Reconstructing Historical Materialism
Jairus Banaji [This is Part I of a two part essay that HUG is publishing. The paper was presented at the 6th Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London, 2009] What I‘d like to do in this paper is raise the general issue of how we can develop historical materialism in more powerful ways than Marxists have tried to do since the sixties. The general issue is addressed by raising three specific questions. First, how should Marxists periodize capitalism? Second, is there a consistent materialist characterization of ‘Asiatic’ regimes, since Marx‘s Asiatic mode of production clearly doesn‘t work as one? And third, why have Marxists had so little to say about the deployment of labour? By deployment of labour I mean not the general ways of controlling and exploiting labour that Marx himself would repeatedly refer to in categories such as ‘slavery’, ‘serfdom’ and so on, but the organization and control of the labour-process in concrete settings , as in Carlo Poni‘s fine monograph on the struggle between landowners and sharecroppers over methods of ploughing that increased the intensity of labour (1) or Hans-Günther Mertens‘ discussion of the organization of Mexican estates. (2) 1. Commercial capitalism, slaveholder capitalism: the problem of configurations Let me start with the issue of slavery because that will lead into the wider issue of the periodization of capitalism. In the Grundrisse Marx states, “The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour.’ (3) This has always struck me as one of the most intriguing passages in all of Marx‘s writings. The Southern slaveholders are called capitalists but their form of capitalism is anomalous, because capitalism for Marx presupposes free labour (or at least wage-labour) and the Southern plantations are clearly not based on that. On the other hand, the plantations clearly are capitalist enterprises (in Marx‘s eyes) or the problem of characterizing them wouldn‘t exist. A passage in Theories of Surplus-Value is more explicit in exposing the roots of the tension evident here. Here Marx writes, “In the second types of colonies — plantations — where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of (blacks) precludes free wage-labour, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it‘. (4) Here he actually states that a capitalist mode of production exists in the colonial plantations despite the existence of slave labour. It is clear that the two determinations that summed up the nature of capitalist production for Marx (the production of capital or the drive to accumulate, on the one hand, the domination and use of wage-labour on the other) were in conflict here, and that Marx seemed to think that in one sense at least, that of characterizing the nature of these enterprises, the former mattered more. By the 1860s this was certainly his position, because in Volume 2 he describes the money capital invested in the purchase of (slave) labour-power as ‘fixed capital’, (5) and in Volume 3 he states bluntly, “Where the capitalist conception prevails, as on the American plantations…’. (6) I‘d like to suggest that the real reason why Marx had to acknowledge the capitalist nature of the plantations was the impact of the colonial trades on the equalization of the general rate of profit, in particular their role in ‘raising the general level of profit’. (7)”As far as capital invested in the colonies, etc. is concerned…the reason why this can yield higher rates of profit is that the profit rate is generally higher there on account of the lower degree of development, and so too is the exploitation of labour, through the use of slaves and coolies, etc. Now there is no reason why the higher rates of profit that capital invested in certain branches yields in this way, and brings home to its country of origin, should not enter into the equalization of the general rate of profit and hence raise this in due proportion, unless monopolies stand in the way.’ (8) Again, “the average rate of profit depends on the level of exploitation of labour as a whole by capital as a whole”. (9) ‘Labour as a whole’, including, then, slave labour or any other form of labour whose exploitation generated capital. It was Marx‘s recognition of the contribution of the colonial trades to the general rate of profit that tilted his conception decisively in favour of seeing the Atlantic slave economy essentially as capitalist. But if that is so, the implications of this view for historical materialism have scarcely been discussed. On the contrary, most Marxists have played it safe and forestalled such a discussion by endorsing an orthodoxy that has little to do with Marx himself. For example, in his debate with Frank, Laclau took the stand that “in the plantations of the West Indies, the economy was based on a mode of production constituted by slave labour’, (10) characterizing the use of slave labour as a ‘mode of production’ when Marx himself had stated explicitly that a capitalist mode of production ‘exists’ in the slave plantations. That was in 1971. By 1997 when Blackburn published The Making of New World Slavery, the same orthodoxy persisted but now in a much less confident form. “The American slave planter of the seventeenth century and after was not a capitalist — in the strict sense of the term, the species was only just coming into existence — but neither was he as far removed from capitalism as the feudal lord or the Ancient slaveowner.’ (11) Or again, “the undoubted fact that neither the feudal estates of Eastern Europe nor the slave plantations of the Americas
