WAGE-LABOUR AND WAGE-GOODS • 73 of selective subsidies of this nature is that it would not have any impact on the general price level. Even were such a subsidy to be financed through budgetary deficits, the unwholesome consequences of such deficits would be much less contagious than if farm prices were to be raised across-the-board affecting prices on all fronts. Real wages have fallen in practically all sectors of the Indian economy^ since Independence. There is a rising crescendo of discontent againt the rural and urban bourgeoisie whose predatory acts are responsible for this development. The effectiveness with which this discontent can be crystallized is once more a function of collective awareness and political mobilization. It is thus no wonder that in the relatively more advanced spheres of economic activity, such as in the organized industrial sector, workers have been able to offer greater resistance to the class enemies and, as a consequence, the decline in real wages there has been somewhat less than in the farm sector. It is not the weakness of the strong but the strength of the weak, which, Marx had indicated, determines the course of history. Even the enemies of the working class are fully aware of the import of this statement; they have been at work, full time, trying to disrupt the solidarity of toiling masses so that the historical process could be, if not rolled back for ever, at least stalled for a while. To foment confusion within the ranks of the workers, a suggestion is being sedulously aired to the effect that the economic backwardness of the agrarian poor and their deprcsssed living standards in our country are the result of exploitation on the part of the urban orgnized working class, who are being dubbed as constituting an "aristocracy of labour". Attempts of this nature have even assumed sophisticated academic garbs.1 It is in this context that those who fight for the cause of the toiling sections should be careful in distinguishing friends from enemies and in differentiating the wheat of policies which genuinely serve the cause of the toiling peasantry, from the chaff of apparently-tantalizing theories which however have little or no basis in fact, and which, when put into practice, further erode the living standards of the workers even as they lend to a further accretion of bounty to their class enemies. 1 See for example, V M Dandekar, "Peasant-Worker Alliance: Its Basis in the Indian Economy", R C Dutt Memorial Lectures, 1980, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.