Anatomy of the Subaltern

A theorization of the future world, without a critical analysis of the working class and their relationships to society
and the political economy would be an incomplete theorization. Perspective of power relations in the domain of
class struggle and the co-ordinates of power that affect more than 90% of the world population is certainly the most
intriguing area in the study of power. This study would however, not explore the facets of the working class, its
struggle and its future goals upon which volumes have been written.

To outline a brief route map of this study, it would begin with the differentiators that make the working class, the
historical perspective of the working class movement and how the differentiators have transformed with the progress
of the Industrial era and finally identification of the true working class.

To briefly state who the proletariat was, as Marx had seen them in mid nineteenth century Europe, one may refer to
some lucid texts of Engels. “The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and
does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence
depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled
competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.”46 For
Marx and Engels, the Proletariat did not always exist but, were the product of the Industrial Revolution of Europe
that happened in the later half of the eighteenth century. What is noticeable here is the “whole existence depends
upon the demand for labor”! Before this rhetoric can proceed any further to dig up the Anatomy of the Proletariat, it
is important to have a cursory glance at the settings in which the class was born and where the spirit of capitalism
nestled.

Eric Hobsbawm feels that the world of the European Revolutions was a smaller one. While the known world was
constantly expanding courtesy the colonizing forces of Europe and their surveyors, the real world, in terms of its
population was also small. Against a 600 million of the present population, Europe had only 187 million in the 18th
Century. The Europeans were also a smaller and lighter creed. Taking an example from an European army: in one
canton in the Ligurian coast, 72% of the recruits in 1792 – 99 were less than 1.5 metres (5ft 2 in) tall.47 But then,
the world increased by a rapid pace as the time-space reference frames shrunk. Towards the end of the 1700s, the
journey between London and Glasgow shortened from a tiring 10 – 12 days to about 62 hours. Each day, the
distances shrank and with the coming of railways and the speedier postal service, the world was not considered vast
and unfathomable any longer. But while connectivity shortened the space time gap between the Capital cities and
commercial centres, the distance between the city and the village increased. “The news of the fall of Bastille reached
the populace of Madrid within 13 days; but in Peronne, a bare 133 Km from the capital, the ‘news from Paris’ was
not received until the 28th”48.

Increasing connectivity among capital cities and power centers reflected everything the bourgeois revolution of 1789
stood for – denouncing nobility; its charter upheld equal rights of human being based on utilities. This created
Marx’s Working Class, the revolutionary proletariat of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. As Engels
mentioned “There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But
there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there
have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions”.49 It was the
condition of the Working Class in the nineteenth century that had led Marx to pen the Theory pf Class Struggle. It is
the condition, not necessarily the ‘economic condition’.

Europe’s semi-urban and agrarian societies are the nerve centers that seriously affected the progress of the Industrial
Society. Beyond the prosperous commercial areas, which were few and far between, 80% of the population was
countrymen. In England, the first time the urban population outpaced the rural, was in 1851. Hobsbawm points out
about a score of names that could be seriously called ‘Urban’ in strict sense of the term. It was the provincial towns
that dominated the scenario. Belonging essentially to the countryside economy, the provincial towns were ‘urban’ in
their industrial skewness. The marketplace was dominated by trading and merchant establishments, serving as the
bridge for food grains and raw materials for an industrial society in its infancy. Despite its classical and somewhat
nourished townscape, the real prosperity in the pre-industrial Europe hailed from the countryside.

