“Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu
Part II
Read or listen to Part I here.
The 9th issue of the Bulletin of Trade Union Research & Information, edited by the Union Research Group. Courtesy: Jairus Banaji
The following conversation took place in December 2020. On the occasion of Jairus Banaji’s latest publication, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew B. Liu spoke to contextualize his work within a multi-decade trajectory of history, theory, and labor organization, across Europe and Asia. We noted the particular significance of an original intervention developed by Banaji in the 1970s, taking aim at the orthodox Marxist equation between capitalism and ‘free wage labor.’ Whereas the wage constitutes a particular ‘mode of exploitation,’ he argued in 1977, ‘capitalism’ points toward an epochal ‘mode of production,’ which is more capacious and universal. The distinction thereby enables scholars to expand their vision of capitalism’s history, from the classical story centered on the urban north Atlantic to other societies and periods fueled by agrarian, unfree, and the nominally independent working classes.
Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu also touch upon Banaji’s early influences, transformations in theory and global capitalism since the 1970s, and the relevance of theory and history for political imagination in 2020.
The transcript has been slightly modified from the audio original; [brackets] indicate new information added after the recording had taken place.
How theory and history shape politics
Sheetal Chhabria: So having sort of discovered or established that surplus value could be extracted from peasants, through debt and whatnot, did that have an impact on how you positioned yourself as a sort of labor organizer? Did you then think, OK, well, then the way we organize labor has to go beyond the factory and the trade unions or not?
Jairus Banaji: No, not at all. Those are kind of discrete parts of one's mind (laughs). As I say, I was still a strong ouvrierist in the late 70s and believed in a vision that left politics had everything to do with the self-emancipation of the working class, but understood strictly as an industrial working class, even though the category wage labor was more generalized [across a host of occupations] than just industrial labor or factory work.
Of course, the distinction between the formal and the real subsumption of labor was implicit in the whole argument about the Deccan peasantry, [so that large sections of the more impoverished and indebted households were subject to domination by capital and not radically different from wage-laborers]. Even though all of that was true, politically, one still continued to see not just the industrial working class, but in fact the more modern sections of the industrial working class as the heart of left or revolutionary politics. If there was a “subject” hidden in history and driving revolutionary politics, it was the working class in this narrowly defined, almost Serge Mallet’s sense of workers in the advanced technological sectors.
And to be fair, the most exciting forms of struggle that were actually witnessed at the time were in these kinds of industrial plants. It wasn't in [sectors like] textiles. It was precisely in places like Hindustan Lever that you saw what I thought was a new working class engaged in [advanced] forms of class struggle and sophisticated ways of disrupting the plant, organizing industrial action and bringing management to their knees.
And remember the Hindustan Lever management was the best organized, most ruthless management anywhere in the Indian private sector. I always believed that it was management culture which shaped the culture of the union. And you could see this being perfectly demonstrated in the way the Hindustan Lever Employees Union had to be able to match the sophistication of their management if they were going to survive.
[When young workers like Bennett D’Costa and Franklyn D’Souza eventually took over the leadership of that union] at the end of the 70s, they introduced a completely new style of militancy and union leadership. And that was the time that we began to work seriously with the employees unions in Bombay. And we got to know both Bennett and Franklyn and discovered through most of the early 80s how sophisticated their styles of industrial action were.
Going back to your question, these were discrete parts of one’s mental geography. There was the idea that wage labor was far more generalized, both historically and in the contemporary world, than most Marxists with formalist definitions of wage labor would allow for. And then there was this idea that it's the elite sections of the industrial working class that should be the vanguard of left politics. And no serious attempt was made to think about agencies other than this sort of elite working-class agency. What would agency mean in terms of the mass of peasants, for example.
Today we see striking demonstrations of this in the way the [Punjab farmers, the bulk of them small and marginal farmers,] have organized their movement to besiege Delhi with demands for the repeal, the complete scrapping of the farm laws [mooted by big industrial capital]. I mean, it's an amazing movement both in the way they've organized it [and for its tenacity. Yet these are precisely the kind of groups to which no class agency was ascribed back in the 1970s.]
