Marx & the Non-West (including Ireland)
Spencer A. Leonard with Kevin Anderson Last summer, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Kevin Anderson, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism(1995) and Marx at the Margins (2010). The interview was broadcast on August 2, 2011 on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK–FM Chicago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Spencer Leonard: Broadly describe your aims and ambitions in writing Marx at the Margins. Kevin Anderson: One aim was that, in the past couple of decades – really the past three decades since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, there have been a number of critiques of Marx that centered on charges of Eurocentrism, ethnocentricsm, and so forth. I wanted to respond to those, but also to look at Marx anew in light of them. Moreover, while there are various works on Marx and European nationalisms, on India and China, and the late writings on Russia, no one had covered the whole of these, including Marx’s writing on the Civil War in the United States, which deal directly with ethnicity. So my second aim as to address them together in a single study with the other, more well-known writings. This also required taking account of newly surfaced writings of Marx slated to appear in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. SL: Regarding the Eurocentrism charge, it is raised not only to criticize Marx, but also to reject the Enlightenment tradition in which all critical theory finds its roots. Yet, rather than dismissing the charge as an expression of third world nationalism, your book takes it seriously—arguing that indeed Marx and Engels are not wholly immune from criticism on these grounds. You point to the “unilinearity” of their early writings, above all the Communist Manifesto and the New York Tribune writings of the early 1850s. But is the category of “the West” really relevant for Marx or for the radical Enlightenment out of which he emerges? KA: Certainly there are places where that is the case. In some of the 1853 writings on India, for instance, Marx speaks of England as a superior civilization, which by virtue of its higher economic form is going to revolutionize India. Also, as late as the preface to Capital, Marx says that more developed countries show the less developed the image of their own future. These examples suggest almost, if one wanted to think of it in terms of a railroad train, that the Western European countries and North America are kind of in the front couple cars of the train and that Asia and the so-called “third world” are in the rear being pulled forward into modernity. SL: So that all countries would in a sense recapitulate the historical trajectory of those at the head of the train. KA: Right! Of course, stated so simplisticly, no one supports such a view. No one would say that India is going to become an exact copy of England. But of the extent that one would say that a country like Britain represents the future of humanity, one is adopting a Eurocentric model. Of course, there are also problems with the critique of Eurocentrism, which is often very critical of the social structures and social institutions of modern Western societies and far less so of the social structures and institutions of the non-West. Marx in examining “non-Western” societies is always critical. And as his thought matures, these criticisms cease to rely upon a Eurocentric unilinearity and move toward a more multilinear perspective. However, Marx is no primitivist anarchist interested in returning to a clan-based, low-tech society. Nor does he idealize the social formations in places like India, with their caste and other hierarchies, their subordination of women, etc. He does not sugar-coat any of that. Nonetheless, towards the end of his life, there is evidence that he entertains more of a possibility of societies evolving and revolutionizing themselves more on the basis of indigenous institutions. This is never entirely so, but he gives more consideration to the internally generated institutions of these societies. SL: It seems to me that when Marx says England represents a higher civilization, he is not really talking about the “Englishness” of England, much less anything “authentically Western.” Capitalism for Marx is not a superiorcivilization. Rather, capitalist society is “civilization,” per se, in a way that the past can only be said to be by analogy with it. Thus, in the Communist Manifesto, he uses the language of “civilization,” and terms everything else barbaric, as for instance in the passage where he talks about the beating down of Chinese walls by British imports. The issue is the universality of the form realizing itself at the level of world history. So, it seems that when he is using that language, he is talking about a social form, one that just happens to have emerged in Europe. KA: Well of course there is some truth in that, but as I also say in the book, the language sometimes verges on what today we would consider ethnocentric—the descriptions of India as an unchanging, unresisting society that has no history except that which is imposed on it by its foreign conquerors, and so on. There are some problems there. Another example would be an early text in which Engels applauds the U.S. war with Mexico, the conquest of California, and the incorporation into the United States of the Southwest, referring to “the lazy Mexicans” who were unable to develop the region in the way the North Americans are going to do. That kind of language reverses by the 1860s and 1870s. You can see a real turn there. Also in writings by Engels, but also on occasion by Marx, there is the claim that the Czech and the Serb peoples (to name only a few) are barbaric, so it is good that in some areas they are dominated by the Germans, who represent a higher civilization. These nations are destined to disappear, and this is a good thing. Again, there are exceptions to this even in the early writings. And whenever they are actually in contact with real historical movements of resistance that