Acid Rock, Mrinal Sen and The Seventies
Sharmadip (Toy) Basu The Bengali Marxist film-maker Mrinal Sen’s Kolkata Ekattor, or Calcutta ’71, is celebrated in the genealogy of Indian New Wave cinema as an exemplar of dialectical storytelling. Released in 1972, it comprises four discrete short stories by different authors. In, and through, these narratives, Sen’s directorial gaze seeks to render apparent the ‘lie of freedom’—a powerful ideological orientation vis-à-vis 1947 that grounded Marxist criticism in India at the time. And like artistic productions emanating from this ideology, Calcutta ’71 is a scathing class-critique of the Indian nation-state’s diseased underbelly, during its immediate pre-natal past, and in the first two decades of its post-natal being. For someone unfamiliar with this second installment of Sen’s famous Calcutta Trilogy, the pedigree of the film would make it appear an unlikely point of departure for an essay that seeks to pursue the subcultural life of Sixties’ American music in the city. But Calcutta ’71 helps me enframe a couple of my concerns. How are the class relations worked out in which American music is represented to be embedded in mid-seventies India by a Marxist-Realist filmmaker, who claims a high degree of correspondence between representation-of-reality and reality-of-representation for much of his oeuvre? In the process, can we also chart a certain new cultural-musical subjectivity animated by re-articulations of Sixties American music in the city during the 1970s? Positioning Rock Music in a Realist Narrative: Each of the four constituent stories that comprise Calcutta ‘71 is grounded in a different decade, sequentially, from 1930s onwards. Each story follows disparate denizens of the erstwhile imperial capital, caught in different stations in life. Nonetheless, voluntarily or by ascription, the characters are also subjects of that of much fraught category: the genteel bhadralok class Training its critical lens on subjects of this entropic category, Calcutta’71 begins with a depiction of the dehumanizing compulsions of urban poverty in colonial Calcutta of 1930s. The second story addresses the utter vacuity of this genteel moral apparatus against the backdrop of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Sited in a compartment of a 1950s Calcutta-bound suburban train, the third narrative concerns food-crisis and the ad-hoc violence unleashed on the under-classes by self-appointed protectors of bourgeois civility. And then, follows the closing movement of Calcutta ’71. Set against the backdrop of far-left political tumult, brutal state-repression, and abject living conditions in the city at the close of the Sixties—something that would putatively find its democratic resolution with the election of the Left Front coalition government to the state legislature in 1977—it is this last story that sets my reflections here. Here, one is made to confront the total disjunct of the urban elite—of the corrupt politicians that this class yielded—from the life-worlds of the people that they supposedly represented. To set the tone of this narrative at the very outset, Sen deploys a signal audio-visual maneuver. If the day-train headed towards Calcutta provided the spatial and sonic setting for the third story in the film, the fourth begins abruptly on the downstroke of electric guitars in unison, enveloped by a 4/4 backbeat being pumped out of a drum-set, and flashing strobe-lights against the night sky. Thus, at the drop of a single frame, the audience is yanked out of the local-train and its concatenated rhythm, out of the 1950s, and launched straight into Calcutta of 1971, into the sprawling gardens of an elite hotel. In terms of the city’s present-day spatial layout, the hotel could be located anywhere on Park Street and its adjoining areas: once the heart of colonial Calcutta’s ‘White Town,’ and now the preeminent site of postcolonial desire and colonial nostalgia. There, an evening party is underway. The sonic cue of drums and guitars on which the film’s final movement begins is sourced to a four-man Rock band, in situ. From a corner-stage on the lawns the band churns out a stirring up-tempo jam (composed by Ananda Shankar). Its sound invokes similitude with that of the San Francisco bands of the Sixties’ Haight-Ashbury milieu: the sound of Acid-Rock music; typified by bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, etc.; replete, with their characteristic improvisation techniques, mediated by modal Jazz and the influence of Raga music on the latter. Yet, it is striking that no one in the party pays the band any mind; there is no active audience for their music. The cynosure of all eyes, and ears, instead, is Mr. Bannerjee—the industrialist-politician who, we are informed, secured his upward mobility in the class and political ladder by black-marketing food-grains during World War II. In fact, the only time the presence of the band is acknowledged explicitly in the narrative is when Bannerjee, facing the band, claims to his acolyte the credit for having hired them. In the film, Bannerjee is the manifest embodiment of the ‘lie of freedom’ that Mrinal Sen sets out to unmask. He is representative of the anglophilic, postcolonial urban bourgeoisie—that, in Sen’s gaze, merely replaced the British at helm of political power in 1947, while the exploitative structure of the colonial state remained intact in its postcolonial