Andrew B. Liu: The peasants would be ‘in itself’ but not ‘for itself,’ is what you’re saying --
JB: No. Even worse than that. The peasants would have been a “sack of potatoes,” as Marx described them. But by the way, they're anything but.
ABL: Your thinking has changed, it sounds like, on this question.
JB: I mean, simply because the other big thing that happened, the great watershed that happened from the 70s and certainly by the 80s was that capital reorganized big time, broke up large plants, large production units, started to set up parallel production facilities, outsourced extensively, subcontracted, and just broke the backbone of an otherwise very well-organized union movement. By the time you come to the kind of early 90s, when the economic reforms or the “new economic policies” are announced, you already have a severely debilitated trade union movement in Bombay. You don't need the economic liberalization of the early 90s to finish it off, because it's already on the back foot. It's already in retreat.
By the time you come to ’92 and the economic reforms, workers are taking voluntary retirement schemes on a large scale, and plants are disappearing from Bombay. The real estate people are moving in and buying up the land and then constructing all these fancy apartments throughout the suburbs, industrial suburbs. The whole geography of the city is changing in a dramatic way by then. This huge restructuring of capital, which takes place in the 70s and 80s and from then on so to speak, partly destroys the centrality of an organized working class to one's notions of politics. Of course, it's also part of a kind of restructuring of the way capital interacts globally, so that you have the construction of global supply chains going on in the 80s. And therefore, workers are emerging in other parts of the world, you know, especially in the Far East, in South Korea and so on.
ABL: So your new work -- this investigation of commercial capitalism -- you would say is self-consciously thinking about precedents for what's happening in the 21st century as well.
JB: No, it didn't begin like that. I mean, it would have been great if I had thought it out in those terms. I only read Nelson Lichtenstein’s paper, “The Return of Merchant Capitalism” recently, a few months back. Otherwise it would have been in the bibliography, because it's so relevant. It’s a way of updating the whole debate. But that simply wasn't at the back of my mind, as I say.
My problem was how do we write a history of capitalism, if you call yourself a Marxist, you have all these categories before you, how do you use them to write a history of capitalism? And it always struck me as paradoxical that Marxists above all should have been writing a history of capitalism but weren't. I mean, whereas you had the Annales school and the various continental historians and so on writing histories of capitalism. Whenever a Marxist attempted to write a history of capitalism it would come out as a wretched piece of work on the whole (laughs). Um, I won't mention names here.
Or it would be so pedagogical, like Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism which is in some sense an attempt to create the basis for writing the history of capitalism. But because Dobb is so ambiguous about merchant’s capital, he's not completely dismissive of it, but he is ambiguous about it. Therefore, he destroys the potential that otherwise lies in that kind of investigation.
A view of Istanbul and the Golden Horn taken by the Swedish photographer Guillaume Berggren, ca. 1870.
Why read history? A theory of the history of commercial and industrial capitalism
ABL: Why do you think it's important for a Marxist to be interested in the history of capital? Why isn't it just, you know, we should join a party or join a labor organization? Why do we have to think about things that happened 200 years ago, for Marxists?
JB: Well, because that has a contemporary relevance. I mean, it affects the way you understand capitalism today. Having a clearer sense of its history gives you some sense of what's going on today as well.
When I was looking through your email, you know, the kind of areas we might discuss, I was struck by the point about real and formal subsumption. If you could ask me that at this stage, I could tell you why I think that -- what was the question?
SC: Yeah, Andy and I had sort of exchanged some emails earlier. And because I was trying to clarify whether you thought -- first of all, whether the distinction between formal and real subsumption is significant? And [secondly,] is your argument that real subsumption is not a logical end point of something like capitalist development -- meaning, one could continue to have what we would call formal subsumption for quite a long time? That wouldn’t then transform into real subsumption?
Note: “formal and real subsumption” are categories found in Marx’s Capital, especially the appendix to the first volume, and were explored in innovative ways in Banaji’s essay on the Deccan peasantry (1976). “Formal” subsumption refers to an older, pre-capitalist labor process that becomes absorbed into cycles of capital accumulation but without changing the conditions of production themselves, e.g., the tools, instruments, profiles of the workers. “Real” subsumption refers to the subsequent transformation of labor, by capital, into a process streamlined and optimized for accumulation, e.g., from a household workshop to a large-scale factory. They correspond to Marx’s distinction between “absolute” and “relative surplus-value.”