Letter from Iowa: Sunil Gangopadhyay
15 June, 1964 313 South Capital Iowa City, Iowa U.S.A Sandipan, Right now I am resting beneath a largish tree on the bank of this river. Windy it is. And 5 dozen cans of beer. Been watching this white girl in swimming costume. Occasionally I am mildly kicking her bottom—how does that look visually? I am literally resting in this state. But I am not part of this setting. As soon as I bring my palms closer to my eyes, everything recedes. No woman’s face. No hunger. No thirst. But beer—yes, that is a reality. Have been reclining on the grass for hours actually. Tried at least 5 times to catch this rabbit but failed miserably. I was in love with your letter for a couple of days. Especially the letters marked with the red pencil. I knew pretty well that you will not like my story. I have no illusion of delighting you ever with my prose. This is because you have written some great prose at one point. Not anymore. But the kind of magic you have produced—we are simply not close enough. I cannot write such prose. I will not write such prose. But that kind of prose pulls me irresistibly. That you will be one of my readers makes me tremble. Still I write prose. Mostly for money. I do not recall indulging in prose but for monetary consideration. Once I had written a novel—quite unlikely that it will ever get published. I do not fear you though for my poetry. I write poetry like prose and shall continue to do so. I have no qualms about that kind of a style. Shakti has written some extraordinary lines. Much, much deeper and larger than me—this Shakti. I respect him a lot. But his poems are headless. I cannot write like that and do not want to write like that simply because I do not live that kind of a life. I can relate much more to Utpal. But this, my resting with beer, makes me oblivious to all poetry. There is no poetry, no heart, nothing. Sandipan, why have you not written much of late? What is this thing about occasional prose pieces? This habit of yours has attracted you to the Hungry Hangama—this latest fad. I did forbid you. And you did not trust me. And then you simply distanced yourself gradually. I never stopped Shakti. Shakti is greedy. Utpal too has taken that route. But I knew that you were not greedy. I have often shared a bed with you, stood in the same shadow while walking in the sun. I know very well the contours of my own greed. And therefore, I could instinctively feel that your greed is less than mine. I became deeply uncomfortable, generated some strong aversion to this new phenomenon. I had always felt that to compose in the English language in order to earn cheap accolades in the West is the worst possible form of greed and narcissism. This feeling has deepened this time here, at Iowa. Would you ever like to be an object of curiosity and pity to the outsider? I have met some Hungry wallahs here—it is these that drive them at the bedrock. Every single day I receive some invitation or the other to write in English. I have refused. Steadfastly. There are 7 crores of potential Bangla readers for me. Much more than French and Italian. I am just doing fine. I write poetry and have no intention to translate my sensibilities. If you wish to access my thoughts in English—do translate me. Happily. I had officially come here to do this kind of mutual back-patting. So far I have resisted that lure. But the real problem with Hungry is not English. The Bangla is even worse. They try shortcut stuff—the idea is to taste readymade fame by abusing and slighting others in the trade. I hope you do not end up really thinking that Malay has some writerly stuff in him! I am wondering because in a recent Hindi literary magazine I have a read an effusive piece by you on this Hungry fad. I was rather surprised that a thinker so abstract as you could feel that writings in the Illustrated Weekly merit any real literary discussion! I know the Hungry folks have tried to pit themselves against the Krittibas or Sunil. I could have dismantled that attempt. That I could. But I refrained. I am telling all this to you because I so much value you as a writer and thinker. There is no trick in this my exhortation Sandipan. I did not follow very well the kind of new things that have happened at your end. Why did you send the same letter to four of your friends—us? I could not fully grasp this method. But then again who has given me this right to understand how your mind works! The point is that once I return to Kolkata, I will sleep peacefully, will walk around rather happily fleet-footed. I do not need any literary-andolan. I really wondered why Malay had published my letter. I hope he has not published any truncated version. That will be so out of the context. I have written to him recently: “If you edit sections of the head or tail of my letters and use some fashionable rubbish like threesome dots or some such instead, I shall box your ears and slap you real hard once I return.” The same is true of your letter. Shakti’s and yours and my private linen is being washed in the public. But these are ephemera—really. No one can touch you. And I shall stand by you always. We have fought over many issues, Sandipan. But I have thought about you patiently: we cannot do without you. I cannot. In a manner of speaking you are my obverse—your fragmentary-disjointed character, your errors and your treachery—to all these I aspire. Like a life I
The Speaker as a Listener
