what is necessary to complement the income from wages. At
this point, in fact, the necessity of finding an adequate monetary
income keeps the urbanized workers in the cities, while according
to the policy to which they are submitted, they should only remain
there for short periods of time. This same policy, because it tries to
attract cheap labour into the capitalist sector, worsens the condi-
tions of production in the domestic agricultural sector whose produce
is supposed to lower the wages.
It is deliberate policy for instance, that in the South African
Bantustans, the administration allocates to Africans plots insuffi-
cient to cover their needs, so as to force them into mining and
industrial employment while tying them up to the reserves through
a low-wages policy.
In countries or in areas where cash cropping has not deve-
loped, the need for cash drives a high proportion of adult men to
the cities. Such emigration results in a fall in food production pro-
portionally greater than the fall in consumption due to their ab-
sence. Agricultural production now undertaken by a smaller number
of people without sufficient capital input to compensate, deterio-
rates. The reproduction of the instrument of labour (the land) is
hindered by the impoverishment of the work force which cannot
cultivate an area sufficient to renew the land's productive potential.
In some cases, as in the reserves of South Africa, the ghettoization
of the African populations on restricted land areas,prevents the rest-
oration of the land by traditional means while no other alternative
is offered. Food production worsens equally where peasant cash-
cropping is promoted since it absorb; a greater and greater part of
the land and the working time of the agricultural population.
In all cases, in order to avoid a rise in wages and prevent the
peasants from giving up cash-cropping in favour of food produc-
tion, the capitalist sector must apply a policy of low prices for
basic food produce and, in particular, cereals. Under these condi-
tions, the domestic subsistence economy is never profitable; at the
same time, paid labour in the higher-productivity capitalist sector
earns an income which corresponds to a greater quantity of subsist-
ence than what can be produced in the village.
If subsistence production and the domestic economy per-
sists it is less for profitability than for social reasons. Agricultural
self-sustenance is the infrastructure of kinship relationships which
preserve the links of solidarity necessary to ensure a minimum of
the security that the capitalist employer refuses to the worker. The

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6 SOCIAL SCIENTIST'

domestic sector perpetuates itself also to the extent that the whole
of the active rural population cannot be employed fully in the sala-
ried sector.
The introduction of capitalist methods in the domestic sub-
sistence sector would result in the elimination of labour-rent and
hence in the surplus profit drawn by the capitalist sector from the
employment of workers fed and reproduced by the domestic sector.
This is the reason why colonialism hardly encourages the modern-
isation of domestic food production. When it allows it, domestic
agriculture is transformed into a low productivity capitalist sector
producing at too high a cost to supply the market at a price com-
petitive with the cereals coming from the United States or from
other countries using high productivity techniques in agriculture.
For these reasons domestic food production is not only
unable to feed the cities, but also to supply a surplus product for
storage. Because of this absence of storage, rural areas have
become everywhere extremely vulnerable to hazards. At each
drought, at each natural catastrophe, an increasing number of
small peasants are driven from the land and fall forever into,
dependence on the capitalist sector of production.2 In other words,
the rural sector is less and less capable, because of this policy, to
ensure its own reproduction. In none of the so-called underdeve-
loped countries (and this is characteristic of underdevelopment),
has capitalism assumed the responsibility for this situation which
it has contributed to create. The policy of the employers and the
governments is to stubbornly refuse to take upon themselves,
through the implementation of an adequate welfare policy, the
charges of the maintenance and reproduction of the labour power
which they employ directly or indirectly. On the contrary, where
effective social policy is attempted, where the workers have con-
quered some social advantages, the economic "liberalism" imposed
by the United States via the International Monetary Fund or the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development obliges
these countries to give them up under the pretence of restoring
"economic equilibrium". This overexploitation of labour and the
contradictions inherent in it have a direct effect on employment
and on demography in the cities.

Impacton Employment
In order to extract a labour-rent from the rural workers,
employment in the cities must have, for the largest possible number
of workers, the following characteristics: 1) Absence of security of
employment and of social security; 2) Wages below the cost of

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 THE PROLETARIANIZATIONOF RURAL WORKERS 7

maintenance and reproduction of the labour power at large.

