Aijaz Ahmad's "Marx and India: A Clarification"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My homeboy Steve Philion told me not to waste any time. Get a hold of Aijaz
Ahmand's "In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literatures", he said. There's a
killer article in it called "Marx on India: a Clarification." (Speaking of
killer articles, there's one by Steve on the new social movements and the
working class that will appear in an upcoming issue of Rethinking Marxism.
It's appearance in RM bodes well for the sort of dialog that classical
Marxism and post-Marxism have to undertake following the Sokal affair.)

I stopped by at the Labyrinth bookstore right after work to pick up the
book and got into a conversation with the clerk who's not only from India
but a gung-ho classical Marxist as well. He was at the David Harvey meeting
that I reported on, the one that got this thread going, and he remembers me
from my citation of Jim Blaut, who he knew from his undergraduate work at
Clark. That's where Blaut, author of "Colonizer's Model of the World" and
Marxism-International stalwart, used to teach. (He told me a wild story
about Jim but I pledged to keep it a secret.) I informed Siddhartha that I
was going to use Ahmad's article in a debate with some post-Marxists on the
Internet. He said give it to them good.

Ahmad's article is a reply to Edward Said, who attacks Marx's articles on
India as Orientalist racism. Ahmad's main goal is to show the context in
which Marx's incidental journalistic pieces on India appear. This is
totally missing in Said's treatment of the subject, as it is in Ajit
Sinha's. Said zeroes in on the first in the series, which appeared  in the
June 10, 1853 Herald Tribune. This article described Indian village life as
superstition-ridden and stagnant.

The model that Marx had in mind as an alternative to backward India when
writing this article was North America.  Marx was evaluating  the
possibility of capitalist economic development within a colonial setting
such as India's around this time. In the 1850s, the notion that India could
follow the same line of march as the United States was not so far-fetched.
Ahmad reminds us that the gap in material prosperity between India and
England in 1835 was far narrower than it was in 1947.

Part of the problem was that Marx simply lacked sufficient information
about India to develop a real theory. His remarks have the character of
conjecture, not the sort of deeply elaborated dialectical thought that mark
Capital. And so what happens is that enemies of Marxism seize upon these
underdeveloped remarks to indict Marxism itself.

Ahmad notes that Marx had exhibited very little interest in India prior to
1853, when the first of the Herald Tribune articles were written. It was
the presentation of the East India Company's application for charter
renewal to Parliament that gave him the idea of writing about India at all.
To prepare for the articles, he read the Parliamentary records and
Bernier's "Travels". (Bernier was a 17th century writer and medicine man.)
So it is fair to say that Marx's views on India were shaped by the overall
prejudice prevailing in England at the time. More to the point is that Marx
had not even drafted the Grundrisse at this point and Capital was years
away. So critics of Marx's writings on India are singling out works that
are not even reflective of the fully developed critic of capitalism.

Despite this, Marx was sufficiently aware of the nature of dual nature of
the capitalist system to entertain the possibility that rapid capitalist
development in India could eliminate backward economic relations and lead
to future emancipation. His enthusiasm for English colonialism is related
to his understanding of the need for capitalist transformation of all
precapitalist social formations. His animosity towards feudal social
relations is well-known. He regards them as antiquated and a block on
future progress. The means by which they are abolished are universally
cruel and inhumane such as the Enclosure Acts. What he is looking for in
this process is not a way of judging human agencies on a moral basis, but
what the dynamics of this process can lead to. That goal is socialism and
the sole yardstick of every preceding historical development.

A few weeks later, on July 22nd, Marx wrote another article that had some
more rude things to say about India and England as well. But here he was
much more specific about the goal in question. He says that the English
colonists will not emancipate the Indian masses. That is up to them to do.
Specifically, Marx writes, "The Indian will not reap the fruits of the new
elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till
in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted
by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have
grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether."

So unless there is social revolution, the English presence in India brings
no particular advantage. More to the point, it will bring tremendous
suffering.

Furthermore, there is evidence that Marx was becoming much more sensitive
to the imperialist system itself late in life. He wrote a letter to
Danielson in 1881 that basically described the sort of pillage that the
socialists of Lenin's generation were decrying:

"In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in store
for the British government. What the British take from them annually in the
form of rent, dividends for railways useless for the Hindoos, pensions for
the military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc.
etc., -- what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart
from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India, -- speaking
only of the commodities that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send
over to England -- it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of
the 60 million of agricultural and industrial laborers of India. This is a
bleeding process with a vengeance."

A bleeding process with a vengeance? Make no mistake about this. Marx did
not view England as on a civilizing mission at this point. He understood
the nature of the capitalist beast a lot better.

It is difficult to understand why both Edward Said and Ajit Sinha put so
much stock in Gandhi, who said:

"The more we indulge in our emotions the more unbridled they
become...Millions will always remain poor. Observing all this, our
ancestors dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures. We have managed with
the same kind of ploughs as existed thousands of years ago. We have
retained the same kind of cottages that we had in former times, and our
indigenous education remains the same...It was not that we did not know how
to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts
after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre. They,
therefore, after due deliberation, decided that we should do what we could
with our hands and feet...They further reasoned that large cities were a
snare and a useless incumbrance and people would not be happy in them, that
there would be gangs of thieves and robbers, prostitution and vice
flourishing in them, and that poor men would be robbed by rich men. They
were therefore satisfied with small villages."

Now I realize that Gandhi is a complex thinker and that passive resistance
was a powerful force against English colonialism, but doesn't this
idealization of village life seem terribly mistaken. It is a Tolstoyan view
of this life that seems at odds with the terrible suffering of people who
are forced to do back-breaking work for the minimal forms of sustenance.
This life not only is not free, it will inevitably be crushed by  the
forces of global capitalism. It, of course, is the utopian premise of
Vindana Shiva that such an existence can be realized in the age of jet
planes, computer networks and transnational corporations.

A much better appreciation of the choices that the Indian people faced and
the importance of Marxism was made by E.M.S. Namboodripad, who was the
General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (M):

"Indian society had, for several centuries, remained in a stage of
stagnation and decay; its destruction had come as the order of the day.
Since, however, there was no internal force which could destroy the
stagnant and decaying old society, the external force that appeared on the
scene, the European trading bourgeoisie who came to India in the 15th and
16th centuries, particularly the most modern and powerful of them, the
British trading-cum-industrial bourgeoisie, were the 'unconscious tools of
history'. Marx the revolutionary therefore did not shed a tear at this
destruction, though with his deep humanism and love for the people, he had
nothing but sympathy for the Indian people who were undergoing -- and
hatred for the British who were inflicting -- immense suffering on them."

Louis Proyect