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

[valis <valis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 31 Oct 1997, Louis Proyect wrote, among much else:
> 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.                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Louis has suddenly decanted the term "post-Marxist/ism" into our midst;
I would rather hear a definition of it than do my own deducing.
Would he or someone else give that a try?

               [...After much deleted comment...:]

> 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.

Hasn't this sort of vicarious approach been endemic in Europe till quite
recently?  James Mill, I'm pretty sure, wrote a history recounting some
240 years of India's encounter with the British without ever having left
Europe, but the work was standard for quite a while nevertheless.
Not to be outdone, in our century Sir Solly Zuckerman's book on primate
behavior was considered scriptural although based only on the observation
of captive animals.  Let's hope that the appetite for hands-on reality is
better established today, though that often seems scarcely the case.

                             [...........]
Gandhi:
> "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."

Louis:
> 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.

Gandhi generally saw cities as incubators of finance capitalist values,
and his "home-spun" campaign was intended to inspire industries of low
capital content that would spare India's masses the cruel curse of
categorical redundancy.  This was more important than simply frustrating
the looms of Manchester.  Gandhi was sure that the villages could be made
dynamic and healthy places.  Confident of an exhausted Britain's withdrawal
sometime in the post-war period, Gandhi likely foresaw a Soviet preoccupation
with America, Europe, China and Japan that would leave India free to follow
a domestically determined path of growth. Nehru's foreign policy after
independence certainly suggested this.

Unfortunately, Gandhi's ideals seem to have little currency in India today;
the spinning wheel, once such a potent political symbol, has been replaced
by another round object: the satellite dish.  Those who believe that the
socialist omelet is worth any number of broken eggs will surely get their
wish in India!

                                                                     valis