White Collar Employees and the

Proletarian Identity

First Pravat Kar Memorial Research (2000-2002)

Centre for Marxian Studies, Jadavpur University and Pravat Kar Memorial Endowment

Kunal Chattopadhyay

Preface

The research project on White Collar Employees and the Proletarian Identity was
begun two years ago as the first research project funded by the Prabhat Kar Memorial
Endowment, a unique endowment, made by the All India Bank Employees Association
to Jadavpur University for academic research on issues of interest to the working class
and other toiling people. It is appropriate to record ones appreciation of their
progressive approach to the interaction between professional academic work and the
class struggle. The scheme as originally conceived, is a massive one, and this project
report only makes an initial contribution. The basic aim of the project was to examine
how white-collar work has been studied in both Marxist and non-Marxist literature, and
how white-collar employees themselves think and act. The study of the vast literature
itself took up most of the time of the present researcher as well as the research assistant
engaged for the purpose. The original plan had called for a survey of current literature
from white-collar associations, a survey conducted among white-collar
workers/employees, interviews of white-collar union leaders and activists, and a study
of white-collar union building and strikes. By the end of the first year, it had become
obvious that this called for a major project of longer duration, and with considerably
greater funds and time devoted to it. The present work was viewed as a preliminary one
that would create the theoretical framework for such a larger study. One has in mind
studies like those of Eric Olin Wrights work at the University of Michigan and the
Maisons des Sciences de lHomme in Paris, which covered a survey based on a prior
theoretical exercise concerning white-collar and other categories over a period of
several years.
The present report consists of one major essay, along with two appendices. The essay
begins with the views of Karl Marx and Max Weber on class, since most modern work on
class has been influenced by either or both of them. This is followed by a study of some
of the important debates on white-collar work. Much attention has been paid to a mid-
20th Century Marxist debate on class, because that was when the issue of white-collar as
well as intellectual labour suddenly came into prominence in Marxist circles. This has
been followed by an attempt at defining working class in Marxist terms, but keeping in
mind post-Marx work, not merely the writings of Marx. Two issues discussed in some

1
detail are the nature of intellectual labour, and the productive labour/ unproductive
labour divide. How far white-collar employees constitute a separate class is taken up
next. In this connection, we have discussed the impact of changing technology on the
working class. If one were to accept a definition of the proletariat as that class which
was in existence in Britain after the first industrial revolution, at around the time Marx
was writing the Communist Manifesto, not only the white-collar workers, but large
sections of blue-collar workers would be excluded. My favourite examples come from
the US, though examples can also be given from India. Dianne Feeley, one of the editors
of the widely respected Socialist monthly Against the Current, and a leader of the U.S.
revolutionary socialist organisation Solidarity, is a worker at one of Fords plants in
Detroit. Another leader of Solidarity, Paul Le Blanc, is a college teacher, and an
internationally reputed scholar. Le Blanc defines himself as working class. By the
definition suggested just a few sentences previously, not only Le Blanc, but even Feeley,
who is capable of taking vacations abroad, might be excluded. Popular notions of the
proletariat as propertyless confuses between proprietorship and control over means of
production and ownership of consumer goods. The car-driving proletariat of Detroit,
Chicago, New York or San Francisco is essential to the health of the current capitalist
set-up in the USA. In the same way, learning computer work either in college, or in the
parallel educational centres like LCC, NIIT, etc, and landing a job that means one has to
wear suit, tie and polished black shoes at work does not make the computer operators
any less exploited or any less proletarian. That, at least, is the argument presented in the
section under discussion.
One theory or ideological position discussed at length is the view that social mobility
under late capitalism has been such that classes have either disappeared or have been
reduced greatly in importance. It has been argued that the theory and ideology of social
mobility has greater relevance to keeping the working class disunited and sizeable
segments kept in pursuit of personal, rather than collective improvement. Two
positions have been discussed that the white-collar workers are a new kind of the
petty bourgeoisie, and that they are a new middle class. Discarding both, it has been
suggested that while a part of them are working class, others have contradictory class
locations, not encapsulated by either of the two discarded formulae.
There are two short appendices. AppendixI cites a small selection of statements, from
leaflets, journal articles, etc, of white-collar employees, where the identification with the
proletariat is evident. While self-identity is not the sole or main source indeed it is
often the most misleading this is a corroboration of the arguments of the report. It is
also one of the areas where further work needs to be done by studying a wider range
of documents of white-collar employees. Appendix-II presents some findings of a pilot
survey conducted among 106 persons, mostly white-collar. This is absolutely
preliminary. A proper survey would have to cover a wider range of jobs and a wider
geographical terrain, as well as a much larger number of persons of both sexes. The
questions too would have to be refined and a number of additional questions added.
Nonetheless, the initial inferences are significant, for they tend to confirm the
arguments in the report. Finally, a bibliography has been appended. This includes books
and articles that have been cited, along with others whose ideas have been used though
specific citations do not occur. These would in turn form the starting point for a larger
study.

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I would like to take this opportunity to thank a number of persons. To the All India Bank
Employees Association and its representatives, for their generosity in setting up such an
endowment and in helping to run it smoothly. To Prof. Ashok Nath Basu, Vice-
Chancellor Jadavpur University, to Prof. Debes Chandra Chakraborty, Coordinator,
Centre for Marxian Studies, and to members of the CMS, for encouragement they have
given. Sri Gautam Sen, who was my research assistant, did so much of the work that he
should be considered my co-author rather than as assistant. I also owe much thanks to
students of the Department of History, Jadavpur University, who have, as in other cases,
been the first to be exposed to the consequences of my researches. Questions and
discussions in class, particularly in the class on the Industrial Revolution, have greatly
aided the final writing.

White Collar Employees and the Proletarian Identity

The aim of this project was too investigate the identity of the whitecollar worker or
employee. In other words, are white-collar workers 1 part of the proletariat? Or do they
have a separate class location? As it will be shown below, we are aware of the existence
of a vast body of work done over a century, and locate the present study as only a small
contribution within that field. In course of this study, a number of steps have been
taken:
1. A careful scrutiny of Marxs use of class, proletariat and working class, and an
examination of his views on white collar and similar groups.
2. A study of post-Marx theoretical views and an attempt to take a position within
the different and often conflicting views.
3. A study of contemporary literature, including the literature of associations and
unions.
4. Conducting a survey, based on a questionnaire, among white-collar employees.
Given the small scale of the current project, only about 100 such employees,
mostly from West Bengal, were approached. A bigger project, with an all-India
reach, would have to take several thousand employees, divided into various
segments within the white-collar category. However, while not claiming that the
present survey is in any way an adequate sample survey, we have tried to
analyse our findings for the indicative value of the data.
Both in popular parlance, and in the writings of white-collar workers themselves, an
impression is found that white-collar employees fall into a distinctive category called
the middle class or new middle class. In Bengali, it moves away from the ambiguous
usage of class to more explicitly a status definition: madhyabitto (lit. middle level
wealth). The divergent nomenclatures all have this in common that this category of
people is removed clearly from the ranks of the working class. For the moment, we are

1
Though throughout this paper the term white collar workers/employees has been used, the term has
obvious racial, gender and cultural biases.With a vast female workforce, wearing no collars, as well as
the transformation of the dhoti and kurta clad babus into species of salary earning wage workers
needing inclusion in the category under discussion, white collar is clearly too Western and masculine.
But I have been compelled to let it stand, since it has an acceptability.

3
concerned with theoretical debates on this question, to the exclusion of social, political
and historical reasons for the belief.
Marx and Weber: Class and Status
The classic controversy over class derives from the contrasting positions of Marx and
Weber. An explicit discussion of their respective positions is essential even now for
anyone wishing to follow discussions on classes in contemporary sociological, historical
and economic writings. Marxs writings on class, especially on the working class, are
complex. At the very end of the unfinished third volume of Capital when he was about to
answer the question, what constitute a class? he only had time to say the reply to this
question follows naturally from the reply to another question; namely :what makes
wage labourers, capitalists and landlords three great social classes?1
There is no reason to conclude from this that Marx was hazy about what constituted a class. But
to understand the layers of meaning in his usage of class, working class, proletarian, etc, we will
have to examine in some detail his writings on class, especially the working class. As a matter of
fact, often enough, Marx wrote about the working classes in the plural. Thus, the most famous of
all his programmatic statements about the working class leads off: Considering that the
emancipation of the working classes is a task of the working classes themselves.2
Nor was this a slip. Marxs writings show him visualising the working classes and the
proletariat in ways somewhat different from how others were using the terms. On at
least one occasion, Marx tried to make a clear distinction between proletariat and
working class. Marx, and the 19th Century generally, had been much more relaxed in
maters of precision in political terminology, so it will be easy to trip him up in places.
Nonetheless, he did grow more inclined to precision, particularly in matters relating to
economic thinking. Prior to Marx, we see the word proletarian being used as a broader
term than worker. The original Roman proletarian implied such a broad connotation.
But Marx came to reverse the relationship between the two words. In doing so, he was -
- as in so many other things overturning accepted socialist doctrine and ideas. Thus, a
programmatic article of the Communist League, often attributed to Karl Schapper, and
written shortly before the Communist Manifesto, said: In present-day society
proletarians are all those who cannot live on their capital, the worker as well as the men
of learning, the artist as well as the petty-bourgeois3 Here the all-encompassing
definition was intended chiefly to designate the out-group, namely all the idlers, those
who lived of their capital. This was a terminological attempt to solve a real problem,
which the twentieth century would call variously, united front of all the exploited,
proletarian hegemony, and so on. Marx was however concerned with a more precise
definition, because of how he visualised the revolutionary process. In his theory, the
proletariat is the working class peculiar to the capitalist relations of production. It does
not include all those who work for a living, nor all those who do useful or necessary
work. It consists of workers whose livelihood depends on a wage relationship with
those who employ labour power, and who therefore produce surplus value in the
process of commodity production. So the proletariat does not include all wageworkers.
It did not include wage-workers employed by the government who were not producing
surplus value in the course of commodity production. Even more important, from the
point of view of the present study, the proletariat did not consist, for Marx, only of
industrial workers, or only of manual workers, or only of workers at the point of
production. The proletariat did not consist, for Marx, only of workers producing
tangible commodities. Producers of services may also be producers of surplus value. A

4
teacher in one of the innumerable tutorial homes and other parallel coaching business
that dot Indias cities, when she or he is a salaried employee of the organisers of the
coaching centre who run it as a profit-making enterprise, is a proletarian by Marxs
definition, though this is certainly a point to which we will have to come back. Some of
these points restrict the scope of the term, others expand it. Let me bring out one final
element of the definition from Marx, which expands the scope of the proletariat
considerably. The proletariat is constituted by capitalist production. Thus, considered
structurally, the proletariat is not an individual (unless in exceptional cases) but a
collective the collective labourer, or the collectivity of workers whose work taken
together produces a given commodity. It unites not only a number of workers, but even
more importantly, hand and head workers, or mental and manual labourers. The
value embodied in the commodity cannot be ascribed to only the true proletarians
whose hands show calluses, while those who sit in offices or do other non-manual jobs
are supposedly not contributors to the production of the value embodied and so, of
course, of the surplus value. All of them are proletarians. The fundamental antagonism
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, on which Marx bases his reading of
modern history and contemporary class struggle, has to do with production, control of
labour, appropriation of surplus value. It does not represent a contradiction between
gentlemen wearing suits and ties on one hand, and horny-handed proletarians with
patchwork, or shabby dresses, on the other. The dhoti-clad karmachari appears as an
intermediate category in such a conception no doubt. But the conception itself is a
reflection of the class struggle. It represents a bourgeois view. The ruling class has
certain conceptions of class, which are basically stereotypes that justify their
assumption of superiority. This is one such assumption. And this assumption remains a
bourgeois assumption even when would be radical youth or their mentors decide that
all workers who do not work with their hands are non-proletarians and need not be
organised with the same seriousness; that is, when alienated bourgeois who try to break
with their class idealise this image. Finally, it remains equally false and equally an
ideological reflection, a pressure of the ruling class, if you will, when working class
elements accept this definition.
Let us, however, put forward an example of a better understanding of Marx for a more
complex reason. By Marxs usage, a salaried editor in a leading publishing house is a
proletarian, while a metalworker in an Ordnance Factory is not, since the former
produces surplus value and works in a concern geared for profit, while the latter does
not. But these are evidently marginal cases, and they push us to examine better the
relationship between an economic stratum and its social role, and from there to the
relationship of this layer to the class struggle on the political level. Here, it is evident,
the editor of coffee table productions will react in a way often much closer to the
bourgeoisie, while the Ordnance Factory metalworker is likely to display militancy.
However, Marx has in mind a historic tendency: It is not a question of what this or that
proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the given moment regards as its aim. It is a
question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will
historically be compelled to do.4 Though this was written by the young Marx before his
investigation of the nature of bourgeois society had proceeded very far, it was clear
enough in stressing that the polarised situation of class versus class was no more than a
historical expectation. Such a polarisation occurs only in specific junctures, as the social
conflicts intensify. The language of class in Russia in 1917 is not the normal language of
workers. What is important, when considering Marxs idea of the proletariat and the
workers, is the political significance he attached to them. In his view, the proletariat

5
could achieve its revolutionary victory not alone but by leading all the oppressed. It
would do so, because of its strategic location in society. This was why he wrote, in the
Communist Manifesto, All previous historical movements were movements of
minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-
conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the
immense majority.5 Given the actual size of the proletariat, this assertion could be
accepted only as an anticipatory formula, and as a strategy of revolution which thought
of incorporating the other oppressed classes and strata in the revolutionary movement.6
Though we will return to many of these themes later, here we need to introduce Marxs
key protagonist. This was Max Weber. He argued that class is much more differentiated
than Marx had believed. And he emphasized that there were processes whereby
objective class positions may be overlaid by less tangible social definitions. Like Marx,
Weber never provided a systematic survey of class, and we have to piece his ideas
together. In his view, class was definable by the typical probability of 1. procuring
goods 2. gaining a position in life and 3. finding inner satisfactions, a probability which
derives from the relative control over goods and skills and from their income-producing
uses within a given economic order.7 Like Marx, Weber pointed to a basic division
between the propertied and the propertyless, but he also stressed the importance of
differences within each group. Life chances, and with that class situations, would vary
according to the different types of property that owners possessed, and also according
to the different kinds of services which those without property could offer on the labour
market. So class structure was not a simple polarity but was instead highly
differentiated.
Weber went on to argue that class position offered no necessary basis for collective
action; whether or not members of a class recognised common interests and acted upon
these was linked to general cultural conditions.8 For Weber, the more universal source
of conscious common identity was the status group, defined in terms of a specific,
positive or negative social estimation of honour and associated with a specific life-style. 9
Weber, however, was not as Weberian as some of his followers. Indeed, he remarked
that every technological repercussion and economic transformation threatens
stratification by status and pushes the class situation into the foreground.10 However,
this is not to deny that Webers basic thrust was different. While he accepts the
importance of economic-based class relations within capitalism, he diverges in crucial
ways from Marx. Weberian theory focuses on the way in which societal rewards are
acquired, and the manner in which patterns of acquisitions are determined by the
market. Marxs theory focuses on the manner in which new values are created, and the
social relationships arising out of and sustaining this process of production. Weber does
not see conflicts emerging within the production process, but in the labour market.11
For Marx, by contrast, the wages struggle, while important, was only a subsidiary
manifestation of the antagonism between capital and labour. It is also worth
remembering that Marx had, long before the emergence of Weber, identified the
fundamental weakness of any definition of class on purely market criteria: because of
the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour
splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords, any attempt to relate class to the
identity of revenues and sources of revenues would imply the existence of an infinity of
classes.12 This was a problem to which Weber could offer no theoretically coherent
solution. He recognised that if class and market were equated, a uniform class situation
existed only with unskilled and totally property less persons were considered.13 But in

