The H-1B Debate and the Development of Capitalism in India
Will India’s revolution be completed, or the American Revolution undone?
One of the most interesting theoretical debates in recent times about the future of the American working class and its role in politics happened not on the left as you might expect, but on the right. The fragility of the new MAGA coalition between the populists and the Silicon Valley “tech right” was thrown into sharp relief when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy came out in favour of the expansion of H-1B visas. Both of them phrased their support in language that was openly derogatory towards working-class Americans, and all but saying out loud that the reason they preferred importing workers from elsewhere was because these workers would work longer hours for lower pay without complaining. Most of Trump’s base were absolutely outraged. What happened to “America First”?
The MAGA movement had been given a harsh lesson in class consciousness. I had stated before this happened that any genuine populist should not trust figures like Musk, but I did not expect to be vindicated so soon. Musk and Vivek, as members of the capitalist class, always understood “America First” to mean “America’s GDP First”, and they could not understand why anyone would disagree with this. “American Workers First” was the implicit message that had made MAGA popular in the first place, and now it was being trampled on. The backlash was so severe that Vivek was unceremoniously fired (he wasn’t given an official government position to begin with, so this was easily done) while Musk shut up about it and awkwardly tried to change the subject. The plot thickened when Bernie Sanders came out of hiding to condemn Musk and Vivek’s position, while prominent establishment Democrats like Gavin Newsom praised it. It was becoming clear that this was not a partisan issue but a class one, and a space had been opened for previously unthinkable political alliances.
This, however, is not the whole story. In order to understand why Musk and Vivek were so insistent on the expansion of H-1Bs in particular, as opposed to any other method of importing foreign labour, and what the full political-economic implications of doing this would be, we need to go all the way back to the colonisation of India by Britain. Why? Most people who come to the US on H-1B visas are Indian, so carefully studying the history of that country is the only way to know how this came to be and why that is relevant.
India did not actually exist as a unified polity prior to the arrival of the British. Most of the subcontinent was ruled by a different group of foreigners, the Mughals, with the rest of it broken up into many small states. As such, the template for the future Indian state was not borrowed from its pre-imperial past, but was handed down wholesale by the British themselves. The colonisation of India occurred at a time when the age of imperialism (in the Leninist sense) had not yet begun, so the initial role of the British was to destroy India’s domestic industry in order to flood it with cheap goods imported from Britain itself. When pre-monopoly capitalism gave way to imperialism, the export of goods was replaced by the export of capital. Capital had little room left to expand within Britain itself, so British capitalists moved their operations overseas in search of more profits.
This is what caused the colonies, including India, to begin the transition to modern industry. The key here is that it did not emerge from the initiative of a native Indian bourgeois class, but was imposed externally. There was no revolution, like in France, to sweep away pre-capitalist forms of social organisation such as the caste system: in fact, the British deliberately baked the caste system into the structure of Indian capitalism, as it was an astonishingly effective way of dividing the population against each other and preventing the overthrow of the colonial government. Previously, the caste system had been primarily associated with Hinduism but not strictly coterminous with it, so I believe that, taking into account the influence of the British on its modern incarnation, it is fairest to call it a problem afflicting the Indian state machine as a whole rather than any particular religion. The rise of Hindutva as the strongest political force in India has made this distinction fade away somewhat for the time being, but there is no reason to assume it will be that way forever.
The Indian bourgeoisie that did form came onto the scene already incapable of the tasks history would ask of them. They were weak, cowardly, and had almost no existence separate from British imperialism. They were more afraid of their own workers and peasants than they were of the British, and hoped that they could obtain reforms peacefully and gradually to avert revolution. While the Indian masses began to stir as early as the 1920s, with the Russian Revolution acting as a major inspiration, independence was not considered by the British or native ruling classes until India came under attack by the Japanese in WWII. The Indian masses, seeing Japan and Britain as two sides of the same imperial coin, could only be persuaded to fight against the invaders by being promised independence.
India gained its independence as a democracy in name only, and really in a country so economically backward it could not be otherwise1. The main bourgeois party, the Indian National Congress, ruled in near-Bonapartist fashion. Marxist historian Perry Anderson makes the point in his book “The Indian Ideology” that Indian democracy is not contradicted by the continued existence of the caste system, but actually enabled by it. The Indian political system was made in the image of Britain’s, which had always drawn a sharp distinction between commoners and nobles2. Even though there is now the equivalent of DEI and affirmative action for lower castes, all this serves to do is, like its Western counterpart with “race” (see “Racecraft” by Barbara Fields), further reify caste distinctions when the objective should be to eliminate them. However, unlike DEI, “reservation” as it is known in India only exists for government positions, education, and public sector jobs. Outside of these areas, old-fashioned caste discrimination is very much still present.