guise. Comfortably sequestered from the blighted everyday life of the masses, the field of power that Bannerjee defines cannibalizes everything in its ambit. It renders human relationships hollow and evacuates all revolutionary potential from art. It is an ideology critique. Hypocrisy of the urbanity and other concomitant sins drip from almost every statement that Bannerjee and the other partiers utter. Their crudity gets gratingly heightened against Sen’s pivotal use of montages over events at the hotel. Apposing documentary-stills and moving-images of malnourished bodies, of political protest and State-violence, frames with only verbal text and communist iconography, these montages act as the mottled mirror of reality to the phantasmatic world that the party defines. Its worth noting though that each time such a montage takes off, and then returns to back to the party, it does so via the Rock band. The camera cuts to exclusive shots of the stage and tight close-ups of the
Homeric-Thersitic
Robert H. Bell “But after all, what is the whole subject matter of that revered poem the Iliad but ‘the broils of foolish kings and the foolish populace’?”—Desiderius Erasmus (The Praise of Folly) Human folly at Troy is rampant, starting with the Greek king and commander Agamemnon, who recklessly insults Achilles, refuses to apologize, and suddenly, inexplicably, decides to test the resolve of his army. Declaring the end of the siege, the king is flummoxed when his troops flock eagerly to their ships. The Greek cause appears lost. Suddenly steps forth a remarkable, puzzling figure: “Thersites of the endless speech,” who “knew within his head many words, but disorderly;/vain, and without decency, to quarrel with the princes/with any word he thought might be amusing to the Argives.” Who is Thersites? Not even Homer seems to know. The single orator in the Iliad unidentified by rank, patronymic, or place of origin, his name suggests “loud-mouth” and “courage,” in the sense of boldness, impudence. Reputedly the ugliest man at Troy, he surpasses his glowing, glowering peers for sheer repulsiveness. Since only one other Iliadic character is individuated by appearance and few ever described physically, the elaborate delineation of an apparently minor, fleeting figure is striking. The bard oddly highlights and seemingly undermines Thersites. Deformed and despised, Thersites seems utterly grotesque. Despite conspicuous disqualifications, reviled Thersites seizes the stage and delivers a sixteen-line speech to the entire assembly. Astonishingly, this scorned freak publicly upbraids Agamemnon for greed and lust: you’ve already claimed valuable bronze and the choicest women, “whom we Achaians/give to you first of all whenever we capture some stronghold/Or is it still more gold you will be wanting, that some son/of the Trojans, breakers of horses, brings as ransom out of Ilion.” All this ransom and booty are the spoils “that I, or some other Achaian, capture and bring in? / Is it some young woman to lie with in love and keep her/all to yourself apart from the others? It is not right for/you, their leader, to lead in sorrow the sons of the Achaians.” After excoriating Agamemnon, and flaunting the principles of rhetoric, Thersites assails his audience (“Achaian girls . . . women, not men”), repudiates their mission, and urges abandonment. Although Thersites’ rabble-rousing is unavailing, it provokes an immediate, decisive reaction from Odysseus, who abuses and scourges Thersites. Everyone laughs over him happily. Entertained and amused, the soldiers forget their incipient mutiny and return to ranks. So much, it seems, for Thersites, basest wretch at Troy. Humiliated, a pathetic, obnoxious creature, he disappears into oblivion. As is right and proper, according to Odysseus, and to most right-thinking people. Reading Homer in the nineteenth century, Prime Minister Gladstone found the speech “not a good one.” Because Thersites is so flamboyantly over the top, he is not always credited for being on the mark. Critics tend to agree with the soldiers and Odysseus. They have marked Thersites’ tendentious description, his physical ugliness and moral turpitude. Is Thersites a monstrosity by heroic standards? Martin argues that the speech of Thersites, “quite literally, ‘without meter,’” is “over-determined to look bad by a number of criteria,” including slurring his words. Evidently “just an entertainer,” he “deserves no respect.” Much like the Hephaestos sequence, another intervention by a disabled figure prompting mocking laughter, this episode is disconcerting, and fruitfully so. But ought we to dismiss Thersites so precipitately? Notwithstanding the soldiers’ contempt, the narrator’s malice, and the PM’s condescension, Thersites’ “words of revilement” are words of power provoking instant reaction from Odysseus. Thersites is no blithering madman or prating malcontent, and Agamemnon’s reckless conduct he himself eventually acknowledges as folly or madness, até. Impertinent yet pertinent, speaking truth to power, Thersites is seriously threatening. He says that Agamemnon “dishonoured Achilles, a man much better/than he is.” Thersites sarcastically echoes and ironically lauds Achilles: “there is no gall in Achilles’ heart, and he is forgiving.” Ha! “Otherwise,” he says to Agamemnon, “this were your last outrage.” Thersites locates (one might say) the Achilles heel of the antagonistic chiefs. Shrewdly, he recognizes the gravity of the king’s transgression, and intuits how close Agamemnon