Beyond the factory: Struggling with class and class struggle in the post-industrial context

Introduction

The city of Ahmedabad, situated in the western state of Gujarat, India, has been referred to as the ‘Manchester of India’, owing to its large concentration of cotton textile mills. Once a bustling urban centre inhabited by weavers, handicraft workers and traders’ guilds, Ahmedabad’s transition towards industrialisation took place post-1843, when a ban on the import of textile machinery from Britain was lifted. The mills originally produced coarse yarn for local handlooms, but soon started producing high-quality yarn, creating competition for Lancashire exporters. With industrialisation, local labour displaced from the handloom sector was absorbed into the mills. The first labour union in India, the Textile Labor Association (TLA), also known as Majoor Mahajan, was established in 1918 under the tutelage of Gandhi. The TLA’s story is a saga of non-violence, compromise and reformism that placed it in a contentious position vis-à-vis the more militant labour union politics in the rest of the country. Proletarisation and class struggle in Ahmedabad, therefore, possesses a specific socio-historical connotation (Lakha 1988).

Most mills are no more: since the late 1980s, with India’s adoption of economic liberalisation, locally known as the New Economic Policy (NEP), 80 mills have closed down. Licensing and quotas that subsidised these mills in a post-Independence, mixed economic regime was phased out as India embraced neoliberal reforms: most mills could not reorganise quickly in the new environment, and 100,000 workers were laid off between the early 1990s and 2000 (Breman 2002; Mahadevia 2002). The TLA is now a dying organisation, with little influence on the urban poor. A largely peaceful Ahmedabad in the pre-Independence period has now suffered a reversal of fate, as inter-community tensions have become prominent (Varshney 2002). In 2002, Ahmedabad witnessed brutal inter-community violence in which members of the Hindu community attacked, killed and looted from their Muslim neighbours (Ahmed 2002; Sarkar 2002). Most participants and victims of the 2002 riots were the working-class poor, who have been laid-off for some time now.

The new social movement literature propounded by Edelman (2001), Melucci (1985) and Touraine (1981) argues that since the 1970s there has been a shift from a socio-economic to a more socio-cultural turn in social conflicts: that identity politics, difference and ‘othering’ have replaced class politics. The ‘post-industrial’ context as laid out in Anglo-American literature is usually a reference to the transition from Fordist style factory production to a more post-Fordist era. ¹ In the Third World, particularly India, post-Independence planning allowed for the emergence of a semi-protected, import-substitution industrial base imitating some Fordist principles, particularly in the steel, chemical, and textile sectors: Ahmedabad mills are a good example of this. However, most Third World countries did not experience a fully fledged ‘Western’-style Fordism. In the context of this article, therefore, by post-Fordism I am implying the dismantling of the import-substitution license Raj, the lifting of government subsidies and quotas, and a phasing into a period of structural adjustment starting in the late 1980s. The Indian economy has always included a large informal sector, and post-liberalisation de-industrialisation, the advent of multinational capital through export processing, industrial homework and global product assembly have entrenched this trend in a big way (Roy 2005).

Touraine (1981), in the context of the First World, argues that the emergence of a post-industrial society and the decline in labour union movements lead to a postmodern cultural revival, in which conflict and resistance begin to be framed around questions of sexuality, race and homophobia, rather than living wages and inequality. The emergence of a post-industrial society, according to the new social-movement school, leads seamlessly towards a realm beyond the factory: a post-labour, deeply cultural society in which struggles are not framed around capital-labour contestations, but rather, over cultural, informational and symbolic resources. The case of Ahmedabad’s proletariat seems to fit neatly with the prescriptions of the new social-movement literature. The de-industrialisation and de-proletarisation of Ahmedabad seem to have fuelled reactionary communitarianism based on ethno-religiosity. In this article, I will examine labour unionism in Ahmedabad with reference to the TLA in order to investigate whether de-industrialisation indeed leads to a dissipation of class politics. The Ahmedabad case study will be used as a lens through which to make conceptual contributions to the existing literature on class, class struggle and exploitation. I draw from Marxist interpretations of class and class struggle, and examine them in the Ahmedabad context to understand whether and how such conceptualisations can be mined for emancipatory politics. The purpose is not to extrapolate a general theory of class and class struggle that can be applied universally to the post-industrial age, but rather, to understand how such concepts may be contextually re-configured.

