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Contribution short abstract:

In this paper, I describe the historical emergence of new industrial towns in India and in Peru in mid-20th century, whose working classes caught the imagination of Marxists in both countries, and I reflect how their analyses shaped my ethnographic research on local class formation and politics.

Contribution long abstract:

The paper engages with forms of Marxist critiques and politics encountered during ethnographic work on industrial towns in eastern India and in coastal Peru. Both places emerged as major sites of industrial development in mid-20th century and they attracted not only capital and labour, but also the attention and the presence of Marxist unionists, politicians and intellectuals. Expectations were high that the large industrial working classes emerging there could turn into a proletarian vanguard for a socialist or communist revolution. In the cases discussed here, these expectations were disappointed, at least since the late 1970s. However, in both places a circle of committed Marxists remained whom I frequently met during my ethnographic research and/ or with whose writings I engaged. In my paper, I will describe how Marxists in both places analysed (and politically engaged with) local social developments and their relation to wider developments in global capitalism, and I will reflect how their analyses and knowledge shaped my ethnographic research on as well as my anthropological analysis of the specificities of class formation in and around local industries, and on the politics of its working classes.