The Agrarian problem was fundamental in the world of 1789, and the core of the problem was the relation between
those who produced its wealth and who accumulated it. Europe and its colonies in the west and the growing colonial
infestation in the eastern hemisphere brought in a different agrarian problem, with more resources pouring in. The
peasant was a serf working as forced labour on the lord’s land, or in some other chore; a large part served as
domestics. “Servile agriculture produced largely export crops for the importing countries of the west.”50
Hobsbawm says that the Industrial Revolution just “broke out” because without it the impersonal groundswell of
history cannot be understood. This helps in understanding Engels’ statement “The Proletariat originated in the
industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last half of the last (18th) century, and which has since then
been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world.”51
This industrial revolution started with the discovery of the steam engine, spinning machines, the mechanical loom,
and many other mechanical devices. These equipments that required capital investments, altered the whole mode of
production and displaced the former workers, as the machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than the
workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and handlooms. The capitalists soon had everything in
their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system. This system
spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, pottery, and the metal
industries.
“Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who previously had done a
complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of labor made it possible to produce things
faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions
which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one
after another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had
already done.
But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were deprived of whatever
independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture but also handicrafts came within the
province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge
workshops, which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labor.”52
The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the
means of subsistence and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the
means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie. The class of the wholly property less, who are
obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support.
This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.
Engels states that Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same
laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two
come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence,
the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of
precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent
the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this
purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, and required for the
maintenance of life. However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker
sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the industrialist, on the
average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than what they cost, similarly on the
average the worker gets no more and no less than his minimum.
Engels’ response to the condition of the working class before Industrial revolution was that the class was in the
service of petty bourgeois masters. Gradually, the working classes have always, according to the different stages of
development of society, lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes.
In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward countries and even in
the southern part of the United States. In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they
still are in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there
were also journeymen in the cities who worked as manufacture developed; these journeymen became manufacturing
workers who were even then employed by larger capitalists. As opposed to slaves and serfs, proletariat is a free
entity. The middle ages slave was the property of one master, and despite his miserable condition, he is assured of an
existence. The serf, is a tool of agricultural production owning a piece of land or one he is allowed to till in
exchange of a part of his produce.
The proletarian has to sell his labour every hour of the day, to the industrial masters to earn his existence. He works
with the instruments and materials provided by him by the industrial master and have a part of the produce as the
exchange value of its labour only and only if the master needs it. Engels has delved deeper into a subjective analysis
of how the proletariat differs from the handicraftsman and the production worker who owns tools. But his contention
remains that while at the wake of the industrial revolution, with the coming of the steam engine and other steam
powered mills, not only did the labour intensive industries suffered as they went out of business, but the proletarian
suffered in general as they now have a more powerful competition in machines and they now produce products that
are more powerful unto themselves.

This power of the inanimate produce of the human beings that alienate workers from their labour and the workers
survive at the mercy of the fruits of their labour is Alienation that runs in Marx’s work from his writings on
Feurbach, through German Ideology and the EPM (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). The foundation, the
logic of the rise of Alienation of the Proletariat, though economic in nature, runs as the primary philosophical basis
of Marx’s theorization all across. Alienation has been the prime differentiator between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, its conditions and its coordinates in history and the political economy.

‘The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent.
The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. The devaluation of the human
world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things. Labor not only produces
commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which
it produces commodities in general. This fact simply means that the object that labor produces, it product, stands
opposed to it as something alien,
as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor embodied and made material in an object, it is
the objectification of labor. The realization of labor is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy, this
realization of labor appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object,
and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation [Entausserung].’53 Marx felt that the estrangement of labour is the
single most important factor that takes differentiates the proletariat from the rest of the population. Despite all the
rise and fall that had taken place after Marx’ death and notwithstanding the economic determinism the communist
parties resorted to while running for the socialist dream, alienation still happens to be the key differentiator of the
bourgeois and the proletariat.

Before moving on to analyze the anatomy of today’s subaltern, this study takes three quantum leaps: a century from
the time the EPM was written; a century and a quarter when history started defining the third world and colonialism
found a new face in the American perpetrations and the liberalization of the world economy in the last decade of
20th Century when the condition of the working class faced a paradigm shift. It is important for the reader to realize,
more than when & what happened that changed the face of the working class, why such changes were instituted.

Towards the end of the Second World War, a politically turbulent world was reeling in the whirlpool of social crises.
This was the world war where the alliance had huge socio-political differences amongst themselves fighting an
opposition that was a consortium of nation spaced apart geographically and culturally. To top up the effervescent
mug, the nuclear programmes of the USA and the USSR and ruined infrastructure and economic conditions of
various countries made existence miserable for the workers. Loss of home, life and employment created the
singularly most difficult condition for the middle and the working class. Films and literature of the Second World
War settings reflected heavily the crises of the subaltern. While the situation was difficult enough in the affluent
west, in the eastern hemisphere and Latin American societies people were faced with starvation and death. Man
made famines ravaged the 40’s and the 50’s in India and South East Asia. This was also the time for the single
largest social divorce in the history of mankind – the Indian partition. The aftermath of WW II ensured small
intensity conflicts and small scale wars all over the world. In the middle of all these trouble, the success of the
socialist governments and the rise of people’s revolution in the third world societies induced confidences is a highly
politicized working class and made them conscious of workers’ rights. The industrial environment was charged up.
As the poorer and the marginalized countries defeated the colonial and the imperialist forces in their goal of
establishing a socialist government that abolishes inequalities goes to show the desperation of the subaltern owing to
miserable socio-economic conditions. A century after the EPM was written, the working class was reliving Karl
Marx’ dream of a classless world and a human society unimpeded by national boundaries.