Class and classlessness

In spite of its supposed universal purchase as an abstraction, ‘class’ actually means different things to different people. It is variously understood as referring to one’s socio-economic position in terms of income earned; to cultural refinement, as in ‘classy’; and to the nature of work: for example, as a description of jobs, ‘blue-collar’ denotes working class. In the Indian context, class and caste often interact in complex ways. The major religious groups in India are Hindus, and the traditional Hindu social order is hierarchical: individuals are born into castes, which initially represented their family occupation. Although, it started as an occupational division of labour, the caste system ² crystallised into institutionalised racism: social mobility was impossible, as individuals could not escape ‘low’ caste positions even if they were able to upscale in their class positions through economic clout.

Marx understood the histories of all existing societies as the history of class struggle, and envisioned class as continuously evolving. Class represented constantly cohering masses from inchoate fragmentary social groups, to be identified more clearly under industrial capitalism as two broad categories, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, each symbiotically connected in its relations of production, yet deeply antagonistic: the bourgeoisie possessed the means of production of value; while the proletariat, deprived of ownership of the means of production, must sell labour power to earn a wage. The bourgeoisie thrived on profit, which formed the basis of the exploitation of the proletariat; and yet it is only by producing profit that the proletariat could survive. In Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (2002) sum up this dialectical contradiction:

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.

The proletariat and the bourgeoisie are not the only classes, although they are the most dominant ones, and neither are they homogenous. The lower middle class, comprising small manufacturers, peasants, traders and shopkeepers, fights against the bourgeoisie for survival in a losing battle, and is ultimately subsumed within a class of labourers. Przeworski (1977) argues that by the 1950s, Marxists and neo-Marxists had opened up the concept to include secretaries, policemen, teachers, nurses and a whole host of others who did not control the means of production.

In the context of wage work, however, in the industrial relation of production, the proletariat becomes a mere appendage of the machine she or he operates, and in that alienating condition she or he is stripped of national, religious and all other identities. Workers band together to form clubs or unions that win small victories in agitating for higher wages; and the different unions, located in different places and engaged in disjointed, particular struggles, communicate and ultimately produce a national struggle against the national bourgeoisie. The process is complex and fraught with difficulties, since the workers often compete amongst themselves. The organisation of the proletariat into a class in the form of a union or a party happens at the moment of class struggle (Marx & Engels 2002: Ch. 1). It is, however, unclear in Marx’s works exactly how this political transformation unfolds.

For the purpose of analysis, it is important to note that Marx’s class concept has both specific and general connotations. It imbricates the particular/concrete with the general/universal/abstract: the shopkeepers, traders and peasants are specific elements which, along with the industrial labourers, make up the proletariat (general), and this proletariat through unionisation becomes a political class (a higher level of abstraction). In the absence of organising institutions, a proletariat may not be an agent of political change, as such: it is not yet a revolutionary political class or a ‘class-for itself’, although it is a class of oppressed, or ‘class-in-itself’, (Marx 1963). Class, like any other social process, is a dialectical embodiment of the particular and the general, defined by ownership of means of production in particular and general contexts. Therefore, in Marx’s analysis, class is not income, or the nature of job, or lack of refinement: it is the condition of specificity (within the factory) and generality (within industrial capitalism) of exploitation. The specificity and generality of class and class struggle will be an important site of analysis throughout this article.

Unlike Marx, Kautsky (1971) assumes that the transformation of the proletariat into a class is inevitable, a fait accompli, and the task of socialist organisations is to support the oncoming struggle. E.P. Thompson (1978) asserts that class cannot be anchored by static indicators capable of measuring whether a group is a class. Class formation, according to Thompson, is spontaneous: people live in societies structured in certain ways, and some experience exploitative structures and identify contradictory interests, and then struggle against them. In struggle, people discover themselves as classes, and this discovery is their class consciousness. The ‘experience’ of class, according to Thompson, is not just a case of political organising. Instead, he explains,

Class eventuates as men and women live their productive relations, and as they experience their determinate situations, within ‘the ensemble of the social relations’, with their inherited culture and expectations, and as they handle these experiences in cultural ways. So that, in the end, no model can give us what ought to be the ‘true’ class formation for a certain ‘stage’ of process. No actual class formation in history is any truer or more real than any other, and class defines itself as, in fact, it eventuates. (p. 150, emphasis added)