6
order to impose some sort of order on the multiplicity of skills, job opportunities,
qualifications, etc, Weber was compelled to rely on the conventional categories of
everyday discourse. So, eventually, for Weber, the white-collar employees came to be
clubbed with intelligentsia, technicians, and others, though his discomfort is noticeable,
since he admits that there could be considerable social differences. Nor does Weber
offer any serious explanation of this definition of class boundaries, showing why the
white-collar employees are excluded from the working class. 14
According to his analysis of status groups, the status situation might be based on class
status directly or related to it in complex ways. It is not, however, determined by this
alone..... Conversely, social status may partly or even wholly determine class status,
without however, being identical with it. For Weber, status groups are normally
communities and peoples status situation includes every typical component of the life
fate of men that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of
honour involving a specific style of life. In his opinion, the decisive role of a style of life
in status honour means that status groups are the specific bearers of all conventions.
For Weber all stylisation of life either originates in status groups or is at best
conserved by them. He continues, status groups are stratified according to the
principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special styles of life.
Reinhard Bendix, one of Webers greatest admirers rightly summarised, Webers
approach conceived of society as an arena of competing status groups each with its own
economic interests, status honour, and orientation toward the world and men. He used
this perspective in his analysis of the landed aristocracy, the rising bourgeoisie, the
bureaucracy and the working class.... 15
In concluding this discussion on Weber, the following summary points may be made:
1. Status stratification of the type considered by Weber plays no significant role
in the thought of Marx, who shows no interest in social stratification as such. In
so far as classes happen to be status groups and are stratified accordingly, it is
their class relationship that matters to Marx, rather than any stratification
according to status. Is this a defect in Marx? The answer to this question depends
on the value we attach to social stratification as an instrument of historical or
sociological analysis. But - and this is my first point - Weber in fact makes
virtually no significant use of his status groups in explaining anything. I would
argue that Weberian analysis is valuable in examining certain social groups, such
as the clergy in the European middle ages, or the Stalinist bureaucracy in the
USSR, former Peoples Democracies, and even now in China, North Korea etc.
But these are in fact groups which do not fit clearly into any Marxist class
analysis.16

2. Webers use of the term class as is evident is totally different from that of
Marx. To me, Webers notion of class is exceedingly vague and inherently
incapable of precise definition. As noted above, how are the boundaries of
classes to be ascertained? That is the essential question, and my point is that
Weber fails to provide an answer to it. Individuals, certainly, can be regarded as
stratified, after a fashion, according to economic position in general but if we
are to have stratified classes we need to be able to define their respective
boundaries in some way, even if we are prepared to allow for some

7
 indeterminate borderline cases and do not wish to have hard-and-fast lines of
demarcation.
3. But it is my third contrast between the categories of Weber and Marx which is
by far the most important. The status groups and even the classes of Weber are
not necessarily (like Marxs classes) in any organic relationship with one
another, and consequently they are not dynamic in character but merely lie side
by side, so to speak, like numbers in a row. Class in Marxs sense, is essentially a
relationship, and the members of any one class are necessarily related as such, in
different degrees, to those of other classes. The members of a Weberian class or
status group as such, on the other hand, need not have any necessary
relationship to the members of any other class or status group as such, and even
where a relationship exists (except of course where the classes or status groups
concerned happen to be also classes in Marxs sense), it will rarely involve
anything more than efforts by individuals to rise up in the social scale - a feature
of human society so general and obvious that it hardly helps us to understand or
explain anything except in the most trite and innocuous way. I have no wish to
minimise the importance which may sometimes attach to certain features of
status in a static situation - that is to say, when we are looking at a society as it is
at a given point in time, and not in a historical perspective, as a developing
organism. For example, members of a status group near one extreme of a
stratified social scale may seldom if ever marry members of another such group
at the opposite end of the scale, and in India membership of one particular type
of closed status group, namely caste, may even involve contamination for
members of one caste who are involved in certain kinds of contact with members
of another.
Why should one prefer the Marxist to the Weberian concept of class, or the concept of
class that is grounded explicitly in exploitation to the one grounded in market-based life
chances? Three reasons could be advanced. First, the exploitation-centred class concept
affirms the fact that production and exchange are intrinsically linked, not merely
contingently related. This has a bearing on how we will examine the difference between
clerks and managers. They cannot be viewed simply in terms of their position in the
market for certain types of labour power (clerical, managerial), but also by their
position within the relations of domination in production. This also serves to remind us
that class relations are relations of power, not merely privilege. Secondly, theorising the
interests linked to classes as grounded in inherently antagonistic and interdependent
practices facilitates the analysis of social conflict. A simple opposition of interests is not
enough to explain active conflict between two groups. Exploitation is a very important
concept, because it brings together an account of opposing interests with an account of
the rudimentary capacity for resistance. Because, ultimately, the exploiters depend on
the exploited for the realisation of their own interests. And this gives the exploited an
inherent capacity to rejoice. Finally, a class analysis foregrounding exploitation, rather
than market based life chances, implies that classes can exist in non-market societies. In
the Weberian analysis, serfs and slaves would be status groups pure and simple, rather
than classes. One might argue that this same logic could be turned against my
contention that the relationship between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Soviet,
Chinese or East European working class is the relationship between a non-class
privileged group and the workers. This debate cannot be resolved here.

8
Mid 20th Century Discussions on Class In Marxist Thought
From the 60s onward, specially during the 70s and 80s not only from within the pro-
establishment camp, but also from the anti-establishment camp there have been a series
of theories to justify that the working class is dying, if not dead. For example the
Financial Times political columnist commented, there is a new class which outnumbers
either the stereotype of working class or the capitalist. Nicos Poulantzas drew the same
conclusion when he argued that all white-collar employees and even all non-productive
manual workers are part of the new petty bourgeoisie.17 In considering the case of
Poulantzas, the context must be kept clearly in mind. The first point to note is that
despite certain important differences with Althusser, Poulantzas did his work within a
structuralist cast. While this essay is not a proper place to pursue the broad
controversies concerning the nature and importance of Althusserian analysis, some
comments are necessary. A major premise is the relative autonomy of what
structuralist Marxist writers used to call theoretical practice. This was the assertion
that intellectual analysis cannot proceed by means of an unmediated, direct relationship
with reality, but must be framed within a set of concepts and assumptions. The
analytical structure within which a particular theory or argument is embedded was
called a problematic (problematique) this was a particular way of looking into reality,
posing certain issues for consideration and excluding others, and ensuring that the
answers to the questions which were posed would assume a particular form. A social
formation i.e., the overall social structure at a given historical moment is distinct
from the mode of production. The mode of production is an abstraction, not having a
real existence. Or rather, several modes of production coexist within a social formation,
one being dominant. The social formation has to be analysed at a variety of different
levels, or instances, like the economic, political and ideological. The categories and
propositions appropriate for one level of analysis are not necessarily applicable for the
other.
This methodological premise encourages a preoccupation with elaborating and defining
concepts and their theoretical interrelationship, often with minimal concern for the
evidence of the real world. Critics of structuralism accused them of being sterile and
jargon-ridden scholastics. They usually responded that their critics failed to
differentiate between empirical description and theoretical analysis. Thus, in the
famous Poulantzas- Miliband debate, the former insisted that categories such as class,
capitalism or surplus value cannot be simply derived from or reduced to the evidence of
patterns of interpersonal relations within society. He insists on the necessity of
comprehending social classes and the State as objective structures, and their relations
as an objective system of regular connections, a structure and system whose agents,
men, are in the words of Marx, bearers of it.18 So people are not objectively part of
the working class. There is no empirical reality above ways of seeing. What is therefore
important, at the second moment, to note about Poulantzas is why he chose this
trajectory. In the Foreword to his book, he wrote clearly: today it is more than ever the
case that an essential component of revolutionary strategy consists in knowing the
enemy well, and in being able to establish correct alliances. Highly critical of the French
Communist Party for its opportunism, he insisted that a detailed analysis of the function
and interests of the so-called new middle strata must precede any principled decision
on the nature and limits of an alliance between the workers movement and such
groups. Apparently in an orthodox vein, Poulantzas insisted that ownership/non-
ownership of the means of production is an insufficient criterion for class analysis, and

9
what is needed is an examination of whether a position involves performing productive
labour. Now, Serge Mallet, in expanding the boundaries of the working class, had used
the same notion. Yet we find Poulantzas using the notion to contract the working class.
This is because, as Ernest Mandel has indicated on several occasions, while the notion of
productive labour is of key importance in Marxist theory, its meaning is ambiguous and
has attracted intense controversy. The definition offered by Poulantzas was extremely
circumscribed and rather idiosyncratic. His approach would exclude not only the white-
collar workers, but also those who work for the state or in private service industries,
since he insisted that the proletarian has to be both direct producers of surplus value
and directly involved in material production. This of course flies in the face of examples
directly given by Marx. As he provided in one particularly explicit illustration: If we
may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a
schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his
scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter had laid
out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the
relation to be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck but a
misfortune.19 For the moment, my point is that Marx, even in the 19 th Century, was
capable of realising that surplus value is produced through actions and by people whom
Poulantzas would rule out a priori. Poulantzas has many insightful comments in his
discussions of the new middle class or new petty bourgeoisie, for example in the
discussion on the evidence for polarisation within this class broadly defined by him.
But this is then done by falling back on bourgeois academic styles such as classification
of occupational groups. In the end, the procedure adopted by Poulantzas was a species
of politico-ideological Marxism which denied the repeated emphasis of the founders of
scientific socialism to the effect that in the final analysis, the economic basis is the
determining force. I hope to show below the close similarities between the studies of
Poulantzas and David Lockwood. But here, we need to stress that Poulantzas allowed
his anger at the opportunism of the French Communist party to lead to a fudging of the
economic analysis. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a somewhat parallel
dispute within the Fourth International. The Socialist Workers party of the USA,
claiming to be more orthodox Marxists and Trotskyists, criticised the French Ligue
Communistes Revolutionnaires for their alleged opportunism in orienting to, not the
traditional working class, but new petty bourgeois elements. Organisation of the newer
sections of the working class, including the white collar, was an issue in this dispute.
The SWP chose a series of options like turning to industry (pulling party members
away from existing areas of work and pushing them into designated traditional
industrial jobs like steel, garments etc), ending in splitting away from the Fourth
International. In retrospect, in both cases, it is evident that a political choice, made in
advance, had resulted in the analysis of class. 20 They often term this new class by some
alternative nomenclature like new middle class or new middle strata. Its proponents
claimed and proved that these new middle strata -- the clerical and professional
workers -- are steadily growing, and absorbing both the bourgeois and the proletariat.
On such a view, the proletariat was a steadily shrinking force even in the United States
of America. As early as 1951, the Swedish sociologist F. Croncer declared that a social
revolution was under way, the product and vehicle of which is a new social class - the
white collar workers. Some sociologists went even further to include practically the
whole population of the advanced capitalist countries within a single label - middle
strata. G. Schelsky, in his book The Transformation of the Modern German Family tried to
prove that a levelled petty bourgeois-middle class society is taking shape in West

10
Germany. These theoreticians obviously challenge Marxs view on the existence, growth
and role of the working class. For instance, in an article published in the leading Swiss
paper Neue Zurcher Zeitung we read: How mistaken Marx was in appraising social
development can be seen only from the fact that he completely failed to see the
emergence of a new social strata, the clerical workers. 21
Who are included in these white-collar employees to term them as a new class? Lumped
together under the general heading of middle class or middle strata is an
extraordinary heterogeneous collection of jobs -- company executives, senior civil
servants, school teachers, nurses, shorthand typists, engineers, technicians,
draughtsmen. What do these groups have in common? Why are they lumped into a
single and separate class? The reply is very ambiguous. Yet, the most common tendency
is to take some popular perspective like type of work (mental), apparent lifestyle or
pattern of consumption as common denominator.
A close scrutiny will easily reveal that it is absurd to lump together all of them into the
same general classification. In reality the aforesaid group of people, who are
categorised into a single category or class embrace two distinct positions. At one
extreme, there are members of board and senior management who control the means of
production and labour process on behalf of the capitalist class; on the other extreme,
there are members of lower categories i.e. clerks, nurses, draughtsmen, technicians
who of course in between these two extremes there are those professionals and
management staff who partially control the labour process, and partially stand at the
receiving end to obey orders of their bosses.
For the time being it is sufficient to dispute the lumping all these categories into a single
class identity. As the matter is more complicated than the first glance reveals, we will
cover this point later, in details.
Before examining whether the white-collar employees constitute a definite class
category, we have to define class in general, and working class, in particular. Unless we
are able to draw the boundaries of the working class, we cannot ascertain whether a
part or whole section of the salariat belongs to the working class. Of course, in our
discussion, we have to take into account the impact of new technology especially
automation and computerisation in the industry and the consequent changes in the
structure of the working class. While following Marx, I will be concentrating often
enough more on recent Marxist writers in the next section, since my purpose here is
less to restate Marx (something already done partly above) and more to examine what
Marxist methods should mean in todays world.
Class and Class Struggle
There are many ways of defining class which are often contradictory and sometimes
overlapping. It is not possible to go through, compare and come to a true definition of
class, because, the concept and definition of class is historic as well as dynamic. Yet, to
understand overall class behaviour and class struggle in a class ridden society, one has
to develop a workable tool to differentiate one class from another. What follows is a
brief attempt at making a comparative study of some further major attempts to define a
class so that we can understand the political and sociological behaviour of classes. Only
in the general frameworks these provide can we make sense of the debates over white
collar.

11
As a historian and a teacher of Greek history, though I have important differences with
him, I have been much influenced by the works of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix. So let me
express my position through Croixs statement which he makes at the beginning of the
chapter Class Exploitation and Class Struggle in his book The Class Struggle in the
Ancient Greek World.
It seems to me hardly possible for anyone today to discuss problems of class, and above
all class struggle (or class conflict), in any society, modern or ancient in what some
people would call impartial or unbiased manner. I make no claim of impartiality or lack
of bias..... The criteria involved are in reality much more subjective than is commonly
admitted: in this field one mans impartiality is another mans bias and it is often
impossible to find an objective test to resolve their disagreement.22
At the same time what Croix had reminded us is of paramount importance that, the
inevitability of ideological bias does not free us from the responsibility to struggle for
maximum objectivity. Let us try our best to attain that maximum objectivity.
Croixs own summary formulation is admirable.
Class as general concept (as distinct from a particular class) is essentially a
relationship; and class in Marxs sense must be understood in close connection with his
fundamental concept of the relations of production, the social relations into which men
enter into the process of production, which find legal expression to a large degree either
as a property relations or as labour relations. When the conditions of production, such
as they are at any given time, are controlled by a particular group, then we have a class
society, the classes being defined in terms of their relationship to the means and the
labour of production and to each other. Croix further continues, Some of the most
important means of production in the modern world - not only factory, but also banks
and finance houses, even railway and aircraft...indeed the essential element, in the
relations of production characteristic of a capitalist economy.23
Though I myself intend to start out by accepting the definition given by Croix, I must
admit that I dont insist that this definition is absolutely true or correct. Rather I adhere
to this definition as being close enough to satisfy the Marxist framework as I understand
it. I do agree there have been and will be disagreements on the definition of class. But
for me, the test of the correctness of the definition lies on the clarity: its ability to
correspond with the historical reality and its fruitfulness to reply to the pertinent
question raised in our research.
Croix continues:
Class (essentially a relationship) is the collective social expression of the fact of
exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social structure. By
exploitation I mean the appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others. In a
commodity producing society this is the appropriation of what Marx called surplus
value.
A class (a particular class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their
position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according to their
relationship (primarily in terms of the degree of ownership or control) to the conditions
of production (that is to say, the means and labour of production) and to other class.
Legal positions (constitutional rights or, to use the German term, Rechsstellung) is one

12
of the factors that may help to determine class; .... 24[Parenthesis and Emphasise in
original]
Following this definition, we can underline the objective nature of class. Class thus
conceived is not a mater of political line or direction. In other words, any individual or a
group of individuals (even all of them) may or may not be wholly or partly conscious of
his/her/their own identity and common interests as a class; still according to our
definition he/she/they belong to a particular class objectively. It is not necessary to take
up class war on ones own shoulder in order to be a member of a class. This is often
misunderstood, by Marxists, by people who use some aspects of Marxs views, or by
sociological and other critics. There are many such mistakes. They will be understood
better if we add to Ste Croixs definition a somewhat more complex and multi-layered
analysis by Ira Katznelson.25 Talking about classes in the context of capitalism,
Katznelson proposes four levels. The first level is the structure of capitalist economic
development. Capitalism is impossible without proletarianisation and the attendant,
specific mechanism of exploitation. At this level, since certain key properties are shared
by all capitalisms, we can propose such distinctions as collective capital and collective
labour, and productive and unproductive labour. It is at this level that the model
building of the mature Marx in his writings on the critique of political economy must be
tested against its competitor models. The second level refers to the social organisation
of society lived by actual people in real social formations. This level includes such
economic phenomena as workplace social relations and labour markets, and a historical
analysis of their development are invaluable for understanding how the growth of
capitalism has proved capable of fostering many different kinds of workplaces and
work. Of course, the first two levels are closely linked. The debate between Poulantzas
and Eric Olin Wright suffers from the failure to recognize that despite their proximity
the two are ultimately distinct levels. At these two levels, class is defined solely with
reference to the position of its members in the economic structure, their effective rights
and duties within it. At this level, as G. A. Cohen says, a persons consciousness, culture,
and politics do not enter the definition of his class position.26 The fourth level, as
Katznelson sees it, is the level of collective action.
Katznelsons attempt to differentiate between all these levels is useful, in view of
certain common misconceptions. For example, Dahrendorf in his important work Class
and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, argued,
The formation of class always means the organisation of common interests in the
sphere of politics. The point needs to be emphasised. Classes are political groups united
by a common interest. The struggle between two classes is a political struggle. We
therefore speak of classes only in the realm of political conflict27.
This is a misunderstanding of Marxs argument about a class-in-itself versus a class-for-
itself. In The Poverty of Philosophy he wrote:
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into
workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation,
common interests. This mass is thus already a class against capital, but not yet for itself.
The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is
a political struggle.28
If one goes carefully through the above passage, it would be absurd to conclude that for
Marx, the mass of workers is not a class at all, unless it is united and self-conscious.