JB: Yes and no, I mean, formal subsumption continues to characterize all forms of capitalist production which are not based, at least in a minimal sense, on the introduction of machinery in the labor process. So formal subsumption is in numerical terms probably more widespread than real subsumption.
But the “no” part of it relates to my understanding of real subsumption, which is that it's not just something that happens in the labor process, although that's how Marx argues it. It's actually the relationship between labor and capital at a social level, at a political level. A lot of what the Frankfurt school was driving at, it seems to me, is about the way modern capitalism actually involves a wholesale subsumption of labor into capital -- capital not just as an economic relation but capital as the state and capital as a society organized by that state and by capitalists. It has to be seen as a more totalizing relation between labor and capital.
And this is the sense of real subsumption that is at play in the Operaisti [the “Workerism” movement in Italy] and their work in the late 50s and throughout the 60s. Quaderni Rossi, one of the best workerist journals from the early 60s in Italy is largely arguing this kind of position about real subsumption, that it needs to be expanded and understood beyond the labor process. Obviously, the labor process is the foundation for the subordination of labor to capital. But beyond that, capital begins to organize a society which subsumes labor in this more comprehensive sense.
ABL: Like with the “culture industry” concepts from the Frankfurt School?
JB: Yes, but in a sense, more like the way Fordism could be extended to something beyond the labor process. To the way consumption is organized, to cultural domination, and so on.
But just going back to the [historical difference between] commercial capital and industrial capital and where I see the rupture coming in the book [A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism]. It's not very upfront there, but towards the end, there's this suggestion that the subordination of commercial to industrial capital doesn't actually take place in the 17th, 18th, early 19th centuries as Marx seems to suggest. He projects it back [to the era of mercantilism]. It actually takes place when you have the first multinationals emerging towards the end of the 19th century and integrating vertically, integrating forward into their own sales networks and so on. For example, there’s an interesting transition taking place here as late as the 1920s when international firms are beginning to export globally, to export into third-world markets [like India and South America]. Initially, they rely on British firms— most of the latter are managing agencies, mercantile firms [based in the UK or outside] —to handle sales for them.
But what's so interesting is that they rapidly become disillusioned with [the agencies], so that the American oil and mining companies that move into South America try this initially and then they become so dissatisfied with the services that are offered that they decide to organize their own sales networks. They dispense with the services of merchant’s capital here.
And likewise, in India by the late 20s and 30s, they are no longer relying on the managing agencies to handle the distribution of their products or relying on their selling agencies. They just abandon those contracts, partly because the managing agencies are unable to commit capital to the kind of training of technical staff that would be required to handle distribution in a serious way. They're not willing to do that. So it seems to me there is a transition period in the 20s when two very different kinds of capital, namely, the [manufacturing] multinationals on one side and [traditional mercantile firms on the other], intersect and overlap, and they actually have a functional relationship with each other [but one which the latter simply fail to sustain]. But the rapidity with which industrial capital, in the sense of multinationals abandons the merchant firm is quite striking.
I mean, they find that these guys can't actually handle the relationship well. Partly also because they're not willing to commit themselves to just one firm, they'd rather service a whole range of companies in the same industrial sector. And that would lead to conflicts of interest, and so big companies like Shell or Unilever are not interested in perpetuating the relationship anymore. They want complete commitment from those firms to their own product.
ABL: When you gave a talk a few weeks ago at NYU [November 2020], you said that you felt no one had looked at this issue very closely. You did mention Alfred Chandler's famous book [The Visible Hand (1977)] on this. Are you saying that Chandler's book is still inadequate? Perhaps because it's too US-centric, it doesn't get at these global transformations the way that you think someone else, a true global historian, should try to kind of theorize this transition?