The result is that workers cannot settle permanently in the
cities. The necessity to preserve their rural base diverts their atten-
tion from problems linked to employment in the cities and pre-
vents the latter from taking too conflictual a character. It is, on
the other hand, indispensable for capitalism to avoid the stabiliza-
tion of a numerous labour force in the cities, all the more suscep-
tible to assemble, to demonstrate and organize itself.
This end is attained thanks to the different modalities of
employment according to the nature of the employers. Employment
in sectors having the largest organic composition of capital (the
large multinational or national firms) is relatively stable because
it is necessary to avoid too rapid a rotation of the labour force,
even if unskilled. On the other hand, a large and important part
of production is left to small capitalist firms and micro-capitalist
enterprises with a low organic composition often made of a single
worker-entrepreneuror employing an unstable and unskilled labour
force. Relations of production in this sector take their character
from the domestic society and remain of a paternalistic type. A
confusion, to the profit of the employers, is maintained between
kinship relationships (by which the global needs of the worker is
supposed to be taken care of by the employer) and contractual
wage-relationships (which only cover the maintenance of the work-
ers during the period of work).
The "Informal"Sector
An important part of the process of overexploitation of
labour in the cities is thus accomplished thanks to the micro-
capitalist sector (sometimes called "informal") which operates at
two levels:
1 By subcontracting or its equivalents (piecework, and so
on), through which part of the material used in the capitalist
sector is supplied by these micro-businesses under conditions which
permit a type of employment different from that in the large
enterprises and at cheap rates.
2 By supplying at low prices goods and services into the
conventional capitalist sector. Thus the cost of the labour power
employed by the capitalist sector is lowered indirectly through the
exploitation, at the micro-capitalist level, of a non-integrated
labour force.
Studies of this "informal" sector are now numerous. For
some authors, it is a solution to the unemployment problem in the
cities and therefore a form of activity to be encouraged. For others

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8 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

(and for ourselves),it is a means by which the rural overexploitation

of labour is carried into the cities. Subcontracting has various
forms. One of these, which seems to be the first to develop, is home
labour: individual workers recruited either directly or through inter-
mediaries, make items (above all in textiles) for tradesmen. Since it
is based on piecework, the worker tends to overexploit himself and
his family without benefiting from any guarantee of employment
or of any social security8. Another form is the subcontracting of
labour. Instability of employment, low remuneration, lengthening
of the working day, these are the characteristics of this type of
employment'. Employment provided by each of these enterprises
is very small (between 0.5 to 1 employee). According to a study of
Bienefeld corroborated by other researchers6,the prices obtained by
these enterprises are below the cost of reproduction of labour power
and the depreciation of capital, which condemns them to bank-
ruptcy and causes a quick turnover of these micro-businesses on the
market. If the prices are below the value of the product, it is be-
cause many factors operate simultaneously: the non-depreciation of
the means of production because of the confusion between profit
and capital; non-reproduction of the producers which eventually
causes physiological misery for the wage earners and their families,
although this is not immediately apparent, and never accounted
for. Above all, the supply of capital and value from the domestic
sector; it is essentially thanks to this supply that the system oper-
ates and perpetuates itself. According to the studies done by IEDES6
the primary capital "generally comes from savings strictly localised
outside of the formal sector". Loans from friend and kins make
up for 67 percent of the financial sources according to Lachaud
from friends and kins who, because of the rural origin of the grea-
ter number of contractors, obtain their funds from the domestic
sector. (I have myself observed in Abidjan that the equipment of
the tailors settled in the cities was often bought with the money of
kins from the country). Each enterprise employs few personnel but
"nonpaid workers may represent up to half of the total work
force"'. These are the apprentices, fed and sometimes lodged by
the boss but who receive no payment in cash. This personnel is thus
condemned to a precarious form of employment which makes them
dependent on other sources of income or aid in order to survive.
These workers are bred in the domestic sector: their labour power
is the product of an investment from the domestic unit to which
they belong, investment which instead of benefiting the "investors"
(their kins), is exploited almost gratuitously by their employers.
By these different means (supply of capital from the non-capitalist

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 THE PROLETARIANIZATIONOF RURAL WORKERS 9

sector, unpaid workers, return to the country, successive employ-

ment of young parents, and so on) the capitalist sector draws on
the domestic sector which subsidizes the production of the micro-
capitalist sector. Various forms of suibcontracting make it possible
for the large enterprises to employ directly only a restricted
number of people protected by laws or by trade union agreements.
The micro-capitalist sector plays therefore the role of a comple-
mentary employer and of a channel by which value is transferred
from the domestic sector to the capitalist sector.
FromDomesticEconomyto WageEconomy
Wages and salaries of the nonintegrated personnel are fixed
at a level which corresponds to that of a salary of contribution and
satisfies only those who maintain strong links with the rural sector.
But a difference emerges soon among the urbanized workers,
between those who come from the domestic food producing sector,
which is the most deteriorated and those more recently arrived
from areas still producing a surplus product. The wages which
satisfy the latter are set at the general level of remuneration. But
this level is insufficient to satisfy the needs of the former. This
relative decrease of wages is of a cumulative character: workers
must be employed for enough time in the salaried sector to compen-
sate for the lack of produce from the domestic sector on which
they still depend. They are found therefore to neglect village
agriculture even more, to accelerate its decline and to reduce the
agricultural income that the workers and his parents get from it.
The stay in the cities tends to become longer, eventually permanent,
in order to achieve the maximum possible cash income (taking into
account the periods of unemployment) to satisfy the totality of the
needs not only of the workers but also his family. When he has
passed from domestic economy to wage economy, the worker's
existence depends not only on a monetary income but also on the
supply of food in the market. His capacity of reproduction thus
depends on two factors: the level of employment and wages, and
the regularity of food supply coming into the market. This
total dependency on the capitalist sector still does not set the
general level of wages, which remains at the level set for the semi-
rural worker.
All the urban institutions which affect the proletariat have
a tendency to maintain instability or prevent settlement in the
cities. The precarity of employment which is necessary to the
realisation of the labour-rent, is reflected in the precarious nature
of the habitat: the workers from the slums are not considered

