“Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu
PART I
Panchgani near the Satara countryside, in Maharashtra, India. Courtesy: Sonu Singh Bhati, Wikimedia
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.
A biography
Sheetal Chhabria (SC): Jairus, your work has been deeply influential for me and, I'm sure, for Andy as well. I remember reading as a graduate student a bunch of your essays, and I was particularly struck by the way in which you attended to the history of capitalism in a very longue durée. You were keen to decenter Eurocentric origin stories, you wanted the non-teleological account. I recently read a sort of unpublished essay of yours in which you talked about these family firms that managed and controlled Indian Ocean networks. All that stuff was hugely influential for me. And probably most importantly was the fact that you parochialize the wage form and wage labor.
But in addition to that, I just wanted to say, what strikes me most about your work is how empirically rich it is. And I use it as a model when I try to think about writing my own histories, because you tell deep empirical stories that have huge conceptual implications.
Because of all that and because your work is so sort of heavy, we were curious to know what made you do what you do. How did you come to be a historian? What were your influences? Why did you take up these kinds of questions?
Jairus Banaji (JB): So, I grew up in in Bombay until my parents decided to emigrate to the UK, which was around 1962, when I would have been [14]. So, they took me across to England and I finished my schooling there, in a South London working-class school, a so-called comprehensive school, which was a pretty violent place in many ways. I mean, the kids were quite violent [and I usually stayed in the classroom during the breaks].
I first went to Oxford in Michaelmas term of 65. I did Lit. Hum [Literae Humaniores], which includes Classics, Ancient History, and Modern Philosophy. It's a four-year course, broken into 12 terms. After the first five terms, you do an exam in Classics, and then the rest of the course deals with history and modern philosophy. In a sense, those were formative influences because they forced you to address sectors which are otherwise studied independently. Classics was mainly literature, that’s Greek and Latin literature; the ancient history didn't go down to the late antique period, it usually stopped around the second or third century; and then modern philosophy, which I actually found quite repellent in some ways. That's what turned me to Hegel and Sartre.
I went back to India in 1972, having been away for approximately 10 years, but those were 10 absolutely crucial years because they were the years of a kind of intellectual transition. In the meantime, I got married [with Rohini Hensman], we had a daughter as well. She was just over one when we finally left for JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) in Delhi. And within about two or three months of joining JNU in late 72, we started a political circle in the campus. It was a campus completely dominated by the left party student organizations. That's the SFI (Students' Federation of India) and the AISF (All India Students Federation). JNU was a fairly radical place, both politically and intellectually, you could do practically anything you wanted. There was not a trace, not a hint of authoritarianism, except perhaps in the way that some of the left groups reacted to each other. I mean, especially the SFI, which was a very sectarian organization, because it was the largest of the student bodies, affiliated to the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist).
Then in 75 — I'm fast forwarding — shortly before the Emergency was declared, my wife and I shifted to Bombay. We bought a flat there. This was after the first oil-price shock, so the inflation hadn't picked up substantially, and it was easy to buy quite good apartments in Bombay. I spent the next approximately 10 years working with the unions in Bombay. In other words, I abandoned academic work, because I was determined not to look for an academic job in India for various reasons.
And then having worked with the unions, I decided I needed a break, partly for personal reasons, I'd lost a close friend who died very young. First, I went back to Europe. I applied at two places, one in Paris, the other in [the Netherlands]. I was admitted to the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague. That was to complete a book comparing employment conditions in Philips and Unilever, essentially Anglo-Dutch companies, with equivalent conditions in their plants in India. That book was published in 1989. It's called Beyond Multinationalism. It was based on the research Rohini and I had done [along with others] at the plant level in Bombay. Bombay at that time was a flourishing industrial region, a huge, massive labor market area. And we worked closely with the unions, and we had no problems getting access to the plants. I mean, if you wanted to see the shopfloor, then the union would take us around and management wouldn't object. This wasn't the period of the kind of paranoia that later develops in the 80s and 90s. It was a fairly fluid and open period. Using all the material that we had collected over the course of these five to ten years of working with the unions, Rohini and I wrote up this material in the book.
