Reframing the Indian Middle Class as a Labour Aristocracy

Abstract

Taking from, and critiquing, both the scholarship on the Indian “middle class” as well as the scholarship on the ‘labour aristocracy’, this paper argues for the reformulation of the Indian “middle class” as a labour aristocracy or worker elite. We define the distinctive characteristics that set the Indian worker elite apart from the broader working class and highlight, through the case studies of international migration, patterns in urban living spaces and domestic service employment, the stark differences between the worker elite and the poor working masses in India, and the exploitative relationship that exists between the two. The analysis points to the semi-periphery being the locus of the largest inequalities in the capitalist world-system today, where the bourgeoisie and the worker elite both gain tremendously from the exploitation inherent to capitalism. Resultingly, the task at hand in India and the semi-periphery broadly remains to organize the poor, marginalised working masses.