13
What Marx is saying, one might say, is that while it is class enough to be exploited in
distinct ways, unless it becomes united and conscious of its class interests it will fail to
fight effectively against that exploitation in any collective manner. In the same book,
when Marx speaks of the stage of class struggle at which the proletariat is not yet
sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, he surely does not mean class as an
objective entity, rather he must mean a class for itself. When he continues the very
struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political
character, he had two distinct classes: proletariat and the bourgeoisie in his mind, who
though engaged in day to day class struggle have not assumed a political character.
That this apparent contradiction of constituting a class and not yet a class is not any
problem in Marxs head can be easily understood if it is placed beside another great
analysis of Marx in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he sets out to
explain how the small peasants in one sense did and in another did not form a class:
Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate
their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and
put them in hostile opposition to the later, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a
local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their
interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organisations among
them, they do not form a class. 29 [Emphasise mine]
Even more important than Dahrendorf is the work by E. P. Thompson. On the very first
page of the Preface to his major work, The Making of the English Class, E.P. Thompson,
one of the most well-known twentieth-century Marxist historians declared that Class
happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel
and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other
men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.30 It is evident
that for Thompson, Marxs class for itself exists, and his class in itself does not.
Thompsons work raises serious questions which cannot be fully treated here. It is
possible to make out a case that his actual historical practice is more nuanced than
some of the theoretical statements he makes. For the moment, we shall restrict
ourselves to those theoretical statements. In course of these, he vigorously criticises the
conception of class as an objective identify.
There is today an ever- present temptation to suppose that class is a thing. This was
not Marxs meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much later day
Marxist writing. It, the working class is assumed to have a real existence, which can be
defined almost mathematically - so many men who stand in a certain relation to the
means of production. Once this is assumed it becomes possible to deduce the class-
consciousness which it ought to have (but seldom does have) if it was properly aware of
its own position and real interests. ... There cultural lags and distortions are a nuisance,
so that it is easy to pass from this to some theory of substitution: the party, sect or
theorist, who disclose class consciousness nor as it is, but as it ought to be.31
Thompson is right to recognise class as a dynamic identify and he also rightly accuses
the notion of supremacy of theory, party or sect over the process of class being
conscious of its own interests and substituting the class by the party. But his justifiable
irritation with Stalinist and sectarian versions of Marxism or Marxism-Leninism,
whereby organisations and/or intellectuals claim to know exactly how the class should
behave in order to be a class, leads him to an opposite type of simplification. For Marx,

14
class for itself is as real as class in itself, and it is a dynamic process going on in the
capitalist society to transform from later to former. In other words, to use Lenins
coinage, Thompson had bent the stick to the other side too far in his theoretical
pronouncements, leading to his discarding Marxs great understanding on the working
class and its historic role and mission. Otherwise, how can Marxs famous passage in
The Holy Family where he talks about objective compulsions on the proletariat (quoted
earlier) be explained? It is evident that to define and identify a class, Marx presupposed
the existence of a class as being to study the dynamic behaviour of the class.
Not only that, Marx in his famous letter to Weydemeyer admitted, Long before me
bourgeois historians had described the historical development of the class struggle and
bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes 32. This testifies that Marx
did not put any pre-condition of unity and consciousness to identify a class as a class. A
further discussion of Thompson is necessary, in a subsequent section. For the moment, I
hope I have been able to show that a direct reading of Marx, uncluttered by baggage
drawn from other writers, presents the view that classes have objective existence, but
that such objective existence is not what makes distinct classes act in distinct ways. It
is only through engagement in class conflict that they become aware of themselves as
classes. So class struggle is an important component of defining a class. A class aware of
itself as a class is certainly a class engaged in class struggle, and those specific class
struggle experiences will likely be key to shaping the distinct features of the class. We
hope we have already established that the objective class position of an individual
depends on his or her relationship to the means of production. Class thus conceived is
objective, it is formed within the relations of productions and does not arise from
individuals, consciousness. Indeed it may clash with the consciousness. Marxs model is
thus one where classes exist in contradiction. Every ruling or exploiting class also has
one or more ruled and exploited classes. It is in fact necessary, in understanding classes
and class struggle, to understand the distinctions between exploitative and non-
exploitative oppressions. A social group can be extremely oppressed without being
exploited. But in the case of such a group, genocide always remains an option.33 The
difference between Native Americans (the so-called Red Indians) and blacks in South
Africa is instructive. In both cases there was a deep racism. But the whites in South
Africa needed to exploit the labour of the blacks. By contrast, the whites in the United
States spent a long time trying to wipe out the native peoples. The non-exploitative
oppressions genocidal potentiality is well summed up in the utterance, The only good
Indian is a dead Indian. Not even Ford, Krupp or Thyssen came up with the slogan that
The only good worker is a dead worker.
With the establishment of definition of class in general, we can now proceed to define
the working class in particular and draw its boundaries, so that we can reply to our
basic question. Where do the white-collar employees stand?
Definition of the Working class
To define the working class as a special class, we will follow the general arguments of
defining class. Lack of space will restrain us from any in-depth discussion of the
revolutionary potential of the working class, and its process of maturation from class in
itself to class for itself. We will confine ourselves mainly to define the working class to
locate its boundaries objectively. The discussion the revolutionary potential will come
up, however, particularly in connection with white collar workers and the claim that
they are necessarily less revolutionary.

15
Existence of a class society presupposes that one or more classes, by virtue of their
control over the conditions of productions will be able to exploit -- that is appropriate a
surplus at the expense of the larger class or classes. And the very existence of classes
involves tension and conflict between the classes, often termed as class struggle. It is the
precise form of exploitation which is the distinguishing feature of each form of society.
Marx wrote essentially the same in a more explicit way:
The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out
[ausgepumpt] of the direct producers determines the relationship between those who
dominate and though who are in subjection [herrschafts und knechtschaftsverhalbuis],
as it grows directly out of production itself and reacts upon it as a determining element
in its turn. Upon this, however, is founded the entire organisation of the economic
community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, and thereby at
the same time its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the
owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers - a relation always
naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the nature and
method of labour and consequently of its social productivity - which reveals the inner
most secret, the hidden foundation of social structure .... 34

On the basis of this general understanding, a surplus can be obtained in various ways,
which in turn construct various class identities.
1. The surplus can be extracted by the exploitation of wage labour, as in the modern
capitalist world.
2. Surplus can be obtained from unfree labour which may be (a) slaves (b) serfs or (c)
debt bondspersons, or a combination of these,
3.A surplus can be obtained by the letting of land and house property to leasehold
tenants, in return for some kind of rent, in money kind or services, or through taxes
levied by the state as the collective organ of the ruling class.
Describing the essential features of the working class Marx wrote:
Our proletariat is economically none other than the wage labourer, who produces
and increases capital, and is thrown out on the street as soon as he is superfluous for
the needs of aggrandizement of Monsieur capital .....
Do the white-collar workers belong to this section of the wageworkers which directly
produces for the capitalists surplus value? And if not, can they be excluded from the
boundary of the working class?
First of all, let us admit candidly a large section of office workers if not all (e.g. book
keeper, accountants, cashier and other such categories) do not produce surplus value,
nor do they increase capital. On the contrary they subsist on the share of surplus value
created by the industrial working class in the production sector. Production and book
keeping in the sphere of production remind as much two different things as the cargo of
a ship and the bill of lading.35
Now let us come to the complexity of distinction and interrelationship between
productive and non-productive labour. We need to begin by acknowledging the
existence of grey areas when demarcating these two types of labour.

16
Marx differentiates productive labour from unproductive one as follows:
Productive labour, in its meaning for capitalist production, is wage labour which,
exchanged against the variable part of capital.... reproduces not only this part of capital
(or the value of its own labour power), but in addition produces surplus value for the
capitalists.36 Unproductive labour, on the other hand, is labour which is not exchanged
with capital, but directly with revenue, that is with wages or profit. 37[Emphasis in
original]
Marx argues that a commercial capitalist who invests in these activities merely creates a
claim to the surplus value created elsewhere, and thus reduces the general rate of profit.
If the capitalists employ wage labourers this advance of capital creates neither product
nor value. It reduces the dimensions in which the advanced capital functions
productively. However, for Marx, wage-labour employed to transport goods does create
surplus-value since the use-value of things is only materialised in their consumption,
and their consumption may necessitate a change of location of there things, hence may
require an additional process of production in the transport industry.
The above understanding of productive and non-productive workers, of course, in no
way suggests that for Marx, all white collar workers were part of the unproductive
sector. In developing the concept of the collective labourer Marx commented:
The real lever of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual worker.
Instead, labour power socially combined and the various competing labour powers
which together form the entire production machine participate in very different ways in
the immediate process of making commodities...Some work better with their hands,
others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologists etc., the other as
overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. An ever-increasing number of
types of labour are included in the immediate concept of productive labour, and those
who perform it are classed as productive workers, workers directly exploited by capital
and subordinates its process of production and expansion. 38
In Marxs analysis, there is no scope of excluding white collar employees, per se, for
belonging to a particular sociological category, from the ranks of the productive worker.
If a worker, irrespective of whether s/he works with hand or with head belongs to the
collective worker involved in producing commodities, is a productive worker.
Moreover, there is no evidence to conclude that for Marx, only productive workers
constitute the proletariat. On the contrary Marx writes explicitly that the demarcation
may not be precisely accurate; there may be some gray and over-lapping areas, but that
shouldnt prevent us from discussing the issue.
In one respect a commercial employee is a wage-worker. In the first place, his labour
power is bought with the variable capital of the merchant, not with money expended as
revenue, and consequently it is not bought for private service, but for the purpose of
expanding the capital advance for it. In the second place, the value of the labour power,
and thus his wages, are determined as those of other wage-workers, i.e., by the cost of
the production and reproduction of his specific labour-power, not by the product of his
labour-power.
More on intellectual labour
While studying the evolution of division of labour between intellectual and physical one,
Marx observed:

17
so far as the labour force is purely individual, one and the same labourer unites in
himself all the functions of that later on become separated .... . Later on, they part
company and even become deadly foes. The product ceases to be the direct product of
the individual, and becomes social product, produced in common by a collective
labourer...39
Thus physical and mental labour, even if separated, remain associated in the labour
process in the form of collective labourer. Though the aggregate of workers produce a
particular commodity, for an individual worker, intellectual labour is increasingly
divorced from physical. But this separation has nothing to do with putting these two
groups of workers into separate class locations. For instance, following an example
given by Marx, janitors or floor sweepers have nothing directly to do with working up
the raw material, yet are just as much a part of the living production machine (i.e. the
collective labourer) as are the others. Without their active participation the whole
production process will come to a halt. So too the worker engineer has yet another
relation and in the main works only with his brain and so on, but is also a part of the
collective labourer.40
There is a lot of confusion within the Marxist milieu regarding the location of labour in
general and intellectual labour in particular, in the unproductive sector. Here one must
note in particular that the label productive labourer, rather than unproductive labourer,
is not in the least honorific under capitalism. For Marx, it is simply a way of
distinguishing those labourers directly producing surplus value and those who do not
do that. Some scholars tend to exclude the unproductive labourer from the boundaries
of the working class; for them, because that category of worker is not productive, they
do not directly produce surplus value for the capitalists, they should not be included
within the working class. But they fail to understand:
The mass of the individual merchants profits depends on the mass of capital that he
can apply in this process, and he can apply so much more of it in buying and selling, the
more the unpaid labour of his clerks. The very function, by virtue of which the
merchants money becomes capital, is largely done through his employees. The unpaid
labour of these clerks, while it does not create surplus value, enables him to appropriate
surplus value which in effect, amounts to the same thing with respect to his capital. It is,
therefore, a source of profit for him.41
Marx brilliantly illustrates further the role and location of intellectual labour, both
productive and unproductive,
If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a
schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his
scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter had laid
out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a in a sausage factory, does not alter
[Here, one must note in parenthesis that the label productive labourer, rather than
unproductive laboruer, is not in the least honorific under capitalism.] the relation .... to
be a productive labourer is therefore, not a piece of luck but a misfortune. 42 it is worth
noting that Marxs hypothetical schoolmaster teaches in a private school. So what would
be the position of school or college teachers when their salaries are paid by the
government? Discussing the views of the economist Storch that professors and writers
are necessarily productive because they produce enlightenment, Marx retorted that
they might also produce obscurantism. Professors and poets, moralists and preachers,

18
all produce real or imagined use-values. But they do not produce commodities. Indeed,
some or all of their acivities may well be necessary for capitalism, still without being
commodities. A capitalists cook and the chef of a restaurant owned by the capitalist
both cook, and the former performs labour that has a direct use value for the capitalist,
but that does not mean the cook and the chef are the same. Only the chef produces a
commodity with exchange value. 43 He had given similar examples in his notebook.
Actors are productive workers in so far as they produce a play [in so far as they]
increase their employers wealth.44
Commenting on the prejudices of bourgeois economists, Marx remarked that they
thought it was insulting to call Aristotle an unproductive labourer, whereas in fact he
would have felt insulted being called any kind of labourer. But this does not mean that
intellectual labourers under capitalism are necessarily drones. For scientists and
technologists, for example, specifically those whose works affect production, Marx
introduces a distinct term. This is a category that he calls allgemeine Arbeit (general
labour), differentiating it from gemeinschaftliche or collective labour. This category of
labour is general because of its general application, not merely to a given commodity or
labour-process but to all subsequent applications of labour in a given labour-process.
Through this means the productive power of ordinary collective labour is increased.45
This intellectual labour Marx calls science but in the German, the term he uses has a
wider connotation. The German Wissenschaft means accumulated knowledge or know-
how. But the value received by such scientists is far below the value their works fetch
for the capitalist. Rather different are the ideologues economists, philosophers,
historians, political scientists, who produce ideology in the pejorative sense used by
Marx. In other words, they produce ideas which can be used to mislead and confuse the
exploited, to justify the rule of the bourgeoisie, and so forth. Their intellectual
production has the same economic relation to the capitalist as the work of the
capitalists valet, cook, bodyguard or others who perform personal services.
This picture, however, changes with time. The nature of capitalist production having
become more complex, training of the wageworker becomes more complex. In a
number of cases, the capitalist class decides it to be more worthwhile to provide general
training than to take on trainees and provide them with on the job training. The massive
growth of Universities in the developed capitalist countries, and subsequently in
countries like India, means that now, a majority of graduates and increasingly even
post-graduates will be absorbed into the fold of collective labour, and training them
through the university thus becomes part of necessary investment for the capitalist
class collectively. At present, it is sufficient to say, that a person is not automatically
excluded from the ranks of the proletariat because she uses chalk on a blackboard
rather than stitching gunny bags.
We may conclude following Marxs analysis that
1. Both productive and unproductive workers are exploited; both have unpaid
labour extorted from them. The only difference is that in the case of productive labour,
unpaid labour time is appropriated as surplus value; whereas in the case of
unproductive labour, unpaid labour merely reduces the costs to the capitalists of
appropriating part of the surplus value produced elsewhere. In both cases, workers
will be dispossessed of control over their labour-process. 46