The other thing that I had going on simultaneously was a project in Paris at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme to put together an anthology of translations of French writings in Sociologie du travail. This was the more theoretical complement to what I was doing in The Hague. I thought the Sociologie du travail tradition was the most fertile of the various industrial sociology currents that were around at the time. And of course, remember, while I was working with the unions in Bombay, I was also reading a hell of a lot about industrial relations, trade unionism, industrial sociology and so on. You know, I used to type out those notes. I would borrow books from the I.I.T. library and then type out notes in detail. And it was partly that more abstract kind of research into trade unions and industrial sociology and industrial relations that made me feel that the French had the most exciting perspective around at the time.
In particular, I was quite impressed by Serge Mallet and his writings on the new working class. And I was trying to identify some formation that would be roughly comparable to that in the big companies that we were working with in Bombay. Beyond Multinationalism does contain an argument about the new working class. But it's more nuanced than Mallet in the sense that “new” here is sociologically broader than Mallet himself tends to understand. For Mallet, it's largely technologically determined. By new, he means workers who are employed in advanced productive sectors, technologically advanced productive sectors such as oil refineries, electronics firms, and so on. Whereas “new” to me connoted to me something closer to modern industry as opposed to textiles. There was that distinction between traditional industries that have been inherited from the 19th century and industries that have essentially grown up with multinational investment in the late 40s and 50s, which were the kind of firms we were working with in Bombay.
And I had made a third application — I made three applications and was trying to accommodate all of them — which was to go to Oxford to start a D.Phil. in Late Roman History. I was admitted on the understanding that I'd be able to come up with the money to pay for the course. I was navigating between these three countries and cities [Amsterdam, Paris and Oxford] and started my Oxford work sometime late in ’86. That was the thesis which I submitted in ’92.
Then I stayed on in Britain for a few years and started working on Indian business. And eventually [what emerged as] the most serious part of that was a study, a field-based study, on corporate governance in large Indian firms, because the issue was being discussed both internationally and in India. The Confederation of Indian Industry [CII] had just published its own code of corporate governance. It was such a ridiculous piece of document, you know. The Indian business, the Indian capitalist class, is very sophisticated about issues like regulation. They preempt things. They don't want a state regulation of capital, so they decide to kind of move into the field and regulate themselves. But, of course, it's not self-regulation in the sense of the City [London] or in the British sense of self-regulation, which presupposes a whole culture of self-regulation.
A colleague of mine Gautam Mody— who was later to work with the only federation of independent unions that has ever emerged in India, [the NTUI, New Trade Union Initiative]— he and I undertook this fieldwork based on a study, and we conducted something like close to 200 interviews with the top-end of Indian business, private sector firms, including auditors, analysts, and so on. That [Corporate Governance and the Indian Private Sector] was published not so much in hard copy but on the net.
So broadly speaking, till the 2000s began, this was the kind of variegated trajectory of the work I was doing. If you want to see a pattern, it's a kind of interaction between theory and practice in the sense that I'm constantly theoretically reflecting on experiences and actual everyday interactions.
And then at the back of my mind was this idea that I would go back to ancient history, but I wouldn't look at the period that I had studied as an undergraduate at Oxford. I would look at the Late Antique period. And that's what I did in the thesis, which was published in 2001. That’s Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity. But as I say, by the late ’90s, my interests were moving back into the contemporary world. And it took the form of a study of these kinds of corporate strategies and no longer so much focused on the plant and on unions as it had been in the early 80s, but now much more in terms of how capital was reorganizing in India and the kind of rhetoric of corporate governance that was being mouthed.
And then, for most of the 2000s, I started to work again in a fairly sweeping way on historical subjects and came up with a whole series of essays or articles that were published in the Journal of Agrarian Change, in Historical Materialism, and so on. Many of those were collected together in what was published as Theory as History in 2011. A lot of the kind of ancient history or Late Antique work that I'd been doing in the same years was also collected together and published by Cambridge in 2016 as a book called Exploring the Economy of Late Antiquity.