Therefore, for Marx and Thompson, class originates at the moment of struggle. For Kautsky, on the other hand, proletariats automatically become class. Thompson opens up class as a dialectical socio-cultural experience of exploitation. The beauty of Thompsonian dialectical interpretation is the assertion that there is no a priori, pre-given static conceptual container that can be extracted from a prior model of social totality and provided a-historically, a-contextually, and a-spatially as ‘class’. Class dialectically emerges out of struggle at a particular historical-geographical moment; the process of struggling in that moment is class consciousness; and therefore, class and class consciousness are always the last, rather than the first stage in historical process. The opposite, argues Thompson is an undialectical approach rooted in a positivist penchant for a perfect formula: a neat quantitative measurement of this ‘pure category’, an exercise fraught with ‘endless stupidities’ (p. 149). For Thompson, it is imperative that we dialectically pry open closed categories in order to understand how class struggle is materialised not only on the factory floor, but beyond, in the rioting slums, in the criminal courts and in the moral machinery of charitable institutions, because (p. 150), ‘So simple a category as “theft” may turn out to be, in certain circumstances, evidence of protracted attempts by villagers to defend ancient common right usages or by labourers to defend customary perquisites.’

Armed with that dialectical approach, it is possible, according to Thompson, to understand these specific historical-geographical moments as ‘class conflict’, while ‘resisting the attribution of identity to a class’ (p. 151).

Harvey (1996) defines class as a process: ‘a situatedness or positionality in relation to processes of capital accumulation’ (p. 359). He understands situatedness and positionality as embeddedness in the process of accumulation, acknowledging that although embeddedness can often be multiple and inchoate, the multiplicity and inchoateness do not preclude coherent politics on the world stage of capitalism. All propositions for social action, according to him, must be evaluated in terms of situatedness: ‘In the last instance, it is the social construction of situatedness (places) at different scales which matters and, in that social construction of agency of personal political choice and commitment, of loyalties, brooks large, however embedded individuals may be in macro-processes of capital accumulation on the world stage’ (p. 363). It can be interpreted, therefore, that in the post-Fordist ³ context, Harvey makes a tactical shift when he describes class as positionality with respect to capital accumulation and not ownership (or lack of it) to means of production, and replaces class struggle with ‘social action’ (p. 363). Although factories die and labour unions fade, struggles over jobs, livelihoods and resources still exist, and for Harvey, this changing reality is best conceptualised by re-envisioning class as positionality vis-à-vis the process of accumulation. In Harvey’s analysis, class as positionality does not spontaneously arise at the juncture of struggle, as Marx and Thompson argue. The process of situationality, according to Harvey, is always already embedded in the process of accumulation.

This brings us to exploitation. In Marx’s analysis, exploitation happens in the context of wage labour, where lowering the wage and increasing the length of the working day serve as mechanisms of exploitation (other secondary forms of exploitation are imposed by the landlords, money lenders, shopkeepers). Exploitation is sometimes assumed as an economic condition of surplus value being sucked away with no compensation to the worker (Wright 1982). Low wages and long working days, however, permeate outside the factory to determine the entire domain of social existence. Marx (1976) explains the entirety of exploitation and its extension outside the factory:

Dr. J.T. Arledge, senior physician of North Staffordshire Infirmary, says: ‘The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerate population, both physically and morally. They are, as a rule stunted in growth, ill-shaped … they become permanently old, and are certainly short-lived … But of all diseases they are especially prone to chest-disease, to pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis, and asthma. (Capital, Volume 1: 355)

Although by Marx’s own admission, exploitation is all-pervasive and extends beyond the factory, its root lies within the factory system. Using Ahmedabad as a case study, this article hopes to add to the above discussion on class, class struggle, and exploitation in the context of a world beyond the factory.

Class and class struggle in Ahmedabad

The textile industry in Ahmedabad had a rocky beginning because of the intrusion of cheap British goods under an imperialistic free-trade regime. It was only from the 1900s onwards that an expanding textile economy quickly exceeded the national average in productivity (Lakha 1988). The Ahmedabad Mill Owners’ Association was soon formed to consolidate the rising bourgeoisie. Mill owners also networked with money-lending castes to promote industrial-financial collaborations (Spodek 1965). Stock exchange and joint stock companies emerged from these linkages to absorb small investors and raise capital. The growing class identity was an expression of economic status, profit motive, religion/caste and extended family networks (Lakha 1988; Mehta 1982; Varshney 2002).