19
2. Whether it is the physical labourer or the mental labourer, it does not make any
difference to qualify anyone to be workers or non-workers. It depends on the
relationship of one to the means of production and the overall labour process.
3. Finally we may accept the broad definition put forward by Ernest Mandel:
The defining structural characteristic of the proletariat in Marxs analysis of capitalism
is the socio-economic compulsion to sell ones labour power. Included in the proletariat,
then, are not only manual industrial workers, but all unproductive wage labourers who
are subject to the same fundamental constraints: non-ownership of means of
production; lack of direct access to the means of livelihood; insufficient money to
purchase the means of livelihood without more or less continuous sale of labour
power.47
White collar employees - a separate class?
It is an undisputed fact that, throughout the last century, the proportion of
production workers in the workforce has declined accompanied by the expansion of
other forms of employment. This is what has led to the theories about a new middle
class, or the white collar workers as a new class, and so on. The figures certainly
show a decline in the proportion of the blue-collar workers, or workers directly
engaged in production. Thus, for Britain between 1911 and 1971, we get the
following data:
Table 1 The Occupied population of Great Britain by major occupational groups, 1911-7148

Occupational Groups No. of persons in major groups Major occupational groups as

(000s) % of total occupied population

1911 1921 1931 1951 1961 1971 1911 1921 1931 1951 1961 1971

Employers & proprietors 1232 1318 1407 1117 1140 622 6.7 6.8 6.7 5.0 4.8 2.6

All White Collar 3433 4094 4841 6948 8479 10405 18.7 21.2 23.0 30.9 35.9 42.7

Managers and 631 704 770 1245 1270 2085 3.4 3.6 3.7 5.5 5.4 8.6

Administrators

Higher professionals 184 196 240 435 718 928 1.0 1.0 1.1 1.9 3.0 3.8

Lower professionals 560 679 728 1059 1418 1880 3.1 3.5 3.5 4.7 6.0 7.7

and technicians

Foremen and 237 279 323 590 681 736 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.6 2.9 3.0

inspectors

Clerks 832 1256 1404 2341 2994 3412 4.5 6.5 6.7 10.4 12.7 14.0

Salespersons and 989 980 1376 1278 1398 1364 5.4 5.1 6.5 5.7 5.9 5.6

shop assistants

All manual workers 13685 13920 14776 14450 14393 13343 74.6 72.0 70.3 64.2 59.3 54.7

20
Total occupied

population 18350 19332 21024 22515 23639 24370 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

This kind of data, combined with a reading of working class quite at viriance with the
one presented above, has led many theoreticias, including many inclined to various
types of Marxism, to conclude that the working class is in decline and that the historical
observation made in the Communist Manifesto (that the society as a whole is more and
more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing
each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat) is no longer valid. A good number of books and
articles have been published with the titles which loudly speak for themselves. Andre
Groz wrote a much-publicised book with the bold title: Farewell to the Working Class. 49
Financial Times produced a much heralded book, Strike Free: New Industrial Relations
in Britain.50 This is not a survey of all such titles, but it is perhaps worth commenting
that even staunch Marxist scholars like Ashok Rudra turned out articles along such lines
at a time when the disappearance of the working class was in the air.
Gorz put forward the straightforward analysis that changing technology meant that the
working class is finished. Eric Hosbawm in Marxism Today tried to argue that since the
manual working class, the core of the traditional socialist labour parties is contracting
and not expanding this could only countered by alliances with the middle class.51 It is
possible to reject Hobsbawms arguments as a new version of the typical Stalinist ploy
of alliance with sections of the so-called progressive bourgeoisie. But such an offhand
political response fails to address the theoretical issues raised. Even if one took ones
stand as an orthodox Marxist against a revisionist position, such a form of rejection
suffers from the same flaws as the Kautsky-type restatement of orthodoxy against
Bernstein. They refuse to look at changing reality and extend revolutionary strategy.
In a keynote speech at the British Trade Union Congress, General and Municipal
Workers Union General Secretary John Edmonds harped on about a new servant class
which the unions could not expect to organise. 52
Whatever be the occasion, reasoning and nomenclature utilised, all of these findings
reached a common conclusion - that the work force is splitting into two distinct classes -
one, a relatively small and declining working class and the other, a relatively increasing
new class, which is neither bourgeois nor proletariat. This was explicitly summarised by
Nicos Poulantzas in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. He argued, as we saw, that all
white collar employees, and all non-productive manual workers (for example: dustmen,
and porters in a hospital) are not part of the working class, but of the new petty
bourgeoisie. His justification of the claim rests on the idea that white collar employees,
because they perform intellectual rather than manual labour, are polarised ideologically
and politically in the direction of the bourgeoisie. This is true even of those white-collar
employees (technician and others) who are part of the collective worker, The class is
thus conceived not as objective, but subjective identity, and makes ideology itself the
decisive criterion of class.
It is at this point that we can discuss the famous study of the white-collar workers by
David Lockwood. Lockwood uses Max Webs concept of status in his study of clerks,
The Blackcoated Worker. He argues that clerical workers cannot be regarded as part of
the proletariat because of their residually middle class status situation. Interestingly,
Lockwood in a way took up cudgels on behalf of the white collar employees against

21
those who thought they were insufficiently class conscious. 53 Lockwoods central
concern is to elucidate why there should be a divergence in the class awareness of
clerks and manual workers. So his starting point is that clerks do exhibit distinctive
attitudes towards their employers, trade unions and political affairs; and an explanation
for this is sought in objective differences in their socio-economic location. Lockwoods
discussion is structured around a distinction between market, work, and status
situations. Discussing the labour market, he stresses that the income advantages of
clerical workers are far from wholly eroded, and that they get a series of fringe benefits
which reinforce their privileged position vis--vis the manual workers. But the
organisation of work, according to him, is even more important in creating major
differences between the two groups. In previous eras, clerks chiefly worked in small
units and in close contact with their employers, who normally offered salary and career
advancement as rewards for individual initiative and loyalty. Obviously, by the mid-
20th century, the coming of large-scale, bureaucratically administered offices had
changed much of this. But Lockwood maintained that clerical functions mostly remained
physically segregated from production activities, and argued that their work
environment and the resultant social relations inhibited clerks from identifying their
position ad interests with those of manual workers. Thus, real differences in class
position interact with the traditional differentiation of status associated with popular
notions of white-collar employment. Though the changes in the nature of clerical work
might have attenuated some of the former claims to social prestige, he held that the
status distinctions remained very much in existence. Though Lockwood claimed to be
synthesizing Marx and Weber, the claim is dubious. His key focus on market relations as
a determinant of class was entirely derived from Weber. His discussion of work
situation shows him dealing with a range of discrete elements in work conditions,
rather than with the nature and dynamics of the capitalist labour process. His usage of
the term class situation is revealing. He deals, not with the relation between social
groups, but with the notion of class as an attribute intrinsic to the position of
particular social groups. Anthony Giddens in The Class Structure of the Advanced
Societies (1981) likewise uses market capacity to differentiate between the white-
collar employees and the workers. One major problem with all these analyses, apart
from any mentioned previously, is that they increasingly fly in the face of concrete
experiences of white-collar behaviour. To take an example from India, in 1946,during an
early white-collar strike, Geeta Mukherjee recollected in an interview, the students of
Calcutta had taken out a procession in solidarity, and the striking employees greeted
them, not by any militant demonstration, but by showering flower petals, and when that
was not available, using strips of paper.54 This is a far cry from the late 20th-- early 21st
century white-collar agitation. Emphasising solely or primarily the issue of
consciousness, and defining consciousness in loaded terms, can have the effect of
producing completely misleading discussions of class.
One particularly significant element of the changing pattern of white-collar work is the
gendered character of employment and the consequences. Lockwood noted the facts
clearly enough, and commented that the black-coated worker had become the white-
bloused worker.55 But he failed to recognise that this was part cause and part
consequence of the relative deflation of this type of work. In the developed countries,
for example, women were often transferred from the manual jobs to clerical jobs. But
that does not change the fundamental fact that they are compelled to sell their labour
power in order to survive. At work they have little or no control over their work. In a
country like India, where the employment of white collar, including particularly women,

22
came about in a different way, the theory of a different class apparently had greater
validity. But apparently is the key word. Women who were employed as white-collar
employees (for that matter, at an earlier stage the men, too) came from small landed
layers, from traditional (and indubitable) petty bourgeoisie, and so on. So it seemed
reasonable, looking at the recruiting basis of the white-collar employees, to call them
the new middle class or new petty bourgeoisie. But in reality, the fact that this process
has been seen in different countries at different stages of development indicate a global
tendency the tendency to the polarisation between two basic classes mentioned in the
Communist Manifesto. The fact that the same kind of conclusion -- the existence of white
collar employees as a new middle class with affinities to the ruling elite or with
authority and elite positions could be formulated for the developed countries, by
scholars like Poulantzas, Mills, Carchedi, Croner, Dahrendorf and others56 indicate that
there is nothing unique about the Indian situation, even though the historical origin of
the Indian white collar employees, including particularly the women white collar
employees, might be distinct.
The attempt to distinguish between white collar and blue collar employees on the basis
of ideology is deeply idealistic. Ideology is not ownership. Class identification cannot
change class location. To take a Wodehousian story, his footmen are supporters of the
Labour Party (in some of the stories, even of the communists) while butlers are Tories.
This of course does not turn the butlers into nobles. In the same way, white-collar
employees may identify themselves with conservative ideologies and political parties,
but that only indicates ideological differences. If this logic were to be accepted and put
into practice then each sect calling itself Marxist would define its own proletariat
namely, those who accept its version of class-consciousness.
Changing structures of the Working Class due to Modern Technology
Throughout the last century, especially second half of it there has been considerable
change in the structure and composition of the workforce. In general terms, the effects
of these changes contributed to the reduction of the proportion of manual production
workers and the increase in the relative number of engineers, technicians, laboratory
and research workers, office and clerical workers, and workers in distribution and
services, including government service. All these non-manual workers, including
officers and members of top management are heaped together and designated by as
while collar employees, and said to be belong to a new class -- the middle class. The
proponents of projecting white collar employees as a separate class often base their
theory in some common sense view like status, occupation and income. However, an in-
depth investigation easily reveals the untenability of all these characteristics to define
or locate a class.
There may be some apparent commonness among all sections of white-collar
employees with respect to their lifestyle, or pattern of consumption. They may own the
same set of consumer goods up to a certain point, like the same TV, fridge; they may
wear same type of clothing, or they may read same type of books and have an often
similar consumption of cultural products. This similar pattern of consumption may be
cited to conceal their different positions within the overall relationships of power and
privilege in society. On the other hand, patterns of consumption are often dictated by
the capitalists need to produce, to sell and realise the surplus value, and therefore to
drive for more widening of the markets. In India today, jeans and McDonalds appear as
luxury for the well to do. In the USA, they are staples for the working class. There are

23
plenty of blue-collar workers owning televisions, or consuming cultural products at par
with the white collar workers.
Often occupation is treated as the criteria to determine the class position. The
protagonists of occupation-led class theory fail to understand that an engineer may be
self-employed, top executive or, a rank-and-file design engineer (equivalent to a skilled
worker), the last one (who depends solely on the sale of his/her labour-power, however
skilled and who does not perform any managerial function) obviously has a proletarian
class position. Income is the third category which (mis-)identifies ones class position. A
small garage-owner may earn less than a white-collar employee or skilled worker, but,
whereas the income of the former includes profit earned through the extraction of
surplus value, the latter solely depends on the sale of the labour-power for their
livelihood.
Actually what affects changes in the structure of the working class, stemming from
accelerated mechanisation and automation, produce on the degree of skill demanded
from workers in capitalist enterprises; whether automation leads predominately to an
upgrading or to a downgrading of wage earners.
To ascertain the class position of white-collar employees, the technological changes in
the allocation of the workforce are to be carefully noted and examined in the proper
perspective.
1.A hundred and twenty-five years ago clerks in Britain worked in small units. In
such a situation, the sort of work they did - book-keeping, correspondence etc. -
placed them in close and continuous contact with their employers. The relation
between the clerk and his employer, wrote Charles Booth in 1896, or between him
and the work he undertakes, is usually close and personal. The educational
qualifications for this sort of work - a little instruction in Latin, and probably a very
little in Greek a little in Geography, a little in science, a little in arithmetic and book-
keeping, a little in French - set clerks apart from manual workers. Further the elite of
clerical workers, employed in banking and insurance, earned an income which
enabled them to reside in a fairly genteel neighbourhood, wear good clothes, mix in
respectable society, go sometimes to the opera, shrine from letting their wives do
household work. Sumit Sarkar has provided a portrayal of the clerical elements in
19th century Bengal which is also worth remembering. Sarkar shows that the
bhadralok identity was a cover including people from different social groups. As
landholdings fragmented, getting a chakri was to become significant for the genteel
yet impoverished sections of the lesser landed elements. A very privileged group of
persons who were able to manage to learn a little English and other elementary
lessons, would get a honourable position in British administrative hierarchy and
could earn prestige from the rest of the society. For this section, the bhadralok
identity was a lifebelt to the drowning person. The status and the relatively large
income difference served for a long time to conceal their trajectory of convergence
with the mill hands.
2. With the development of modern large-scale machine industry, the importance of
mental labour increases steadily in production and especially in the preliminary
process (designing of machines etc.) and hence the number of people engaged in it
grows both absolutely and relatively.

