The brick kilns of Central and South Asia have long attracted the attention of aid agencies, activists and academics as sites of serious labor exploitation. Brick kiln workers are regularly described as “modern day slaves” in need of rescue. But we must move beyond this simplistic “victim paradigm” to understand the social character bondage as well as locating this bondage within local and global systems of domination and dependence. This is what I propose to do over the next 1000 words, using a case study of the brick kilns that I studied in the Pakistani regions of Gujrat, Islamabad and Rawalpindi in 2015 and 2016. First of all , however, we need to understand the crucial role of debt as the engine of capitalism, as well as the ways in which it restricts the choices of a nominally “free” workforce.
Debt bondage and the rise of Indian capitalism
South Asian scholars are divided over when and how capitalism first took hold in colonial India (of which Pakistan was once a part), but most agree that this was already a reality at the end of the 19th century. One of its hallmarks was the growth of long working hours for low hourly wages in agriculture and industry, propelled by the imposition of debt.
Loans were made to workers in the “credit market” at an extremely high price and then repaid in the form of low wages in the labor market. These wages have been kept artificially low, ensuring the development of a cycle linking debt to work dependency. Workers “voluntarily” got into debt to help pay for their survival, then had to “voluntarily” take jobs that earned them so little that they had to go into more debt. This flow of demand for both credit and wage labor was continuous, with debt playing a crucial role in establishing – and sustaining – capitalism in the subcontinent.
Life and debt in the brickyard today
Such a dynamic finds an echo in contemporary Pakistani brick kilns. My research focuses on those at the bottom of the brickyard hierarchy – people who typically work piecemeal to pay off debt that has accrued with the brickyard owner. This debt is in the form of an “advance” (peshgi) that people take to pay for things like marriages or illnesses, or to buy material goods like motorcycles. Although the debt is held by an individual head of household, all household members are involved in the production of bricks to repay it. And as households face regular deductions as part of their repayments, they are often forced to request additional advances, as the ensuing cycle of debt is ultimately transferred from one generation to the next.
An example of this indebtedness is Faisal, whom I first encountered in October 2015 in an oven near Rawalpindi. He was 41 and told me he had lived in brick kilns for 25 years. His son and two daughters grew up with him in brick kilns. “I didn’t realize I wasn’t a free person,” he said, “until I applied for a second loan from the kiln owner. I was young at the time and I needed money because my father didn’t have a job… There is no other way for people like us to have money ” .
I didn’t know I wasn’t a free person until I applied for a second loan.
Lack of basic social and economic protection, as well as lack of access to credit, are fundamental preconditions for this type of debt dependency. Faisal’s story is a good example of this, as is Syeda’s. Syeda is an 18-year-old girl who I met at a brickyard in Gujrat in June 2015. “In Pakistan,” she says, “once you apply for a loan, you become a debtor forever. Nobody cares. We ask for loans as the only way to make a living ”. When I met her again in February 2016, she was pregnant: “I have to keep working,” she says, “although it’s more difficult now”.
Because debt dominates the entire horizon of people like Faisal and Syeda, it’s fair to say that their very future is tied. But as Syeda says, “If we weren’t here in the oven, how could we have a child? It’s a bad life. But at least it’s a lifetime. Collegial relationships can provide a measure of security in situations of overwhelming poverty and insecurity, and workers trade submission for protection.
Debt: a social relationship
Yet a full picture of debt bondage under capitalism can really only emerge once when we bring the “social” back into our analysis. “Pesghi is the only possibility that we have to fulfill our duties in society, ”Faisal explained to me. “There are several questions to think about – dowry be a good example ”. In his case, he also had to worry about remittances and the future of his children. These socio-cultural duties all require money – and when you’re too poor or too excluded to access cheap money, you end up needing to get into debt.
Sociocultural factors can also be observed in other dynamics. In Rawalpindi, the owner of an oven explained to me that “migrants and low-class families tend to accept working conditions that the locals would refuse. They are ready to live in a way that others would consider unbearable ”. This often includes being deeply in debt and having this debt conditioning their work. This is in part the result of the poverty of migrants and lower castes. But not only. Low caste families, for example, also face radical social immobility due to their status, and indebtedness offers them an alternative to street begging. Migrants, on the other hand, use brickyard work as an alternative to escape agriculture, but their social and economic isolation strengthens the bonding capacity of the debts they accumulate.
Fiction of freedom
Debt, by itself, does not lead to bondage. On the contrary, the potential for this type of exploitation emerges from the way in which indebtedness interacts with social, legal and economic uncertainty, as well as with social and cultural inequalities and injustices. In situations of vulnerability and social marginalization, debt can become the crucial link between a person’s “free” choice and his nonfree life – to paraphrase Marx, he can “choose” his debt, but it doesn’t. not on its own terms. manufacturing.
This is what lies behind the story of the workers “voluntarily assuming debts which they must repay”, which one often hears among brickyard owners. Such a monetary-individualistic morality obscures how “modern bondage” is deeply rooted in local social networks of inequality, with global connections and implications. A so-called “free person” may very well get into debt using the system of loans and “advances”. But in doing so, it plays at a micro level a whole macro context of inequality and dependence. And modern slavery experts would do well to take that into account.
Research for this piece was conducted as part of ERC GRANT 313737 – Shadows of Slavery in West Africa and Beyond: a Historical Anthropology (www.shadowsofslavery.org).
