Abstract
The essays in this Forum raise central questions about the modalities of labor circulation in contemporary capitalism. They are all focused on South Asia, some with migration dynamics within the subcontinent and others with its export outward; some with working class and artisanal labor and others with high-skilled professional labor. All raise important questions regarding the interaction between structure and culture, offering a variety of different arguments.
In many ways it is refreshing to see scholars of South Asia take up labor questions at all. For some time now, the study of labor–whether rural or urban–has been receding in Indian historiography. Some 15 years ago, Rina Agarwala and Ronald Herring were sufficiently perturbed by this development to bring together a volume on the decline of class analysis in South Asian studies (Whatever Happened to Class? Reflections from South Asia, 2008). Where it had once been the common sense of South Asia scholarship, they noted, class analysis and political economy had, by the early 2000s, largely fallen off the map. South Asia scholarship was not alone in this, of course. It was a more general phenomenon in which work and working were largely relegated to the sidelines across the historiography of the modern world. Even more, the influence of political economy as a theoretical framework waned to the point of utter irrelevance, so much that when it is now brought up at all, it is largely as a caricature or a straw man to be knocked down in favor of some variant of culturalist orthodoxy.
The essays in this volume go some distance in exhuming the issues buried under the weight of the cultural turn, but they also exhibit some of the latter’s weaknesses. In her careful study of the Indian migration regime, Rina Agarwala has shown that it both reflects a class divide in who it sends outward, and also reproduces it. Nowhere is this divide more apparent than in the difference between internal and outward migration. Within India, a massive internal labor circulation is overwhelmingly of the partially proletarianized rural masses, while the thousands of professionals who head westward come from the educated elites of the country. They face not only entirely different prospects and conditions when they arrive at their destination but also starkly contrasting relations to the Indian state. It is in this respect that Agarwala’s attention to Gulf laborers and Thomas Chambers’s study of the migration of Muslim artisans, who straddle an internal and external regime, is particularly interesting. As Agarwala’s study shows, India is a massive exporter of labor to the Gulf region, and both the class origins as well as the institutional context of these migrants differ in fundamental ways from India’s mass of more affluent migrants. The meaning of “migrant” in these two contexts could not be more different. The engineers, academics, and doctors who arrive in the United States have rapidly ascended to the top of the income ladder, such that they comprise the richest ethnicity in the country with the median income nearly twice that of Anglo Americans. The wage laborers who crowd the Gulf labor market, however, live in conditions that their more monied counterparts would find intolerable.
A natural extension of Agarwala and Chambers’s work would be to carefully compare the dynamics, and the consequences, of the two streams (i.e., internal and external) of migrant labor, both in its material conditions and its social implications. Another would be to embed this analysis in a wider consideration of labor flows, which would include the migratory regime within the country. Here, Jonathan Parry’s important study of the labor conditions in Bhilai offers a rich source of information. He shows with considerable skill how two generations of workers in the steel industry manage the labor market, even as the conditions of employment change drastically. Parry is careful to trace the links between the economic situation in which the workers find themselves and the choices that they make to sustain body and soul. It is therefore a bit surprising to find him wondering if a more traditional, materialist framework of the kind I endorse in The Class Matrix has much to offer beyond the bland and truistic observation that workers work because the alternative is to starve. That particular observation has its place; but it is not meant to be the entire payoff of a structural analysis. The essence of this approach is to focus not on the mere fact of structural embeddedness, but on how that embeddedness limits the options available to workers, making some choices more attractive than others. This starts with the mere fact of waged labor, but it then extends to various facts within the universe of waged employment as well as other, downstream effects. Hence, Parry himself deploys a quite consistently materialist analysis to show how workers’ structural location affects their entire social universe–their housing, the division between work and leisure, their social networks, kinship relations, and so on. As I explain in The Class Matrix, a class analysis is not meant to displace culture from the field, but to better explain how and why it operates the way it does. Parry’s own book itself demonstrates this very ably.
Another interesting point raised in these essays has to do with the class and gender situation of the groups being studied. As Pallavi Banerjee’s work shows, despite their “migrant” status, the IT specialists she examines and Chambers’s workers in the Gulf region belong to quite different classes, in that they come from quite distinct backgrounds, but more importantly, they face dramatically different life chances in the host country. This contrast is especially so with Banerjee’s IT workers, who at the very worst are at the higher ends of skilled wage labor, but typically, are firmly situated in the professional middle class. Parry is also inclined to slot his two groups of steel workers into different classes, and Agarwala appears to endorse this move. But it is less clear to me that this is warranted. To be sure, the distinction between kam and naukri captures something, but this has more to do with the conditions of work than a differential location in the labor extraction process. Even in vernacular Hindi, naukri is a generic term, equally used to capture wage labor as it is more exalted occupations. This point is especially pertinent in India today, where what is legally called the formal sector–and once was a bastion of stable employment–is rapidly changing over to contract and informal labor. In other words, the same work that would have been slotted as naukri in the recent past is today deployed as kam. We appear to have two locations within the same class relation, rather than two distinct classes.
Agarwala ends her essay by raising the issue of collective action. Here, too, greater attention to class distinctions would be useful. As Agarwala’s book demonstrates, the success of elite migrants’ organizations pales in comparison to those of poor migrant laborers’ organizations. Therefore, while Banerjee’s nurses belong to a category of workers who are experiencing some success in union organizing, it is not clear how much this is open to other immigrant workers on contingent visas or no visas. Meanwhile, virtually no signs of union life occur among IT professionals in the United States, and I doubt very much that this will change in the foreseeable future. But perhaps the most unlikely of all are Chambers’s contract workers in the Gulf states, where, because of the combined weight of their legal status, their short-lived tenure in any given place, and the draconian labor regimes imposed on them, the costs and risks are simply overwhelming despite their desperate need for protection. In Bhilai and its peer locations, the situation was once somewhat propitious for formal-sector unionization, but this is no longer the case. The whole point of the informalization of these jobs has been to make collective representation well-nigh impossible, and throughout the country work conditions in these erstwhile islands of job security are in a rapid downward spiral, being harmonized with the conditions in the informal sector–a sector just about impossible to organize. The near future therefore appears grim; what is waiting on the more distant horizons, is, of course, impossible to predict.