24
3. In as much as the division of labour constantly proceeds further, not only in
various enterprises, but on the scale of the whole of society, new trades and branches
of economy spring up and the limits of the concept of collective labour previously
discussed are extended accordingly.
4.Clerical and distributive employees engaged in the process of circulation constitute
a specific detachment of the class of wageworkers. Unlike the industrial workers,
they take no direct part in production, yet their labour is essential to capitalist
reproduction, which could not proceed without circulation.
5. It is also important to note that in the present day capitalism the differences
between factory and office and commercial workers with regards to their working
and living conditions are disappearing. Whereas in the late 19 th century the
commercial and clerical workers wages were considerably higher than the factory
workers, the difference has all but disappeared. There are cases, quite often, of clerks
being paid less than certain categories of industrial workers. And with the
introduction of mechanisation and automation in the offices, the work of clerical
workers is rearranged in a fundamental way, with mass employment and an
impersonal, bureaucratic style.
6. The rank-end-file salaried workers labour has gradually lost whatever creative
elements it had and is being depersonalised. In increasing measure they perform
monotonous mechanical operations accompanied by both nervous and physical
fatigue. The higher the level of technology the more this tendency is manifested. This
is true of workers of all sorts.
7. It is true that the office and trade employees do not come in direct contact with the
means of production. Yet this does not mean that they do not belong to the same
class. It is not ones union with the means of production, but ones separation from
them, which is the hallmark of the proletariat.
8. Side by side, if at the early stages of mechanisation, the manual skill of the machine
operation retains its significance, it is gradually relegated to the background as the
conveyor and semi automatic machine tools all exhaustively introduced. There
appear a large number of workers on the conveyor-belt whose labour is monotonous,
and devoid of any creative element. Thus, mechanisation is accompanied by the
downgrading of skills.
9. Another essential category is that of maintenance workers possessing traditional
skills as well as greater general and technical knowledge. In other words, automation
reduced the importance of the manual skills required in manipulating the subject of
labour and enhanced that of the technical knowledge and skill required to make
machines and supervise production. This process continued at all times. Computer
operators and computer maintenance personnel becoming a new, skilled expert
proletariat is a case in mind. It might be argued that the skills they possess mean they
have greater autonomy and flexibility, and that they should therefore not be treated
as parts of the proletariat. The creativity or the flexibility they have is not proof that
they are non-proletarians. A computer operator who ids given a particular job and is
asked to be creative in coming up with the end-product is ultimately under the
control of the management, who decide whether the work was properly creative or
not, based on the marketability of the product. The fact that such employees
sometimes sit in air-conditioned rooms or wear relatively expensive dresses relate to

25
 the conditions of production and image/self-image of the company and of the
employees themselves.
The Marxist concept of the collective labourer is acquiring more importance in the
course of the development of capitalist production. As Marx put it:
The product ceases to be the direct product of the individual and becomes a social
product, produced by common by a collective labourer i.e. by a conclusion of workmen,
each of whom takes only a part, greater or less, in the manipulation of the subject of
their labour. As the cooperative character of the labour process becomes more and
more marked, so as a necessary consequence, does our notion of productive labour and
of its agent the productive labourer, become extended. In order to labour productively,
it is no longer necessary for you to do manual work yourself; enough if you are an organ
of the collective labourer, and perform one of its subordinate functions.57
The expansion of the process of capitalist production or, in other words, its constant
drive for increasing the productivity of labour, in its turn, has the effect of extending the
boundaries of the working class, i.e. of the collective labourer, by proletarianising
persons engaged in occupations and professions who may have formerly not been a
part of the working class. Accumulation of capital is therefore, increase of the
proletariat. This can be tested with reference to the Post-World War II long wave and
the transformation of the labour force, for that is what gave rise to the debate on white
collar in the first place.
The reduction of the turnover-time in the era under discussion was related to the
acceleration of technological innovations.58 This acceleration of technological
innovation is a corollary of the systematic application of science to production. Though
such application is rooted in the logic of the capitalist mode of production, it has not
been continuously and evenly bound up with the entire history of capitalism. On the
contrary, Marx pointed out in the Grundrisse that it initially penetrates very gradually
into that mode of production, and does not constitute the basis of the historical
development of machinery. As he stressed, it is only at a higher stage of industrial
capitalism that invention becomes a business. 59 It was only with the development of the
chemical and the electrical industries in late 19 th century that innovation became
directly interlinked with scientific knowledge, and a scientific training became essential
for inventors. And it was only in late capitalism that research and development was
organised as a specific business. The objective conditions for the acceleration of
inventions were connected with the Second World War and the subsequent post-war
rearmament. Radar, miniaturization of electronic equipment, new electronic
components, nuclear weapons and delivery systems, even the application of
mathematics to problems of economic organisation through operational research, all
had their origins in the wartime economy. As a result, company dominated organised
research grew. By 1960 there were 5400 such research centres employing some
387,000 scientists.60 Like any other business, the business of research has the sole goal
of profit maximisation for the enterprise in question. The growth of research and
development in turn created a vast increase in the demand for educated workers.
Hence the university explosion. By the end of the 1950s, 32.2% of the 20-24 age group
in the USA were enrolled in higher education, and even in relatively developed third
world countries like Argentina the figure was a significant 10%.61 This in turn led and
continues to lead to the recruitment of large numbers of teachers, a significant part of
whom, with no tenure, are placed in insecure situations. In addition, what capital wants

26
is that these teachers should train intellectual workers who will perform specific tasks,
not intellectually alert humans. Much of the same process, with some changes, can be
observed in the Indian case as well. Thus, there is a growth of various types of workers
from categories which previously would have been classed as non-proletarian.
The state employees, whose number increased rapidly in post-independence India, and
for that matter in many countries after the Great Depression and World War II, are also
a heterogeneous group. Some sociologists deliberately or inadvertently, lump all of
them together as a separate social category. Even if we exclude the manual and non-
manual workers employed in the state productive sector, who obviously constitute
members of the proletarian class, it would be highly erroneous to include under a single
category teachers and medical employees employed by the government or the
municipalities, the civil service bureaucracy, army officers, judges, state prosecutors.
The enumeration alone is enough to show that they belong not only to different but
antagonistic categories. Some are obviously part of the proletarian class, who are devoid
of decision making power and have to obey the order of the top bosses in order to run
the capitalist system smoothly, while others are in the service of the capitalist
machinery of administration and coercion and become part of the bourgeois class. As
regards working conditions and the length of the working day, most office workers
employed by the state and the municipalities are in the same position of the industrial
workers.
The theory of social mobility
There are many theoreticians both within and outside Marxist milieu who hold that the
capitalist society can be said to be divided into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat only
in the nineteenth century, the century of poverty. They base their theory on common
sense, rather then any historical study to prove that as the twentieth century is the
century of affluence, it is witnessing an equalisation of the workers and the capitalists,
a vanishing of distinctions concerning income and consumption. According to them in
the nineteenth century the workers indeed lived in extreme poverty and were truly
proletarian in status. They argue, the process of deproletarianisation in the last fifty or
sixty years has resulted in a major part of the working class merging with the upper
strata of society.
This misleading classification has become the basis for propaganda about the alleged
dwindling of the working class. In fact, the reality is the opposite. In Labour and
Monopoly Capital Harry Bravermen argued that with the development of mass
production, work has become increasingly routinised. As a consequence, there have
been a continuing proletarianisation of the labour force - despite the apparent increase
in white collar employment.

On what do the proponents of the social mobility theory base their arguments? Their
method is exceedingly simple. They claim that Marx believed that the working class is in
a position to own only a few scraps of personal property and is doomed to lose even
those as capitalism develops. To this idea of their own fabrication of Marxism they
contrast the fact that a considerable part of the workers not only in the highly
developed country like USA, but also in the developing countries like India, own a
certain amount and varieties of personal property: furniture, radio, TV, Refrigerators
and in some cases even automobiles and houses (though mostly acquired through

27
credit) and a small amount of savings, sometimes invested in stocks and bonds. Along
with the acquisition of these type of properties, evidence of the gradual improvement of
education and skills are cited to prove that the proletarians are rapidly disappearing.
Even if we neglect the question of the number of workers having access to property and
education, their argument fails miserably. The crucial criterion to designate masses of
workers as proletarians is not the greater or lesser opportunities or access the workers
have to acquire personal property or relatively higher education. The proponents and
adherents of the social mobility theory consciously or unconsciously confuse personal
property and private property in the means of production and draw from this absurd
premise a fallacious conclusion which contradicts the real fact of life. The argument
about working class becoming lesser stakeholders through the ownership of stocks and
bonds cannot be discussed in detail here. But this would be as true of a worker at one of
Detroits auto plants as of white collar or technical workers in nearby Wayne State
University or University of Michigan. Though at the present it is not likely that bank
employees in India and jute workers will both have equal access to stocks and bonds,
that reflects Indias relative economic backwardness. That does not show, in any case,
that specifically white-collar workers are different.
We have already seen the proletariat is above all such an exploited class who cannot
work for itself without working for the capitalists; it cannot earn its livelihood without
enriching its social antagonist - the bourgeoisie. As a class deprived of the means of
production, the proletariat can win its sustenance only by selling its labour power, that
unique commodity which differs from all other commodities for its ability not only to
reproduce itself continuously but also to yield to the bourgeois an ever growing mass of
unpaid labour materialised in the form of profit.
The readers may note that this is not a case of defending Marx in retrospect. Marx
himself analysed long ago that, in contradistinction.....to the case of other commodities,
there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral
element. Moreover, he stressed that, the number and extent of workers so-called
necessary wants as the modes of satisfying them, are themselves the product of
historical development, and depend therefore to a greater extent on the degree of
civilisation of a country, more particularly on the conditions under which, and
consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers
has been formed.
What actually happens is: the value of labour power varies from country to country,
even areas and branches to area and branches of capitalist production and reproduction
of labour power as a commodity. Changes in the value of labour-power are also often
uneven and contradictory. For example, on the one hand, it tends to fall in as much as
growing labour productivity is accompanied by a reduction in the cost of the means of
subsistence essential for the production and reproduction of labour power. On the
other, modern mechanised and automated production, and the use of electronic devices,
new source of transport and communication require of the worker higher educational
standard and skill, which in turn involves greater expenditure and time on education,
which again raises the value of labour power.
The notion of social mobility has however a great value in the functioning of the
economy. In actual fact, few workers move sufficiently up the social ladder. Paul Le
Blanc, a Marxist scholar and revolutionary socialist activist in the USA, writes about his
own background in the following way: The working class in which I grew up was

28
hardly a romantic abstraction. It consisted of actual people with a great variety of
individual characteristics. My generation came of age in a prolonged period of unusual
relative prosperity for the U.S. working class. Most of us came from families that were
neither rich nor poor, and so we were taught to think of ourselves as middle class. But
the incomes supporting our families came, more often than not, from one or two people
who received wages or salaries from an employer who had end of their ability to labour
in some blue-collar or white-collar occupation.62 One should add, and the
overwhelming majority of their children also end up as wage earners of roughly the
same sort as their parents. But a segment does shift, from blue-collar to white-collar,
from ordinary white collar to expert, (this is indeed what Le Blancs own testimony
indicates), and so on. Apart from the valuable ideological impact of this, in those
countries where this does happen, there is the status angle. To be middle class or
white collar means to have certain superior or refined consumption pattern.
Others then feel the need to adopt a similar pattern. Recreation, education of children,
all these come under pressure. In the Indian case, one could mention a few issues, such
as the purchase of fridges, televisions, the keeping of private tutors for the education of
children, the hankering for kindergarten and convent education even when the so-
called kindergarten is located in a garage and so on. All this compels the workers to
economise their spending on essentials, and spend practically all their earnings and
savings on costly articles and services, the acquisition of which provides a status
symbol. The overall result remain the same: the workers have to sale their labour power
to sustain their livelihood, and devoid of control of means of production.
Social mobility does not mean, in actuality, the prospect of large chunks of workers
moving up personally through the social ladder to end their days a s petty bourgeois,
new middle class or small capitalists. Since white-collar unions have been repeatedly
attacked, falsely, for drawing off all funds so that nothing is left for development or for
the poor, this is worth stressing. Wages of ordinary white-collar workers do not form
part of the surplus value distributed among the elite and its hangers on. Now, the so-
called reforms in India, first the structural adjustment programme and then the
longer-term neoliberal designs, have their origins in the Reagan-Thatcher policies. So a
look at the British or US middle class during the Reagan-Thatcher years would be
instructive. From the 1980s, the developed capitalist countries, beginning with the USA,
experienced the rise of the Yuppies. Underlying the emergence of this figure (it is a
contraction of Young Upwardly Mobile Professional) was the economic shift described
by the U.S. Marxist Mike Davis as the increasing subsidisation of a sub-bourgeoisie, a
mass of managers, professionals, new entrepreneurs and rentiers. But this had a flip
side. During Reagans first term, low-income families lost $23 billion thanks to cuts in
wages and social welfare benefits, while high-income families gained over $35 billion
due to tax cuts.63 Politically, these yuppies provided much of the leadership of the New
Right. While exact parallels should not be sought for India, important similarities need
to be highlighted. Reforms have hit the very poor. They have also hit the ordinary
white-collar employees. At the same time, one needs only look at the English language
newspapers and their illustrated supplements to understand the kind of change that has
come about. The wage-earning white-collar middle class of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s
was best captured a few years ago in the T.V. serial Wagle ki Duniya (The World of
Wagle). For Wagle, a clean dress to go to office in, running water in Bombay, and such
mundane stuff made up the notion of a comfortable middle class life. By contrast, the
middle class being targeted today is quite a higher stratum. Nightlife, food joints, a
whole series of features that deal with very expensive tastes, such as designer-wear

29
clothing, have replaced Wagle in his washed and pressed clothing. At the same time, the
abolition of a whole series of subsidies for the poor have accompanied these. There has
been the enrichment of the managerial strata to the point where it is evidently getting a
part of the surplus value. Clearly, to lump this section with bank employees threatened
with bank closures and mergers, forced to put in more hours of work, put through speed
ups through the full-scale computerisation of banks now under way, is completely
pointless. The social mobility of this upper white-collar segment is not uninteresting.
The actual capitalist class is small, and it cannot keep itself in power except through the
creation of wider layers to which some power is delegated and which is co-opted as
junior partners in the capitalist milieu. Thus, Alex Callinicos cites a sociological study of
the British upper class to make the point that directors, top executives and principal
shareholders of the top 1000 companies and their associates, along with their direct
family members, numbered in 1984 between 25,000 and 50,000. This extremely small
group formed the core of the ruling class in Britain.64 Similar is the case in most
countries. A lasting rule cannot be effected by a direct, head-on confrontation between
this small class and the entire remaining population. So stratification and the creation of
a small degree of upward mobility is even vital for the stability of capitalist rule.
However, this type of upward mobility can also be split into two segments. Graduates of
business schools and the like, usually themselves children of the upper layers of the
white-collar or new middle class categories, can more easily enter into the fast track.
Even in the early days of neoliberal reforms, for e.g., 1992-3, IIM graduates could expect
a good six-digit figure as their annual salary even as trainees. By 2002, when this report
is being written, the whole notion of the salary of such categories has changed. It is only
in the context of this sector of the population that the following newspaper report is
true: Salaries have zoomed and the average hike in India last year was higher than even
Korea and Australia, claims a report by Hewitt Associates, a global HR consulting firm.
The pay-package itself is unrecognisable with performance-linked incomes increasingly
forming a significant part of ones salary. 65 On the other hand, a carrot is dangled
before the ordinary clerical staff in the form of a hierarchical promotion system.
Theoretically, a person can join Jadavpur University as a typist or a junior assistant, and
by dint of hard work and perseverance, move up the ladder to become an Assistant
Registrar or a Deputy Registrar; and in the same way one could join a private firm as an
ordinary clerk and become a manager. Some few do get this opportunity. To be sure,
they are at the bottom of the ladder, but at least they do have one foot on the first rung.
Two contradictory factors operate here. On one hand, the managerial title is often set
much lower down, so that the supposed manager is actually doing superior clerical
functions. On the other hand, a small segment does climb up into the elite. But they do
so after spending most of their life as workers.
In order to distinguish the specialists who get power as well, there have been several
efforts. Eric Olin Wrights models have the problem of providing a static picture. In
addition, by combining relation to means of production with skills, Wright in his newer
versions ends up with a mixture of Marxist and Weberian elements which seem less
than satisfactory.66 However, the attempt by the Ehrenreichs to posit a Professional
Managerial Class was not without value. They argued that the PMC came into existence
as part of the process described by Braverman the deskilling of manual work, the
introduction of scientific management, the domination of monopoly capital. As a result
of this transformation, they argued, the capitalist class found it necessary to have as an
adjunct a class specialising in the reproduction of capitalist class-relationships, a class
which is employed by capital, and which manages, controls and has authority over

30
labour without directly employing it.67 There are reasons why the argument as a whole
is flawed and unacceptable. If defining a class in terms of its functions (creation of
capitalist class-relations) is permissible, then it is a small step to say that bank and post
office employees are not the same as steel, coal, textile or jute workers. For that matter
one could then say that workers in the ordnance factories are a class apart, because
their labour allows the ruling class to maintain capitalist class-relations. But the
distinction between ownership and control remains a valuable one. There is a danger of
adopting an excessively simplistic model of working class, whereby wage/salary
earning would be the necessary and sufficient condition for being part of the
proletariat. By this logic, Stalin, Mao, Brezhnev or other bureaucrats, as well as top
management in capitalist enterprises, all become part of the proletariat. By this logic,
the Railway Board officials and the Central government bureaucrats who smashed the
great railway general strike of 1974, or the management of industries, are only
unwittingly serving their enemy class. In fact, in course of distinguishing between
various categories of white-collar workers, we can find out a rather different fracture
line than the colour of the collar. Ownership of the means of production are certainly
central to capitalism and the capitalist class. But when class relations are viewed as
relations of production, it should be evident that the control over labour exercised by
the management places them in a different position. The necessity of separating these
elements from ordinary clerical or even ordinary expert elements is important both as
a matter of analysis, and even more for political reasons. This will be discussed in a brief
section on white-collar unionism. Before that, however, a further discussion on
engineers, technicians and such experts is needed.
Locus-standi of the Engineers and Technicians
The popular notion and common-sense belief is: the engineers and technicians belong
to the new middle class or petty bourgeois class, because they do supervisory work and
earn more than the average rank-and-file manual workers. Similarly, all supervisory
staff are often held to be different from ordinary clerical staff, etc. The fallacy of the
argument can be proved very easily.
It is true that even during the middle of the last century the difficulties of getting an
education and the small number of qualified engineers and technicians contributed to
the fact that they were highly paid and were able to keep up with the bourgeois in their
mode of life. Not only that, those few lucky had been very close to the owners of the
means of production i.e. the capitalists and thus had drifted away from the proletarians.
Today the new technology requires more people engaged predominantly in mental
labour - designers, engineers, physicists, chemists, technicians.... all groups of workers
essential in the preparatory stages as well as for controlling and planning production
process, in the technical sense. In the yesteryears the old time engineer was usually the
administrative manager of the enterprise. Today the big factories employ hundreds of
engineers and technicians performing highly specialised technical functions.
Moreover there is happening a profound change regarding the distinction between
mental and physical labour. On the one hand, technical progress requires more and
more traditional workers with greater scientific and technical knowledge. This has
already been discussed. The modern worker at an open-hearth furnace or converter
spends about half of his working time on computations, controlling the production
process and assessing the results of his labour. On the other hand, many traditional