The dreams of a classless world with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat got better with time and the 60’s world was
an era of the triumph of the working class. By the time the EPM and the Communist Manifesto was a century an a
quarter old, nations like China, Vietnam and Cuba went socialist. The story of Uncle Ho and the romantic Che was
doing rounds on the subaltern lips. At the same point in time, students were agitating against organized western
alliances and atrocities in various parts of the world. The sweeping waves of the campus uprising, French students’
uprising, the Naxalbari movements and the liberation of Bangladesh were colouring the 60’s red. The Proletariat
found a loyal and a sympathetic comrade in the middle class people. The world revolution, the union of workers at a
global scale and the end of inequalities all seemed real in the 60’s and early 70’s. The people of Vietnam and Cuba
made a joke out of the American perpetration to such an extent that Hollywood was soon making scores of movies
to cover-up the Vietnam defeat. Ironically, many of these insensitive movies were awarded the Oscars for best
stories, scripts, camera, direction and the works; an award for everything in the movie Platoon except for the greatest
bleeding lie category.

Marx’ notion of capitalism being the most progressive segment in social evolution was proved right.
Notwithstanding the capitalist decadence, the bourgeoisie of the world took two decades to iron out their stained and
crumpled suits and tied the knot in what the 90’s saw as liberalization. In other words, the bourgeoisie of the world
came together to change the face of the capitalist, the face of capitalism and the condition of the working class.
Three major events played critical role in the 80’s that was instrumental in the phenomenon of liberalization and
globalization of the world economy. This is a classic paradigm of economic change bringing about social change.
Towards the late 70’s and early 80’s the individual capitalists were disappearing and they were disappearing fast.
This process of corporatization – companies/corporations taking place of the individual – lasted till the end of the
century and its rapidity shook the world. So it is not Rockefeller, Packer or Murdoch, nor the Ford or Ambani or
Tata as a capitalist ruled over and owned the means of production, their corporations did. It also saw the rise of state
owned and public-private corporations that ruled over labour. So the workers, the working class organizations and
the subaltern in general was confused as they could not put a name and face to the perpetrator or their exploiter. In
the course of this mechanism of graduating to a corporate world, the two things capitalism instituted were: (a) going
public with the company and gathering enough resource to buy out smaller competition; and in the environment of
mergers and acquisitions finance became the most important driving force of business and the bourses became the
corporate playground, and (b) invention of Human Resource Development (HRD) to tackle trade unionism by
improving the conditions of the workers. The mid 80’s saw the first event instrumental in this change – Automation
and mechanization. With the invention of the personal computer and improvement of the mainframe, the world
stepped into a digital era. Digitization kicked off things like robotics and fast manufacturing. The workers and the
middle class immediately reacted as human labour was being replaced by machine labour and large scale lay-offs
started. Much in the fashion the workers protested against steam mills and power looms in the 19th Century. But it is
a huge hungry world out there and in 10 years time it became clear that one cannot stop the progress of technology
and computerization and robotics actually helped in creating more employment in the long run. But the scale of
alienation the working class faced was phenomenal in the mid 80’s. The second event came in 1988, the decline and
collapse of the Soviet Union. Capitalism handled this situation extremely well and its propaganda machine focussed
cameras on everything from hunger to prostitution to crime and Joseph Stalin was painted as the biggest perpetrator
of human society in history. This event was supplemented by the genocide of Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the
iron veil of the socialist states melted down like wax. By the beginning of 90’s, it was a world obsessed with high
finance, stock market and management theories. Marx’s workers and wage labourers, who owned nothing but their
labour and got paid enough to support his meager life and existence, suddenly owned everything. The wage levels
improved, so did the job security and with the wave of consumerism and the world of easy finance and EMI’s, the
workers in the organized sector was never happier. The working class now has a home, gadgets for modern living,
can support children’s education and can stash away a little in future savings. Estrangement of labour suddenly
seems like an alien word.

The corporate warhead of HRD had done its job well and has not only been able to achieve embourgeoisment of the
working class but have ensured that the worker returns to the shop floor with regularity in a roundabout way. The
state stood beside the corporation and the lure of a good life, the social prestige provided by handsome net-worth
and the urge to repay back the debt caused by living well ensured sincerity and dedication to work. The biggest
holdback from liberation, initially limited to the white collar workers in early 90’s and had spread across to the
domain of blue collars, in plastic money. In India, the whopping 3% per month interest charged by credit card
companies, approved by the honorable ministry of finance, ensures that every worker sticks to his job with utmost
sincerity. This sincerity is fear – the fear of being trapped in debt if one loses one’s source of income. By the turn of
the twentieth century, the embourgeoisment of the working class was complete. The workers of the unorganized
sector still lives in relative misery but the rags to riches fables and the increase in the levels of aspirations in a world
well connected with media of different kinds keeps the candle burning in their hearts. The real subaltern in the EPM
sense, and in the third world context, apparently is the daily wage labourers who survive below the poverty line.
This class is huge, particularly in India, and is not necessarily industrial workers. Another class is a portion of the
middle class people of India who, owing to lack of education and initiative are either jobless or are into marginalized
labour that is barely enough to support the daily subsistence. Psychologically, they do not belong to the blue collar
category and in their abilities they do not fit into the white collar.