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10 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

citizens but temporary residents whose real home is in the rural

zone.8 Little of the urban infrastructure or services are available
to them. Neither sanitation, nor public transport. Electricity is
rarely installed and the distribution of water is hardly sufficient.
Public authorities generally ignore the existence of these"squatters".
These circumstances have the effect of hiding the prolet-
arian nature of these labourers in comparison to the integrated
workers who are settled and lodged. Even though they are not
employed directly by the owners of big capital, nor qualified to
belongto trade unions, this population remains nevertheless a
proletarian one for two reasons: I) The labour performed in the
micro-capitalist sector benefits the capitalist sector directly or
indirectly; 2) They act as the reserve army of capital whose
functions are (a) to bring pressure on the employed proletariat and
(b) to buffer up cycles of employment and unemployment.
DemographicImplications
To understand the demographic implications of this situa-
tion we must recall that demographic increase in domestic societies
is not a result of the rate of fecundity but of the capacity of the
younger generations to survive until productive age. (Productive
age is reached when the young worker can supply a surplus-prod-
uct contributing to the reproduction of the group: that is, between
12 and 15 years). In other words, demographic trends depend both
on the volume of food production and on the continuity of food
supply during the time necessary to breed a new generation. The
hazards of agricultural production and its variations, immediately
or eventually, regularize demographic growth. In domestic societies
storage is the means by which one attempts to alleviate these var-
iations. With colonisation or foreign occupation, the storage capa-
city of domestic communities has been considerably reduced if not
suppressed : requisitions, the constitution of "collective granaries"
and above all the commercialisation of grains have contributed to
an almost constant deficit. With the increase in the overexploitat-
ion of labour and its effects on the countryside, the regularity of
supply of grain and therefore the possibilities of demographic growth
have diminished in the rural areas while domestic communities
become more and more dependent on the market and therefore on
cash income. This is true to a greater extent in the cities, for the
workers are deprived of agricultural resources.
Disorder
and Demographic
Overexploitation
During the stage of expansion of international capitalism
following World War II, the dominated countries have become

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 THE PROLETARIANIZATION OF RURAL WORKERS I1

more and more dependent on importation and less and less on in-
ternal production for their supply of food. The overexploitation of
labour because it exhausts rural resources, compels the capitalist
countries to produce a large quantity of food under conditions of
high productivity for the workers of the dependent countries. At the
same time, increasing industrialization and proletarianisation make
a growing number of people dependent on wages to ensure their
needs and their existence. Under these conditions, demographic
growth no longer depends on the capacity of production and sto-
rage of the domestic economy but on new factors: spread and con-
tinuity of cash incomes, employment and level of wages, prices,
and reliability of food importation. During this stage of capitalist
development, increasing industrialization, extension of the wage
sector, the spread of cash economy and the extension of markets
have done more than the weakened domestic subsistence economy
to increase the population. Increased natality, generally attributed
to better sanitation, results from the extension of the market for
basic produce.
It is by these means (the handling of food production and
food marketing) that capital has largely contributed to the demo-
graphic boom of the dependent countries; hence to the creation of
a proletariat numerous but poorly skilled, which met the needs of
the type of investment and technology exported to the dominated
countries. This situation however does not solve the problem of
the equilibrium between subsistence and population. In the
domestic economy, because of the limited capacity of storage
(3 to 4 years), and the low level of development of the market for
grains, the adjustment of demographic growth to the production
of subsistence is short-cycled. Today the situation is different. The
countryside, where a deteriorated domestic subsistence economy
perpetuates itself, is still partly living on its production but it
depends more and more on importation to make up the deficits. In
the large cities, the urban population now depends almost entirely
on food importation. Nevertheless, for urban workers, the access
to food depends also and above all on cash and therefore on the
possibilities of employment. These being so, and given the policy
of overexploitation of labour already described above, it is in the
constitution of a large family, made possible in the short term by
the comparatively low price of food, that the worker seeks his
security. Everything therefore concurs at this stage to increase the
population and thus the proletariat. When cataclysms arise, par-
ticularly those of great amplitude like drought or flood, neither
the rural equipment, nor the transport infrastructure, nor the fin-