JB: I think Marxists need to take that kind of literature more seriously. [In terms of modern capitalism, it was the ‘second industrial revolution’ that was the starting-point, and here next to new sources of energy and technologies in steel, chemicals, etc. it was the] emergence of these new capitalist firms, [Chandler’s giant enterprises], which have the power to organize the world economy, [that marked the real rupture].
If you look at the last quarter of the 20th century, the bulk of international trade, a very large proportion of up to 40 percent, is just intra-firm trade. But, of course, now organized through these complex webs of supply chains [that straddle the world]. These vertical connections between lead firms on the one side and contractors and outsourcing firms on the other, [form a truly] dense web of relationships today.
The importance of Chandler [to Marxists] is that he manages to define the features of the large-scale industrial capitalism [that went on to dominate most of the 20th century]. The textile capitalism that you find in Britain in the 19th century doesn't, to my mind, connote large-scale industry in [the sense in which Marx outlines this in the Grundrisse in the pages that discuss fixed capital].
There's a dissonance between Marx’s theoretical understanding of industrial capitalism and the reality that he's actually relying on. For that matter, even [Robert] Owen is saying the same thing as Marx, saying it earlier than Marx, and saying it more emphatically than Marx. He's talking about these gigantic combinations that are emerging under capitalism, but he's talking about it in the 1830s. So there is this tension between your ability to predict or foresee something and the actual empirical reality, which is a pale shadow of that.
There are fascinating passages in the Grundrisse on fixed capital and on labor stepping to the side of the production process. Marx makes statements of that sort in the Grundrisse which raise all kinds of questions about the theory of value -- if labor steps to the side of the production process, what do we do with this understanding of value? But there are all those passages in the Grundrisse which, it seems to me, anticipate automation in a very striking way. And again, these are theoretical images of a future that hasn't actually transpired when they're written. Marx is writing those notebooks in [1858], yet he's describing a situation that will only finally come true in the 1920s and 30s, with the huge flow processes in the German steel industry, and so on.
So this is a quite remarkable ability of thought to anticipate reality, one which hasn't actually emerged at that stage, as the basis for speculation.
ABL: Yeah, that's fascinating.
SC: And do you think, given the pushing back of the emergence of industrial capitalism, Is industrial capitalism then short lived?
I think it's Lenin who talks about the “combine” [“combined enterprise” in Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)], the way in which financiers actually control vertical supply chain integration by the 1920s and 30s. I mean, isn't that quite short lived, that period of industrial capitalism's dominance [from only the 1880s to 1920s in Banaji’s proposed scheme]?
JB: Well, in terms of the way industrial capitalism organized itself after the First World War and down to the 1960s, maybe. Mass production, in other words, and what many Marxists simply called “Fordism,” might conceivably be short-lived, simply because of the diseconomies of scale involved in confronting large, concentrated, workforces [from the 1970s onward].
The big lesson that capital draws from the radicalization of the 60s is that it doesn't pay to have to confront workers when they’re massed together in individual workplaces, to expose itself to industrial actions which can paralyze the plant. Especially to the degree that automation progresses, and plants become vulnerable to even the smallest forms of disruption, as with the oil refineries and so on, then it makes no sense to allow workers to have that kind of bargaining power.
This is an offensive or an attack that unfolds at various levels, one of which is to simply de-unionize the labor market, to start depending more extensively on contract labor and less secure forms of employment [that undermine union densities]. The other, of course, is more directly to restructure production so you don't have large factories, large enterprises of the kind that you had down to the 60s.
So there's a kind of partial movement away from the mass production model. But there's a brilliant critique by Chris Smith [“Flexible Specialisation, Automation and Mass Production”] of those who push this argument too far. In other words, of the work by Piore and Sabel [The Second Industrial Divide] and of the romanticism of the return of craft labor and so on. It's more complicated than simply talking about the end of mass production and seeing flexible specialization as the return of [more autonomous forms of] labor, etc. One shouldn’t press the point so far that that you actually miss the sheer nuance and complexity of late capitalism and the late 20th century. My position would lie somewhere there, that we begin to see a major reconfiguration of capitalist economy in the last quarter of the 20th century, where all these strands that have been individually present earlier are somehow being drawn together.
