Review of: Jonathan Pattenden (2016) Labour, State and Society in Rural India: A Class-Relational Approach

Koyel Lahiri
2018 Global Labour Journal  
2016) Labour, State and Society in Rural India: A Class-Relational Approach. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0719089145. 216 pages. Hardcover £75. Reviewed by Koyel Lahiri, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, India This book makes valuable contributions to the study of many aspects of development and change in contemporary rural India. It sets out to understand, in minute detail, labour relations and labour processes at sites of production, the manner in which the state
more » ... ates these relations, as well as collective actions emerging out of this milieu. This in turn enables the author to take well-argued positions based on fieldwork -that while workplace-based actions by labour have been decreasing significantly in recent decades, the state has emerged as a viable terrain of pro-labour struggle. However, collective action for the most part is identified as small-scale and more focused on accessing state resources than challenging capital and the status quo. Labour, he states, falls into the pragmatism of short-term gains. The book is organised into nine chapters including an introduction and conclusion. The second chapter establishes the logic of using a class-relational approach to studies of poverty and development in general and, more specifically, in the context of this narrative. The third chapter engages with secondary literature on the changing dynamics of exploitation in rural South India in recent decades, against which the remaining chapters discuss fieldwork findings. Pattenden argues for applying the class-relational approach to analyses of poverty, positing it against the mainstream neo-liberal approach to poverty since the 1990s. The latter has heavily influenced government policies for poverty reduction in many developing countries, including India. The class-relational approach is different from other approaches such as the residual approach (poverty as caused by exclusion from development processes) and the semi-relational approach (a stratification-based approach to class) because poverty is understood to be a product of the social relations of production, which helps one understand how it is produced and reproduced by capitalism. It does not divorce the process of exploitation from the material conditions of labour. Furthermore, it allows for a complex engagement with class which is seen to be affected by other forms of social relations such as caste and gender. Such an approach, as he states, looks at the underlying processes of dispossession, accumulation and exploitation. The discussion of the fieldwork material (Chapter Three) is set up with a thorough engagement with secondary literature and statistics that highlight key changes in class relations in rural India in the past few decades. This includes the informalisation and segmentation of the labour force, statebased mediations of class relations through Local Government Institutions and social policy, the proliferation of membership-based organisations, both of the neo-liberal variety and those led by labour. It examines the role of the state in mediating class relations and argues that social policy is a critical arena of class struggle in rural India.
doi:10.15173/glj.v9i1.3381 fatcat:3eakituj55faxb6maf6i5wntby