The workers in the mills were largely poor Muslims and ‘low caste’ Hindus, displaced from the handloom sector (Report of Indian Factory Commission 1890; Patel 1988) to become the first industrial labour force in India (Patel 1988; Lakha 1988; Gadgil 1971). The working and living conditions, however, were deplorable: long working hours, seven days a week, was the routine, as were congested one-room living quarters with bathrooms shared by many families, and drinking water contaminated by mill effluence. This resulted in very high mortality rates among mill workers, who were so debilitated that most quit by the age of 40-45 (Mehta 1954). The wage was only 52 per cent of the living requirements, giving rise to a high incidence of indebtedness, usury and alcoholism (Majumdar 1973). Women and children also contributed to the labour force. With rapid industrial growth, the Ahmedabad mills were soon threatening Lancashire textile capitalism. From the 1890s onwards, Ahmedabad’s mills were affected by numerous instances of labour militancy, with labourers damaging property and going on strike in response to wage cuts and horrible working conditions. These unorganised strikes and violent outbursts were referred to as the hullad, or the riots (Majumdar 1973).

The industrial proletariat participated in the first organised struggle in 1918, when it called a strike demanding higher wages. Gandhi, one of the leading figures of the Indian nationalist movement, became actively involved in the 1918 strike, and helped form the Textile Labour Association (TLA) in 1920 (Patel 1988; Varshney 2002). Gandhi introduced arbitration, moderation and nonviolence as mediating techniques, and couched labour politics as class collaboration, rather than capital–labour confrontation. Struggle meant compromise rather than militant confrontation, and strikes were adopted as the last resort. In order to transform society, Gandhi recommended individual transformation of the worker through education, skill-building, social work and cultural activities, to be achieved through the labour union associations (Desai 1951; Kannapan 1962; Lakha 1988). The TLA became a vibrant labour union association, with a burgeoning membership, impressive headquarters, and a range of welfare activities such as libraries, schools, cheap loans, girl’s hostels, gymnasiums, worker’s cooperatives, and training centres. Apart from propagating class collaboration, the TLA also worked towards inter-community collaboration, defining a Hindu–Muslim relationship inspired by notions of non-violence and unity.

Labour union politics in the rest of the country were either radical-Marxist, believing in militant struggle, or reformist, advocating moderation. Marxist ideologues severely criticised Gandhi’s philosophy of trusteeship and compromise as tools for nourishing the status quo (Dutt 1927). The TLA’s politics thus stood in an uncomfortable aloofness relative to radical groups. Gandhi’s passing and the Congress party’s declining hold over the state of Gujarat and Ahmedabad led to political gains for Hindu nationalist parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been organising in Gujarat for some time now (Varshney 2002).

The BJP and its parent organisations represent far-right political parties based on Hindu fundamentalist ideas of cultural nationalism that cast the Muslims as foreigners and critique Gandhi’s politics (Appadurai 1973; Raychaudhuri 2000; Ahmed, 2002). The BJP’s rise was accompanied by the decline of the TLA from the late 1980s and early 1990s onwards. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), India adopted neoliberal free-market reforms known locally as the New Economic Policy, in which key sectors like steel and textiles were opened up to a free market model, phasing out subsidies and protection. Textile mills in Ahmedabad could not reinvent themselves, and 80 mills closed down in Ahmedabad during the decade of the 80s and 90s, with 100,000 workers laid-off with no state or national level plans for alternative employment (Breman 2002; Mahadevia 2002). Massive unemployment led to an increase in urban poverty, the feminisation of poverty and an increase in informalisation, with a generation of working-class people and their children pushed into casual work (Breman 2002; Kundu 2000; Mahadevia 2002; Kundu & Mahadevia 2002). In 2002, this cultural segmentation and economic desperation was played out in horrific Hindu-Muslim riots in the working-class neighborhoods of east Ahmedabad, in which members of the Hindu community attacked, killed, raped and looted their Muslim neighbours (Shah 2002; Ganesh and Mody 2002). Thousands of Muslims were killed, and 40,000 Muslims were rendered homeless (Yagnik & Seth 2002).