You have a kind of explosion of the financial markets starting with the rapid surge of the bond markets in the US in the early 80s, once Reagan comes to power. The financial markets take off in a spectacular way, and that leads to the spectacular increase in derivatives trading which ultimately culminates in the financial crash of 2007-8.
So you have the trajectory of finance capital in these new forms on the one side, [the US investment banking industry], and then you've got Wal-Mart and the return of merchant capitalism in Lichtenstein’s sense, [the shifting balance between retail and manufacturing capital]. Wal-Mart then abandons the numerous American manufacturers it relied on, just moves away from all that and shifts production to China in a big way. So you have supply-chain capitalism being organized globally throughout the last two decades of the 20th century and beyond. That leads to huge job losses in the U.S., which in turn fuels the rise of Trump, you know, two decades later.
And then you've got industry itself. You've got manufacturing being increasingly organized through supply chains in quite complex ways. But the producer-driven chains don't have to be organized internationally. They can be operated domestically, which is what we began to see in India, for example, in the 1980s, with all these large industrial firms which had [major factories] in cities like Bombay now relying on [contract manufacturing in] the hinterland.
The massive cycle of restructuring that started from the 70s. Beyond Multinationalism actually starts with the restructuring of capital in the seventies, with how large firms like Philips were destroying jobs in a very big way.
On writing the global history of capitalism
ABL: There’s so many parallels -- it seems like in the 1970s there was this huge efflorescence of interest in capitalism and Marxism. At least in the United States today, it seems like the ’08 crisis has produced something similar, not necessarily Marxist, but -- you've probably heard of the historical discipline being interested in the ‘history of capitalism’ [but which is] kind of noticeably anti-Marxist or – not-Marxist, or ambivalently Marxist. Do you have any -- have you been paying attention to this discourse of primarily US and now increasingly European historians being interested in the history of capitalism?
JB: I think it’s a [step forward,] a good movement, whether it's made by people who are self-consciously Marxist or not. It’s good, first, because it raises the whole issue of the history of capitalism in a central way [and not as part of debates about “transition”].
And secondly, it's very diverse internally. If you look at the work that's being done broadly under rubrics like “history of capitalism” or “histories of capitalism,” a lot of it is contemporary and about the 20th century -- maybe with the exception of Sven [Beckert]’s work on cotton textiles and so on, that sort of ranges historically. [And of course slavery has become pivotal to our understanding of the emergence of American capitalism and of the ways in which the latter was shaped by it and its legacies. This works in complex ways, e.g., take the implications of the argument in Caitlin Rosenthal’s Accounting for Slavery.]
ABL: I thought a question we might want to ask that’s related to a lot of this is, you mentioned this choice of yours not to use the word “origins,” but to use the word “rise” of capitalism. In a recent review, the author had pointed out that you unlike, say, Robert Brenner or Ellen Wood -- who have a very clear explanation of the origins of capitalism -- this reviewer says you do not have a straightforward answer to that. I just want to hear what would be your response to that?
JB: I mean, yes, obviously in one sense, that's obviously correct, because I'm not obsessed with the question of capitalist origins. The term suggests something punctual, [a precise time and place where it happened], like the English countryside in the 16th century. Jane Whittle actually developed a critique of Brenner which showed that agrarian capitalism in England has a chronology that doesn't square so easily with Brenner's framework. A lot of her book on agrarian capitalism is at least implicitly a critique of Brenner's chronology of English capitalism.
But [Wood’s perspective] makes no sense, because if you see capitalism as an international system, then it makes no sense to say this is where it began, in this sector of this national economy when you don't even have a national economy in any viable modern sense.
The ambiguity permeates Brenner's best work, [which] is Merchants and Revolution -- it's so obvious that he's trying to fit some of that into the framework of the [origins of capitalism] debate by saying that the progressive sections of the English aristocracy are capitalists, [but not the powerful London merchant groups that organized] joint-stock companies [like the English East India Company]. On the other hand, when he talks about the “new merchants” and their investments in the Caribbean, [he calls their enterprise] “sugar capitalism.” But why only sugar capitalism? Why not the capitalism of the various East India Companies? [How were they different? They used supply chains to organize their procurement of textiles in Bengal and the Coromandel. They relied on wealthy local capitalists who had the resources to secure large orders.]
