Middle-class in India

[Nehru]

Comrades,

I don't know about the west, but the middle-class in India hates the poor, blames them for all problems (such as they have too many children, they're lazy, stupid etc.). They defend the rich, work for longer hours for less pay, in short, a darling of the capitalists.

In this situation, do we assume that middle-class Indians are a lost cause, and that our time is better spent on workers? Even reactionary workers may wake up someday (horrible material conditions will force them to), but the middle-class is too much into bourgeois propaganda to do so.

Regards,
G

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

The "middle-class" does not exist as a class in the Marxist sense. When you say "middle-class", what do you have in mind? It can include everything from relatively well-paid workers, petit-bourgeois to regular capitalists.

[Weezer]

First off, the middle class does not exist.

People in the "middle class" are just proletarians with a slightly higher standard of living. The Middle class is a term invented so that slightly higher paid workers can feel better about themselves and to divide the working class. Both the middle class and working class own little to no percent of the means of production.

As for the Indian middle class, they are not a lost cause. They're still workers and just need to realize that's what they. They just need a bit of class consciousness.

[Blackscare]

At the end of the day, "middle class" is just a sociological construct. It has to do with being within a certain income bracket and having certain status symbols (in the US, at least, these are things like home ownership and a new car, etc). The term "middle class" really has nothing to do with Marxist conceptions of class, IE relation to means of production. Most of the middle class are in fact proletarians, and the rest are petite-bourgeoisie. While they may have a lot of reactionary social views at this time, there is no reason to assume that during a period of critical social upheaval that certain segments would not come over to revolution.


Now, that is not to say that the left should be spending more time focusing on the middle classes, since I think more revolutionary fruit can be plucked from the more down-and-out segments of the proletariat. There is nothing inherently different about their position that makes them unable to reconcile with revolution, though of course they probably wouldn't go along with the idea until their own standard of living fell. In the US and western Europe, I think that the middle classes have more potential to become revolutionary (at least in part) in the near-mid future, since the west is on the decline and the middle class is being squeezed.


In the east, the middle class is just now flowering and, just like their counterparts in earlier times in the west, they have more of a stake in the progression of capitalism in their respective countries.


I'd say the Indian left should subject the Indian middle class to "benign neglect"; ignore them but don't necessarily count them as enemies. Material circumstances are what make class struggle, not the efforts of revolutionaries. While the quality of life for the middle class continues to grow it is pointless to agitate amongst them, but when that falters it becomes necessary to reach out to them.

[Nehru]

What I mean by middle-class are workers with very, very good wages, so much so that they consider themselves 'superior' to fellow workers. They are not capitalists, technically, but they're not in a bad situation as other workers.

[Weezer]

What I mean by middle-class are workers with very, very good wages, so much so that they consider themselves 'superior' to fellow workers. They are not capitalists, technically, but they're not in a bad situation as other workers.

That's what these higher wages do - they set up a false sense of class, and these higher paid workers think they're different and that their interests are different from working class interests. One of the most effective tools of class alienation.