Collective Pride
Arindam Chakrabarti One good thing about collective pride seems to be that it has a tendency to curb or neutralize individual pride. One often takes pride in one’s family or school by stating how unexceptional or routine one’s own performance or achievement is compared to others of the same family or school. Similarly, the glory of greater collections tends to render the excellence of smaller groups less and less worthy of exhibition. But does that mean that collective pride is any more excusable or less offensive than individual pride? Hume makes a stray remark that “Vanity is rather to be esteem’d as a social passion, and a bond of union among men.” Nationalism, patriotism, political party pride are such cohesive forces which do promote integrity and protect social groups from aggression or absorption by stronger groups. But they also encourage large-scale combativeness, cultural insularity and communal hatred. Schopenhauer decries “national pride” as “cheap” precisely because it levels out individual excellences and provides a generic refuge to those who lack self confidence and individual merit. While the commendable forms of collective pride are patriotism, commitment to one’s club or community, rootedness in one’s culture, the contemptible forms are too well known: Racism, Jingoism, cultural chauvinism, the religious myths of the chosen people are easily recognizable as obnoxious. But the more paternalistic forms of cultural pride which come in the form of not wishing to judge alien or primitive societies by one’s own exacting standards, or the readiness to explain away and put up with atrocities too easily as due to “different value systems” are harder to recognize. Modern societies tend to practice some sort of collective self-mortification by being cynical about the domestic and over reverent about the foreign. But we must be as suspicious of excessive group humility as we have to be cautious against individual obverse vanity. Sometimes, of course, the very content of collective pride precludes competitiveness or intolerance. If a certain cultural or religious group feels proud that they are the only people who have the catholicity to honor the value of all other cultures or the truth in all other creeds such a pride kept within limits should be less harmful and more ennobling than others. In so far as collective pride too is, after all, felt by individuals, it is based on more or less close relation with the self of the proud person. It can be, in that sense, always reduced to individual pride. An American’s pride “that we Americans are the most prosperous nation in the world” can be reduced to the pride that she herself belongs to the American nation which etc. But in this individualized form national or cultural prides are easily seen to be un-universalizable especially in international or trans-cultural contexts where such prides can be pointfully shown off. Unlike individual pride which can be well deserved in certain cases, especially when the proud-making excellence is hard earned, collective pride is very often undeserved. So is collective shame. The individuals who feel these emotions hardly have any choice or responsibility in bringing about the noble or lowly thing which makes them proud or ashamed. The illiterate Bengali feels proud of Tagore’s poetry, the conscientious American feels ashamed of Vietnam. One feels the irrationality of such emotions but cannot therefore help feeling them. Even unavoidable individual prides are often based on truthful recognition of quite unchosen features like noticeable good looks, or congenital talents. What we shall be examining, however, is whether such pride becomes any more commendable when it is more widely shared. Let us put collective pride in the explicit “we” form to the test of universalizability. Suppose I am proud that we Indians have the greatest music of the world. On the crudest level I cannot at the same time will that the English, the American, the African or the Japanese should be proud that they also have the greatest music, because if they have to be proud that they all have the best music then they will have to have the best music in which case ours no longer will remain the best or even one of the few best musical traditions. It will not do to try to save the universalization by introducing the dodge that I have no objection to their believing that they do have the best musical tradition. For, as I have argued above, for me to wish that the Germans be proud that they produced the greatest music is for me to wish that it be true that they did, otherwise all I am ready to universalize is false collective pride. As in the case of true or well-deserved individual pride, the truer a cultural group’s claim to excellence (in a particular respect) the less sincerely can the pride be willed to be universalized. To come up with considerations like “So what, if the Americans do not have so great a musical tradition of their own, they have science and technology” makes the national pride all the more offensive instead of toning it down. The less shallow way out is to relativize excellence to standards internal to a nation, culture or group. Thus, while I can be proud that we Indians have the greatest music by Indian standards, I can allow that every other nation be proud that they have the greatest music by their standards. This sort of “ours is the best for us” move lies at the back of most moral recommendations of moderate collective pride. While we give up the claim that there are absolute transcultural universal standards of judging the worth of cultures themselves, within a culture we can retain objectivity of norms for evaluating individual accomplishments. If every culture (that is, these sets of norms which are immanently objective) is to be judged only by its own standards, each of them will come out as excellent and unique and a non-jealous collective pride will be trivially universalizable. But this