I mean, your coastal warehouse firms in China, in the tea trade, are precisely examples of the [same type of organization. In markets like China and India, foreign merchant capital depended crucially on local networks run by well-resourced merchants who acted as their brokers. The vertical chains through which commodities like tea and textiles circulated back to the ports for shipment abroad should be seen as embodying] a circulation of capital.
On the relationship between colonialism and capitalism
SC: Can I ask maybe what will be an obvious follow up question. If capitalism is fundamentally international in question and in practice, I want to know, what do you think of the “drain of wealth” thesis or the question of colonialism in the subcontinent?
JB: Well, there obviously was a drain of wealth. The point is that much of the surplus-value that's being extracted by mercantile firms in, say, the 19th century from a country like India is coming from [rural] households.
And a lot of that is unremunerated labor, meaning, it's not actually overtly paid for. In my work, I’ve repeatedly referred to [Thomas] Macaulay’s analogy between the contracts that were being signed, say, between indigo planters and the peasants in Bihar, the analogy between those contracts and the contract between capitalist and worker back in England. I thought it was quite a perceptive, amazing thing for a 19th century thinker to say. Macaulay says it’s like the relationship between the capitalist and the worker.
The important thing here is that the peasant at the other end is part of a household [that works with family labor and] the household is very largely subsidizing the reproduction of labor power.
A lot of the labor, insofar as it involves women and children, is automatically unremunerated, regardless of whether the actual head of household is being paid sufficiently for whatever work he is doing. Quite regardless of that, there's this vast reservoir of labor power within the rural household or family that is being drawn upon by capital in these complex and mediated ways. And if you see the scale of profits which are being repatriated to Britain from places like Bihar and Bengal, there is a drain of wealth, there's no doubt about that, except to understand its real meaning, you have to see it as a capitalist relationship, as part of the accumulation of the total social capital somewhere else.
ABL: Sheetal, is your question more like, is ‘drain of wealth’ as a nationalist argument the best way to understand it, as opposed to something that's not so nationalist -- about India versus England -- but about, you know, the extractive classes versus the laboring classes. Is that what you're getting at?
SC: Right, yeah. I thought Jairus was maybe saying the latter by saying it's fundamentally a capitalist relation. Which is not exactly the way the nationalist framing of it goes.
JB: My description is more specific because I actually refer to combined accumulation in the book. All those wealthy “native” merchants who organize supply chains on behalf of the joint-stock companies or of various private partnerships are also making money, right? They're expanding their own businesses, [the way Parsi merchants did in the 19th century or Calcutta’s Marwari capitalists did in the early years of the 20th century]. So combined accumulation entails a symbiotic link between different layers of capital. This undercuts the nationalist or purely nationalist sort of critique.
ABL: Yeah, the other question I was thinking about during my own research -- I’m sure Sheetal did as well -- if we take your framework -- a very internationalist, global, almost abstract approach to thinking about capital -- then this raises the question of, well, then what does colonialism or imperialism matter? Right? If you kind of dissolve those political distinctions and it becomes just about the capitalists and the workers. Is that something that you've had a sort of wrestle with in terms of your own --
JB: I mean, obviously it matters. It's almost like saying, well, since fascism is a form of capitalist rule, why would fascism matter?
Obviously it matters, because if there is a drain of wealth and to one degree or another external forces are impoverishing these territories, whether those territories are organized as sovereign powers or not -- China was a sovereign power, India wasn't at that stage -- that simply means that there's exploitation occurring. Whether or not you commit yourself to a notion like unequal exchange -- I’m quite sympathetic to the idea, because I think that's the only Marxist way of understanding what [Yevgeni] Preobrazhensky meant by the plundering of petty production by merchant’s capital. In fact, Preobrazhensky argued that historically the main form of primitive accumulation was merchants plundering petty commodity producers.
Now, a lot of economic sectors could be mapped onto that particular model. But what, for a Marxist, does the term “plunder” mean in this context? Someone like [Arghiri] Emmanuel was actually trying to give it theoretical substance by saying this is a relationship of unequal exchange, that surplus-value is being transferred from one sector or country to another.
