A review of Dipesh Chakrabarty 'Rethinking working-class history: Bengal 1890-1940' Princeton, 2000, pp245 by Martyn Hudson
The question of the ‘east’ has always had a problematic status in both Marxist history writing and political practice. Vulgar conceptions of historical development and an inability to co-opt the ‘east’ into these kinds of mechanical explanations have bedevilled Marxist writing over the last century and a half. Marx’s own idea that the peoples of the east and particularly the peoples of India could not represent themselves but only be represented both historically and politically was only the first in a long line of theoretical blunders up to and including the ambivalent Bolshevik congress of the peoples of the east, the central Asian question under Lenin and Stalin, the suppression of Chinese Communism and the role of an independent and revolutionary India as expressed by revolutionaries such as MN Roy in the early Comintern.
The fact that the question of the peoples of the ‘east’ was never posed properly in the first place has led to a theoretical deficit at least in European Marxist thought. Apart from the extensive debate on Maoism in European circles there has been little of worth over the last fifty years on the eastern question. The fine work of Victor Kiernan on global imperialism, Ben Kiernan on Indochina, and the excellent edition of Revolutionary History on Trotskyism in Ceylon all reaffirm the work that still has to be done in this area. The most sustained European explanation of the eastern question is in the bourgeois anti-Marxist work by Kubalkova and Cruickshank Marxism-Leninism and theory of international relations, with its correct stress on the importance of the east but with a woefully inadequate understanding of a materialist analysis of historical development.
What is absent from all of these texts is an explanation of the peoples of the ‘east’ themselves. Long-range history from above is perfectly acceptable in delineating the general contours and line of march of wider historical developments but they reinforce, in general, the bourgeois idea of the elimination of the concrete specificity of ordinary worker and peasant existence. All the more important then, that this work has not been disregarded in the Indian Marxist movement particularly amongst those arguing against the nightmarish weight of religious conceptions of the world such as islamism and hindu nationalism. The subaltern studies group has been particularly important in restoring to historical and political work the hitherto invisible working and peasant classes of India - in fact the oppressed in all of their forms. Often linked to European-based writers such as Tim Brennan, Gayatri Spivak and Sivanandan their work has led to a serious reassessment of the nature of imperialism and oppression often with a recourse (sometimes unsuccessfully) to cultural studies, Gramsci and postcolonial thought associated with Derrida and his rethinking of Marx and history.
Prior to the emergence of the subaltern studies group there had been a long period of theoretical reflection in Indian Marxism on the nature of cultural inheritance and the components of national culture. Useful Marxist work such as Dilip Bose’s Bhagavad-Gita and our national movement, S.G. Sardesai’s The riddle of the Geeta, and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s In defence of materialism in Ancient India had led to an overwhelming rejection of the vulgar Marxist notion of historical inevitability and a very specific rejection of the base-superstructure models of culture so present in the 1970s academic left. The founders of the subaltern studies group inscribed at the heart of the their project the idea that culture and ideology is central to class formation and particularly the emergent working class formations of the Indian subcontinent.
One historian associated with the group in its earliest days was Dipesh Chakrabarty, who specialised in the exploration of working class culture in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries particularly amongst jute workers. His early work published in Subaltern studies and in the Marxist influenced Past and Present culminated in the book reviewed here - Rethinking working class history - which takes as its starting point the Bengali peasantry and their institutions and culture prior to the emergence of the colonial/capitalist social and economic relationships and their formation and self-formation into a Bengali working class under the rule of capital. Of course the debate itself is framed within Edward Thompson’s idea of emergent working class relationships in early capitalist English society where he ignores and downplays the objective conception of capitalist class formation from above in favour of a subjective self-making working class as it is expressed in class culture.
The central point of Chakrabarty’s study is to understand the nature of the specific relationship between pre-capitalist economic and social formations and capitalist ones, particularly with regard to the culture, beliefs, traditions and so on of the oppressed. Particularly important is the undemocratic nature of the rule of capital and how this conflicts with inherited pre-capitalist notions of the workers. As Chakrabarty points out his study is concerned with ‘a capitalism that subsumes precapitalist relationships. Under certain conditions, the most feudal system of authority can survive at the heart of the most modern of factories,’ (p.xi). As he very clearly notes - there is nothing in the logic of the capitalist market that guarantees democracy or citizenship. The ‘master-slave dialectic’ is reproduced in Indian capitalism not in any simplistic bourgeois democracy/proletarian democracy manner because the very idea of a bourgeois hegemonic culture in classical Marxist terms is simply absent. Chakrabarty argues that the clue to factory relationships lies not in political economy from above but in disentangling the networks of the culture of the oppressed and how capital is resisted and shaped by that and the relations of the oppressed which go into its making.