A Letter from Badal Sircar
To: Richard Schechner November 23, 1981 Dear Richard, You wanted me to write for the “Intercultural Performance” issue of The Drama Review. You wanted me to write about my experience with my theatre group Satabdi; about the difficulties I had and the successes I have had; about my state of mind, my experiences as a playwright and a director. What can I write? I am no writer of essays. I am a theatre man. I wrote some plays because I am a man of the theatre, not because I am a writer. I have to write in English, but English is not my language. My experiences with Satabdi, in theatre, in the cultural jungle of Calcutta, my city; my experiences with other people, with society, with life itself in all its absurdity, sordidness and beauty-all these are no better than a chaotic mass of confusion, and a long history of trying to find a meaningful course, a rational path, through this chaotic agglomeration. I am looking back to locate and understand the path already traversed; I am looking ahead to project it to the future so that the next few steps can be taken. So where do I begin? At the beginning? At where I am now? At somewhere in the mid-course? Better somewhere in the mid-course; then I shall not have to bother about chronology, continuity, or coherence. Calcutta. The city I was born in and raised in. An artificial city created in the colonial interests of a foreign nation. A monster city that grew by sucking the blood of a vast rural hinterland which perhaps is the true India. A city of alien culture based on English education, repressing, distorting, buying, promoting for sale the real culture of the country. A city I hate intensely. A city I love intensely. Calcutta, July 6, 1979. An old building in the congested College Square area occupied by the Theosophical Society of India for more than ninety years. The lecture hall on the second story, 58 feet long and 24 feet wide, with its old dusty cupboards full of books on Theosophy and faded oil paintings of potentates of Theosophy—given to Satabdi on hire every Friday after much persuasion. First performance of Basi Khabar. Culmination of a year-long process. The first experience of Satabdi of creating a play collectively. Year-long-but what is a year? None of the Satabdi members are paid anything. They work in banks, schools, offices, factories; they assemble in evenings exhausted by loveless work and sardine-packed public transport; they have to disperse early for long journeys, many by scandalously irregulars suburban trains. On Sundays we can work for five hours, provided we are not invited to perform somewhere-a village, a “bustee” (slum), a suburban town, a college lawn, an office canteen. Shows on Friday evenings; Thursday evenings spent on the rehearsal of the play to be performed the next day. How much time can we get for working on a new project? Eight hours in a week is an optimistic average. Still, a year means that we all grow with the play for one full year, and the play gets into our bloodstream. One year back. July, 1978. First performance of Gondi—an adaptation I made of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. We felt good. We enjoyed preparing it—only fifteen performers taking care of forty roles; hut, stream, door, trees, bridge made of human bodies. We all felt that the play is Indian and contemporary and can be understood equally by the educated of the city and the illiterate of the village, and our later experience proved this belief to be correct. It was the third year of our regular weekly performances at the Theosophical Society hall. Before that we have had two years of such weekly shows in another room (1972-1974), and a spell of nearly two years of only open air shows. Performances in public parks were stopped by the police during the “Emergency”(1975) and our search for an indoor space ultimately brought us to this hall in early 1976. Admission was free; a donation of one Rupee (eleven cents, a cup of coffee in a shabby cafe costs more in Calcutta) was expected and was willingly paid by most, but that was not the condition for entrance. Leaflets containing the program for the next five or six Fridays were distributed to the spectators, otherwise we depended entirely on word-of-mouth publicity. (I am using the past tense because we now perform in another hall-the system has remained the same.) The relation between acting and sitting areas varied according to the demand of the play. For Gondi we could provide about 125 seats, all seats were booked much in advance, and we felt good. That was the beginning of the year-long process of creating Basi Khabar. After Gondi we had no play at hand. We were having workshops, relating sometimes to the cruel absurdities we live in. Enormous wealth and immeasurable poverty. A devastating flood ruining hundreds of thousands in the villages and a huge crowd of fans gathering to see the film stars raising donations in Calcutta for flood-relief. Construction of the underground railway in Calcutta and 90 percent of the underground water remaining untapped, rendering most of the arable land mono-crop. Satellites in space and 70 percent of the population under the poverty line. Democracy and police brutality The stupidity of man, the cruelty of man, the achievements of man, the callousness of man-not just in this country, but in the whole world. But what about the courage of man? Somebody asked. What about Spartacus, on whose struggles we made a play in 1972? What about all those who dream of and die for the emergence of a new and better society? We decided that we would try to make a play collectively on these issues built around the theme of a revolt. Revolt—the ultimate burst of collective courage. We chose the Santhal revolt of 1855-56 that shook the British imperial hold on Eastern India for