31
office and distributive workers are being engaged with computers and similar machines
instead of pen and paper. Thus the classical distinction and contradiction between
manual and mental labour have been undergoing such a profound change that the
mental and manual labourers are coming closer even to form a single struggle and
platform.
The colossal increase in the numbers of qualified engineers and technicians and the
extension of education have enabled the capitalists to pay less for their labour. The gap
between the general education level of the trained workers and the technicians,
between that of technician and the qualified engineer has narrowed, thereby decreasing
the value of labour power of these groups. The main body of qualified engineers and
technicians no longer enjoy the privilege more or less close or similar to the capitalists;
on the contrary, in modern capitalism, they have a mode of life which approaches that of
the proletariat.
The convergence of the interests the qualified engineers, and technicians and those of
the factory workers contributes to a change in the ideology of the qualified engineers
and technicians as well as their attitude towards class struggle. More and more
engineers are being organised in a proletarian way and taking the form of struggle
usually taken by the working class.
The capitalists and their apologists endeavour to convince the qualified engineers and
technicians that they are in a privileged position. So, their labour power is called a
salary to distinguish it from the wages of the proletariat. In other words, a respectable
mask disguises the relations of exploitation -- appropriation by the capitalists of the
unpaid labour of the engineers and technicians.
In reality, the role of an overwhelming number of engineers and technicians remain the
same as those of the factory manual workers. They may be termed as high skill workers
who sell their labour power, who lack control over the overall labour process and
means of production. Thus, if Marx in his time defined the qualified engineers and
technicians as a section of the working class, it is even more true in the present day
capitalist society.
In the 19th Century, a significant part of the engineers might have been managerial staff.
Throughout the 20th century, this picture was changing. Foremen and technicians
increasingly have less control over the ordinary workers, and a less exalted place in the
capitalist command hierarchy. One proof of this lies in reports from labour struggles. In
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, major labour struggles, for example those
connected with the Russian revolution of 1917, or the post-war revolutionary wave in
many European countries, display a very intense hatred of foremen as direct and
immediate representatives of the rulers. Foremen being beaten up, material being
poured over their heads, foremen being put on wheelbarrows and dumped into
canals/rivers, reports of this sort are available. 68 In countries where the organisation of
production has proceeded further since then, such hatred and antagonism are more
often directed to other layers.
Contradictory Class Position
From the discussion above, it is clear that all the wage or salary earners, all the white
collar employees, including the top boss, the members of the board of directors or all
the members of the professions even if they get a salary do not constitute a single class

32
neither the working class nor any other coherent class. We have been arguing that
neither is this absolute polarity with 50,000 (or some other small figure) rulers taking
on the entire population the real picture, nor, on the other hand, is it true that the
working class is diminishing and a different class named the white collar employees, the
new petty bourgeoisie, the new middle class, or simply the middle class, expanding.
As it was discussed in the previous section, a thin layer of white collar employees,
though they too do not own the means of production and are paid salaries, have major
function to control and have authority over the whole labour process and labourers.
There should not be any hesitation to consider the uppermost tiers of the so-called
salariat class as adjuncts of the ruling class. After all, how would a Marxist classify a
judge of the Supreme Court? Judges are paid salaries. But are we to assume that a
crucial state power function has been handed over to the working class?
In contrast, there are vast numbers of white collar employees who have been treated so
far as members of the working class, not only because they are salary/wage earners, but
also because they do not have control over their labour within the overall labour
process, and have to obey the orders of bosses and managers and work under an
authoritarian and disciplined system.
There are still other sections of the white-collar employees (including professionals)
who have varying degrees of control over investments and resource-allocations, the
physical means of production, and labour power. This ranges from upper to lower
management, who exercise partial control over investment and resource-allocation, and
following the arguments made by Wright (though he has himself moved away from
them) they should be called people having contradictory class position, because they
possess some elements of the capitalist class and some elements of the proletariat. One
could argue that the petty bourgeoisie are just such a category. But we are not talking of
quite the same thing. In his analysis of the petty bourgeoisie, Marx did talk of this class
as being simultaneously two types.
The independent peasant or handicraftsman is cut up into two persons. As owner of
the means of production he is capitalist; as labourer he is his own wage-labourer. As
capitalist he therefore pays himself wages and draws his profit on his capital; that is to
say, he exploits himself as wage-labourer, and pays himself, in the surplus value, the
tribute that labour owes to capital. Perhaps he also pays himself a third portion as
landowner (rent), in exactly the same way. 69
Because of this Janus-like character, the petty-bourgeoisie faces both ways. When the
line of demarcation is between property owners and the propertyless, and when
successful mobilisations are carried out on that basis, it can be fierce guardians of
property rights and of the bourgeois order. Petty bourgeois mobilisations have been the
key to fascist, neo-fascist and populist politics. 70 When, however, the contestation is
between those who live by their own labour and those who live off the labour of others,
the petty bourgeoisie can discover that it, too, is exploited by capital, that the
distinctions between real and formal subsumption notwithstanding, it is also an
exploited class. In such situations, it can be mobilised by the revolutionary
proletariat.71In the Manifesto, of course, Marx linked petty-bourgeois decline with the
industrial revolution and the continuous growth of entrepreneurial capitalism. So, 154
years after the Manifesto how does the reality match? Is the white-collar employee class
a part of the petty bourgeoisie? If we look at the long-term trends in self-employment in

33
a number of developed capitalist countries, the decline of the traditional petty
bourgeoisie becomes evident. In the United States, they were 41.77% of the gainful
workers. In 1907 this had come down to 30.58%, in 1920 to 27.79%, in 1939 to 20.92%,
1n 1970 to 9.47% and in 1984 to 9.16 %. For Germany, in 1882 the self employed
formed 38.16% of the labour force, a percentage that declined to 34.83 in 1910, 29.26 in
1940, 20.8 ion 1970 and 14.1 in 1984.72
But obviously, the features of the petty bourgeoisie, though deserving of deeper study,
have little to do with the contradictions of upper or middle white-collar, or PMC type
social layers. When Marx talks, in the passage from the Theories of Surplus Value quoted
above, about the petty bourgeois being a capitalist who exploits himself/herself as a
wage-labourer, it is of course an image that he creates. The petty bourgeois shopkeeper
feels himself/herself to be free, ones own boss, and neither exploited nor an exploiter.
The contradictory position of the layers now under discussion stem from the fact that
they do in fact receive wages, and yet have a degree of power that sets them apart from
the mass of workers.
While enjoying independence and authority in varying degrees they also have to bide by
the discipline laid down by the capitalist authority, and have to live an uncertain life like
that of wage-labourers. In this context, one may argue (and of-course in theoretical
abstraction that is to be accepted) that even a skilled worker not only enjoys certain
control over labour process, but often enjoys certain supervising power over unskilled,
especially temporary workers.
Therefore, it is better to view this layer of contradictory class position on a sliding scale
or with varying weightage. If we consider the total members of wage/salary earning
persons as a pyramid structure, those at the bottom have nil or negligible control over
the labour process and may be termed without qualification as the proletarians. It does
not matter whether he/she belongs to mental/manual labourer. As one climbs up the
ladder, the supervisory function increases, (sometimes even just illusionary or
fictitious), but upto a certain point, his/her function remains subordinate or better to
say subservient to the overall labour process dictated by capitalist high command,
he/she belongs to the members of the working class. Still, his/her wage is determined
by the value of his/her labour-power, treated as a commodity. As one climbs further, the
supervising function increases, and after a certain point, a group of supervising
authorities (mainly professionals) cross a threshold to attain the contradictory class
position. These layers of contradictory class position differ both from the capitalists
and the proletariat by the degree of control they have over the labour process,
investment decisions and resource-allocations. In this context, it may be pointed out
that a design engineer may not have any control or authority over the labour process
while a manager-engineer may enjoy certain authority to discipline his/her subordinate
workers, both white and blue collar worker.
As Wright had pointed out in his earlier work, the large majority of white collar
employees have -- at most -- trivial autonomy on the job. So there is no reason for
excluding them from the ranks of the proletariat. But upper white-collar employees and
certain layers of experts exercise a degree of management function that set them
apart. The non-Marxist sociologist John Goldthorpe discussed the relationship between
this category and the ruling class in the following way:

34
These employees, in being typically engaged in the exercise of delegated authority or in
the application of specialised knowledge and expertise, operate in their work tasks and
roles with a distinctive degree of autonomy and discretion; and, in direct consequence
of the element of trust that is thus necessary in their relationship with their employing
organisation, they are accorded conditions of employment which are also distinctive in
the level and kind of rewards that are involved.73
Fixation of salary in a graded way plays a crucial role in motivating the persons in top
management and contradictory class positions to behave in a responsible and desired
manner. The delegation of power to managers poses certain problems to capital, in
particular, the problem of ensuring that this power be used in responsible and creative
ways. It is not enough to ensure conformity of managers to the bureaucratic rules of the
corporation through repressive controls; it is also important to stimulate responsible
behaviour. Income, as graded structure of bribes, is a crucial element in creating the
motivational inducements to such behaviour. And this implies that managers income
will contain an element above and beyond the cost of reproducing the value of labour-
power, i.e., they will be getting a share of the surplus value which reflects their position
as a contradictory location within class relations. At the same time, thee are vital
differences between managers and capitalists. Why do managers come into exist and
what functions do they perform? Unlike slavery, feudalism, or the modes of production
in ancient and medieval India, capitalism is distinguished by the fact that on one hand,
the workers are free, that is, they are not compelled by law to produce for the ruling
class, and second, that they do not own any of the means of production and are
therefore compelled to sell their labour power regularly to capital. Given these two
items, a third feature immediately develops the labour performed by workers for
capital has to be subject to the continuous supervision and control of capital. The
peasants in Mughal India basically controlled their own labour-processes, with the state
moving in to demand its pound of flesh and different rungs of the rulers taking their
share of the surplus. By contrast, the capitalists share of the surplus comes due to their
control over the labour process. As long as the capitalists scales of operation were
small, they could organise this control and supervision process personally, with the help
of a small number of clerks and foremen. The growth in size of capitalist enterprises, the
growing complexity of functions, meant on one hand the transformation of clerks and
technical personnel into parts of the proletariat in an unqualified way, and on the other
hand in the growth of a new managerial cadre. The control exercised by the
management must however be distinguished from the power of the capitalists.
Capitalists owe their position not to bureaucratic appointment but to their own power,
stemming from ownership of the means of production. Barring a small layer of top
management, who are co-opted into the ruling class through various mechanisms, the
rest have operational control, not control over investments and resource allocation, and
form part of the category I am calling, after Wright, people with contradictory class
location.
Contradictory class location also explains those in the upper reaches of the educational
process, to return to a point briefly made earlier. College and University teachers are
wage-labourers who depend on the continuous sale of their labour power for survival.
An argument has been made in recent years about the upgradation of their status
through enhancement of salary. The enhancement of salary is real enough. One has only
to go to an average University to see the rapidly increasing number of cars owned by
teachers, as one indicator of their increased comfort level. But this has come along with

35
increased control. The recommendations of the Mehrotra and the Rastogi Commissions,
along with other measures by the UGC and the various state governments, have
imposed longer working hours, tighter control on what is taught and how it is taught.
This reflects the changing role of the bourgeois university in late 20th and early 21st
century India. At the same time, compared to the mass of wageworkers, college and
university teachers enjoy greater freedom at work. They can find time for research, for
Marxist activism blended with their own work in a way that a worker in a steel mill or a
bank would not.
According to Marx, non-productive labour means that though surplus labour is
extracted, it is not converted to surplus value. In other words, the non-productive
labourer too is an exploited labourer. People in contradictory class locations are often
different. Whether we call them the new middle class, the managerial-professional class,
or something else, they perform functions of capital, and are provided earnings at levels
that suggest they are getting part of the surplus. These elements, the upper white-collar
layers, have a different pattern of earning, for they can fairly expect a continuous rise
through personal (individual) promotion and career improvement. Workers, both blue
collar and ordinary white collar, can expect such improvements only through collective
action. Thus, people within the contradictory class location are closer to the capitalists
or to the workers, depending on control functions, levels of earnings, mode of life-
improvement options, etc.
To repeat, the contradictory-class-position does not only suggest a push and pull
tendency both towards the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it also suggests that this is
not a class per se, it is a heterogeneous layer produced and reproduced continuously,
that too in a contradictory fashion and on a sliding authority in the capitalist system.
Of course, in real life, there are no hard and fast boundaries between classes. These
boundaries are highly fluid changing continuously under the impact of diverse
economic and social factors.
Class and Gender:
The discussion so far has been apparently gender-neutral, and therefore, in actuality, tilted to
masculinity. If this appears a rather extreme assertion, let me make the following initial points.
First, there do not exist abstract persons, but concrete men and women. Even if our use of
language avoids referring to the worker as he, our assumptions often silently go on uttering
the masculine form. Secondly, we tend to talk about the individual person as being working
class, petty bourgeois, and so on, and to go on silently expecting an identity between the class
location of that person and the class location of the entire family of that person. By and large,
however, this turns out to mean that we locate women in terms of their fathers, husbands and
sons, depending on their age, rather than in terms of their own place in the production relations.
In families where husbands and wives are dual earners, there is much problem over examining
their class locations. At the same time, in cases where the wife is a non-earner, there too, her
location is a problem.
A key question is whether the family is the unit of analysis or not. If it is, then a white-collar wife
married to a capitalist husband poses no analytical problem, for she belongs to the capitalist
class through her family. If we asked whether a worker husband married to a petty-bourgeois
wife would count as a petty bourgeois, then the gendered assumption behind the earlier
conclusion begins to become evident.
Wrights study shows, however, that cross-class marriages are reasonably heavily present. In
the USA, his data shows, about 10% of all dual-earner marriages consist of a manager or

