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Social Stratification

Notes interests of the poor and the less privileged sections of society. An organized group representing
its class interests becomes a ‘political class’ in its own right.
Studies of the Indian working class (Das, 1983) consider labour as a commodity, and the value of
labour power as the basis of understanding the capitalist appropriation and exploitation of the
surplus generated by the proletariat. According to Dev Nathan (1987), the working class can be
divided into four broad sections :
(1) that which gets more than a family, i.e., more than the value of labour power;
(2) that which gets a wage about equal to the family wage, and can thus at a reasonable standard,
cover the full cost of production and reproduction of labour power;
(3) that which is more or less able to cover the immediate costs of production of labour power,
but has to depend on the non-capitalist sector in order to reproduce itself/or has to depress
its standard of living in order to reproduce itself; and
(4) the pauperized section that is not even able to meet the immediate cost of production of
labour power.
The composition of the working class is affected by two factors : (i) the caste, tribal or ethnic origin
of the worker in the precapitalist sector; and (ii) the gender-based division of labour between male
and female and the associated patriarchy. Thus, the working class is highly stratified within and
in relation to the capitalist and the middle classes. The factors such as caste, ethnicity and gender
create inequalities within the working class structure and therefore obstruct smooth sailing of the
working class movement. The distinctions found within the working class structure ranging from
the ‘labour aristocracy’ on the one hand and the ‘pauperized labour’ on the other explain the
nature of economic stratification and its socio cultural consequences on the workers.
Lieten’s study (1987) of workers in multinational companies shows that a segment of the working
class is able to command higher wages and can thus divide the class in a distinct manner. Such a
structural divide within the working class hampers uniform class consciousness. The consciousness
of the jute mill workers of Bengal (Chakrabarty, 1984) could not transcend their identification as
a Hindu or a Muslim to have identification as a solid working class. Thus, all collective public
actions of the workers were marked by inherent duality. The working class in terms of its socio-
cultural composition is constituted of the urban poor living in slums and hutments, industrial
workers (both men and women), textile workers, sugar industry workers, plantation workers,
railway workers, cottage industry and informal sector workers, etc. The working class, despite
these differences, is comprised of urban and rural poor both in organized and informal sectors of
economy. This would mean that the poor are just poor, and therefore, it would be better if we
understand them as such without undermining this fact by using rural/urban, caste/class and
caste/caste criteria (Joshi, 1979). Caste is not found as a major principle of social organization
among industrial workers (Ramaswamy,1979).
The Special Number of Economic and Political Weekly (1981) on “Indian Working Class : Some
Historical Perspectives” contains papers on the following themes :
(1) Structure of the labour market in colonial India by Ratan Das Gupta.
(2) Labour legislation and working class movement : The case of the Bombay Labour Officer,
1934-37 by Dick Kooiman.
(3) Kanpur textile labour : Some structural features of formative years by Chitra Joshi.
(4) Growth of trade union consciousness among jute mill workers, 1020-40 by Ira Mitra.
(5) Industrial unrest and growth of labour unions in Bengal, 1920-24 by Sanat Bose.
(6) Tea labour in Assam : Recruitment and government policy-1840-80 by Suranjan Chatterjee
and Ratan Das Gupta.

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