So those particular works, of 2011 and 2016 was simply making sure that I wasn't losing the material that I had already worked on, that in some sense it would be validated by being published and read. They were simply collections of essays that straddled years and years of research. I think it was sometime after I published Theory as History that I decided what needed sorting out was this whole issue of …not so much the “origins” of capitalism as the history of capitalism.
Which is when I started, obscurely maybe, working on this book on commercial capitalism, because if you look at Theory as History, then there are two chapters in particular that raise the issue of commercial capital, the introductory chapter where there's already a reference to the plantations and the fact that they are largely financed from London by big City merchants like Henry Lascelles, and so on. And then, of course, the chapter on “Islam, the Mediterranean, and the Rise of Capitalism.”
I avoided the word “origins” of capitalism because this wasn't a substantial cognitive claim. It was a looser agenda, namely the rise of capitalism. I hope you see the point of a distinction between talking about the origins of something as putatively specific and the rise of something as more flexible and potentially more fertile. So that was the essay where I argued that it made no sense to transplant Marx's strictly methodological remarks in Capital about the relationship between commercial and industrial capital to a history of capitalism, since, you know, it wouldn't allow you to actually construct a history, since we didn't have large-scale industry in most of those centuries —whatever your chronological boundaries, you're not going to find large-scale industry in Marx's sense in any of those periods. So [what sort of history of capitalism were we] going to write? That in some sense was the starting point of the idea of merchant capitalism or commercial capitalism as an economic regime with its own features.
Andrew B. Liu (ABL): If we could just back up for a second, I'm actually still curious about what you call the formative decade of the 60s, the 70s. Looking back, do you think there is a reason you were so interested in these questions of labor?
And -- personally, what was the trajectory of your family deciding to move to the UK? When you were in the UK, it seems like you learned an amazing collection of languages that you used later on. Were you sort of immersing yourself in that academic world in a way that you felt like you were going to be there forever? Because what's striking is that you later on, you say you leave the academy consciously. I'm just kind of curious -- there's so many interesting questions that arise from that decade.
JB: Yeah sure, I mean, politically, the transition comes in university. When I was at Oxford in the late 60s, I joined one of the far-left groups, they were called “state caps” because they characterized Russia as state capitalist. At that time, the name of the group was International Socialism. Subsequently, a lot of the first generation or early generation of that group would leave when they decided to rebaptize themselves as a “party.” And that happened in the [mid-]70s. But by then I'd already left Britain. Had I stayed on, I would either have been expelled from IS because there were factional fights, and I was defending the right [of comrades] who didn't accept state capitalism to stay in the organization. But there was a drive to move them out of the organization. I probably would have been expelled, had I stayed on. But otherwise had I not been expelled, I would have left in ’75 when they decided to call themselves the Socialist Workers Party. So politically it was [my time at] the university that was important.
And as I said, I was doing a course that allowed me to move in so many different directions. I mean, had I wanted to specialize in literature or some aspect of literature, I would have stayed with Classics. But of the two parts of the Lit. Hum. course, it was the second part—what's called Greats rather than [Mods] — which attracted me most, because I could read both philosophy and history in that.
So politically, the crucial thing was that a lot of the far-left groups in Britain at the time were what we call “ouvrierists.” In other words, they were very strongly oriented to working with workers, looking for workers in some sense because workers were largely inaccessible. Terry Eagleton and I, for example, would leaflet the car factories in Cowley very early in the morning. It was bitterly cold. You know, we'd be there for the first shift in the morning. He would drive us to Cowley and we'd go together and then we'd stand at each end of the gate and you'd have all these workers zipping into the plant early in the morning on their Lambrettas or whatever. It [wasn’t easy]. We had to keep reaching out to them, and they'd grab the leaflet as they were flying past. In some ways, it was quite an amusing activity.