36
professional husband and a working-class wife. 74 When examining the crossing of boundaries,
we can take three yardsticks: crossing property boundaries, crossing authority boundaries, and
crossing skill boundaries. Chances of a cross class family being formed across property
boundaries are far slighter than such families being formed across authority boundaries. In
other words, manual worker-bourgeois linkages are the least likely. In general, relating a
womans class position through her husbands job or position in the production process is a
method strongly contested by many feminist scholars. In Joan Ackers pithy formulation, this is a
case of intellectual sexism.75 Cross class marriages, had they been extremely rare, would have
posed no more than interesting theoretical exercises. But the type of marriages being discussed
are not so rare, and with wmens employment of various kinds growing steadily under the
hammer blows of capitalism, they are regularly increasing. A non-quantitative statement is
possible here. Certain types of white-collar or intellectual labour jobs that are considered
genteel enough, are often held down by women who are wives of managers, including very
senior management who would be located within the ruling class. The schoolteachers job is an
example of such a location.
Many of these issues were debated in the wake of an article by John Goldthorpe. In his essay,
entitled Women and Class Analysis: in Defence of the Conventional View, he endorsed the
controversial view that the class of women is derived from the class of their husbands. So in the
case mentioned above, all such school teachers would be in the same category as senior
management, while male school teachers and unmarried and self-supporting women school
teachers would be in a different class. He argued that the class position of women, even when
employed, remained derivative, being determined by the class position of heads of families
(males).76 Goldthorpe does not, of course, deny that by and large, individuals, rather than
families, fill jobs in the capitalist economies. But he disputes that the class structure could be
treated as a relational map of the job structure. While it may be the case that the basic material
interests of people depend upon their relationship to the system of production, it need not be
the case that those interests depend primarily upon their individual position within production.
Insofar as families are units of consumption in which incomes from all member of the family are
pooled, then all members of the family share the same material interests and thus are in the
same class, regardless of their individual jobs.
To claim that husbands and wives have identical interests with respect to the gross income of
the family is somewhat like the argument which goes that capitalists and workers have identical
interest in maintaining the profitability of the firm (which, as long as capitalism exists, is a
logical sounding argument, but which in fact sets worker against worker) and are therefore in
the same category (which is absolutely false). Amartya Sen presents data showing that in
families under conditions of poverty, there are often great inequalities in food distribution.77 So
even when we use such a simple device as income to determine class (inadequacies of using
income as a measuring rod have been discussed earlier) it is evident that married women in the
labour force will have material interest in their own incomes and therefore distinct,
individually based class interests in their jobs. It might be argued that this constitutes gender
interest, but not class interest. This requires further analysis. But a few preliminary points could
be made. First, there is ample evidence that the proportion of family budget brought in by the
woman affects her bargaining power within the family. Second, with divorce a fact if life,
increasingly even in India where much social stigma is attached to it, married women would
have good reason to think that the potential value of the job for their class position is also
significant.
A second general criticism of Goldthorpes argument concerns his very narrow understanding of
class interests. As remarked above, class interests are not simply income-linked issues. Even if
married couples share a common consumption pattern, their location in the workplace would
set up differences. A typist burdened with extraworkload a s her company hands out VRS would
be placed in a radically different position compared to her senior management husband.
Certainly, it could be argued that a dual-earning family where one spouse is upper class is more

37
likely to see moderate behaviour from the subaltern class spouse. But that is an issue of class
consciousness and class struggle, not of being in a class.
Third, even at this level, Goldthorpe is wrong to assume that families, not individuals are the
units drawn into class struggles. It is quite possible to imagine a situation where one spouse is a
union member and activist while the other is a petty bourgeois or a manager and is hostile to
unions. There exist studies in the advanced capitalist countries where such situations have been
traced by the scholars.78 Certainly, it would be unlikely for husbands and wives to fight openly
on opposite sides of the barricades and remain husbands and wives, but barring such extreme
instances, like the wife being a strike leader in a firm where the husband is a general manager,
in other contexts they could well be involved in different and even opposed class formations.
Finally, Goldthorpe simply asserts that because the economic fate of the family is more
dependent on the husbands job, therefore the class location should be exclusively identified
with that job. When we are dealing with intermediate layers, with say the husband having an
upper white collar or contradictory class location and the wife having a lower white collar or
working class position, this is unlikely. In the advanced countries, in a good number of dual-
earning families the wife contributed a significant share.
However, beyond all thee criticisms is the problem that Goldthorpe seems to treat class like
rooms in a hotel. People come and occupy the rooms. The idea of relations between classes
disappear. For some people, obviously, the relations are mediated, not direct, for e.g., children.
But for that very reason, married working women cannot be said to have mediated relations.
They are directly related to other members of their class and to the opposite class. It could then
in fact be argued that white collar women employees who are married to men of other
(significantly different) social layers have their class psotion determined more by direct than by
mediated relations. Further study would necessitate building as model with various controls
and carrying out in depth surveys. Richard Sobels study of white collar shows that the upper
white collar in the USA is over two-thirds male while the lower white-collar is almost two-thirds
female.79 Evidently, the gender division in society continues in an age when we are supposed to
have passed all that, and the proletariat includes a high proportion of women, particularly the
white-collar proletariat. This has extremely important political lessons for organisations of the
proletariat.
In place of a conclusion:
The apparently abstract and purely academic debate over the nature of white-collar
work has been revealed as a politically serious matter. Given the decline in the
proportion of people who can be classified as industrial workers in the 19th Century
sense in the developed capitalist countries, erroneous theories have come up. On the
right there has been the claim that class struggle and political strategies based on class
struggle are dead. On the ultra-left, Maoism inspired the view that only the so-called
third world was capable of making revolutions. There were others, who believed that
late capitalism could produce its grave-diggers, but they would come from outside the
working class. In India, too, the reformism of the mainstream left, sliding into full scale
service to the bourgeoisie as it adapts to capitalist neoliberalism, has led to
recrudescence of ultraleft Maoism of the Peoples War variety. Both of course share
the merit of eschewing class struggle by the proletariat. Our study of class and the
location of white collar workers reveal that labour under late capitalism continues to be
alienated labour, exploited labour. Modern labour continues to have three key
characteristics centrality to the production process (only living labour can help the
further accumulation of capital), alienation, and economic exploitation. These are also
the objective roots of the revolutionary potential of the working class. In the present
essay, we have consciously avoided long discussions of class-consciousness. However,

38
at this point, a few brief comments are indicated. Ordinary white-collar employees
organise in unions. In Great Britain, the decade between 1969 and 1978 saw two million
new white collar employees joining unions, while only one million manual workers did
so. Histories of unions like the Railway Clerks Association show that terms and
conditions of service, such as salaries, pensions, sickness benefits, formed the core
issues.80 Coming to India, the past and present of the All India Bank Employees
association deserves a full scale study. For the present, let us note the following. The
official history of the AIBEA by P. S. Sundaresan, Vice-President of the organisation,
links the origins of the AIBEA with the history of working class struggles in general,
with the formation of the AITUC, and relates unionisation to working hours and pay and
the struggles over these issues. 81 The Imperial Bank strike of 1946 saw solidarity action
by AIBEA, and, as the author writes, It created a tremendous impression amongst the
working class fraternity that white collared employees like the working class can come
out, conduct strike actions and register victories. 82 A contradictory class-consciousness
was evident. On one hand, the forms of organisation and struggle were clearly
proletarian, and on the other hand there was a constant bid to differentiate between
white-collar employees and the working class. Over time, the situation has further
evolved. Given the nature of the collective labourer today, and the nature of functioning
of capitalism, it is not surprising that bank employees have played a major role in the
anti-neoliberalism, anti-privatisation, anti-globalisation struggles in India.
So, we would say that late capitalism strengthens the working class. It makes the
working class grow numerically, compelling layers that try to differentiate themselves
to become more and more proletarianised. The basic tensions between capital and
labour are reproduced in so-called middle-class, white-collar milieus. Ultimately, this
puts the struggle for socialism back on the agenda. But from the consciousness here and
now to a revolutionary struggle is a long story. That needs to be studied separately.
What needs to be avoided is the error of thinking that since the consciousness of certain
layers includes the idea that they are bhadraloks or that they have a higher social status,
therefore those layers must be read out of the working class. This is what bourgeois
sociology would like to do, as well as bourgeois propagandists. This is also what
ultraleft tendencies often do, when they fail to quickly make headway in recruiting from
among the workers.
There is however, no royal road to socialism. The experience of the 20th Century is
unambiguous. Substitutionism, the gaining of power on the backs of peasants, or
through the medium of a foreign army (China or Vietnam for the first, East Europe for
the second) does not lead to socialism, at least if socialism is understood in Marxs sense
as the self-emancipation of the working class. Instead, a bureaucratic dictatorship, more
or less hideous depending on the exact nature of its relationship to the working class,
takes over. Ultimately, in every case, that has meant the road back to capitalism either
led by the so-called communist party (as in China), or by a reform wing of the
bureaucracy. Socialism, as Rosa Luxemburg said nearly a century back, will be
constructed by every worker, and therefore the entire working class, in all its
complexity, must be organised and mobilised for that. To take very concrete early 21st
century models from India, it is by uniting all workers, by waging anti-globalisation
struggles, and relating them to direct living issues of the workers of all sorts that
socialist consciousness can be enhanced. The alternatives that are being presented are
the unnato bamfront of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, which is willing to evict poor settlers,
beat up brutally all protesters against the governments neoliberal policies, use the

39
terrorism scare in exactly the same way as Bush, Jr., or L.K. Advani to try to ram
through anti-democratic laws on one hand; and the warmed over, stale line of
annihilations and rural warfare presented by the CPI(ML) Peoples War. Interestingly,
both lines would like to portray the white collar employees as non-proletarians, since in
one case, that becomes an excuse for tail ending bourgeois politics and economic
dictates, and in the other case, for ruling out serious work to unite and mobilise the
proletarian masses.

Notes and References:

1
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. III, London, 1959, p.862.
2
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works [hereafter cited as MECW], vol 20, Moscow, 1985, p.14.
3
H. Forder, M. Hundt, J. Kandel and S. Lewiowa (eds), Der Bund der Kommunisten: Dokumente und
Materialen, Berlin, 1970, volI, p. 504.
4
MECW:4, p.37.
5
MECW : 6, p.495.
6
For this strategy see Kunal Chattopadhyay, Marx and the Origins of Permanent Revolution, J.U. Journal
of History, vol.X, 1989-90; and M. Lowy, The Politics of Combined end Uneven Development, London, 1981.
7
Max Weber, Economy and Society, London, 1968, p.302.
8
Ibid, p.929.
9
Ibid, p. 932.
10
Ibid, p. 938.
11
Ibid, p.931.
12
Capital, III, p.863.
13
Economy and Society, p.302.
14
Ibid. pp. 304-305. This arbitrary demarcation is also applied by Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political
Order, London, 1971.
15
Bendix, quoted by G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, London, 1981,
pp.87-88.
16
There have been attempts to argue that the Soviet bureaucracy was a bureaucratic collectivist class
(Schactman, Draper, Carter, Rizzi, Burnham), or that it was state capitalist (Cliff, Bettelheim, others). The most
effective rebuttals have come from Ernest Mandel.
17
See N. Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, London, 1975.
18
Nicos Poulantzas, The Problem of the Capitalist State, in Robin Blackburn, Ideology in Social Science,
London, 1972, p.242. For a relatively detached review of the issues involved in the Althusserain storm, see Alex
Callinicos, Althussers Marxism, London, 1976. For a very sharp humanist-Marxist riposte see E. P. Thompson,
The Poverty of Theory,
19
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, n.d., p. 509.
20
The entire history of the SWP and its split with the fourth International is tied up with this debate. To spare
the reader unnecessary digressions, I am simply adding a few references here. My own detailed reading is based
on an examination of the International Internal Discussion Bulletins of the Fourth International, the Discussion
Bulletins and Party Organizers of the SWP (USA), and public writings, like line documents and explanatory
articles by leaders of the Fourth International and the SWP. See in particular the SWP resolutions on the US
revolution from the late 1970s, and jack Barnes speech in Intercontinental Press, special issue on the 11th World
Congress of the Fourth international, 1979. Concerning the specific issue, the working class and how far the
LCR was orienting towards it, the verdict is now in. In the 2002 French Presidential elections, the LCR
outpolled the PCF candidate, and despite not having contested Presidential elections for a long time, came very
close to the votes polled by Arlette Laguiller of the Lutte Ouvrier, a Trotskyist party in France which holds a
definition of the working class similar to the one held by the SWP or Poulantzas. This was followed by direct
contests between the LCR and the LO in the parliamentary polls, where in a number of cases the LCR outpolled
the LO even in its chosen areas. This suggests that it was the LCR which correctly identified the new working
class elements and turned to them as equally important segments.
21
Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 16 July, 1962.
22
G.E.M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, p.31.
23
Ibid, p.32.
24
Ibid, p.42.
25
See Ira Katznelson, Introduction, in I. Katznelson and A. R. Zolberg (eds), Working Class Formation:
Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, London, 1986.
26
G. A. Cohen: Karl Marxs Theory of History: A Defence, Princeton, 1978, p.73.

40
27
R. Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society, London, 1959, p.
28
MECW:6, p.211.
29
MECW: 11, pp.187-8. For a full treatment of Marxs handling of the peasantry as a class, see Kunal
Chattopadhyay, Marx, Engels and the Peasant Question 1: The Peasantry as a Social Class ; J.U. Journal of
History, vol.V, 1984; Marx, Engels and the Peasant Question 2: Towards a Worker-Peasant Alliance; Journal
of History, vol.VII, 1986-87, pp. 143 170; Marx, Engels and the Peasant Question 3 : The Experience of the
French Revolutions, Journal of History, vol. VIII, 1987-88, pp. 71 - 90.
30
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, 1968, p.9.
31
Ibid, p.10.
32
Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence
[henceforth MESC], Moscow 1965, p.69.
33
For the long war on the native Americans, see Kunal Chattopadhyay, 'The Frontier, democracy and
development: Space and Power in Capitalist Development in the United States', in Ranjan Chakrabarti (ed),
Space and Power in History: Images, Ideologies, Myths and Moralities, Calcutta, Penman, 2001.
34
Marx Engels Werke, Berlin, 1965, bd. XXV, p.799.
35
Capital, vol II, P 134, note.
36
K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 1, Moscow 1973, p. 152.
37
Ibid, p.157.
38
missing
39
K. Marx, Capital, vol. I, p.508.
40
K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. II, p.398.
41
K. Marx, Capital, III, p.292.
42
K. Marx, Capital, I, p.509.
43
K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value:I , p.278; K. Marx, Grundrisse, English translation by Martin Nicolaus,
London, 1973, p.533.
44
K. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 328-9.
45
K. Marx, Capital:III, p.81.
46
Eric Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State, London 1978, p.49.
47
E. Mandel, Introduction to K. Marx, Capital:I, Harmondsworth, 1976, p.47.
48
Source: Robert Price and George Sayers Bain, Union Growth Revisited: 1948-1974 in Perspective, British
Journal of Industrial Relations, November 1976, p.346.
49
A. Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, London, 1982.
50
Philip Bassett, Strike Free: New Industrial Relations in Britain, London, 1986.
51
Marxism Today, October 1982, p.11.
52
See also his interview with Bea Campbell, Marxism Today, September 1986.
53
David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker: A Study in Class Consciousness, London, 1958. See, for e.g.,
pp.202-211.
54
Geeta Mukherjee, interviewed by Soma Marik, 19 October 1999.
55
David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker, p. 36.
56
G. Carchedi, on the Economic Identification of the New Middle Class, Economy and Society, 4(1), pp.1-86,
1975; C. Wright Mills, White Collar, New York, 1951; F. Croner, Die Angestellten in der modernen
Gesselschaft, Frankfurt am-Main, 1954. The works of Dahrendorf and Poulantzas have already been cited
earlier.
57
K. Marx, Capital III, p.294.
58
On automation, see Friedrich Pollock, Automation, Frankfurt, 1964, p.16.
59
K. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 703-4.
60
Leonard S. Silk, The Research Revolution, New York, 1960, Edwin Mansfield, The Economics of
Technological Change, London, 1969.
61
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, London 1993 reprint of 1975 original, p.259.
62
Paul le Blanc, A Short History of the U. S. Working Class, Amherst, N.Y., 1999, pp. 9-10.
63
Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, London, 1986, pp.211, 234.
64
Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, The Changing Working Class, London 1989 (reprint of 1987 original),
p.31.
65
Calculated Benefits, in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 13 August 2002, Jobs (Supplement), p.1.
66
E. O. Wright, Class Counts, Cambridge, 1997.
67
B. and J. Ehrenreich, The Professional-Managerial Class, in P. Walker ed., Between Labour and Capital,
Hassocks, 1979. The book is a collection of articles over this issue, with articles in response to the Ehrenreichs
and their reply.