The continued existence of the caste system has not only hamstrung India’s development, but has had knock-on effects in the rest of the world. A notable Indian diaspora was present in many parts of the British Empire, consisting of both lower-caste labourers and upper-caste administrators. The upper-caste Indians, given special privileges and convinced of their inherent superiority, were very well suited to their jobs. According to Jan Jelmert Jørgensen in “Uganda: a Modern History”, Indians were deliberately imported there to “serve as a buffer between Europeans and Africans in the middle rungs of commerce and administration”, which was one of the reasons why Idi Amin expelled them all. We owe the political careers of such people as Priti Patel and Suella Braverman to the Indian diaspora in southeast Africa, which should give you a good idea of its psychology.
Americans, insulated from British imperial politics by the legacy of the Revolution, were not commonly aware of the caste system until quite recently. The first reaction of your average Joe upon hearing that a bill to combat caste discrimination has been proposed somewhere is usually one of bewilderment: what does that even mean? America has no notion of caste, so how could that be a thing? Well, contrary to the romantic idea that American immigrants immediately become diehard patriots and renounce the more unsavoury customs of their homelands, Indian-Americans still perceive caste, and in a country where caste discrimination is not even de jure illegal you can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be at least some of it.
This is exacerbated by the fact that Indian-Americans are one of the most affluent demographics in the country (which makes sense, as only relatively rich Indians can afford to move there), and so the upper castes are massively over-represented compared to the population of India itself. Rich Indians who come to the US often apply to managerial positions with the ability to hire and fire, so caste discrimination moves from the realm of personal grudges to the workplace. Indian managers play the double role of accepting lower pay than Americans would for the same job, and willingly using their caste position to be a blunt weapon of the bosses, just like Indian overseers in the British empire.
It would be wrong to infer from India’s relative economic backwardness that it does not suffer from elite overproduction. Before you get the wrong idea, I am not saying that the level of education in India or anywhere else should be lower. Rather, the issue is that the supply of people with certain academic credentials, which universities are incentivised to inflate as it makes them more money, outstrips the societal demand for their skills, which private sector employers keep artificially low to avoid having to pay too much in wages. The Russian Revolution raised the demand for scientists, engineers, artists, architects, doctors, teachers, and all sorts of educated people by an incomparable amount, and this was undeniably a good thing. Higher education in the humanities is less common in India than in the West, which means that India has a surplus of STEM graduates instead. Instead of being given do-nothing bureaucratic jobs like Western humanities graduates, they are dealt with by being sent overseas, particularly to the American tech sector.
You can see from this why Silicon Valley, which people like Musk and Newsom represent, is the epicentre of pro-H-1B sentiment in the US. American tech workers themselves, of course, are less than thrilled by the idea of being replaced by cheaper Indian labour, and even those who are not personally in danger of being replaced or even taking a pay cut have no love for the H-1B system. Why? Musk has stated that he is in favour of H-1Bs because they encourage skilled immigration. On the surface, this appears to be true: according to the Pew Research Center 75% of Indian-Americans have a bachelor’s degree and 43% have a Masters or better, as compared to only 20% and 13% respectively in the general population, but this is an unsatisfactory explanation. If the Indian techies really were more skilled than their American counterparts, the backlash to H-1Bs would be much less severe. So what’s actually going on? Well, elite overproduction is only half of the story. It might be more enlightening to refer to it as elite bootlegging.
You see, the Indian education system is legendarily corrupt, so getting a degree there doesn’t prove much. However things are in your country, I assure you it is at least as bad there. Multiple Indian institutions have been caught self-citing on an industrial scale in order to inflate their rankings, and to achieve this “publish or perish” culture is turned into overdrive from the start: many students are not just encouraged but actually required to submit multiple papers in order to finish their degrees. This is why India’s paper retraction rate is so high, but the sheer volume of low-quality research that is churned out means what actually gets retracted is only the tip of the iceberg. Many journals, scientific conferences and even research institutions that claim to be hosted in India are Potemkin façades whose only purpose is to wring money out of people desperate to pad their profile on Google Scholar. India’s elite overproduction is a result of putting quantity over quality in education3, so most of it is people whose credentials are dubious at best.
