Culture, Structure and Working Class Politics

Leela Fernandes This essay attempts to analyse certain forms of cultural politics as a means of demonstrating the varying layers of structural inequality that serve to constitute the working class. The author argues that criticisms of teleological, unitary conceptions of the working class do not necessitate a shift from but rather a revision of the ways in which we think of structural analysis. By examining the linkages between class, gender and community in the jute mills it is possible to move away from a focus on the ways in which cultural difference forecloses class politics to an understanding of the ways in which different forms of class-based political practices may contest and reproduce the intersecting structural hierarchies which constitute the working class.