ABSTRACT
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 understanding the world and how it changes. Indian intellectuals have been a major 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 success. Class analytics, however, continues to serve two critical functions: disaggregating development and explaining challenges to rules of the game. Restoring 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 aggregate or disaggregate classes is more complicated than ever. Nevertheless, alternative 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 systems 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 difference — caste, community, identity, gender—that likewise seek to explain transformation of locations in social structures to effective collective agency.
Notes
3. Members of the Peoples Guerrilla Army, Peoples War Group (PWG), Maoists Communist Center (MCC), Communist Party of India (Maoist), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Janashakti are called ultra-leftists or Naxals, after the 1967 agrarian uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal, which was sparked by landlord abuses of tribals. Singh's comments in GOI Citation2006.
9. Paul Krugman (Citation2006, A19) noted: “So what's our bitter partisan divide really about? In two words: class warfare.” For an argument that politics in the United States follows class coalitions that either fatten the rich or attempt mild distribution, see Phillips Citation1990.
12. On early analyses of how India's urban workers’ movements reflected the strength of the nation's democracy, see Fisher Citation1961; Kennedy Citation1958. On early official agrarian class diagnosis for policy in India, see Herring and Edwards Citationl983, 17–49; 153–79; Herring Citation1983, 17–49; 153–79.
13. Chibber Citation2006. On the assault on science, see Nanda Citation2003. On the postmodern move in history in particular, see Richard Eaton's “(Re)imag(in)ing Otherness: A Postmortem for the Postmodern in India,” in Eaton Citation2000; see also Hutnyk Citation2003.
19. Even under the “Islamic socialist” regime of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. See Candland Citation2007.
21. Gail Omvedt's Reinventing revolution (1993) is tellingly subtitled “New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India.” On material interests in ethnic politics, see Herring and Esman Citation2001; Chandra Citation2004.
27. Wade Citation(1988) offers an example of how careful attention to material forces and rational decisions by farmers explain some interesting puzzles in water and land control in South India, to his satisfaction, controlling for cultural variables.
29. See Elster Citation1985, 335–41 for a detailed discussion on this point. There is a parallel to gender studies: tables showing numbers of males and females in various occupations do not tell us much about gendered relationships on the job or in society generally.
30. An excellent treatment of the “qualitative-quantitative” divide, and synthetic methods, is Kanbur Citation2003.
33. On useful distinctions among these concepts, though somewhat different from the text, see Wright Citation1997, chaps. 1, 2, 10.
36. Scott Citation(1985) comes very close to this position. Much of the resurrection and celebration of “local knowledge” likewise assumed inherently superior Volk information and wisdom.
37. See Tietelbaum 2006 for the worker's dilemma in choosing between well-insti-tutionalized (perhaps co-opted) unions and very militant (perhaps counterproductive) unions.
40. Jon Elster Citation(1985) produced the most explicit attempt to meld these traditions.
41. Roy, Herring, and Geisler Citation2007; Herring l985. With the divergences in local knowledge of agriculture in north India documented by Akhil Gupta Citation(1998), one sees the complexity of farmers’ dilemmas in sorting means to ends in agriculture.
43. Gadgil and Guha Citation(1995) propose an alternative class system for ecology, based on relation to nature and consumption. For a more complicated look at the interests of their “eco-system people,” see Baviskar Citation1995. On state property, see Herring Citation2002.
44. For a powerful case for the importance of narratives of environmental change and policy in differentiating interests of individuals, see Dryzek Citation1997. As evidentiary rules differ across paradigms, closure is cognitively difficult.
49. India's first Backward Classes Commission, appointed in 1953, offered empirical evidence of the well-understood social reality: inferior position in the caste hierarchy was the main determinant of social and economic backwardness.
50. Dirks Citation2001, esp. 43-60, on “the ethnographic state.”
51. The text uses “caste,” as is commonly done, to mean jati. All etymological derivations based on the Oxford English Dictionary.
55. One comparative study that presents the quantitative case carefully but goes beyond numbers to social relations and political history is the excellent work by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen Citation(1996).