41
68
See, for example S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd, Cambridge, 1983; D. Mandel, The Petrograd Workers' and the
Fall of the Old Regime, New York, 1984.
69
Theories of Surplus Value: 1,pp.395-6.
70
For the present writers analysis of the petty bourgeoisie and its role in fascism, see K. Chattopadhyay, The
Fascist Upsurge, in K. Chattopadhyay, ed, The Genocidal Pogrom in Gujarat: Anatomy of Indian Fascism,
Baroda, 2002.
71
To avoid a digression in the text, I am adding in these notes a brief comment. While it is true that the petty
bourgeoisie, including the peasantry, can be pulled in a revolutionary direction by the working class, the strategy
of popular frontism, which consists of alliances between working class parties and bourgeois parties with petty
bourgeois social bases, has the opposite effect. It demobilises the working class in the name of setting an
advance limit on how far the class struggle can proceed without upsetting the petty bourgeoisie. The makers of
this strategy, from opportunists in late 19th century, via the Stalinist strategy-makers of the Comintern in the
Second Chinese revolution and Dimitrov on to Hobsbawm or the CPI(M), deliberately garble the issue. The task
of a revolutionary alliance is to win over the petty bourgeoisie to the revolution through a militant strategy, not
an alliance with so-called petty bourgeois parties that will become brakes on militancy.
72
From E. O. Wright, Class Counts, Table 4.3, p. 124.
73
J. Goldthorpe, On the Service Class, its Formation and Future, in A. Giddens and G. Mackenzie (editors),
Social Class and the Division of Labour, pp. 168-169.
74
E. O. Wright, Class Counts,p.227.
75
Acker, J., Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism, American Journal of Sociology
78, 4:936-945, 1973.
76
John Goldthorpe, Women and class Analysis: In Defence of the Conventional View, Sociology 17: 468-9,
1983.
77
Amartya Sen, Family and Food: Sex Bias in Poverty, in Amartya Sen, Resources, Values and Development,
London, 1984.
78
See for example C. Costello, Were Worth It: Women and Collective Action in the Insurance Workplace,
Champaign, Il., 1991.
79
Richard Sobel, The White Collar Working Class: From Structure to Politics, Westport, Conn., 1989, p.51.
80
See Robert Price, Introduction, to part II of Richard Hyman and Robert Price eds, The New Working Class?
White Collar Workers and their Organisations, London and Basingstoke, 1983, `51-152, 156-160.
81
Com. P. S. Sundaresan, A Trade Union Odyssey, Bangalore 1996, pp.1-11.
82
Ibid., p.68.

42
 Appendix - I

When they speak for themselves

An interesting aspect of white-collar existence is that the majority of the leaders and the
ideologues within the white-collar employees movement do not always accept the reality
that they are parts of the working class. Rather there is a strong tendency to identify the
white-collar employees as a separate identity other than the working class. We can talk about
a number of reasons for this unwillingness to accept the proletarian identity. First, in every
country there is a history of how the proletariat is formed and re-formed. The first entry of
Bhadraloks in Calcutta's labour organisations is over a century old. During the swadeshi
movement period, this increased. The strike of clerks of Burn Company, Howrah, in
September 1905, protesting against a mechanical means of recording attendance times was
significant. But precisely because in Bengal for instance the white collar employees came
from a Bhadralok background (i.e., petty landlord, or urban pseudo-landlord style origins),
they sought to retain a formal appearance as distinct as possible from the low caste majoors
who were often up country peasants seeking seasonal jobs. Another factor is that the ruling
class necessarily tries to divide the proletariat through a whole series of techniques, because it
would prefer a buffer, rather than push all the sellers of labour-power towards greater unity.
To call a clerk baboo, or its equivalent, and so on, should be viewed as much in such a
context. We can cite the case of a low-level engineer who was sacked from a small concern
because his bosses saw him taking a cup of tea with ordinary workers. As discussed in the
main essay, from an early stage, there was a tendency, not only in India but globally, to
conceptualise the white-collar employees as petty bourgeois or new middle class in
character. The left, even as it organised unions, sought to refurbish this notion of a petty
bourgeois/ non-proletarian workforce, perhaps at times tactically so that the workforce would
at least agree to be unionised (as a member of a University Teachers' Union, the present
writer can testify to the resistance even now to calling it a trade union). Yet, the moderate
leaders and the ruling class alike cannot protect this supposedly distinct identity, but are
forced to accept the reality. Here are a few examples from different white collar
organizations.

1.The Medical Sales Representatives often refer themselves as field workers and behave as a
constituent of working class.
a) The main heading in the organ of Federation of Medical & Sales Representatives
Association of India: Fifty thousand field workers expressed solidarity with IDC field
workers.
b) FMRAI observed May Day 1999, and its report was highlighted in its organ;
FMRAI, its units and members observed this years May Day throughout the
country. May Day, International workers day became significant now in the
background of neocolonial attacks through globalisation . [FMRAI NEWS, July
1999]

43
 c) Here is a leaflet issued in 2000 (undated) jointly by CITU, AWBSRU, Association
of Chemical Workers etc. The leaflet, while highlighting various forms of onslaught
on the employees and workers of Sandoz by its management, urges the readers to
participate in the movement against the anti-working-class activities of the
multinational.
d) The Organisational Report of National Federation of Sales Representatives Unions
placed before the General Council on 26th and 27th July, 2002 by the Secretary of the
Federation was concluded with the slogans : Long Live Unity of Sales Workers and
Long Live Working Class Unity.
e) The sales representatives of Pharmaceutical companies have often been referred as
workers in the Bulletins of All West Bengal Sales Representative Union.
2. a) White discussing Labour law for the New Millennium, the AIBEA explicitly
demands:
There must be universal coverage, doing away with the limitations on coverage
under different existing laws and cover all the establishments/undertakings
irrespective of the number they employ and the nature of the undertaking or the
activities or the salary/wage limits. Only those who exercise substantial powers of
management are to be left out. This is also in line with the fundamental human rights
converting of the ILO. (June 99, Bank Flag, organ of AIBEA )
b) One of the lead articles in Bank Flag to commemorate May Day begins with the
heading:
The Working Class movement showing resurgence and facing new challenges; and
concludes with the call:
Let this May Day, 1998 be pledged to carry forward our Trade Union activity
towards raising the class consciousness of the working people, making them aware of
their political role as a class, defending class and national interest . [May 98 Bank
Flag]
3. The Forum of Public Sector Workers and Officers has been formed of which Bank
employees are one of the important constituents. On its behalf, a Charter of Workers was
prepared and it was submitted to all the political parties of the country. The charter begins
with the call:
To all political Parties
Working class has expectations from you (Feb 98, Bank Flag)
4. a)The organ of the Coordination Committee of the Associations of Central
Government Employees of West Bengal, The Coordination in its May Day special
issue of 1998 highlights the historic call:
The working class has nothing to loose but their chains. in its front page
b)The editorial of the same issue begins with the following :
The movement has to be developed on the basis of working class ideology.
c) In the lead article of the May Day issue of 1999 the government employees were
repeatedly referred to as a part of the working class.

44
 d) In a number of articles in The Co-ordination, the struggle against capitalism and
fight for socialism have been declared as the historical mission of the government
employees. If they are some different class, especially madhyabitto ( middle-income
class), how do the authors, or the leaders of the employees' movement, explain the
fact that their historical mission coincides with that of the working class!
[Refer, articles in Jan-98, Nov-99 )
Sukomal Sen, a leading figure in the govt employees movement even tried to prove the case
theoretically.
In the March 1998 issue, he wrote an article with the title: Communist Manifesto and the
unquestioned relevance of proletarian revolution. While discussing the effect of the
development of capitalist research and inventions on the structure of the working class, he
directs the attentions of the readers towards the re-union of the intellectual and productive
activities and the entry of intellectual labour into the production process, and eventual
drastic change of the structure of the working class due to the relative increase of the service
sector and skilled intellectual workers with respect to the industrial workers. Then he
showed theoretically why and how these intellectual elements in the production process
should he treated as the working class. Ironically, Sen's party, now in power in West Bengal,
has given a different kind of proof. The West Bengal Government has issued a Government
Order, imposing a forty-hour work-week on College and University teachers. This has been
analysed by the present author elsewhere.
5. In the second issue (26.7.2001) of Srambarta, the organ of the Bluestar Workers (Cal)
Union, the Union while making an appeal to fight against the drive for V.R.S never forgets to
refer to both the white collar and blue-collar employees as member of the working class.
The examples may be increased manifold. There may be some more interesting observations
and comments. But, the above examples are sufficient to prove that though the members and
leadership and rank-and-file of the white collar employees or intellectual labourers, often like
to pose as a collective group possessing a separate identity other than the working class, and
sometimes even refer themselves as a different class, middle class or Madhyabitto,
whenever they face an onslaught either by the management or government-- they are forced
to relate their existence and their struggles with the broader sections of the working class and
recognise their real class-identity. Not only that, whenever they try to locate their position
historically, they do not find any separate historical existence or mission; they have to relate
themselves with the great historical events of the working class like May Day, November
Revolution etc.

45
 Appendix- II

Questionnaire

Please fill up the following form:-

Instruction

Please mark afor positive reply andr for negative.

If there is more than one answer that you may feel is correct in * marked question, then put
number according to your preference (1,2,3). For any clarification you may contact by
phone: 465-2507; or email: sengautam@hotmail.com, or contact the person who has given
you this form.

1. Identity:

Gender: Male 1 Female1 Profession. Age

Salary/wage (per month) Rs. City/town/village & State.

Monthly income (if any) of spouse Rs
No. of dependents in the family:
No. of students in the family:
Educational Qualification of the respondent: Madhyamik1 H.S.1 Graduate1 Post
Graduate1 Other.1
Name of workplace:
Post. Working1 Retired1

Type of household items owned: B/W TV1 Colour TV1 Cycle1 Phone1 Computer1
Washing Machine1 Fridge1 Motorbike1 Scooter1 Car1 Other1

Type of residence: Tenant1 Ownership1 Quarter1 Other.1

Amount of area where the residents reside:..sq.ft/sq.metre.

2. In which class do you place yourself?*

Middle-income1 Employee1 Worker1 Other1 [You may prefer more than one]

3. a. If you include yourself in a class other than the working class then why?*
Not directly participating in production Way of living Presence of consumer goods
lime TV etc. Higher income Higher cultural standard Educational qualification

46
Being close to the authority For doing less physical labour For receiving special
esteem from the society Other
b. If there are workers in your work place, how do you differentiate with them?
Earning more income Having different culture Receiving sympathetic behaviour from
the authorities Superior position in the hierarchy Getting special advantage Have to
do less laborious work
c. If there are workers in your workplace, then do you belong to the same
union/association? Yes No
d. In your enterprise
Do the officers and the employees use the same canteen? Yes No Not relevant
Do the employees and the workers use the same canteen? Yes No Not relevant
Do the officers and the employees use the same lavatory?Yes No Not relevant
Do the employees and the workers use the same lavatory?Yes No Not relevant

4. What is your attitude towards your relation with owner/management?*

Feel that the owner/management and yourself belong to the same family
Enjoy the same right with respect to them in cases of major decision making
Feel fraternal andamicable relationship with them
The relationship is such that they give orders and you have to obey those for your
livelihood
Others..

4. If you include yourself within the ranks of the working class, then why?*
Being deprived from decision making feeling alienation from the whole working
process always have to obey orders of the boss if retrenched, there will be no other
way of earning livelihood

6. Are you member of any Trade Union/ Association? Yes No

a. If you are a member, then why?*

The organisation pressurises There is a compulsion to remain in this or that
organisation To get personal benefit To develop collective fight for getting
protection against the onslaught of owner/ management and to maintain standard of
livelihood
b. If you are not a member, then why?*

47
 The organisation does not protect the interest of rank and file workforce There is a
lack of democracy in each and every organisation
The leadership is opportunistic No personal interest will be served The trade union
movement is harmful

7. How can you protect yourself from the onslaught of owner/management in the best
way?
Through individual bargaining Through lobbying Joining collective struggle
Other

8. Do you feel deprivation or/and uncertainty in your life? Yes No

If yes,
a. Whom/what do you make responsible for that?*
Own fate Owner/ management Callous government Because a few own or
control all the means of production Inequality in distribution of resources and wealth
Capitalist system

b. How do your react?

Feel helpless get angry intend to protest feel that united resistance would be
more effective desire to change the society desire to change the government
Other..

9. Have you ever participated in a strike/s? Yes No

10. How do you evaluate the strike movement?*

Should not be called A natural weapon for self-defence and bargaining A last
resort
11. Do you observe May Day? Yes No

If yes, do you raise the slogan: Workers of all countries unite? Yes No

If yes, do you feel uneasy? Yes No Do you feel natural? Yes No

Analysis of the Survey

A survey had been planned to facilitate our research work. The questionnaire has been given
above. However, it was soon recognized that this would not be an adequate sample survey.
So the results are presented as simply pointers to further research.

48
Mode of survey
Initially, the researcher prepared questionnaire which would help white collar employees to
self-evaluate their class behaviour and position themselves. The researcher then selected a
group of persons attached to white collar unions or mixed unions and explained the content.
The selected persons passed the questionnaire to different individuals in different sectors.
The respondents include a wide variety of professions: clerks, nurses, teachers,
chemists, draughtsmen, officers and others. The establishments covered were also of
various nature : steel, coal, college, school, banking, media, post and telecom and
other.

The total number of respondents was 106.

The number of white-collar respondents was 102.
The number of blue-collar respondents was 4. These blue-collar employees were
inadvertently included in the evaluation process.

Observation
Out of 102 white-collar respondents, 58 opted to declare themselves as members of
working class ( category A), while 44 placed themselves as non-workers ( category B).

1.So far the consumer pattern is concerned the majority of both the categories
possess CTV, Fridge, Phone: a few in both the categories possess two wheelers and
computers.

2. Within category A, the salary/wages range from Rs. 1,500 to Rs. 20,000 a month.
Their educational qualifications vary from Madhyamik to Post-Graduate. The
variation of wage/salary in category B is from Rs. 4,000 to Rs. 20,000 pm: the
average earning in category B is slightly higher than category A. The educational
qualification in category B is more or less similar to category A. The tenant/ house or
flat ownership pattern is evenly distributed between the categories.

3. Though the respondents of category B highlight one or a combination of the

following points:
i)Not directly participation in production, ii) style/manner of living, iii) Educational
qualification, iv) doing less physical labour to designate themselves as middle class
and/or employees and though a good number of respondents in category B feel that
they have amicable relationship with the management and enjoy some right in
decision making process, yet
a) Almost all of them declare that they have to obey unquestioningly the orders of
their bosses;
b) A majority of them are members of some Trade Union or Association; and almost
all of them joined Trade Union to fight their cause collectively;
c) All 44 respondents feel deprivation and uncertainty in their lives and blame
either management or government or unequal distribution or capitalist system or
their different combination for the same.
d) All 44 respondents participated in strike movement and out of them 20 consider
strike as a natural weapon and 32 as a last weapon.
e) 42 respondents observe May Day and out of them 32 feel no unease in raising the
slogan Workers of all countries unite. Only two are not in the habit of observing
May Day.

49
4. The 4 blue-collar employees did not express any specific differentiation while
expressing their consumer pattern or relation with management/owner. Their
attitude towards trade union movement, strike or May Day observation also do not
show anything marked contrast with respect to the Categories A or B.

Inference

The dominant tendency of the observations of the respondents corroborate our

theoretical position i.e the white collar employees, though not always conscious of
their class position, belong to the working class. Admittedly, this is a brief survey. It
has neither a big enough data base nor has any attempt been made to draw out
elaborate statistical conclusions (chiefly because the narrowness of the data base
suggested the futility of such an exercise). However, this survey indicates lines along
which a bigger project could be undertaken. Two areas where special care should be
taken in case of a bigger survey are the following: first, the positions of women when
we are considering married women with husbands holding a different category of
jobs, as well as unmarried women living with parents where the father holds a
different category of job; and second, the differences, if any, between those
employees who work in exclusively white collar sectors, and those who work in mixed
enterprises (for e.g., white collar employees in factories, where differences between
white-collar and blue-collar might be clearly evident).

Bibliography

This is not intended as an exhaustive bibliography. It includes most books and articles used in
writing the report, which have been footnoted. It also includes certain books and articles
which are important for pursuing new lines of inquiry.

1. Abbott, Pamela and Geoff Payne (eds.), The Social Mobility of Women: Beyond Male
Mobility Models, London, 1990.

50
2. Acker, J., Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism,
American Journal of Sociology 78, 4:936-945, 1973.
3. Bain, George. S., The Growtrh of White-Collar Unionism: The Rebellious Salariat,
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