Ahmedabad has transitioned into a geographically–historically specific version of post-Fordist deindustrialisation: the factory floor as the site for organising production and labour has disintegrated, giving way to informalisation and communal segregation. Working-class struggle in Ahmedabad and in other parts of the First and Third Worlds, therefore, require reconceptualisation. Does the disappearance of the factory require a re-evaluation of what constitutes exploitation? Does the erosion of class unity and the rise of communitarian affiliations mark the rise of a post-industrial era in which identity and cultural grievances are the sites of struggle? In the next section, in the hope of grappling with some of these questions, I will draw from interviews carried out among laid-off working-class Hindus and Muslims of Ahmedabad in 2006.

Classless classes and anti-class struggles in post-industrial Ahmedabad

I interviewed 65 Muslims, 39 of whom were women; and 35 Hindus, 15 of whom were women. The respondents were selected through ‘snowball sampling’, in which key informants such as members of local non-governmental organisations and local auto-rickshaw drivers provided the first contact information for an initial set of households; these households provided contact information of other families; and this snowball effect continued until no new contact information could be obtained. Of the interviewees from each community, 95 per cent had family members who once worked in the mills, while the remaining 5 per cent included interviewees who were indirectly dependent on the mills by way of retail. The snowball sampling and interviews were carried out in the neighbourhoods of east Ahmedabad, because these are the old mill localities and hence would include laid-off mill workers. In addition to the eastern mill districts, Jhuapura and Siddiquabad in the southern peripheries of west Ahmedabad were chosen since they represent all-Muslim ghettoes consisting of people displaced from east Ahmedabad during the 2002 riots. All interviewees were from separate households, and belonged to the adult age group of 20 and above. About 89 per cent of the Muslims and 75 per cent of the Hindus interviewed were engaged in informal work such as construction, auto-repair, vending and hawking used clothes, and the sale of vegetables, or of cheap trinkets. The women were mainly engaged in toy-making, kite-making, stitching and tailoring. The names of the respondents have been changed to ensure their anonymity and safety.

Most interviewees were nostalgic about a once ‘glorious’ past in which the economic situation was, according to them, near perfect. In the context of job loss, lack of alternative source of employment and communal tensions, the de-industrialised working class envisions the factory as the most emancipatory site for working-class upliftment. Stories of the ‘mill-days’ acquire mythical proportions, the sweat, blood and rigour of harsh factory conditions are forgotten, and the security of the daily bread is repeatedly invoked.

Siraz Alam from Gomtipur, a Muslim in his early eighties, wipes away tears as he recounts the pleasure of being a factory worker:

East Ahmedabad was a ‘community’ of workers: we worked hard, and bargained hard for wages and bonus. What we brought home did not make us millionaires, but we had three meals a day, and I could induct my son into mill work. Do you see that tea stall? That is where both Hindu and Muslim workers chatted during breaks. It is all gone now, the mills closed down since the late 1980s. I had retired by then, but my son lost his job, his outstanding dues were not cleared, the capitalists said that they could not run the mills any longer as they were suffering losses.

Siraz Alam acknowledges the harsh working conditions, and recognises that the wage was just enough to ensure survival, but what mattered more was the existence of formal jobs, which also somehow bound the socio-cultural fabric into a class of people united in the daily context of struggle, rather than fragmented into Hindus and Muslims. Ram Ratan of Bapunagar, a member of the Hindu community, emphasises the hardships of unemployment and informalisation, and layers these economic frustrations with his growing mistrust of the Muslim community. Siraz Alam’s ‘community of workers’ swiftly segments into patriots and terrorists in Ram Ratan’s narrative:

My brothers and I worked in the mills. Now I sell onions, and my son has no job and no prospects. The capitalists packed up and left, the government does not care. I hear that they are going to sell the mill lands to build malls. West Ahmedabad is replete with skyscrapers and hotels, and there is no development in the east, because the poor and the low caste live here. Plus the Muslims are trouble, we don’t want anything to do with them. I am sure they have connections with terrorist organisations, they only look poor, the Saudi oil barons protect and provide for them – who can trust them now? You saw what happened on September 11.