59. John Harriss Citation(2003) finds that a decisive defeat of the dominant class/caste social coalition has occurred in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. In these states, the umbrella accommodationist Congress Party lost its dominance early. Congress hegemony was replaced by anti-Brahmin populism in Tamil Nadu, and by aggressive Left coalitions in Kerala (first) and West Bengal (more enduringly). Despite the differing organizing principles used, namely, caste in Tamil Nadu and class in Kerala and West Bengal, all three state parties initiated successful redistributive policies. See also Frankel and Rao Citation1989.
60. Ramachandran Citation1996, 180–200; Herring Citation1988. Mass energy in social movements was organized as the Congress Socialist Party [Communist Party after 1942], which eclipsed conservative Congress elements by sheer weight of numbers and activity.
61. This understanding is not restricted to the subcontinent. If one were to ask, for example, why there is no working-class party in the United States, and thus no social democracy of the European variety (Sombart l976), one would have to consider ethnic tensions generated from waves of immigration, which created intense competition for jobs and deflected anger to class-fellows of different ethnicity. These dynamics help explain the comparative absence of class consciousness or class formation that make the United States anomalous among industrialized societies.
62. In the New York Times series entitled “Class Matters,” mobility is connected to cultural capital in the United States. See Correspondents Citation2005.
63. Karl Polanyi is perhaps the most noted theorist to insist on the unnatural nature of the process of commodification of human beings as labor. Responses to insecurities and indignities of commoditized labor in market society — child labor, for example, or discarding of the elderly when their labor has no market value — drive his vision of social policy that hems in the market. See Polanyi Citation1957.
69. Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron first used the term in Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction in 1973. On the concept and applications to India, see Fernandes and Heller Citation2006.
73. Chibber puts capital in a more active political role vis-à-vis the state in 2003, especially Chaps. 5, 6, and 8.
74. This section owes much to John Harriss, who bears no responsibility for its flaws.
76. For an excellent treatment of the interaction of ideology and structure in reference to this line of reasoning, see Harriss Citation1982.
77. Contesting theorists launched what became known as the “mode of production debate,” mainly but not entirely through the Economic and Political Weekly. See Harriss Citation1980; Thorner l982; Mukhia Citation1999; and Herring Citation1985.
85. Zoya Hasan (1009) has suggested, with regard to Uttar Pradesh, that this form of mobilization of class interests has been eclipsed by the politics of Hindutva.
87. For the analytical perspective of a farmer organization leader, see Joshi Citation2001; on the politics of the organization itself, see Omvedt Citation2005.
90. Patrick Heller (Citation1999, 237–48) rightly emphasizes the resultant pressure on the Kerala communists to make their own class compromises, and he thinks the class compromise may produce economic development.
91. Beyond the scope of this essay, it must be said that such generalizations are weak on evidence, and the connection to transgenic technology imaginary. See Herring Citation2006. For a broad overview of the crisis and farmer suicides, see Vaidyanathan Citation2006. Some sectors are doing better than others, some years are better than others: 2002–03 was a hard year for agriculture; 2003–04 was a banner year, with growth in excess of 9 percent; 2004–05 was a year of weaker performance.
93. Marmot summarizes findings from multiple studies. He notes: “When traveling along the distance of nearly twelve miles on the Washington, D.C., Metro from downtown to Montgomery County, Maryland, life expectancy of the local population segment rises about a year and a half for each mile traveled. Poor black men at one end of the journey have a life expectancy of 57 years, and rich white men at the other end have a life expectancy of 76.7 years.” Marmot finds more generally that “In rich countries, such as the United States,…persistently, those at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale have worse health than those above them in the hierarchy” (Marmot Citation2006, 1304).
95. That neoliberal magic can work for the poor if they can only be em-propertied by legal changes is developed in Soto Citation2000. On pressures from multilateral agencies in the form of aid conditionality, see Herring and Esman Citation2001; Stiglitz Citation2002.
107. For an explanation of cleavages without class politics before the resurgence of the left, see Roberts Citation2002.
108. States within India matter in differentiating the life-chances of citizens. Consider Drèze and Sen Citation1996; Harriss Citation2003; Heller Citation1999, 7–10, and Sinha Citation2005. Class interests may well be served by patronage systems in which carrots are plucked from a common patch but rewards sustain both local elites’ political power and some floor guarantees for the poorest of the poor. See Herring and Edwards Citation1983.
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