Taking from, and critiquing, both the scholarship on the Indian “middle class” as well as the scholarship on the ‘labour aristocracy’, this paper argues for the reformulation of the Indian “middle class” as a labour aristocracy or worker elite. We define the distinctive characteristics that set the Indian worker elite apart from the broader working class and highlight, through the case studies of international migration, patterns in urban living spaces and domestic service employment, the stark differences between the worker elite and the poor working masses in India, and the exploitative relationship that exists between the two. The analysis points to the semi-periphery being the locus of the largest inequalities in the capitalist world-system today, where the bourgeoisie and the worker elite both gain tremendously from the exploitation inherent to capitalism. Resultingly, the task at hand in India and the semi-periphery broadly remains to organize the poor, marginalised working masses.

本文借鉴并批判了关于印度“中产阶级”的学术和关于“工人贵族”的学术，主张将印度“中产阶级”重新表述为工人贵族或工人精英。我们定义了印度工人精英与更广泛的工人阶级区别开来的独特特征，并通过国际移民、城市生活空间模式和家政服务就业的案例研究，强调工人精英与贫困工人群众之间的显着差异在印度，以及两者之间存在的剥削关系。分析指出，半边缘地区是当今资本主义世界体系中最大不平等的所在地，资产阶级和工人精英都从资本主义固有的剥削中获得了巨大的利益。因此，印度和半外围地区当前的任务基本上仍然是组织贫困、边缘化的劳动群众。