The Hindu : The working class

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 29, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

The working class

By Andre Beteille

Attitudes towards manual work, or at least some forms of it, are changing even in India in part as a result of changes in the technology and organisation of work.

THE WORKING class has received continuous attention from social and political commentators for well over a hundred years. Yet, even in the middle of the 19th century, it was a new expression which brought into focus a new reality created by industrial capitalism, first in England and other Western countries, and then elsewhere. Until that time, it was common to speak about labourers but not about a working class. Before the advent of industrial capitalism, Western society was represented in terms of its division into estates just as Indian society was represented in terms of its division into varnas and jatis rather than of classes.

The classic formulation of the conditions of the working class may be found in the descriptive and analytical writings of Engels and Marx. Engels provided vivid descriptions of working class men, women and children in mid-19th century England while Marx developed a theory which maintained that that class would be the principal agent of historical change. That theory has had a profound influence on intellectual and political currents throughout the world. In it the workers, as the `owners merely of labour-power' are contrasted sharply with the owners of capital or the bourgeoisie. The idea of a working class or proletariat deprived of everything except its capacity to merely labour appealed to the imaginations of many who were themselves somewhat better placed. Some came to believe that the working class was by its very suffering destined to lead humanity as a whole to a better future.

The polarisation of bourgeoisie and proletariat became a central theme in theories and programmes of political change through the conflict of classes. But the polarisation did not take the course predicted by the theory. As the 19th century passed into the 20th, it began to be evident that the `owners merely of labour-power' were a mixed bag, and the passage of time seemed to make them more and not less of a mixed bag. Social and political attitudes were shaped not only by the structure of property but also, and independently of it, by the occupational structure, and there the distinction between non-manual and manual occupations could not be seen as merely an aspect of the one between capitalists and workers.

The gap between the working class and the middle class continued to be present even where the latter consisted mainly of `owners merely of labour-power'. An important sociological study made by David Lockwood nearly 50 years ago showed how clerks and manual workers in Britain differed from each other. They differed in their market situations, in their work situations and, above all, in their status situations. Even when they had similar incomes, they had different patterns of expenditure, different lifestyles and different aspirations for their children.

Differences between the lower levels of non-manual employees and the upper levels of manual workers have not been of the same magnitude or significance in all places or at all times. The general disesteem of manual work common among agrarian societies was accentuated in the Indian case by traditional attitudes towards purity and pollution. But attitudes towards manual work, or at least some forms of it, are changing even in India in part as a result of changes in the technology and organisation of work.

At the time of Independence, India had a small middle class and a small industrial working class. Both have expanded considerably, and their expansion has brought some sections of workers, particularly in the organised sector, closer to some sections of the middle class in their market situation, their work situation and their status situation. This has happened in many parts of the world and some sociologists have called it `embourgeoisement' or the process of `becoming bourgeois'. But it is not a simple one-way process. For, while workers have adopted many middle-class social standards, clerks and other non-manual employees, including teachers and doctors, have adopted many trade-union practices developed first by the industrial working class.

The very processes that have brought some sections of manual workers closer to the middle class have carried them further away from the majority of manual workers in a variety of occupations in the unorganised sector. Here the pay is very low, there is hardly any job security and the conditions of work are often appalling. So great is the disparity between these workers and those who constitute the aristocracy of labour that one might well ask if it is at all reasonable to speak of all workers, or even all manual workers, as belonging to a single class. The irony is that political movements and parties continue to use the imagery of 19th century capitalism to make demands in the name of the `owners merely of labour-power' whose benefits go not to the worst-off but to the best-off sections of manual workers and also to many non-manual workers.

Fifty years ago in India, the differences between manual and non-manual workers were clear and distinct. The wages of manual workers were generally, if not invariably, lower than the salaries of employees in clerical and related occupations. Even more than in Victorian England, in the city of Calcutta where I grew up in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, manual work was considered `rough' whereas non-manual employment, no matter how poorly paid, was `respectable'. In the West, technological changes since World War II have rendered manual work less rough and unclean. Similar changes are taking place in India although they are as yet largely confined to the organised sector outside of which manual work continues to be onerous and disagreeable.

Differences between manual workers and clerical and other employees were not confined to the workplace. They were equally, if not more, marked in the home and the neighbourhood. In the city of Calcutta, and I presume in other Indian cities, clerks and manual workers lived in different neighbourhoods, although shortage of housing and unemployment were leading some downwardly-mobile members of the middle class to move into slums. The reverse movement, of well-paid and upwardly-mobile manual workers into middle-class neighbourhoods, was to begin later, and even now it is not much more than a trickle.

In addition to developments in the technology and organisation of work, the spread of literacy and education has played a part in altering the balance between the higher grades of manual and the lower grades of non-manual employees. In 19th-century England, manual workers in factories had little or no education whereas the ability to read and write was essential for clerical and related occupations. It took factory workers more than one generation to recognise that even if they themselves had missed out on schooling, their children would benefit by being sent to school. As schooling becomes universal, the disparities between manual and non-manual workers are bound to become softened, although differences in the amount and quality of education still remain even in England which was the first industrial nation.

The equation between factory work and no education, and office work and some education held to a very large extent in India at the time of Independence. It does not hold to the same extent any longer. It hardly needs to be repeated that the expansion of literacy and education was painfully slow in the decades immediately after Independence, but things have begun to change. Many public sector undertakings now have their own schools which provide subsidised education to the children of workers. Sometimes this education is better than what is available to children whose parents are in lower white-collar employment in small establishments outside the public sector. Again, the vast masses of those who are in casual or unregulated employment find schooling of even the most elementary kind outside the reach of their children. Even when those children manage to get to school, they drop out before long and they reproduce the life histories of their parents. Such enormous and perhaps increasing disparities in life chances among workers in different occupations and in different sectors of the economy lead us back to the question as to what people really mean when they speak of the working class in contemporary India.

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