Needless to say, we couldn’t actually recruit many workers. I mean, that's just the perennial crisis of the far left in the postwar period. But the activity of trying to reach out to workers and communicate politics in some way was again crucial in a formative sense. It stayed with me in the subsequent period. When I went back to India, there was a sense in which I remained not just an anti-Stalinist, but also a kind of ouvrierist, I carried that legacy into India. And it was always the working class in some narrowly defined sense, the factory working class, which would seem to attract us.
ABL: Why did you decide to move back to India?
JB: Oh, because I wasn't happy in Britain. I mean, it was, culturally and socially, it was a climate I didn't find very congenial. That's partly a reference to racism and so on. But my wife, Rohini, was also quite keen that we should get back to the ‘third world’ quote-unquote. And India seemed to be the logical choice, if only because I'd been there as a child and I knew it vaguely, so to speak, not really well. Actually, going to India was quite a culture shock, it was, you know, traumatic in some ways, because I was going back as an adult, as a young adult, and I saw things that I hadn't been aware of as a child. Because I'd say I'd left when I was around [14], and then I was going back when I was in my early 20s. It was a culture shock. And the other thing is that I wasn't going back to Bombay, which is where I’d grown up. I was going back to Delhi, which belongs to a kind of North Indian culture area, which in a sense accentuated the shock.
ABL: Was your family politically active?
JB: No, absolutely not. My father, actually— there is an interesting dimension of biography which reflects itself in my work, which is that my dad worked for Voltas. He was a senior manager in Voltas [in the fifties]. Now Voltas emerged as a merger between the Tatas, on the one hand, so the “-tas” part of it refers to the “Tatas,” and Volkart Brothers, which was a Swiss trading company going back to the 1850s, big traders in cotton. The combination of these two firms was what came to be called Voltas. And my father worked in Voltas.
My first cousin, who was fairly close to our family, married an expat Welshman called Tony Davies. He was head of regional sales for Firestone in Bombay at the time. He handled the whole South Asian region as an integrated market. Another vivid memory I have from my childhood is of having the company car pick me up for lunch, whenever I had lunch at their place. [The driver was a handsome Pathan who, along with hundreds of others, was deported from India as soon as war broke out with Pakistan]. I lived in South Bombay, so it wasn’t far from where Firestone was located at the time, in Sewri.
So there are these two companies at the back of my head, Voltas, on the one hand, and Firestone, on the other. And in fact, the work I'm currently doing partly deals with the rubber industry, so I'm constantly working on or reading about Firestone, which, by the way, I also worked on as part of the Union Research Group (URG, as it was called) when we formed [this at the end of the 1970s]. When we were working with the unions in Bombay, we had access to the plant through the union, and I also spent time in the dispensary in Firestone looking through their register of accidents, because we were doing an issue just on industrial accidents and we got some very rich data from the company. This was before the Modis took over Firestone. Firestone went bust in the 70s because of a corporate strategy which proved disastrous. They never adapted to the radial tire in a way that companies [like Michelin] did. They resisted as long as possible, and in the end it spelt the rapid extinction of the company. [In India] they sold Firestone, the entire Indian business, to the Modis. It became Modistone. And internationally, of course, Firestone was taken over by Bridgestone, the Japanese tire company [and today the world’s biggest tire company].
And then, in a sense, all the work that I was doing on the peasantry and on agrarian issues was likewise based on a [jumble of] vague childhood memories of what the Satara countryside was like, because I partly grew up there as well. The work on the Deccan peasantry that I did in the mid 70s was based on a vivid recollection of the countryside around Pune and Satara. [I went to boarding school in Panchgani, the same one that Freddie Mercury went to.]
So all these kinds of [“embedded”] biographical themes get mixed up [with the research and practical work one does], your memory certainly shapes or influences one’s agenda in so many subtle ways.
SC: I'm just curious, to what do you attribute your moving to the left? You have this early story of studying ancient history and being involved in student movements and a labor struggle. Were those connected for you at the time? Do you think it was your social affiliations that moved you to the left? Or was it what you were studying? And how did you how did you move between, know, study and labor struggle? What was the feedback loop between those?