Three Tim Poems
Akhil Katyal Tim calls from Brighton Tim calls from Brighton, panting, I ask him what’s wrong with you, he says he wants a bit of friendly advice but mainly needs my cue for ranting, I plop myself on the bed and give him the ‘Go ahead.’ ‘If only,’ he says, ‘I could forget him, all will be fine,’ he’s lonely, my instinct says, but I listen to his words an’ keep a tab on mine, but soon, Tim, without a sense of proportion, as is usual with him, lets his grumbling decline from the high themes of love and loss, to how his day had been, what he’d read and what he’d seen, how he goes to the gym, to gather moss, for the hot guys, but still, hates to get on the treadmill. We yack about his daily itinerary, bitch about the world, and wax literary, ‘Love, you know Tim, is a bit like your treadmill, where else would we sweat so much, with heart-rate gaining, think about time elapsed and the time remaining, and run like that (we don’t want to be parted) only to end at the point we started.’ Returning from the Piccadilly Cinema Tim thought it slightly odd that, after a movie, he would think so much of him. To overreact to a film might seem a little sad to you, and so it did to Tim, but movies, they do that to you. Walking back, he thought of those days with him, ‘what’s the point,’ he asked, ‘of looking into the past, it only tells you how long misunderstandings last,’ yet this twenty-five year old kept on chewing the plot in his head, the guy in the film, he remembered, said ‘I love you still, there is no point lying, in the end we’re all dead, or dying,’ on his way back, Tim did not think of anything as far as tha’, but wished he knew, tonight, if not how to set right what now was riven, at least to know how much he had to forgive and be forgiven. (Thanks to Vikram Seth) Tim’s day out in Falmouth (Cornwall) As the sleeper moves more south, more west of London, some place names come weird, the rest you just cannot say (what we don’t know (Cornish) we let it lay), it halts at Taunton an’ Truro, an’ Looe an’ Learkside, an’ when you pass all these, you reach Gyllyngvase, if you please. Tim had to give a lecture; that done, earlier in the day, he goes out into the evenin’ sun, obeying what his supe’ had to say, ‘Cornwall? perfect, don’t forget, once you teach, go hit the beach, they don’t come more blue.’ That was true enough (Tim saw some surfers too) but he’d always been skeptic of small towns, never could stray from the centre of things, for him, it was always either London or New York, cities which call a sfork a sfork, where you shout (you want to) when you talk, look out (you have to) when you walk, not these one High Street towns, damn, ‘what to make of Falmouth,’ Tim frowns, ‘these small Cornwall seaside downs,’ so much so that he feels a bit dismayed, when the owner of the guest house where he stayed, says ‘Back from the beach? So you goin’ to hit the town?’ ‘What town,’ Tim almost said, then felt silly, might as well, ‘can’t just sit here, shaking me willy.’ He went out, and in about half an hour, he was glad he was there, the street was full of the seaside air, not many people but under these lights, this night felt different from all other nights. He walked into a pub where 3 men sat, ‘let’s try,’ he thought, ‘some sort of sea port chat,’ he was afraid, though, that it would not click, all sea-talk he knew was in Moby Dick, but Tim, you see, flirts a lot when he’s on a trip (he trips a lot, that’s another thing, when he flirts), but three pints down, he forgets the fear and turns a little loud when speaking to one third of the crowd, ‘What’s your name,’ he asks the red shirt, ‘Chris,’ ‘new around here?’ and then that is that and this is this, they talk till they are well past the intro, and are now poking fun (at each other, when did he do this last in London?) they ask the full names of the other. ‘Chris, Chris Weizenbaum’, Tim laughs and says ‘what’s sort of name’s Chris, for a proper Jew boy like this’ ‘Why, what’s wrong, did you expect Jacob or Moses?’ ‘No no, that’s too much, but at least a Leo,’ Tim went on, when he thinks Jew, he thinks talent, he thinks of Jerry Seinfeld or Woody Allen,’ and slightly tipsy, Tim imagines them passing their baton on to Chris, and all of Manhattan (Jew paradise) is suddenly this, and this, here, the Falmouth night wears on, the nip in the air enters the door, the barman here, seems to be done, ‘we’ll close now, sons, it’s already one,’ (urgh, small towns!) they walk out, more like, they flow, in a bit, Tim gets to know that Chris is Irish, he laughs, ‘Are you thinking what I am thinking? Gay and Jew, and Irish too, think of all the cards that you can play.’ ‘Well it would seem,’ Chris says winking, ‘all three have come to use today.’ (Thanks to Howard Jacobson) Akhil Katyal is a Delhi writer currently based in London. He blogs at akhilkatyalpoetry.blogspot.com. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Reconstructing Historical Materialism II
