Hard work matters but India’s challenge is to turn workers into capitalists

livemint.com:

Narendra Modi had struck a chord with the same demographic bulge by drawing a distinction between “hard work" and “Harvard." It was a point of political rhetoric, with the latter meant as a stand-in for privilege. In a country of multitudes aspiring to lifestyles the internet had begun exposing them to, it held a special appeal among those who saw themselves on the hard-work side of that split. The actual hours they worked wasn’t relevant—nor its intensity, let alone productivity.

Modi’s formulation was memorable for the politics of it. Here was the leader of a rightist Bharatiya Janata Party who had deftly taken away a platform long used by leftist parties. Once upon a time, Communists had been the ace champions of India’s have-nots, ever ready to expound on a “class struggle" led by workers against capitalists.

In their book, one was either an earner of wages or an owner of capital, the latter held all the cards, and fair play meant turning the tables. If the economic system espoused by Communism fell apart on warped work incentives, its either-or identity roll-call failed to survive contact with a key institution of capitalism: the stock market. Today, rightist rhetoric prevails.

To grasp its allure, think of America. “If you can’t beat em, join em," goes an old American saying that wasn’t lost on its toilers. While the British East India Company was the world’s first joint stock corporation, it’s US capital markets that first attracted salaried workers who were trading work-hours for money to trade their hard-earned savings for shares as they went along, so that they too could become capitalists and live off their accumulated holdings by the time they grew old.