JB: Well, it couldn't have been my social affiliations since I came from a fairly upper-class family, a typically South Bombay family. And I didn't pick up any politics directly as a child. I mean, I remember [conversations filled with paranoia about] Krishna Menon, not so much in my own parents as among their friends and so on. This whole rhetoric of “reds under the bed” and so on, the idea that the Congress Party under Nehru was being taken over by the Communists and that Krishna Menon was the symbol of this.
So, it couldn’t have been my social background so much as the kind of stuff that I started reading even before I went to university. I was reading a lot of stuff that in some way politicized me, but this was cultural rather than directly political. I read a lot of Rimbaud for example, I found Rimbaud fascinating, because of his rebelliousness against the society of his day. I read a biography of Rimbaud, The Day on Fire, when I was still in Bombay. This was a book that we had at home. The author was James Ramsey Ullman, who also wrote a novel about Michelangelo. I was very impressed by the Day on Fire. I was also starting to read Sartre, again before I actually went to university, [and once there, there was a flood of literature from Hegel, Herbert Marcuse, and Louis Althusser to Simone de Beauvoir, especially the Penguin translations documenting her mesmerizing life with Sartre. Continental philosophers were vastly more interesting than the analytical philosophy I had to read as part of the Greats course].
And then, of course, there was the whole context, the conjuncture of student radicalism, the Vietnam War [and Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, the Cuban Revolution, the Black Panthers], all of which were profound influences. You couldn't be kind of alien to these things. They were surrounding you. At Oxford, for example, [Trevor Munroe and I started and ran a third world society which held its meetings at Nuffield College, one of the two bastions of the Oxford left at the time] and we had Monthly Review speakers over from the United States. Fanon was the other big influence in the late 60s, one was reading Wretched of the Earth [with the same reverence one showed to Marx. At Balliol, Thomas Hodgkin ran a hugely popular seminar series on imperialism, and almost the whole Oxford left would be there].
Jairus Banaji, 1960s. Courtesy: Jairus Banaji
ABL: You've briefly mentioned this reference to racism? Do you feel like your sense of being sort of racialized in the UK also contributed to the sense of ...
JB: Yeah, sure! And in that sense being part of the left was a liberation. It was an arena where you didn't experience that kind of alienation anymore. It was in school, by the way, that I experienced racism for the first time, of course. Just as Adorno says he experienced fascism for the first time as a school kid. It was in the comprehensive school I went to in South London that I discovered racism, but a racism that moved in complex ways, not just white against black or Asian. It moved in different and complex ways.
But as I say, university was a more secular environment. It was less obviously marked by racial discourse and racial practices. And of course, the Left within university was an even freer kind of space. It was exhilarating, it was exhilarating to be there.
The intellectual debates of the 1970s
ABL: You’ve mentioned Hegel a few times. This is something I've been thinking about, so this is a bit of a personal hobbyhorse. It's an open-ended question about what was going on in the 1970s, especially for people studying Marx. It seems like there was a real sort of Hegelian revolution. I think I would put yourself inside there. But a lot of the people who have become very prominent since then also attribute their rethinking of Marx to their discovery of Hegel and the Grundrisse and [György] Lukács. People such as Moishe Postone, David Harvey, Giovanni Arrighi, Diane Elson, Ernest Mandel. I'm curious -- I'm only reading about this, obviously, I wasn't there. What was it like at the time? Was there really a sense of people talking about, ‘we have to rethink what Marxism was, or has been up until now’? And ‘we have to make it much more open ended’?
Your essays, especially the “Modes of Production [in a Materialist Conception of History]” essay or the “Deccan Plateau” essay [“Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century”] are really difficult, but I think rewarding ultimately. They are this sort of wrestling with the philosophical method of Marx, which helped me understand Marx a lot better. But was it unusual at the time what you were doing? And how did you come up with that? Like, was it reading groups? Were just kind of sitting alone in your room figuring this stuff out? How did that happen?
