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Whatever Happened to Class?
Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in
South Asia; scholarship from the region have contributed much to class analysis. Yet
class has lost its previous centrality as a way of understanding the world and how it
changes. This outcome is puzzling; new configurations of global economic forces
and policy have widened gaps between classes and across sectors and regions, al
tered people’s relations to production, and produced new state-citizen relations.
Does market triumphalism or increased salience of identity politics render class ir
relevant? Has rapid growth in aggregate wealth obviated long-standing questions of
inequality and poverty? Explanations for what happened to class vary, from intellec
tual fads to global transformations of interests. The authors of articles in this book
ask what is lost in the move away from class, and what South Asian experiences tell
us about the limits of class analysis. Empirical chapters examine formal and infor
mal-sector labor, social movements against genetic engineering, and politics of the
“new middle class.” A unifying analytical concern is specifying conditions under
which interests of those disadvantaged by class systems are immobilized, diffused,
coopted — or autonomously recognized and acted upon politically: the problem
atic transition of classes in themselves to classes for themselves.
Articles in this book were published in a thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies
(vol. 38, number 4, 2006) and in the March 2007 issue of Critical Asian Studies (vol.
39, number 1).
Rina Agarwala is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Johns
Hopkins University. She holds a Doctor in Philosophy (Ph.D.) in sociology and de
mography from Princeton University, a Masters in Public Policy (M.RP.) in political
and economic development from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)
in economics and government from Cornell University. Agarwala has also worked at
the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in China, the Self-Employed
Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, and Women’s World Banking (WWB) in New
York.
Ronald J. Herring teaches political economy and political ecology at Cornell Uni
versity, where he has held the John S. Knight Chair of International Relations and
served as director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, chair of the
Department of Government, and acting director of the Title VI National Resource
Center for South Asia. His earliest academic interests were with land relations: Land
to the Tiller: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in South Asia (Yale and Ox
ford University, 1983). Current work includes state property in nature, politics of ge
netically engineered organisms, and connections between economic development
and ethnicity. See, for example, Carrots, Sticks and Ethnic Conflict: Rethinking De
velopment Assistance, edited with Milton Esman (University of Michigan Press,
2001).
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CLASS?
Reflections from South Asia
Edited with an introduction by
Ronald J. Herring and Rina Agarwala
First published 2008 by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
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© 2008 BCAS, Inc.
Typeset in the USA by BCAS, Inc.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 13:978-0-415-45468-1 (hbk)
ISBN 13:978-1-138-98706-7 (pbk)
Contents
Abstracts v
Introduction — Restoring Agency to Class: 1
Puzzles from South Asia
Ronald ]. Herring and Rina Agarwala, guest editors
1. On the Decline of Class Analysis in South Asian Studies 24
Vivek Chibber
2. Was the Indian Labor Movement Ever Co-opted?
Evaluating Standard Accounts 50
Emmanuel Teitelbaum
3. Workers' Organizations in Pakistan: Why No Role
in Formal Politics? 73
Christopher Candland
4. From Work to Welfare: A New Class Movement in India 91
Rina Agarwala
5. Middle-Class Activism and the Politics of the Informal
Working Class: A Perspective on Class Relations and
Civil Society in Indian Cities 109
John Harriss
6. Why Did "Operation Cremate Monsanto" Fail? Science
and Class in India's Great Terminator-Technology Hoax 127
Ronald J. Herring
7. Hegemonic Aspirations: New Middle Class Politics and
India's Democracy in Comparative Perspective 146
Leela Fernandes and Patrick Heller
Notes 7 66
References 7 85
Contributors 206
Index 208
Yu
Abstracts
Introduction — Restoring Agency to Class: Puzzles from South Asia
Ronald J. Herring and Rina Agarwala
Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics
in South Asia. Yet in the subcontinent class has lost its centrality as a way of un
derstanding the world and how it changes. Indian intellectuals have been a ma
jor force in the eclipsing of class through discursive strategies of constructivist
idealism. Formalism in social sciences finds class relations elusive and difficult
to measure. Market triumphalism eclipsed concern with rehabilitation of
“weaker sectors” and redressing of exploitation as measures of national suc
cess. Class analytics, however, continues to serve two critical functions: disag
gregating development and explaining challenges to rules of the game. Re
storing agency to class requires attention first to relations that structure choice
in restricted or expansive ways. Global forces have altered people’s relations to
production and to one another, as have changes in the political opportunity
structure, with significant effects on tactics and outcomes. Knowing how to ag
gregate or disaggregate classes is more complicated than ever. Nevertheless, al
ternative understandings of class structure are more than academic: they reflect
the strategies of political actors. The difficulty for class analysis is to illuminate
the conditions under which interests of those disabled by particular class sys
tems may be inter-subjectively recognized and acted upon politically at the local
and/or international levels. Appropriate and robust sociopolitical theory for
this purpose is illusive, but no more so for class than for other bases of differ
ence — caste, community, identity, gender— that likewise seek to explain trans
formation of locations in social structures to effective collective agency.