Prasanta Chakravarty I remember a bearded, unkempt middle aged character, presumably not from the neighbourhood, who would be a permanent fixture at various seminars held within Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in the mid-nineties. Sometimes he would hop seamlessly from, say, a seminar on “Bengali Literature in South Indian Languages” to “Recent Developments in Neutrino Physics” in the smooth course of a single day. He would primarily be there for free food. And during the summer—for the air-conditioning. The organizers knew about this guest but would indulge him anyway. He created no fuss. Would find for himself a cosy corner in one of the back-rows. And would sometimes even mildly doze off between sessions. I was then pleasantly surprised to see him one evening perorating quite knowledgeably on the shifting fortunes of the Annales school of history to a bunch of research students in one corner of an odd canteen. As I was participating in and witnessing a recent seminar in Delhi, I remembered the face of that dilettante scholar gypsy. There were really some star speakers here, some delightful talks, some powerful questions raised and responded to and yes, some great food and entertainment sessions too! The whole seminar was meticulously and energetically organized: everything went off like clockwork. But I was looking, quite sentimentally perhaps, for the unkempt guy. That is to say, people who would be there for every single session and in the interstices too. Just be there and even doze off if necessary. But be there. I am primarily thinking about the speakers. Many were present for their own paper only or for one day at most. They were present. But what about their presence? In seminars, we go to hold forth. Mostly. To convince others of our views. In the marketplace of ideas, what have we been worrying about lately—that we try to convey and if possible convert by our powerful argumentative and rhetorical skills. That job once conducted, we tend to move on. So, one gets to hear often in human science circles: how come gender was covered, but not caste? Or some variation. Cover ideas! Very ambitious and taxonomic. But what about another kind of contract that we make with the organisers and our fellow spirits in the world of thought—a convivial contract of listening to other ideas? The very word seminar—from seminarium, semen (seed) would refer to a breeding ground, a nursery. Breeding cannot happen alone. We need to partake of that process. There is a texture to each seminar, one which gives it a shape and character. To begin with, there is a vertical axis. It pertains to the slowing down of ideas and the maturing of collective thought within the confines of the hall. As one listens to the first few speakers one gets the basics clear. This is, as a friends says, the 101 aspect of the larger subject at hand. The issues get gradually disentangled. Ideas begin to waft and float around—coagulating here and there in the hall. A semantic form of listening begins. Trends begin to emerge. By the middle of the day, those ideas, the initial ones, have made their way to the dining lounge. We bring our own thoughts, mix and match and wonder how individual unit ideas would travel during the rest of the day. Some happily recount personal tales about other such seminars, convictions and idiosyncrasies of the speakers and try to match their own perceptions and convictions with the currents and cross-currents of ideas. It is not that I am giving a directional shape to the texture of a seminar, but trying to think ,rather, about how ideas gradually build up. This building up takes a more concrete form as we traverse through time. We now get into listening proper, beyond the semantic. This is paradoxically a reduced form of listening. The partakers quickly realize that there is a shuttling between sound’s actual content, it source and its meaning. The language, the techniques of language, the arguments that we so habitually use, suddenly begins to reveal themselves—in unexpected turns and twists. We gradually see the subtle undertones, feel the ‘laughing off’ of a project or sense the circulation of trivial or harebrained ideas. Why was the word ‘reform’ used fleetingly in this way instead of that, we may wonder? Why does a left leaning intellectual frame her arguments around ‘status’ and ‘nation’—and not critique them either, we speculate? What I am getting at is a certain entrenchment via retreat that leads to a kind of subjective relativism in convivial partakings. Every listener hears something different and the sounds, the twitching of the muscles around us and the sighs and smirks perceived: those that scaffold the ideas, get denser and subtler, ever growing. The nature of the claps after each talk tells a story, too. They shine. We take in the spirit. Submerge ourselves. As Anaximenes who, wondering about ‘air’ thought, “As our souls being air, hold us together, so breath and air embrace the whole cosmos in small meetings.” Perception, in small meetings at such breeding grounds, is never purely an individual phenomenon. It partakes in a particular act of sociology—that of shared perceptions. Reduced listening is a phenomenon. Only a sustained form of listening can take us to this objectivity born of inter-subjectivity. For this to happen, each pin drop must be listened to—with utmost care. This is the contract that each speaker implicitly, ideally, makes—with and in a seminar—which they agree to join in. But there is also a material and lateral aspect of the kind of cross-pollination that might happen in a seminar. We go to seminars for selfish reasons—to serendipitously discover titles of books, lines of arguments that startle us and remain with us for years to come, meet new people and hear their deepest beliefs and benefit from them—pure and simple. That self-regarding purpose too gets defeated if we decide to fleetfoot in and out of the arena. Word is soundful and sound is meaningful. The meanings are
Professor Morrie and Revolutionary Literature
