Reflections from a South Asian Experience
DSA Conference
November 2013
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Reflections from South Asia
Thus reflecting upon post-industrial as well as
post-agrarian societies, using UK as a proxy
Seeing inequality differently
Understanding pervasiveness and persistence
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Need to explain relative order in contexts of
extreme inequality. How does that happen?
Not just objective conditions of the state
Need to understand mechanisms beyond
violence, ideology and legal codes
In the social domain, people actively reproduce
inequality and thus support the Marxian
account of the state
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Driver of economic progress?
Human need to enjoy the pleasure of status
Too much and too little: both a problem
So honestly: do we disapprove of inequality?
Depends what kind, and with what societal
consequences
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Too much associated with poverty, low rates of
economic growth (pax economic liberals),
exploitation, precarious rights, injustice,
oppression and suppression
Wilkinson and Pickett
Deneulin and common good
Horizontal as well as vertical
Tilley and Durable Inequality
Geography of Inequality--Myrdal
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Absolute and relative
Imperial rents and labour regulation
Commodification of labour and political
volatility
De-commodification and welfare—Polanyi and
Esping-Andersen
A brief period of sanity in capitalist
development? Limits of the special case?
The social policy challenge for today’s
emerging economies/middle income societies
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The class discourse is back in the UK
60% regard themselves as working class
What happened to embourgeoisification?
Now more lumpen than proletarian
Social basis of fascism?
Racist othering
Fearful, insecure and alienated workforce
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Need for good sociology rather than bad
political economy
Need more focus upon relationships rather
than a debate between legacy and agency, with
false hopes of social mobility
Need the ‘how’ questions answered
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Modifying determinism
But cannot dismiss objective conditions of
property—the base of superstructure
But need to get beyond the ‘what’ questions about
state and class and look at the ‘how’ issues
Althusser and the ‘ideological instance’
State oppressive violence too expensive to sustain
Several examples: from first Henry Tudor to De
Klerk, but de-humanisation and demonisation
thrives in modern Britain
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Rationing of scarce resources to protect elite
hoarding
Need for legitimate queues and restricted
access
Authoritativeness backed up by pseudoscientific classification of need
The codification of entitlements
Less use of explicit violence
Foucault’s normalisation
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Becoming pomo
Structuration and actor-oriented
But not a complete rejection of determinism in
favour of agency
Ondaatje’s ‘In the Skin of a Lion’
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The activity of caste a perfect example of the
looseness of the structure of things, allowing
room for agency
Hence malleability with permeable categories
and boundaries
Thus ‘accommodation’, enough flexibility to
maintain caste as a form of social order
A retained frame of meaning, an idiom
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Caste as the ideological instance
A way of understanding order despite deep
inequality
But dharma and karma insufficient to offset
glaring injustice
Thus ideology and belief not enough
Need a more material and social explanation of
interactive mutual needs across social
topography
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Mutuality and inequality
Clients of service providers may be superior
patrons or inferior supplicants
It all depends
Variations of status reflected in forms of payment
and other forms of control over key means of
production
That is, relations have their transactional content
as well as social expressions
Is mutuality vertical or horizontal?
It can be either—duality in the social division of
labour
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Caste is everywhere
Combination of legacy and reproducing social
action
Emblematic of wider rationales for inequality
A metaphor for how social inequality is
reproduced
English literature, including about South
Asia—like E.M.Forster.
Many forms of expression
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Myth of separation of economic and social
domains—key to the illusion of bourgeois
liberalism
Supposed to reconcile economic inequality with
social equality
But: Barrington Moore
But: Low ceilings to social mobility
Actually: Generalised commodity relations also a
myth
Exit the proletariat, and return of pre-industrial
patron-clientelism, i.e. hierarchical aspects of
jajmani
The emergence of Standing’s ‘the precariat’
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Increasing inequality: reflective not just of
differences in property, wealth and income
But between being secure and insecure
Erosion of de-commodification
Reversion to ‘hybrid’ personalised commodity
relations in UK
Will South Asia ever pass through a proletarian
phase—doubtful
So—a convergence?
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Not a truly proletarian workforce, despite tag of
being an organised sector
Predominantly female, so added layers of gender
and patriarchy
Controlled by sardars, mastaan and male superiors
in and outside workplace
Thus management of the commodity, labour,
through personalised, non-rights, non-protected,
extra-economic relations demanding loyalty, with
low voice and exit options
Self-employment and other informal activities
across sub-continent—same kinds of social
mediation
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Cities of Peasants
Nets: networks and entrapment
Not transitional phenomenon, but permanent
hybrid
Merit no longer a sufficient condition of access
to decent work
Conformity to subtle messages of class identity
A world of implicit clubs
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Majority of people induced to opt for
inequality which is also informal and not rights
protected
Atomised and disorganised by elite classes
Strawbs—no longer applies
Mafia, mastaan and pirs: intermediation
societies—a welfare regime category
Imperative to introduce security into insecure
arrangements: presentation of self, ‘loyalty’
rather than ‘voice’ capabilities
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In the insecure world of actual hybrid
capitalism
Quest for moral attachments
Instrumental relations in hypothetical,
depersonalised commodity relations not
reliable
De-instrumentalisation comes at a price
Iterative sacrifices of personal autonomy
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Not just prerogative of resource controllers
Tilley’s normalisation of categorical boundaries to
solve organisational problem of sequestering
scarce resources
Thus labelling and habitus, consistent with North’s
limited access state
Exploited are also complicit in social reproduction
of limited access through induced, Faustian,
acceptance of personalised commodity relations
Because they are also solving organisational
problems associated with insecure livelihoods
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A set of survival capabilities which endorse
and reinforce rank and inequality
Dehumanising, shaming, loss of dignity
In other words: alienation
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Agency and making history
Hector Pietersen museum in Soweto
Islamicist movements
Christian fundamentalism
Unruly politics
Lizzie Bennet
Bob Marley
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UK: rights to restore
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South Asia: they remain to be created