Is Class Struggle dead? Not really! This study has proved one point that the history of the human society is the
history of power struggle and power struggle is never complete without class. To pre-suppose the death of class
struggle would be to acknowledge the death of history, which is a distinct improbability. The existence of the
subaltern and class struggle is reflected in the level of alienation that exists within the working class. This part of the
study aims to measure the level of alienation and the hypothesis here is on the contrary to the death of class struggle,
it has grown in intensity and has widened in quantum as a large part of the petty bourgeoisie or the middle class and
the non-industrial unorganized workers also face alienation in their existence and in the process of selling their
labour.

One interesting shift that has taken place over the last century and a half, maybe 140 years at best, since Marx
published the first volume of Das Capital in 1867, is the change in the quantum of the exploited in the world. Marx’s
industrial England had a total of 1.7 Million people employed in the Industrial sector. Other countries were far less
industrially developed. According to World Bank figures of 1997, the world has a total of 2.8 billion wage workers,
and has about 1.4 billion agricultural workers. This makes the works a whopping 65% of the world population.
Considering the spouses, the children and other dependents a worker might have, the working class in the middle of
the first decade of 21st Century is larger than ever before.

The worker mentioned here does not strictly indicate proletariat or the industrial working class of the Marxist
parlance. It would also include people employed in general in non-industrial and non-factory jobs. But then,
alienation faced by such people is also phenomenal. To take an Indian example of a Sales “Executive” who sells
Credit Cards, Home or Personal Loans for Banks, including nationalized Banks in India, earn anywhere between
Rs.2000 – Rs.4000. These are city-centric jobs where at the highest level of the salary range mentioned here, one
cannot expect to lead a decent life. Such workers are taught to think like a management personnel – a situation
created by HRD wherein everyone is a Manager – and would walk the streets with a briefcase, in full-shirtsleeves
and a tie! Worse still, take the example of a BPO employee, who works huge shifts and is constrained to assume a
role of a fellow countryman of some other nation, chasing sales, payments or answering service calls. Herded in a
boxy automobile he/she is brought to work every morning or evening, and returned home doing the same
mechanical chore day after day. Or consider the situation of a manager of some marketing/servicing organization
who had been taught to think like an entrepreneur, running a profit center. He has to take care of revenue, expenses,
pay salaries and then earn his own keep. However, high his/her remuneration may be, he/she is a lone spoke in the
wheel and along with many others of his type in different geographical location, earning surpluses for the
corporation. The Executive, the Tele-caller, the Manager and many more people similar to them, generally known as
management personnel, sell their skills, or cerebral expertise that can also be classified as labour to ensure that a
profit generating machinery, much larger in size, functions smoothly. They continue to churn surpluses, earning their
keep and the corporate mechanism of which they are a part simply owns them, much in the fashion a slave would be
owned by a master. The alienation faced by the executives, managers, service personnel, salesmen is larger than ever
before. The limited competition of 19th Century and even early 20th Century made the Management worker a true
representative of the capitalist. With the rise of commodity aesthetics, unbridled competition and with the decline of
the capitalist and rise of the corporation, the Management Worker is an alienated soul, an oppressed subaltern who in
material terms owns a lot, but would lose everything should he ever choose to come out of the corporate machinery.

In other words, this is a world of subalterns obsessed with toys like the i-pods & smart phones. These are the little
fetishes the corporate world offers to the extended subaltern family to keep their feeling of alienation, their trauma
of estrangement at bay. The best part of this deal of the game is that one is taught, particularly at the business
schools, that management control is the end of one’s objective of life, a control that would someday take the fresher
to the CEO’s chair. Trainee to CEO stories are dime a dozen and are reiterated as case studies all over the corporate
culture – and people believe them.

Moral brigades apply black ink on the sensuous poster and feels that they have blacked out obscenity. They actually
leave the poster where it was stuck and the black ink triggers imaginations. The government may whitewash a
graphitti and rest in peace but, the light rain at night brings out the message on the wall and makes the passerby even
more aware. The psychology of alienation is such that one does not need to go to the Communist Party to figure out
whether he/she is alienated or not. Alienation plays on the subconscious of the human mind and in due time within
the collective unconscious and finds its expression through the invention of a collective subaltern identity. In a world
where the quantum of the subaltern is growing side by side with the capitalist illusions and with existential
discontents, a collectivity of the subaltern is on the standby, still unconscious, waiting for the Capitalist modes of
production to negate itself.