Jairus Banaji [ This is the second and concluding part of the essay. It was presented at the 6th Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London, 2009] 3. The indeterminacy of ‘free labour’ and the return to materialist categories The last issue I‘d like to raise is the incoherence of the notion of free labour. Much is made of free labour in run-of-the-mill discussions of historical materialism, as if the whole edifice of Marxist theory would collapse without the crucial cornerstones of free/unfree labour, economic/extra-economic coercion, and so on. These dichotomies are rooted in the voluntarist models of contract that sprang from the pervasive individualism of the nineteenth century and barely survived the searing assaults of American legal realism. (61) If Marxists continue to repeat them, one imagines that is because they derive comfort from the illusion that free labour is essential to capitalism. But the dichotomy between free and unfree labour is either a tautology (under most legal systems there are individuals who are either free or unfree) or a remarkably naïve reposing of faith in freedom of contract which is assumed to be a reality when it is in fact a transparent fiction, even more of one today than it was in the nineteenth century, as every good lawyer knows.(62) Marx called it an ‘embellishment’ on the sale and purchase of labour-power. (63) Contracts between employers and workers were simply a ‘legal fiction.’ (64) More often than not, free labour for Marx only meant labour dispossessed of the means of production. More illuminating than the contrast between free and unfree labour and its obvious potential for mystification would be a history of wage-labour itself, the ‘differences of form’ that Marx would doubtless have developed in his ‘special study of wage-labour’, (65) but reconstructed historically, with a wealth of material that scarcely existed for him. Both the extent of wage-labour before capitalism and the brutality with which wage-labourers were treated under capitalism (and still are in most parts of the world) have been massively underestimated by Marxists. These are both issues that only historians can sort out properly but they will obviously have a major bearing on the future shape of historical materialism. As Karen Orren writes, “the institution of wage labor long preceded the emergence of capitalism in the seventeenth century.’ (66)Both the dispossession of labour and large-scale migrancy have been more common throughout history than the standard model of historical materialism suggests. Dispossessed farmers who worked as casual labourers or tenant-farmers on great estates in China from the late seventh century on, (67) ‘runaway households’ as the early T‘ang sources refer to such impoverished peasants; (68) the seasonal labourers who migrated from Umbria to the Sabine country to handle the harvests there; (69) the substantial volume of hired labour used in public works at Rome; (70) or the extensive use of wage-labour on English estates of the thirteenth century (71) are random examples drawn from the history of China and Europe. What was distinctive about agrarian, mining and industrial capital was not the existence of wage-labour markets but their forcible creation — laws for the ‘enforcement of industry,’ (72) the control of unregulated squatting on private land, (73) the kind of mechanisms discussed by Arrighi in his classic paper ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective’; and so on. That the Roman agricultural writer Varro recommended the use of wage-labourers for hazardous jobs (74) suggests that the capital invested in slaves was seen as fixed capital and vulnerable to loss (devaluation). It was Roman civil law that evolved the first clear model of the buying and selling of labour-power, doubtless because the use of hired labour was so widespread. Indeed, Roman labour markets were incomparably less regulated than the labour markets of colonialism with their widespread regulation by master and servant regimes. For example, there were half a million contract workers in the tea gardens of Assam by the early twentieth century, yet flogging of men and women was common in every garden, either for non-completion of work or for disobedience and desertion,’ (75) The forced recruitment of wage-labour that characterized pre-industrial forms of capitalism shaded off into the repeated use of force against wage-labourers, even in England in the nineteenth century when legal coercion was widely used against craft workers and the English working-class was, in a technical sense at least, still ‘unfree’ when Marx wrote Capital. (76) Indeed, it may well be that the overdetermination of ‘purely’ economic coercion by legal compulsion is a peculiarity of modern wage-labour markets, if we date the emergence of these to the Statute of Labourers in the fourteenth century. To return to Laclau with this background behind us, the centrality of free labour to capitalism was the crux of his critique of Frank. Laclau‘s implicit reasoning was as follows: capitalism is characterized by free labour, free labour by the use of purely economic coercion. ‘Extra-economic’ coercion defines non-capitalist relations of exploitation, and these in turn constitute pre-capitalist modes of production. If the expansion of world capitalism consolidated pre-capitalist modes of production, then that is because it was bound up with the widespread use of non-capitalist relations of exploitation in the countrysides of Latin America and other parts of the Third World. The coherence of this picture is still seductive some forty years down the line, which is why Laclau continues to be cited. But taken individually, almost every link in the chain of reasoning is false. The contrast between servile relations of production in the periphery and free labour in Europe is consistently overstated. Dispossession was no less characteristic of the colonies then it was of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was sufficiently widespread in New Spain in 1633 for the abolition of compulsory labour to have no serious effect on the supply of farm workers to private estates. (77) In South Africa, “the struggle to dispossess blacks on alienated land and subjugate them in the interests of capital accumulation proper” lasted throughout the nineteenth century. In the sheep-farming districts