1. On the Decline of Class Analysis in South Asian Studies
Vivek Chibber
The decline of class analysis has been pervasive across the intellectual land
scape in recent years. But South Asian studies stands out in the severity with
which it has been hit by this phenomenon. It also is the field where the influence
of post-structuralism has been most pronounced in the wake of Marxism’s de
cline. This essay offers an explanation for both the decline of class analysis and
V
VI Whatever Happened to Class?
the ascendance of post-structuralism in South Asian studies as practiced in the
United States. I suggest that the decline of class theorizing was a predictable and
natural result of the decline of working-class politics in the United States. But
the severity of its decline in South Asian studies in particular was a symptom of
its never having made much of a dent on the field in the first place. This left un
challenged the traditional, Indological approach, which was heavily oriented
toward culturalism. This in turn made the field a hospitable ground for the en
trance of post-structuralism, which, like mainstream Indology, not only es
chews materialist analysis, but is largely hostile to class. South Asian studies is
thus one of the few fields in which traditional scholars and younger ones are
both able to agree on their hostility to class analysis. Finally, I argue that the de
cline of class is now visible in Indian universities too, and this is largely caused
by the overwhelming influence that U.S. universities have come to exercise over
Indian elite academic culture.
2. Was the Indian Labor Movement Ever Co-opted? Evaluating Standard Ac
counts
Emmanuel Teitelbaum
Despite its central importance to India’s political and economic development,
the organizational capacity of India’s working class is poorly understood. Stan
dard social scientific accounts portray the Indian working class as weakened by
continual fragmentation and wholly dominated by political parties and the
state. Social scientists therefore assume that the Indian working class is eco
nomically and politically inconsequential. This essay challenges these promi
nent misconceptions. Drawing on original survey data, government statistics,
and a discussion of Indian industrial and labor law, the author shows that the In
dian labor movement has been much more unified, much more contentious in
the collective bargaining arena, and much more politically influential than pre
viously assumed. The author speculates that the key reason social scientists
have misjudged the strength of organized labor in India is that their assessments
have relied too heavily on “key source” interviews with business, political and
trade union elites, all of whom have incentives to portray workers as divided
and weak.
3- Workers’ Organizations in Pakistan: Why No Role in Formal Politics?
Christopher Candland
Why have Pakistani workers failed to transform their evident street power into
sustained influence in formal politics? Throughout South Asia, worker’ organi
zations formed alliances with political parties, political parties formed workers’
organizations, and governments incorporated worker’ organizations into state
consultation machinery. With the exception of Pakistan, in each of the countries
of South Asia, representatives at these workers organizations have become
members of parliament and cabinet ministers. In India, a workers’ representa
Abstracts vii
tives even became president. Why have workers’ representatives been almost
completely absent in Pakistani governments? This essay argues that Pakistan’s
traumatic creation — one of the twentieth century’s greatest humanitarian di
sasters — unleashed ruling class insecurities that were unfavorable to workers’
organizations. The managers of the new state demanded centralized power. Au
thoritarian colonial institutions were ready at hand. Pakistan’s international alli
ance with U.S.-anticommunist alliances led to the suppression of workers’
organizations and precluded their influence in formal politics. The ruling
classes targeted workers’ organizations. Pakistani governments ensured that
workers’ organizations were excluded from formal politics. Before concluding,
the essay considers whether military governments are necessarily inimical to
workers’ organizations.
4. From Work to Welfare: A New Class Movement in India
Rina Agarwala
The rigidity of early class analysis and the recent demise of any type of class ana
lytics have turned attention away from examining the growing population of in
formally employed workers as a class. By not examining informal workers as a
class “m themselves,” we are losing insights into how they are translating their
positions into a class “for themselves.” As a consequence, the recent literature
on globalization and liberalization is increasingly concluding that the decreas
ing proportion of formally employed workers (and the subsequent rise in in
formal employment) the world over signifies a decline in all class-based
organization. Such arguments have obscured our understanding of the current
social dynamics of exploitation and resistance. In an attempt to begin filling this
gap, this article recovers class as an important analytical tool with which to ex
amine (1) the current relations of power between the state, employers, and the
majority of India’s workers, and (2) how the structures of production within
which informal workers operate affect their collective action strategies. A refor
mulated labor movement model is offered to expose the underlying mecha
nisms through which informal workers translate their location in the class
structure as a class “in itself” into a political group as a class “for itself.” Insights
into how informal workers organize can have profound implications for our un
derstanding of changing state-labor relations as national governments attempt
to liberalize their economies and simultaneously rein in their welfare functions.
5. Middle-Class Activism and the Politics of the Informal Working Class: A
Perspective on Class Relations and Civil Society in Indian Cities
John Harriss
This article, drawing on the results of both survey research and of ethnography
in Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai, concerns the relationships between the mid
dle class and the informal working class in Indian cities in the sphere of civil so
ciety. These relationships are shown to be very significant in the definition of the