Again, there are people [on the left who will] dismiss the whole argument because it seems to have the implication that therefore the industrial working classes in the West are somehow implicated in the exploitation of colonial labor. But the answer to that is surely that you have to construct solidarity between workers in different parts of the world. That's the answer. The answer is not, well, I won't accept this theoretical understanding because it has uncomfortable political implications. When Lenin grappled with this issue, [he referred to] a labor aristocracy [as if to insulate the bulk of the British working class from the charge that it was complicit in the fruits of imperialism]. Anyway, there is a Marxist version of the drain theory, and it's called ‘unequal exchange.’
On politics in South Asia and the world today
SC: I guess I was curious, given all your experience and your study, what is some advice you would give young organizers or young Marxists about what can be done in India specifically today?
JB: You mean politically or do you mean as academics and intellectuals?
SC: Politically. No, not as academics.
JB: Well, I think to encourage a deeper understanding of democracy and encourage cultures of opposition and resistance and understand that the roots of fascism lie in [the kind of pervasive authoritarianism that is imbued in children through both family and school. They lie in cultures of] patriarchy, in the quality of education, and in the way children's minds are formed or molded and so on. I mean these cultures of deference and subordination which are so deep-rooted in South Asia, whether it's Pakistan or India or Sri Lanka or, for that matter, Myanmar.
So basically a politics that contests fascism [at a much deeper level and] along a very wide front. [Some of this is implicit in the work of Arthur Rosenberg and argued more openly and forcefully in Wilhelm Reich’s early chapters in Mass Psychology of Fascism.] Both Rosenberg and Reich were pointing to absolutely fundamental features of [fascism as a mass politics] -- whether we’re talking about classic fascism or neo-fascism or whatever. [The argument is that the strength of fascist movements lies in those features that contribute powerfully to] the way a mass base is constructed for right-wing parties [led by figures like Modi, Trump and Bolsonaro].
And that's a problem that's still very much alive in the US, obviously, given the millions of people who voted for Trump. So that even if Trump has been defeated and is a loser (laughs), Trump leaves a massive residual legacy which people on the left and in the US still have to confront.
I referred earlier to the “Platform” tendency, which began from the sense that the left is in crisis and will not progress [unless it radically overhauls its conception of politics]. Well, one of the big omissions in postwar left politics has been the lack of a vibrant cultural politics, the inability to address issues about the family, sexuality, education, and so on. In that sense the emergence of feminism [in the 70s] was filling that kind of major gap in the traditional left by raising new ways of thinking about social relations and about domination and power. I think you can't have a Marxism today which isn't feminist. You can't have a viable socialist politics which doesn't integrate Marxism and feminism and build on their potential synergies.
So if the new politics is going to be viable, it has to be totalizing as well as intersectional. [It has to be able to think about gender, race, class, caste, etc. as if it was trying to solve] a simultaneous equation. And think about the central question of where or what is the working class? It's all over the world today. No society in history has had a wider spread of wage labor — of wage domination, waged employment — than contemporary society. [In this sense at least, capitalism has never been stronger.]
[To have a viable left politics today, one with imagination, we have to have] the ability to contest capitalism on all these levels, instead of standing on the sideline and simply denouncing X or Y.
And the other thing that I'm quite unhappy about is the kind of stand that traditional sectors of the left, such as the CPM, take on foreign capital, because that's like falling straight into the trap. A business group like Reliance has always avoided any kind of financial or equity collaboration with foreign firms, but on the other hand, Reliance always thinks in dollar terms, Reliance accesses the capital market internationally, and so on. [India today is ruled by a handful of business groups, all close to the power-elite in the country.] If there was ever a real threat of [a hostile] takeover [of some major Indian company by a foreign competitor], it would never go through. There is no way in which an international firm would be able to take over any substantial Indian company [if the latter didn’t want it]. So those are the rules of the game in India. We have a capitalism [that is barricaded behind a web of regulation that’s specially designed to protect India’s family-run industrial houses]. There is certainly no transparently governed, much less unfettered market and for corporate control. We just don't have that.