Most Hindu poor like Ram Ratan express some semblance of class-consciousness against the ‘government’ and the ‘capitalists’ when they protest the contexts of de-industrialisation, informalisation and bourgeois urban renewal. But this class anger exists in unruly cohabitation with a reactionary communitarianism in which anti-government/capitalist and anti-Muslim sentiments somehow merge. A sense of loss of economic power due to mill closure is juxtaposed with a sense of loss of cultural clout to the imaginary virile Muslims and their Saudi sponsors. Discourses of Sept 11 and the ‘war on terror’ are repeated in order to legitimise the 2002 violence. Older Hindu respondents (above 40 years) do not claim any involvement with the 2002 riots, blaming it on some abstract ‘mob’ that came from ‘somewhere’ (Nikhil, aged 60, from Bapunagar). The younger Hindu respondents, however, are more open about their involvement. Anil from Bapunagar says,

Can you see those miyaas (Muslims) staring at us from the other side of the border? They can never dare to come to this side after the lessons we taught them in 2002, they must be disciplined in the U.S. and in Palestine, like we disciplined them here in 2002.

The BJP and its organisational base have systematically penetrated the psyche of the young Hindu poor. Post-September 11, Islamophobia provides nourishment for BJP’s identity politics, where Hindu-ness and Muslim-ness become supreme identifiers, cleaving any possibility of inter-communitarian class alliance. People like Anil are not ignorant dupes brainwashed by the BJP; they actively allow this brainwashing, in spite of their rational faculties, because they see no point in identifying the ‘original’ contexts of exploitation (class and caste oppression). Therefore, while similar contexts of joblessness and informalisation provide sites for common struggle, Anil chooses to ignore them and instead proceeds to construct a fragmented geography of borders and walls. Akhil, a young member of the Hindu community, says:

Yes, I understand that both the Hindu and Muslim poor are suffering because the rich and upper caste have formed their government and that both communities need jobs, but the Muslim poor are not like the Hindu poor, they are aggressive trouble makers – they should go to Pakistan or follow our rules.

For many Hindu youth like Akhil, cultural annihilation of the religious ‘other’ is a more virile form of identity affirmation than a consolidated working-class struggle, because this is a generation raised beyond the factory, nurtured with an identity politics of reactionary nationalism, terrorism and Islamophobia. Many respondents from the older age group, however, remember the TLA as an epitome of Gandhian non-violence and working-class politics. Aliya, who is a Muslim from Bapunagar, says:

Gandhiji’s vision gave the TLA its unique character – the TLA was not just about bargaining for higher wages, bonus and improvement of working conditions, it bound Ahmedabad together through its various social and civic involvements. The welfare of women and children were considered paramount under the TLA model. Now that the factories are no more, the TLA is weak and Ahmedabad is divided on community lines. Most working-class people are engaged in faltoo kaam [literally, ‘useless labour’, metaphorically referring to informal work], with lower wages than what we would make in the mills.

It is ironic that the workers themselves refer to their labour as faltoo kaam – it can be assumed that in the context of post-industrial informalisation, the workers are keenly aware of the devaluation of labour to the point of becoming ‘useless’, not for capital but for the labouring class and its survival. The concept faltoo has become ubiquitous in the local political economy, with 95 per cent of interviewees claiming to be engaged in it. When asked why they refer to paid rigorous labour as ‘faltoo’, Asha Ben says:

The mills are no more, we now do whatever we can get. These are low-paid jobs, often involving hours of meticulous work with no respite, no breaks on weekends. Since the economic returns are low, our menfolk have to work longer, and we women have to chip in. My husband was a mill worker, now he is a vegetable seller. Sometimes he sells enough to buy two square meals, but most of the time nothing for days. I must attach buttons to thousands of shirts for a subcontractor connected with a foreign company to make up for the shortfall. Our work is faltoo, because it is temporary, hire and fire, low-paid, and keeps us hungry and insecure all the time.