Well, all right, but surely the USA, with its higher (for now) standards, only picks the genuinely talented people from the pool? Not through the H-1B, at least. The H-1B works via a lottery system where 85,000 applicants a year are chosen at random to be allowed to come in. This system is not only arbitrary but easily abused: companies aiming to hire H-1B workers can submit applications for jobs that don’t exist or submit the same application multiple times in order to get better odds. In 2008, it was estimated by USCIS itself (the agency that handles H-1B applications) that one-fifth of all applications involved some form of fraud. Among computer professionals specifically, the rate of fraud was even higher. But all of this can already be avoided: there is a type of visa that does work in a genuinely meritocratic manner, the O-1. If Vivek and Musk genuinely wanted to attract the best talent, the sensible thing for them to do would be to scrap the H-1B altogether and expand the O-1 to fill its niche.
So, we have established that support for the H-1B by capitalists is not because it selects for skilled workers, but because it allows wages to be driven down. Also, workers who come in on H-1Bs are bound to a single employer and have very limited political-economic rights compared to natives, which has caused it to be compared to identured servitude, including by Bernie Sanders in his criticisms of it. Both the liberal and conservative wings of the American bourgeoisie are intent on the “Dubaification” of the country: rendering the home-grown working class obsolete, and having all labour performed by an underclass with little to no rights in slave-like conditions. The manner in which this is to be achieved differs between the two wings, however: the liberal wing, under the guise of compassion for immigrants, advocate for no legal recognition of this state of affairs, preferring it to happen “under the table”, while the conservative wing advocate for its legal codification and an end to the illegal aspects. Cracking down on illegal immigration while simultaneously expanding the H-1B serves precisely this purpose.
“Dubaification” and the Indian caste system are natural fits for each other. The latter provides rigid spiritual inequality as a justification for rigid class inequality. Rigid spiritual inequality, however, is something which is not only alien to the best traditions of the American Revolution but actively erodes them. It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Bourgeois phrases such as this are not much use to those born into poverty, but they at least contain the implication that any reason why one man might enjoy more rights than another is societally contingent rather than spiritually inherent.
American capitalism has reached the point where it has long since ceased to be a progressive force, and without further room to grow has now bent back on itself and begun to cannibalise its own gains in order to prolong its existence. By importing the Indian caste system, America is completing its usurpation of the British Empire’s old position that began in 1945, thereby dialectically transforming itself into what it once fought against. Identity politics is nothing but another crystallised expression of this self-destructive tendency: equality before the law, freedom of speech, the right to self-defence, presumption of innocence, the right to privacy, and freedom of information have all been undermined in its name. In fact, those laws against caste discrimination that I mentioned earlier have been criticised for being “Hinduphobic”. Noted H-1B proponent Gavin Newsom actually vetoed such a law on the grounds that it was unnecessary as caste discrimination was already implicitly covered by existing laws, even though it was very unclear how that would work. Anyway, it’s safe to say that the rejection and eventual abolition of the caste system will not come about through bourgeois legislative means.
This is a situation where the fates of India and the US have become tightly entwined. The task of abolishing the caste system, which would in theory have belonged to the bourgeois revolution, has now fallen on the Indian proletariat and peasants. We have seen this before in Russia, China, and elsewhere. The full completion of the American Revolution, with its first phase beginning in 1776 and its second in 18634, now rests not only on the American workers but to an extent on the future revolution in India also. Marx and Lenin understood in their time how vital the Indian question was to the prospect of revolution in Britain, and this is no different. By the same token, the overthrow of the American capitalists would cut the chains of imperialism binding India at their root. The Indian comprador bourgeoisie, deprived of support from their foreign masters, would be no match for the might of the proletariat. After all, revolutionary and communist traditions in India are strong, despite the country’s relative backwardness. Meanwhile, without Silicon Valley as a release valve, the decrepit edifice of India’s education system would collapse under its own weight.
This may sound rather far-fetched, but remember that class consciousness does not arrive by halves. Even the smallest spark can ignite a raging fire, and Musk and Vivek’s H-1B blunder has created a great deal of combustible fuel. The fact that most of the outcry against this came from within the MAGA movement should give the American left, almost all of whom wrote off all Trump supporters as irredeemable fascists back in 2016 and have remained in that mindset ever since, a badly needed wake-up call. You don’t get to choose which part of the working class storms the Winter Palace5. You must play the hand you’re dealt, and in this game the stakes could not be higher.
The peasantry, by virtue of their isolation from each other and from the cities, do not have much by way of means or reason to participate in liberal democracy, so liberal institutions in a country which still has a large peasantry will be representative of only a minority of the population. The only institution that can actively involve the peasantry in government is the village soviet, but obviously such a thing was not on the cards in India.
This distinction became weaker over time as the bourgeoisie became more powerful and eventually absorbed the remnants of the aristocracy into itself, but it has still never been formally abolished.
Western countries have been doing this too since the Great Reaganite Restructuring in the 80s, but to a lesser extent.
The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Or the Capitol, as the case may be.