SC: You're saying the CPM follows this sort of red herring and distracts from real issues?
JB: What I mean is that the CPM goes for the [soft target]. That's what I'm saying. The [softest] targets are the international firms. From a Marxist point of view, the international firms are more progressive than all other sectors of capital, simply because they organize the international economy.
This needs to be said. If [Marx] were alive, he wouldn't be reacting with horror to the existence of international firms that straddle numerous countries. It's just natural that this is the form modern capitalism takes. But the left goes for the softest targets in India today. There's an almost natural traditional middle-class xenophobia about MNCs [and it’s easier to plug into that sort of cheap nationalism than to think seriously about what an anti-capitalist politics and agenda would actually mean in India today when you have such powerful family-based capitalist groups in command].
But this is also where investigative journalism is crucial. If you're going to ask questions like why has [Gautam Adani been able to] expand so very rapidly in the last ten years, [starting almost from scratch], you have to be able to investigate [that, but it’s that kind of journalism that almost completely died out or, more correctly, has been obliterated].
[The left in India has never seriously thought about what it means to contest capitalism on its own terrain. At the other end of the spectrum, we have a capitalist class that is exceptionally timid and quiescent in the face of power.] I'll give you a small example. I made an intervention at a CII meeting in 2003 where Modi, who was then chief minister of Gujarat, was the guest speaker. He came about two and a half hours late. Everyone was waiting and kept looking at their watch, because time is money in this sector of business. Finally, he landed up and gave a speech, and when I finally got a chance during the question hour, I made an intervention at the meeting, [which got me thrown out, physically removed because it caused an uproar. I was] hauled off to a local police station for a few hours until the meeting was over. Modi was going to have dinner with the Ambanis that evening at their Bombay residence.
Now, the reason I bring this up is that the only Muslim businessman of any note who asked any question at this meeting — look, this was less than a year after the horrific Gujarat violence —was [Fakhruddin] Khorakiwala [of the Wockhardt group]. And guess what he asked Modi about? He asked “How will you ensure labor peace in Gujarat?”! Gujarat had just been through this wave of hideous communal violence with over a thousand people killed in the course of it. And the only significant Muslim businessman at that meeting, when he has a chance to ask a question, asks, how will you ensure industrial peace in Gujarat! I mean, that shows you the [utter political prostration of the bulk of the capitalist] class in this country.
The other side of all this, of course, is that there is still a strong culture of democracy that survives to some degree. I mean, we saw it in the anti-CAA [Citizenship Amendment Act] protests a year ago, huge demonstrations with a wide cross-section of citizens participating. Students, [and young women students especially,] were active in that. And then, of course, you see the farmers’ rebellion today, [seeking to scrap laws that have been hurriedly passed to bolster agendas that the corporates have for agribusiness. These are both examples of how deep the passion for democracy is in India, even if it has been consistently contemned and battered over the years, starting with Congress’s abysmal failure to ensure justice following the anti-Sikh genocide of 1984, and culminating now with the way the entire state apparatus has been bent to Modi’s will. But they haven’t completely uprooted the culture of democracy that was imbibed by successive generations of Indians down to the younger generations that launched the opposition to Nazi-style demographic engineering last year.]
So I don't think ending on a bleak note would be fair. We've got we've got all these sectors challenging the challenging the rule and domination of the agendas of the ruling class.
OK, thank you for the conversations.
Jairus Banaji spent the greater part of his academic life at Oxford in distinct spells separated by life in India. He has been actively associated with both Journal of Agrarian Change and Historical Materialism. His latest book is A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Haymarket, 2020).
Sheetal Chhabria is Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College and the author of Making the Modern Slum: the Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington, 2019), which won the American Historical Association’s 2020 John F. Richards Prize for South Asian History. She researches the histories of capitalism, the production of space, the governance of labor and poverty, and the production of the economy as social scientific fact. She has published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of World History as well as written for The Nation, Jacobin, and Scroll, amongst others.
Andrew B. Liu is an Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University, near Philadelphia. His book, Tea War: a history of capitalism in China and India (Yale University Press), was published in 2020. He is now researching the political economy of China and East Asia in the late twentieth century.