Bourgeois Politics of the Working Class

V M Dandekar This article, and the one which appeared last week, are extracted by the author from his R C Dutt Lectures on Political Economy delivered recently at the Centre fenStudies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In his article last week, after reviewing Emmanuel's thesis on unequal exchange in international trade, the author reformulated its main propositions by recasting them in the Sraffa system. In this article he applies these propositions to a domestic economy and elaborates on the form exploitation and class conflict as- sume under conditions of unequal wages between different sectors and industries. He concludes by bringing out the implications of this for the prospects of a peasant-worker alliance in the Indian economy.