What Chakrabarty is claiming is that there is no ideal conception of hegemonic, bourgeois, capitalist society which can act as the template to understand any historical formation. Rather, by examining the truth of concrete historical circumstances. Capitalism, he argues has thrived in all kinds of different political circumstances and has very little to do with any facile idea of bourgeois democracy. In terms of the Indian working class and their experience of colonialism we often have an economistic and mechanical conception of history as a technological determinism, as Chakrabarty notes - ‘The reigning assumption seems to be that inequalities and conflicts handed down from our past persist only because of the economic ailments of the country - underdevelopment, unequal distribution of wealth, (neo)imperialist domination, and so forth. Remove them, runs the prescription, and we would move from precapitalist inequalities to capitalist ones,’ (pxiii). In other words the development of a purer form of capitalism or ‘Indian liberalism’ is necessary largely because this rests on the false notion that capital is a combination of ‘bourgeois democracy’, mercantilism and industrial production for profit.
Politically, this rejection of the idea of bourgeois democracy and a purer capitalism has a number of consequences, argues Chakrabarty. Firstly, we must resist the idea of surrendering precapitalist social relationships of labour which give us resources of resistance within capitalism. This stems directly from his empirical assessment that the relations of capital and worker have subsumed positive expressions of class from the previous social formation and are inherently superior to what he calls ‘bourgeois individualism’. He expresses the Indian dilemma of equality and individualism in this passage which is worth quoting at length ‘The question is this: can we bypass all these dilemmas in third world countries like India and build democratic, communitarian institutions on the basis of the nonindividualistic, but hierarchical and illiberal, precapitalist bonds that have survived and sometimes resisted - or even flourished under - the onslaught of capital. I have written my book on the assumption that in countries such as ours, several contradictory struggles have to fuse into one. The struggle to be a "citizen" must be part of the struggle to be a "comrade." We have to fight for "equality" at the same time as we try to criticise and transcend the bourgeois version of it. Giving up these battles means embracing an illiberal, authoritarian, hierarchical social order in the name of socialism,’(pxiv). So the struggle for democracy is at one a social struggle against capital but constantly from the standpoint of the oppressed, subaltern class. This is achieved by severing the link between the enlightenment ideas of liberty and democracy and the political economy of capital.
Chakrabarty argues essentially that his empirical studies of the working class of the jute mills of Calcutta and Bengal more generally have to make us reassess the nature of class formation. He argues that the workers of Bengal were not born into bourgeois society at all in terms of their class composition. Their culture, institutions, modes of resistance and political organisation was essentially a precapitalist formation of solidarity. The predominance of pre-bourgeois relationship in the working class leads to different forms of solidarity and resistance to capital in that the most important determinants in the class are not those inherited from capital itself but the older social formation. But the political forms of capital were also those of the older formation and had nothing to do with liberty and democracy as Chakrabarty makes clear in his analysis of the Sardar or headman, ‘legally required factory documents on working-class conditions were largely irrelevant to the exercise of the sardar’s authority which was rooted not in capitalist but in precapitalist modes of domination. The sardar ensured obedience…through means that were either "illegal" or fell outside the rule of law. His was not the "disciplinary authority" that Marx outlined in his argument.’ (p114).
The inherited social and cultural relationships subsumed within capital can only be resisted when their full social weight has been understood as part of a strategic conception to overcome capital without falling into the trap of capitalism equalling bourgeois individualism and bourgeois democracy. This is of critical importance for communist work in the working class communities of Bengal. Communists, argues Chakrabarty have to ‘address themselves to the already existing working class notions about defying authority,’ (p185) - components inherited from the older period and providing the basis of communist transformations outside of metropolitan capitalism. The problem, he argues, is undermine those inherited cultural dispositions which can lead to communal violence between muslims and hindus just as easy as they can lead to strikes and political conflicts - the role of the communist here is central in terms of the strategic conception of class transformation and the termination of the rule of capital. That is why we must also resist the undemocratic characteristics of precapitalist class formations - and understand that emancipation lies forwards, with all of the complexities of our class inheritance and resistance, not backwards.
Although there are serious problems in some of the theoretical devices Chakrabarty uses, particularly with regard to his rather uncritical acceptance of some aspects of the subaltern studies tradition associated with post-colonial thought, this work is unhesitatingly Marxist in its approach and intention. It is imbued not only with a sustained understanding of the lives of ordinary workers but never falters in its commitment to the emancipation of the Indian working class often so absent in Marxist writings on the ‘peoples of the east’.
Score: 8/10
Reviewer: Martyn Hudson