Ashim ‘Kaka’ Chatterjee Tuesdays with Morrie disturbed me. This book disturbed me a lot. The story of Professor Morrie Schwartz is distinctive. There is not much of action here. Not too much description of life’s experiences. Colourful characters do not clash with each other in order to create a dramatic situation. What one encounters instead is death—in its full glory—and life arising out of death. Tuesdays with Morrie is a story of an old professor and his not-so-old student. What kind of a man is Professor Morrie? He teaches sociology at Brandies University. Not merely chhatra-dardi or chhatra vatsal—to brand him thus will be saying a lot less about his relationship to his pupils. Students are his life. Naturally his home, the restaurants near his university, the lawns and nooks—all are sites for nurturing a peripatetic world of examined life with his students. His love of books and ideas is infectious. Love of life, even more. He arrives at a class. A hall full of anxious young minds—waiting. But Morrie is silent. For 15 long minutes. First the students are bemused, mild jokes hover around, notes get exchanged, a certain uneasy restlessness pervades. Then there comes a moment of pin-drop silence. Hush. The professor begins. His subject of the day: the influence of silence in human relationships. Why do we get bothered by silence? Wherefore peace in utterance? This is the way the man wins over his students, commands respect and love. He is not as dexterous as his more famous fictional rival in To Sir With Love nor as historically vexed as Coetzee’s Professor Lurie. But Morrie is not against life. Though he cannot manage his steps, he would dance. Not a good singer, he would be immersed in music. Not a particularly skilful swimmer, he would love to go for a dip. His student, who is narrating Morrie’s life, is bringing this world, a cosmos really, into being with utmost care and craft. The university life being over and done with, his students bring Morrie a brief-case, embossed with his name. They embrace—the teacher and his pupils. And part silently. In such a lively man’s life there arrives a terrible tempest. All in a flash. Morrie gets infected with Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS)—a motor neurone predicament. We all are familiar with Stephen Hawking and his encounters with this disease. Not much has been discovered yet about this condition and not much preventive or curative stuff is available yet. But death is imminent. Maximum duration of possible survival is 5 years. In Morrie’s case, it is 2. As Morrie comes out of the diagnostic centre, he notices the busy world going on with its daily activities. As the world refreshes, he withers. Gradual, little, incremental changes are making him give up the small pleasures of life. He discovers in the morning that he can’t fix his car’s brakes—driving as an option is gone. Begins to trip as he walks and therefore requires a walking stick—end of independent walking days. In the locker room, in order to change his outfit, he needs manual help—end of privacy. Appears before his students one morning and announces that he might not finish his quota of coursework that particular semester and so they can opt for other courses or may drop out—end of his secret pride. ALS, the writer tells us, in an evocative phrase, is like a burning candle. It will burn out and melt your nerves into a waxen residue. The process starts from your legs and usually travels up. After a while, you cannot stand on your feet. And then sitting too becomes impossible. Finally, if you are still alive, a rubber tube will facilitate your breathing. And all this, when you are fully conscious of the rapid changes taking place in your body. The professor takes a profound decision: that he will utilize fully the rest of his living days. There is no need to feel embarrassed about the inevitable. Why not make his death a case for research? Is it not worth it to travel the boundaries of life and death and think afresh? With this thought in mind, Morrie begins to disseminate himself to others, to everyone. He gives a clarion call for meetings in his apartment in order to discuss the many variations on death threadbare. Not empathy or sentimentality he needs—but interviews, new connections, telephonic conversations— with an urge to examine life through death is what he would rather like to indulge in during the remaining period of his existence. He walks into TV studios. His student and now a well known newspaper columnist Mitch Albom had promised to keep in touch after they parted upon Mitch’s graduation from the university. He could not fulfil his promise. The rat race got him. Mitch responds now—after 16 long years and they start a new research agenda, like the old times: meeting his professor every Tuesday and thrashing out issues of life in their many hues—Society, Rights, Guilt, Death, Fear, Aging, Greed, Marriage, Family, Forgiveness and so forth. By that time Morrie is unable to conduct his everyday activities. Every Tuesday is downhill. But he is unfazed. He requests in a matter of fact fashion to a guest, “Can you please hold on to this bowl—need to take a piss?” Since he has no other option but to rely on others, he has no qualms or feelings of guilt. When asked in a television show about what bothers him about this dependency, pat comes his reply: “Soon someone has to wipe off my arse.” The final Tuesday was reserved for ‘Adieu’—as a subject of discussion. Only a few words. Morrie breathes his last the Saturday next. Discussion on death and human preoccupation with death is timeless really. Yet it is also historicised in specific circumstances. The sons and daughters of Amrita have not been able to transcend death fully. The idea actually is not to transcend death but to encounter it, as part of our material living.