This narrative is repeated by the interviewees, though the nature of the ‘new’ informal work changes from household to household, from vegetable selling to rickshaw pulling and to construction work for men; and for women, from stitching to toy-making, and kite-making. Informalisation in Ahmedabad has become much more than just a change in the nature of work due to de-industrialisation, and more than just a decline in wages: it is the dismantling of an entire working class into insecure and vulnerable individuals for whom work, or kaam, can no longer provide sustenance. But this same kaam is increasingly lucrative for subcontractors and middlemen, who tap into an unemployed, de-industrialised reserve army for assembling clothes, toys and cigarettes at below minimum wage. As labour becomes faltoo in the neighbourhoods of east Ahmedabad, it frees capital for circulation and profit accumulation in west Ahmedabad, where hotels, hospitality, retail chains, glossy malls and shopping corridors crop-up as new landscapes of post-Fordist multinational investment. Informalisation has been a key feature of most Third World national economies like that of India, but with market deregulation under neoliberal reforms, informalisation now directly aids multinational capital. Exploitation becomes invisible through informalisation, and uneven local geographies of post-Fordist accumulation such as malls, movie theatres and hotels stand alongside closed mills. In Ahmedabad, in the absence of the consolidating influence of the factory floor and an over-arching labour union, class disintegrates into reactionary communitarianism. The erosion of common spaces of livelihood, growing poverty, increased competition for scarce jobs, the decline of TLA’s inter-community mediating influence, the rise of the BJP and its identity politics, September 11 and growing Islamophobia have all coalesced over the years to reproduce a fragmented urban poor that had lost common contexts of struggle. If it is in struggling that a class eventuates itself in the Thompsonian sense, then informalisation in Ahmedabad has so severed the common contexts of struggle, can the urban poor eventuate as a class?

Is Ahmedabad therefore, a postmodern, deeply cultural society in which the intra-class divisions are so gaping that class is an unreality? Or does class and class struggle need revaluation in an era of de-industrialisation and informalisation? The point is that de-industrialisation and informalisation do not usher in the end of exploitation: they entrench it in myriad dispersed ways, so that locating the roots of exploitation becomes a complex task. In the absence of a cohesive attempt at identifying and abstracting the original conditions of exploitation, ethno-religious and caste politics emerge as the dominant identity destabilising class politics. In the next section, I will attempt to abstract from the particularities provided by my interviewees so as to add to the understanding of class, class struggle and exploitation in the contemporary post-industrial context. It is important to be very clear here: my fieldwork is based on qualitative interviews and oral histories, and the conceptual abstractions I draw from them are by no means an attempt at extrapolating an umbrella theory of class and class struggle for India or the post-industrial capitalist global economy. The additions I attempt to make are by no means complete: they are, and will continue to be conceptual struggles.

Class eventuates itself

De-industrialisation leads to leakages in previously contained formal spaces of production like factories, so that the production process flows into informal spaces in society. Informal sectors have always existed, but post-Fordism allows for their uncontrolled expansion. The growth of informal economies increases poverty, the feminisation of poverty, vulnerability and insecurity, as wages go down. From working in harsh conditions within the factory, the worker is now ‘liberated’ from the mill, but is thrown into the world outside in which she or he must now find her or his workshop. Concerned with undocumented exploitation in the informal sector in India, the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) estimates that in India, 57 per cent of urban informal workers receive wages that are below the national minimum requirements (Kannan & Papola 2007). The NCEUS also notes that working conditions are unsanitary and deplorable, wage payment is often delayed, hire and fire policies are all pervasive, and that women and children become the most vulnerable groups in these sectors. Many people in Ahmedabad rent wagons and carts to sell used clothes, vegetables, or offer auto-repairing services. The NCEUS clarifies that hawking, vending, rickshaw work and cart-pulling are some of the most common informal jobs, and are often classified technically as ‘self-employment’, although in reality, this is actually disguised wage work, providing none of the ‘liberatory’ potentials of self-employment.

Struggling with class and class struggle beyond the factory

Globalisation and post-Fordism are forging unique geographies of de-industrialisation, informalisation, class and community conflict. In that context, this article attempts to understand the contemporary relevance of Marxist concepts such as class, class struggle and exploitation. I use examples from a globalising city, Ahmedabad in India, to empirically concretise the abstractness of some of these concepts. Structural adjustment and the local grounding of neoliberalism have ushered in the deindustrialisation of Ahmedabad’s textile industries, and along with this has also eroded a unique labour union politics forged by the TLA. The disappearance of the factory floor and the labour union associations; the growing informalisation of labour, the increase in economic vulnerabilities and the rise of religious fundamentalist politics forge the contemporary geography of post-Fordist globalisation. Does class disappear with de-industrialisation, making way for identity politics as the new social movement literature suggests? Is exploitation in the Marxist sense of extraction of surplus value from labour redundant as a concept, because factories no longer exist? Have class-consciousness and class struggle disappeared with the rise of identity politics? These are some of the questions I have explored in this article. The larger purpose was to use Ahmedabad’s political economy and labour struggles as an empirical basis for re-conceptualising class, class struggle and exploitation.

