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
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