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12 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

ancial means, nor the international resources allow for enough

importation to cover the food deficit of the countryside in add-
ition to the permanent deficit of the cities. Mortality will be greater
as the increase in population takes place during a long period
without relation to local production.
The present demographic disorder, which is the effect of a
nonadjustment between employment, subsistence, circulation and
fecundityis the effect of the disorderly policy of overexploitation
of labour. Although the degradation of subsistence economy has
not yet reached its limits, one may consider that we have reached
a new stage of capitalist development which is already character-
ized by an almost complete dependency of the proletariat of the
dominated countries both on the wages (therefore on employment
and capital), and on the agricultural production of the capitalist
countries, particularly the United States. But the increased popu-
lation of the previous stage, as described above, no longer coin-
cides with the new demand for labour by international capital which
has in the meantime crossed a new technological threshold of pro-
ductivity: the numerous and low skilled proletariat of the depen-
dent country is no longer necessary as such for capitalist develop-
ment. One is therefore faced with a terrible situation which con-
dems millions of individuals to physiological misery and death in
the years to come. Resorting to liberal economy, which tries to
erase all social investments, is one means to liquidate physically an
incalculable number of people. Misery, illness or early death will
be all the more unseen since statistics of the liberal economists don't
take them into account.
It is thus necessary, when analysing the present conjecture,
to refer oneself to the different periods of domination of capital over
the dependent countries. The policy of employment and wages has
caused,since World War II, some effects which are deplored today
as "natural phenomena", but which are within the logic of the
overexploitation of labour which has characterized this period: the
deterioration of the domestic production of subsistence; the grow-
ing access to a cash economy of a population receiving globally
from the capitalist sector wages below the cost of its reproduction,
but favouring in the short term an increase in population induced
by the insecurity of this critical period of change for the peasants.
Not only does capital refuse to take upon itself this proletariat
which it has contributed to bring about during this phase of deve-
lopment, but it considers coldly in the coming stage that it should
let this relative surplus population, induced by new investments
and the new technology, die. A large operation of physical liqui-

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 THE PROLETARIANIZATION OF RURAL WORKERS 13

dation of this "excess" population is going on, in various forms, in

underdeveloped countries: the policies of the Bantustans in South
Africa; the policies inspired by Milton Friedman applied by the
International Monetary Fund and the IBRD in Latin America and
Africa; famines in the Sahelian countries and in Bangladesh, and
so on. In all these circumstances it is the proletarianized popula-
tion of rural origin which is the first to be affected, since they have
no institution or organization capable of ensuring their security
and protection. This situation is rooted in the mode of overexploi-
tation of labour which has been imposed by capitalism since the
50's on the proletariat of rural origin in the neo-colonized countries.
It is therefore necessary to denounce the misery and its corollary,
repression, resulting from a policy which strikes all dependent
countries and that will in the future assume greater proportions9'

1 Meillasoux, "Imperialism as a Mode of Reproduction of Cheap Labour Power",

Bielefeld, 1972 (unpublished); and Femmes, Greniers et Capitaux,Maspero, 1975.
Related expositions of this phenomenon of overexploitation have been made by seve-
ral authors, sometimes independently. The term 'domestic' refers to what can be
considered the "domestic mode of production" based on household self-sustaining
agriculture.
2 This is what happened recently in India after the big flood of September 1978. See
"Camp inmates reluctant to return tojehangirpuri", Hindustan Times IWeekly,
17 September, 1978.
N V Hopkins, "From Small Town Crafts to Industrial Organizations: Tailoring in
Testour", AAA Meeting, November 1976.
J Breman, "Labour Relations in the Formal and Informal Sectors", 7journalof Pea-
sant Studies, 3 April, 1977.
P Hugon, N Abadie and A Morice, Lapetite production marckandeet l'emploi dans le
secteurinformal: le cas africain, IEDES, Paris, 1977.
6
Ibid., p 108.
7
Ibid., p 124.
F T D Shopo, "Some Uses and Misuses of Aspects of African 'Tradition' and of Certain
Anthropological and Sociological Theories (Rhodesia)", Department of History,
University of Rhodesia 1977.
According to a report of ILO dated 22 August 1978, in the year 2000 the active
world population will be composed of two and a half billion workers. In the 20 years
to come it would be necessary to create 1,250,000.000 jobs for 900 millions of new
people coming on the world market. 50 millions are already unemployed. 300
millions are underemployed. 'he "developing" countries ought to take charge of
85 percent of the creation of employment. But the active population of industrialized
countries will only grow by 19 millions of people before the year 2000 (against 122
millions between 1950 and 1975). If the drop in mortality continues there, the
industrialized countries will no longer have a sufficient number of workers at the
beginning of the XXI century, and this may wel 1compromise economic growth. Le
Monde, 25 August 1978, p 17.

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