JB: Well, there are two levels at which one can respond. One is that what the New Left or the postwar left, if you like, was doing was rediscovering a rich legacy from the Marxist past which had never been foregrounded, for obvious reasons, by the Communist Parties and the Stalinist intellectual tradition. So the New Left as an anti-Stalinist formation was forced back into looking for, you know, these traditions, which had not necessarily been very successful earlier.
[Second,] connected to that was the emergence of publishing houses like New Left Books, which I think started publishing around 1972, and New Left Review itself was publishing very good stuff, a very wide range of continental Marxists. There was this fantastic interview with Sartre. There was stuff by [Lucio] Colletti, stuff on [Galvano] Della Volpe etc. So if you were part of the thinking left at the time, then you discovered traditions of philosophy and sociology within Marxism which wouldn't have been so obvious had you just gone and joined one of the Communist Parties. Now Hegel was part of that kind of renaissance. Not necessarily a very prominent part of it, but certainly Hegel was part of that, partly because of thinkers like Marcuse.
But when I went back to India, of course, none of this was there. And I went back with a sense that the left was stagnating and in crisis — worldwide, I mean, I don't mean just the left in India. It was already there in Oxford Left, a cyclostyle magazine I and a few others were producing in Oxford in the late 60s. One was writing about the crisis of the left. I remember writing a piece called “Sartre and the Crisis of [Marxism,” in a student magazine called Spartacus] before the end of the sixties. But certainly by the time I got back to India in 1972, I felt that one had to, if the left was going to have any future, it had to think seriously about its own theoretical foundations. You know, how far back these went, how they connected with thinkers like Hegel, and so on.
Not so much in JNU, where the readings were more political. In the circles we formed, the readings were let's say, discussions of the Russian Revolution, which came as a big eye-opener to a lot of the students that joined this circle. But in Bombay, after leaving JNU and Delhi, one had a political circle here, which was, let's say philosophically more fluid and open. We continued to discuss things like the Russian Revolution, but now we were opening up to a discussion of [Colletti’s critique of Hegel and how valid that was, I.I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, etc.]
In the essay in the Elson volume, there’s a constant swiping at Colletti. That’s because we read Marxism and Hegel as part of this political circle in Bombay. In that sense, New Left Books was quite fundamental because it introduced us to a whole range of literature and of currents within Marxism, which weren't necessarily of any interest to the ouvrierist groups in Britain. I mean, they were so fixated on working with the workers that they completely neglected issues like theory. In fact, “theory” was a bad word. In the discourse of the oeuvrierist groups, theory simply meant reading the “Communist Manifesto” or something at best.
The value of theory, interventions in Marxism
ABL: Why do you think it's so important to read theory?
JB: I don't think you can be political in a Marxist sense without having a deep commitment to theory, as well as an understanding of it. You know, I mean, that's the whole point about Marxism, that it's simultaneously a theoretical and a political formation, it’s inextricably linked. If you call yourself a Marxist, that must mean you have something to do with Marx's work. The center of Marx's work in many ways is Capital. And just understanding the early portion of Capital requires a whole kind of theoretical formation. You can't go into the chapter on value or the understanding of value without some sense of what lies behind all that. [In 1875, in a passage of Volume 2 that Engels left out,] Marx described himself as a “disciple of Hegel” [and referred to the “presumptuous chattering of the epigones who think they have buried this great thinker.”] You know, I only discovered that recently, but it's an interesting passage.
ABL: Was there someone or some book that kind of guided you through that? Because when I try to read Hegel and Marx, I’m lost, I need somebody to help me. Was there something where you were reading with other people or there was there a --
JB: Well, we just plunged in at the deep end. I mean, we had an aeronautical engineer from I.I.T. [Bombay] in our circle. And he's the first guy who said, we have to read the Science of Logic. You know Hegel published two Logics: the ‘minor Logic’ and the ‘big Logic.’ So this comrade actually forced us to start reading the big Logic as part of our political circle. We called ourselves the Platform Group. The “platform” meant trying to create a basis for revolutionary politics, which, as I say, we thought was stagnating, if not declining in the 70s.
