Consciousness and Action among Auto Workers in India: The Maruti Movement, 2007-2017

This dissertation is a study of the dialectical relation between class consciousness and collective action among auto workers in India. Specifically, it examines how the existing state of class consciousness shapes and, in turn, is shaped by class struggle in the context of the militant working class struggle in Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL), India’s largest carmaker. This dialectic of consciousness and action among the Maruti workers is shaped by workers’ working and living conditions, their own political organisations, and interventions by the institutions of the state. There are distinctive political barriers to class consciousness and class struggle such as caste, ethnicity and regional identities. Yet, there are objective economic and political conditions such as low wages and denial of trade union rights which have the potential to weaken these political barriers without undermining the importance of these identities for the working class. This dissertation argues that in the absence of political organisation/s imbued with a political consciousness that underscores the centrality of capitalism and the capitalist state and the limits (both material and discursive) they put on working class struggle and consciousness, it is not possible to scale up place-specific and plant-based militant trade union struggles.