While Karl Marx (1847) fundamentally associated the replacement of one human with another in the capitalist labor process with social reproduction, the anthropological literature on plantations often points out the significance of social differentiation. But on colonial and contemporary plantations, replacing one workforce with another is informed by the social hierarchy that suggests which social groups can substitute for one another.

In the south Indian plantations I studied, the migrant casual workers of a particular social group (Adivasis, the Indigenous) are retained as potential substitutes for the regular workers from another group (Dalits, the ex-untouchable). The very potential of being replaced perpetuates a liminal life for Dalit regular workers. Similarly, the long wait and adverse treatment as substitutes generate an anxious life for Adivasi casual workers. The liminal precarity of each workforce, produced through acts or threats of substitution, conditions the labor regime in colonial capitalist plantations.

The idea of substitution thus rationalizes not only exploitation, but also expropriation, violence, and oppression, whereby human beings are reduced to nothingness in racialized capitalism (Fraser 2016). Ideological structures generate degrees of value for individuals and communities and locate them hierarchically in categorical relationships (see Mitchel 1956). While neoliberal capitalism atomizes individuals and individualizes precarity, its operation always places the individual within the social hierarchies and economic inequalities that appear natural within the capitalist production system.

The periodic replacement of workforces in the colonial and contemporary plantations (Martínez 2007; Raj 2022) and the racialized hierarchical valuation of various ethnic groups in terms of their replaceability/non-replaceability (Bourgois 1989; Holmes 2013) have been foundational for theorizing the material relation within the plantation’s ideological mechanisms. Assigning values to human beings is carried out through constant differentiation and stereotypes based on identity categories, including ethnicity, color, and nationality, which are also used to demarcate plantations’ class order (Martínez 2007). The demarcation is further reinforced by phenotype and bodily markers that the racialized workforce embodies and disciplines itself to the flexible dynamics of capitalist expropriation (Holmes 2013). This violent process centered around substitution and non-substitution produces conjugated oppression (Bourgois 1989) or categorical oppression (Raj 2020). The racial-capitalist process not only uses stigmatized identity categories to maintain precarious workers at different locations of production, but the larger process of stigmatizing workers also prevents them from leading a dignified life also outside the plantation production.

Samuel Martínez (2007, 23–24) explains how, in Dominican sugar plantations, “West Indians replaced Dominicans in the cane fields in the 1880s… Haitians took the West Indians’ place in the 1930s, as gang labor gave way to piece-rate wages. Each of these shifts reduced the workers’ bargaining power… Plantation managers have thus not only circumvented resistance by replacing old laborers with new ones but have promoted ethnic divisions as a strategy of labor control.” The plantation order, over time, produced intrinsic values to the deployment of ethnic hierarchy in overshadowing coercion and exploitation. Social differentiation ensures a stable class order and neutralizes resistance.

In another context, Philippe Bourgois (1989) discusses the role of identity in the reproduction of the class order in the United Fruit Company’s banana plantations on the borders of Panama and Costa Rica. Based on the interrelationship of class, power, and ethnicity, Bourgois argues that the plantations’ production order is reproduced through the hierarchization of ethnicity between whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Kuna and Guaymi Amerindians.

Building on Bourgois, Seth Holmes (2013, chapter 3) explains how a social Darwinist perception of Indigeneity and civilization becomes a spectrum upon which workers of different ethnicities and citizenship status are hierarchically located in the strawberry farms in the United States. White/Asian Americans, white and Asian American U.S. citizens, Latino U.S. citizens or residents, undocumented mestizo Mexicans, and undocumented Indigenous Mexicans are vertically located in the class order. Here, class/ethnic locations are tied to the varied experiences of class position, respect, dignity, and suffering.

I have discussed a similar process in the Indian tea plantations where the new generation corporate companies replaced the Tamil-speaking Dalit laborers with Adivasi workers from eastern India, creating a new ethnic division of labor (Raj 2022). The tea companies were able to bypass strict labor laws on retaining the new workers as precarious casual workers because of the inferiorization of the latter’s identity categories within the categorical relationships encompassed by the violent caste system.

The caste system operates a complex hierarchical valuation of human beings not only to rationalize division of labor but more fundamentally to reproduce a hierarchical division of laborers (Ambedkar 1936). Within the caste system, the logic of replaceability in capitalist production order is rooted in ideology as much as in materiality, as the emphasis is more on caste-informed sociocultural assumptions of who is capable of, and expected to, possess the required skills and knowledge, than on who actually possess them. The claims of possession of skills and knowledge are policed through caste and ethnic profiling and stereotypes.

Here, the possibility and impossibility of substitution and replaceability are attributed to innate and predetermined human qualities, a system perhaps more violent than the spectrum of civilization and Indigeneity that Holmes discusses. Not only the tea companies’ expropriation of Tamil Dalits and Adivasis, but also the idea of the plantation itself is not scandalized, because the violent mechanisms of the caste hierarchy provide impunity to the plantation capital.

The replaceability of the Tamil Dalits and the adverse location of the new Adivasi labor should also be understood in relation to the multitude of substitutions and replacements that occurred, for example, with machines replacing the humans and diverse species being replaced by the mono-crop plantations and the associated restructuring of landscape (Li and Semedi 2021). Hierarchized and racialized communities are reassembled in mirroring the transforming nature of technology and landscapes. In the reassembling process, the possibility and impossibility of replaceability through continually linking skills to ethnic stereotypes make the communities vulnerable. Technological transformations are appropriated into the valuation of human beings through caste among other categories.

In general terms, the inequality that capitalism produces and relies on to reproduce itself through the politics of (substitute) production is appropriated into the fundamental logic of the caste system that human beings are innately hierarchical. Capitalism relies on the substitution of human labor, while the caste system formulates terms upon which the substitution of human beings itself could occur. Caste encompasses capitalism in the Indian context.