SC: This was the same time you were working with the trade unions in Bombay?
JB: This was a period which was transitional to full-time work with the unions. Because once we started working with the unions, there was very little time to sustain a political circle in Bombay. So I'm talking about a whole period of years from the time that we established contact with Praful Bidwai in the early 70s and then moved to Bombay and the years 1978-79, which is when some of us started working on collective agreements, sitting in the Bombay Chamber of Commerce office in Ballard Estate in South Bombay, looking through all the agreements that they had in their steel cabinets — in their Godrej steel cabinets, systematically compiling descriptions of conditions of employment in these large firms. But that activity starts in ’79.
[In the main part of the 1970s Rana Sen (CPI theoretician Mohit Sen’s nephew who died in 1985), Praful Bidwai, Javed Anand, Ram Puniyani, Dilip Simeon, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Pritam Singh, Debabrata Banerjee, Rohini, and Ammu Abraham, almost all of whom would become well-known in some way in the years that followed, were all part of the Platform Tendency.] Praful, tragically, died a few years ago, but all of these comrades subsequently became known either as well-known journalists or for their anti-communal work or as historians. [Most of us were active either in Delhi or in Bombay.] In Bombay, we were extremely interested in philosophical questions and philosophy of science. And we ran a cyclostyled magazine called The Bulletin of the Communist Platform.
I can't say that it lasted for very long, but it was quite substantial while it lasted. I wrote a long essay on the philosophy of revolutionary practice, which was an attempt to bring Hegel back into an understanding of what revolutionary practice would mean, [of its rational and experimental moments]. That was recently retrieved by Sebastian Budgen and then he asked me to clean up the text. That is now on the Historical Materialism blog. It’s called “A Philosophy of Revolutionary Practice: The first two theses on Feuerbach (1977).” It’s a rather long essay, but from the footnotes to that, you'll see that I was reading widely in the philosophy of science at the time, 1976-77.
About the “Modes of Production” essay, I should tell you that that was actually written [in 1974 partly as a reaction to the Ernesto Laclau and Andre Gunder Frank debates. I hadn’t read the Perry Anderson volumes (1974), even though my own essay was only] published in 77.
ABL: The “Asiatic Mode of Production” essay [in the appendix to Lineages of the Absolutist State]?
JB: Not that so much as the first two volumes of, you know, it was projected to be a kind of multivolume work. Passages [from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974)] and Lineages, the first two volumes, right?
I typed out [my essay] in Bombay and then I was invited to Dar es Salaam around the time as an external examiner. The final form of the essay was finished in Dar es Salaam, and then it just languished for a while until it was picked up by Capital and Class. They said they'd like to publish it, so I said, fine, go ahead.
Now, what's crucial to the architecture of that particular essay is the distinction between forms of exploitation and relations of production, because that opens up everything. Once that distinction is made, you no longer have this crude, kind of mechanical mapping of modes of production and relations of production on to some spectrum of gradations of exploitation, you know, like feudalism/serfdom, capitalism/wage labor, etc. Once the distinction is established conceptually, there’s a hell of a lot that you can do after that.
ABL: In my reading, that [distinction] is the foundation of understanding all the insights you've come up with since then. And it's such a philosophical overturning of the previous understandings of what Marxism was.
I'm just kind of curious, do you know, do you remember how you came to that realization that you have to make this distinction? Was it because you were looking at the world beyond Western Europe? Or was it a philosophical revelation? Do you remember what was the inspiration? Because for me, I agree, that [distinction] is the theoretical linchpin of so many of these arguments you have made.
JB: I mean, I think the debates that were going on in in India at the time on the “Mode of Production” [in agriculture], where you have people like Paresh Chattopadhyay, Utsa Patnaik, and Ashok Rudra contributing — my dissatisfaction with what was being argued in those debates was driving me towards this particular distinction. But in particular, it was the relationship between, say, moneylenders and peasants which I was trying to figure out, because either you somehow kind of just dismiss that as pre-capitalist and forget about it, so to speak, or you try and integrate it into some understanding of capitalism.
