Working Class of India
Author: Sukomal Sen
Publisher:
Published: 1970
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPosts
Rethinking Working-Class History
Author: Dipesh Chakrabarty
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-06-05
Total Pages: 269
ISBN-13: 0691188211
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDipesh Chakrabarty combines a history of the jute-mill workers of Calcutta with a fresh look at labor history in Marxist scholarship. Opposing a reductionist view of culture and consciousness, he examines the milieu of the jute-mill workers and the way it influenced their capacity for class solidarity and "revolutionary" action from 1890 to 1940. Around and within this empirical core is built his critique of emancipatory narratives and their relationship to such Marxian categories as "capital," "proletariat," or "class consciousness." The book contributes to currently developing theories that connect Marxist historiography, post-structuralist thinking, and the traditions of hermeneutic analysis. Although Chakrabarty deploys Marxian arguments to explain the political practices of the workers he describes, he replaces universalizing Marxist explanations with a sensitive documentary method that stays close to the experience of workers and their European bosses. He finds in their relationship many elements of the landlord/tenant relationship from the rural past: the jute-mill workers of the period were preindividualist in consciousness and thus incapable of participating consistently in modern forms of politics and political organization.
The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India
Author: Rajnarayan Chandavarkar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 496
ISBN-13: 9780521525954
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first major study of the relationship between labour and capital in India's economic development in the early twentieth-century. The author considers the spread of capitalism and the growth of the cotton textile industry.
Classes of Labour
Author: Jonathan Parry
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-20
Total Pages: 549
ISBN-13: 1351362844
DOWNLOAD EBOOKClasses of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town is a classic in the social sciences. The rigour and richness of the ethnographic data of this book and its analysis is matched only by its literary style. This magnum opus of 732 pages, an outcome of fieldwork covering twenty-one years, complete with diagrams and photographs, reads like an epic novel, difficult to put down. Professor Jonathan Parry looks at a context in which the manual workforce is divided into distinct social classes, which have a clear sense of themselves as separate and interests that are sometimes opposed. The relationship between them may even be one of exploitation; and they are associated with different lifestyles and outlooks, kinship and marriage practices, and suicide patterns. A central concern is with the intersection between class, caste, gender and regional ethnicity, with how class trumps caste in most contexts and with how classes have become increasingly structured as the ‘structuration’ of castes has declined. The wider theoretical ambition is to specify the general conditions under which the so-called ‘working class’ has any realistic prospect of unity.
The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder
Author: David Webber
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-04-02
Total Pages: 351
ISBN-13: 0674972139
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers led a shareholder revolt that unseated three of Burd’s boardroom allies. In The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, David Webber uses cases such as Safeway’s to shine a light on labor’s most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and under constant assault in Washington, state houses, and the courts, worker organizations are beginning to exercise muscle through markets. Shareholder activism has been used to divest from anti-labor companies, gun makers, and tobacco; diversify corporate boards; support Occupy Wall Street; force global warming onto the corporate agenda; create jobs; and challenge outlandish CEO pay. Webber argues that workers have found in labor’s capital a potent strategy against their exploiters. He explains the tactic’s surmountable difficulties even as he cautions that corporate interests are already working to deny labor’s access to this powerful and underused tool. The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder is a rare good-news story for American workers, an opportunity hiding in plain sight. Combining legal rigor with inspiring narratives of labor victory, Webber shows how workers can wield their own capital to reclaim their strength.
The Labor of Development
Author: Patrick Heller
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-10-18
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 1501720732
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe state of Kerala in southern India is notable for the ways in which lower-class mobilization and state intervention have combined to create one of the most successful cases of social and redistributive development in the Third World. In contrast to predictions that labor militancy in developing countries threatens to overload fledgling democratic institutions and derail economic growth, The Labor of Development shows that the political and economic inclusion of industrial and agricultural workers in Kerala set the stage for a democratically negotiated capitalist transformation.When compared to the other Indian states, Kerala's departure from the national pattern is tied to its history of social movements and highlights the significance of understanding sub-national patterns of democratic consolidation and state building. The case of Kerala provides important theoretical insights into the circumstances under which the expansion of political and social citizenship can become the basis for managing economic change. Using examples from agriculture, industry, and the informal sector, Patrick Heller examines the institutional and political dynamics through which the demands of organized labor and the imperatives of capitalist growth have evolved from a period of open conflict and stagnation to one of class compromise. He also demonstrates that the Kerala model has broad ramifications for understanding the relationship between substantive democracy and market economies in low-income countries.
India’s Middle Class
Author: Christiane Brosius
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-06-12
Total Pages: 401
ISBN-13: 1136704841
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is one of the first ethnographic studies to examine the complexities of lifestyles of the the upwardly mobile middle classes in India in the new millennium. It reveals an original theory on cosmopolitan Indianness and urbanisation in the age of globalisation.
The Making of the Madras Working Class
Author: Tē Vīrarākavan̲
Publisher:
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 9789380118161
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWorking Class Movement in India in the Wake of Globalization
Author: Jose George
Publisher:
Published: 2012-01-01
Total Pages: 470
ISBN-13: 9788173049637
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfter the collapse of the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the East European communist bloc, capitalism abandoned its liberal programmes worldwide, and this brought about three-fourths of the worlds population at the mercy of the blind and ruthless forces of the market. In India too, the wave of liberalization under a new economic policy, which had been agreed upon and promoted by both the big political parties, i.e. Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, put untold pressures, uncertainties and hardships on the toiling masses. Welfare schemes and subsidies to goods and services provided by the state were slowly withdrawn and the representative class of finance capital took a reactionary posture in political and social life. In India, the crisis at grass-roots' levels has led to a historical unity among trade unions affiliated with different political parties, and there is hope that they may join hands in the struggle for better living conditions. Against this backdrop, this book, which is an outcome of a national seminar, tries to understand and analyse the conditions of the working class people in India. Various dimensions of working class peoples life and politics have been deliberated here. Also, an attempt has been made to present a working class perspective on various economic and social issues of contemporary Indian society.
The Dignity of Working Men
Author: Michèle Lamont
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-06-30
Total Pages: 406
ISBN-13: 0674039882
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMichèle Lamont takes us into the world inhabited by working-class men--the world as they understand it. Interviewing black and white working-class men who, because they are not college graduates, have limited access to high-paying jobs and other social benefits, she constructs a revealing portrait of how they see themselves and the rest of society. Morality is at the center of these workers' worlds. They find their identity and self-worth in their ability to discipline themselves and conduct responsible but caring lives. These moral standards function as an alternative to economic definitions of success, offering them a way to maintain dignity in an out-of-reach American dreamland. But these standards also enable them to draw class boundaries toward the poor and, to a lesser extent, the upper half. Workers also draw rigid racial boundaries, with white workers placing emphasis on the "disciplined self" and blacks on the "caring self." Whites thereby often construe blacks as morally inferior because they are lazy, while blacks depict whites as domineering, uncaring, and overly disciplined. This book also opens up a wider perspective by examining American workers in comparison with French workers, who take the poor as "part of us" and are far less critical of blacks than they are of upper-middle-class people and immigrants. By singling out different "moral offenders" in the two societies, workers reveal contrasting definitions of "cultural membership" that help us understand and challenge the forms of inequality found in both societies.