was to being killed by the infuriated Achilles. Laughed at, willing to “say any word he thought might be amusing,” Thersites is an unusual yet recognizable comic figure. Aristotle conceives comic types as “worse” than men are, meaning less admirable in appearance, character, and conduct. While “high mimetic” characters like Achilles live for an ideal (glory, say, or arête), “low mimetic” figures like Thersites are more fully embodied. Thersites’ physical freakishness exposes the sexual and appetitive motives of Agamemnon and Achilles, and for his pains is pummeled and harried. Aristotle’s brief remarks On Rhetoric, identifying three types of comic characters, bear upon Thersites. He is a buffoon, jesting to amuse others; he is an eiron, feigning ideals to mock Agamemnon; he is also an alazon or imposter, strutting and blustering to aggrandize himself. It’s possible to regard Thersites as comic relief or as a foil to set off the solemnity of the heroes and their epic mission. In this view, Thersites is a lightning rod, like those Shakespearean commentators who exist, observes William Empson pungently, “not at all to parody the heroes but to stop you from doing so: ‘If you want to laugh at this sort of thing laugh now and get it over.” Arguably, Thersites absorbs the destructive capability of purely derisive cynicism. To sustain a potent, viable heroic spirit, one might conclude, Homer inoculates his characters to resist more devastating, potentially fatal, strains of irony. Though tempting, this model fails to account for the extent of Thersites’ disruptive force. Like Shakespeare who develops Thersites into a major character in Troilus and Cressida, Homer conjures not a stock buffoon but a truth-teller, a wise fool. Certainly Thersites is foolish and reckless: “disorderly;/vain, and without decency,” he thwarts order, propriety, and decorum. Thersites presumes the fool’s remarkable license to speak harsh truths. However abusive and merciless, his invective is inventive
Narrativisationalities of Ribaldian Discourse
Dilip Simeon This is my Rifle and that is my Gun, This is for shooting and that is for fun. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text, Discourse for this life, and Text for the next. Ethnicity, Felicity, Moment of Poesis, Deploying Derrida, contrive halitosis. Deconstruct Narratives, re-inventing the Nation, Imagining India, maximise obfuscation. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text..etc Field Marshal editor, Subaltern mate, Retrieving the Body, what fun to relate. Self from the Occident, Other from East, Apply your Mind to know Beauty from Beast. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun..etc This is my Thesis and that my curricula, Voyaging westwards, remain perpendicular. Narrativize textuality of sexuality, Canonize Prurience of Orientality. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text..etc Archaeological Silences, scatalogical noise, Knowledge is Power, wear it with poise. Positing Subject, we wish to sublate, Delivering seminar, we sit and rotate. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Eros, Telos, Nemesis, Mimesis, Mug up my jargon for passing your thesis. Alas ! Alack ! the subversifying Mind, Earning hard currency, so hard to find. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Mentalitie and Problematique, Academic fashions need a boutique Matriarch, Patriarch, theme for research, Mantra and Tantra from ivory perch. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun..etc Subliminalities of subtextualities, Ponder pomposities of prolix verbosities. Problematising the hidden thematic, Metatextualising intellectuals Asiatic. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Locating, Migrating, mastering Said, Oriental professor wants to get —–. Multicultural interpenetration, Metropolitan colonial wants integration. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Ethnographics of phantasmagoria, Induce seances of mental euphoria. While translating the palimpsest tender, Oh how I long for the opposite gender. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Overinterpreting marxist constipation, Wallow in post-modern self flagellation. Transposing observer to popular stance, Overdetermining professorial romance. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun..etc Agenda of subtext needs corrigendum, Traversing terrain of ethnic pudendum. Verbs become nouns, with lightening velocity, Opaqueness of meaning, euphonic ferocity. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Excavating silences, admiring the skirt, Unearthing allegories of lexico-inert. Pluralisms of syncretistic exterior, Massaging advisors’ psychic interior. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Dissecting semiotics of peasant Tebhaga, Fieldworking students need munim dhaga. But how to explain to examiners’ team, The subtler uses of dhaga munim. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Teasing long hidden truths if I may, Bribing chaprasis how can I say. Slog long enough, material will out, By which time victory will turn into rout. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency Turmoil underneath causing slight divergency. Inverting reality only goes to show, Faculty wanting History from below. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc. Dilip Simeon is a labour historian, political activist and chairperson of the Aman Trust. He is the author of Revolution Highway (Penguin India, 2010). adminhumanitiesunderground.org