It was Rohini who was arguing that there's a way of seeing merchant’s capital extracting surplus-value from peasant households. In these internal discussions that we were having, this was the thing that was being argued that actually there's no reason why the relationship between peasants and moneylenders and merchants and so on couldn't be seen as involving the production of surplus-value. So that idea, of course, is then argued in more detail in the Deccan peasantry paper.
And simultaneously, the distinction between relations of production and forms of exploitation is underpinned by Hegel’s distinction between essence and appearance. Hegel is crucial to that distinction, because once you distinguish these levels of abstraction, so to speak, then it becomes possible to see what's happening. That capital can be a sort of essential relation, even if the phenomenal forms that you encounter are, of course, also conceptually confusing forms, because this is just the kind of chaos of reality so to speak that Marx talks about [in the introduction to the Grundrisse]. Those phenomenal forms are simply that. What matters is your ability to relate them back to some ground or some essence which would explain them.
I did the research for the Deccan peasantry paper in the Maharashtra archives in Bombay. That's where I got all my Deccan material from, initially as a requirement for the M.Phil. in the history course in JNU, which I never completed because the Emergency intervened.
ABL: You wrote that essay as a Master’s student?
JB: No, that essay was written in 1977, unlike the “Modes of Production” one, but it was based on material that I started collecting, thinking that I would do an M.Phil. dissertation on this topic. It was actually meant to be an M.Phil. to be submitted to JNU. But in the end, they de-registered all students who weren’t present in Delhi. If you wanted to retain your links with JNU, you had to go back and reregister. And I was in no mood to do that because the Emergency was in full swing at the time, and I had no intention of going back to Delhi.
ABL: So without the Emergency, you were on a trajectory to do a master's and perhaps a Ph.D. in South Asian history.
JB: Yes, in the sense that I was already working on South Asian topics under teachers like Bipan Chandra, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, and Saugata Mukherji. The only paper I actually published on the strength of my course work was the one on the Comintern and Indian nationalism. It was published in a [Trotskyist journal] called The International.
It's called “The Comintern and Indian Nationalism” and argues that it was quite wrong to see the Indian bourgeoisie as just a passive tool of British imperialism, that you couldn't understand the strength of Indian nationalism if you had that kind of analysis. So it was kind of contrary to the Maoist intellectual constructions of Indian nationalism. And again, it's based on research I was doing in Sapru House into back issues of Inprecor [International Press Correspondence]. Inprecor was kind of one of the magazines that the Comintern ran. And I was specifically looking for their understanding of Indian nationalism in that.
So that was one of the South Asian pieces of research I did at the time. The other thing I was becoming increasingly interested in was agrarian history, which is how the Deccan peasantry interest emerged. It was essentially a commitment to agrarian history.
I should mention that I had already, before leaving Britain, committed myself to a book on the peasantry. That was the first time I met Perry Anderson. We sat in the New Left Review office and I signed a contract with them. The book was going to be called The Decline of the Peasantry. And it was a kind of longue durée argument about why we can't expect the peasantry to survive historically under capitalism. The contract with NLB was signed in 1972, so when I went back to India I was largely working on agrarian history at the time.
And reading widely. That's where I first read [Michael] Confino on the Russian landowners of the 18th century and began to discover how much more complex and sophisticated agrarian history could be than simply kind of pigeonholing classes into “feudal,” and so on and so forth. What Confino was arguing was that the kind of economic rationality that these landowners displayed --- we're talking about the Russian aristocracy of the 18th century — was far more advanced than anything we could simply characterize as feudal. That there was a sense in which they had models of efficiency, of estate management, [that were far from backward]. The same thing has been argued for the [American] plantation owners, that they [exemplified] models of capitalist efficiency. So at the time I was quite impressed by [Witold] Kula’s book on Poland, by Confino’s work on Russia. So these are the strands of argument that were drawn into the “modes of production” paper.
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.