In spite of the claims of the new social movement school, that in a post-industrial age old labour movements are extinct, and that human conditions are permeated by cultural and identity issues, I reveal that economic and cultural issues interact in unique ways, and that class, class consciousness and exploitation acquire new complexities as deindustrialisation and informalisation proceed. I argue that under post-Fordism, exploitation leaks from the factory floor and penetrates all aspects of life via industrial homework, subcontracting and joblessness, and becomes a ubiquitous aspect of the social, cultural and economic life of labour. Ahmedabad’s informalisation indicates that exploitation must be reconceptualised beyond the factory floor. This reconceptualisation requires a re-reading of Marx, and the use of those parts of his theory that emphasise ways in which exploitation continues outside the factory, debilitating and extracting from labour its life and vitality. Using those parts of Marx, I argue that the Ahmedabad case shows how exploitation is a situation of rendering labour faltoo (useless) under conditions of employment or lack of it in all spaces of society. Rendering faltoo involves the extraction of surplus value not only from the economic realm of existence, but also the complete usurpation of labour’s social and cultural potential. Exploitation, therefore, involves the theft of the entirety of existence, making labour useless to itself. Such a reconceptualisation frees exploitation as a concept from the narrow confines of the factory floor and the working day, and reveals its ubiquitous nature.

The entrenchment and ubiquitous nature of post-Fordist exploitation therefore requires a re-evaluation of what it means to be working class, especially since labour is fractured and disbursed outside the factory in various informal contexts. Examples of rising Hindu fundamentalism and the oppression of minority Muslims indicate the need to re-envision how class and identity are related. The context of intra-class ethno-religious cleavages, I argue, do not warrant the closure of class analysis in favour of an identity approach; rather, it demonstrates how class and identity interact insidiously. This article argues that such class-identity interaction is not a new phenomenon of a ‘post-industrial’ society, but, as E.P. Thompson had noted, class has always eventuated in cultural ways. I have looked into the labour politics of the TLA under Gandhi’s tutelage, and its later erosion and slow disappearance, and demonstrated how the TLA has always had to deal with persistent undercurrents of caste and ethno-religious politics as competing identities to class. Therefore, class as a conceptual category has always eventuated with cultural identifiers. Class politics always had to respond by finding creative ways to suppress reactionary identities and weave class consciousness. The decline of the mills and the TLA is not the end of class politics – the era of deindustrialisation does not signify the natural end of labour movements; but instead, labouring groups in the absence of organisational institutions often spontaneously re-configure around various primordial identifiers such as caste and religion. The conceptual task at hand is not to announce the end of class as we knew it, but to understand how class eventuates in new ways, albeit sometimes in very regressive ways.

The Ahmedabad case indicates that in a growing context of informalisation of labour, the working class may not be an organisation or an industrial proletariat; but rather, it represents a condition of labouring in the context of exploitation, or the devaluation of labour in myriad sites of employment or lack of it. Class struggle, therefore, is a contestation of labouring groups to have their labour recognised by those who devalue. These contestations may sometimes be framed around overwhelmingly cultural categories like race, ethnicity, religion and caste. In Ahmedabad, for instance, they are framed around reactionary ethno-religiosity, but it is important to pry open categories such as caste, race, religion and class and understand the devaluation of labour that lie in its often-reactionary core. Reconceptualisations involve the prying open of taken-for-granted categories: they do not just materialise in journal articles, to be emulated in politics and activism, and nor do they simply echo in eloquent rhetoric what is going on in the ‘real’ world. Reconceptualisations are always happening in factories, cities, universities and journals, and involve a dialectical process of questioning and answering the concreteness of everyday existence. Class, class struggle and exploitation, like all other social processes, can never, therefore, be frozen in the volumes of Capital or elsewhere: no social theorist, including Marx, can achieve such a fixing, because class eventuates in Ahmedabad, in Oaxaca, in Paris and Detroit, and we eventuate along with it. In reconceptualising, this article hopes to un-fix and pry open some of these concepts in the context of our times.