Class structuration, reproduction, and the politics of labour in India

Abstract

Abstract The statement discusses Jonathan Parry’s recent monograph, Classes of Labour, and in particular his “labour aristocracy” thesis of the most privileged sections of India’s workforces that had been widely accepted in the social sciences in the 1970s but that had later been discarded. It is argued that the ethnography of an industrial town in Central India he presents in the monograph convincingly demonstrates that the relative privileges of public-sector employment have fostered the bifurcation of the town’s industrial workers into two major distinct classes with different life chances, different attitudes to caste, and with often antagonistic political interests. Classes of Labour also demonstrates that Giddens’ concept of “class structuration” offers a suitable theoretical grounding for identifying the major fault lines and driving forces of class formation in his case study but also for a controlled comparison between case studies across India and beyond. This statement moreover argues that this approach conceives of class as an historical, dynamic object, and it asks whether the current crises of class reproduction in the times of jobless growth might provoke a major change in the structuration of classes in India.