V.P. CHINTAN MEMORIAL Second LECTURE

delivered by IRFAN HABIB

in Madras 19th September 1988

INDIAN SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, MADRAS

PROBLEMS OF MARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY

Second V.P.CHINTAN MEMORIAL LECTURE

delivered by IRFAN HABIB

in Madras, 19 September, 1988

INDIAN SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES MADRAS

FIRST EDITION : OCTOBER 1989
Published on behalf of INDIAN SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES,
Madras. By Chennai Books.

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AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE

V.P. Chintan – VPC as he was known to thousands of workers, youth and students in Tamil Nadu – was a remarkable figure in the Indian revolutionary movement. Ever since he joined the Communist Party in 1939 when he was 21, his life had been an untiring and heroic struggle in the cause of our working people; a wonderfully inspiring half a century until his death in 1987 – of revolutionary struggle. A man profoundly interested in the development of the scientific ideology in India, education against Britain. Unfortunately, British Marxist historians like Dobb and Hobsbawn have either omitted a consideration of this aspect of colonial relationships or have only assigned it a marginal role in the origins and sustenance of capitalist expansion in Britain. This lapse has surely to be rectified if the real significance of colonialism in the formation of the capitalist economy is to be properly assessed.

In still another matter, there has been a seeming lag in Marxist appraisals of nineteenth century colonialism. Some of the blame may go to the extreme popularity of Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism which was taken to suggest that imperialism, as a vehicle of capitalists’ striving for territory and wealth abroad, came only with the development of finance capital and monopoly. Indeed, Lenin went so far as to say that :

When free competition in Great Britain was at its height, i.e., between 1840 and 1860, the leading British bourgeois politicians were opposed to its colonial policy and were of the opinion that the liberation of the colonies and their complete separation from Great Britain was inevitable and desirable.

I am sure Lenin would not have written these words had he known that Marx had regarded the anti-colonial professions of the British Free Traders of that very period with healthy scepticism. When India had been in the process of annexation, everyone had kept quiet; once the ‘natural limits’ had been reached, they had become loudest with their hypocritical peace cant’. But, then, ‘firstly, they had to get it (India) in order to subject it to including self-education – was a passion with him. Throughout his political life, educating workers, school boys and school girls and also college students politically and ideologically was a central concern with him. Amidst his extremely busy working day VPC found time, against all odds, to snatch time for reading, going deeper into things ideological, philosophical and theoretical and raising his own level of knowledge in a scientific sense. VPC took the right to criticism, including self-criticism seriously within the movement. He was a man of hard strength and unflinching loyalty to the cause of the working people, qualities which enabled him to stand up and face severe repression and high risks from the enemies of the revolutionary movement.

The annual V.P. Chintan Memorial Lecture instituted by the Indian School of Social Sciences is our small, continuing, tribute to this inspiring revolutionary leader. The first lecture in the series ‘Development of Scientific Ideology in India’ was delivered on July 18, 1987 by B.T. Ranadive, a veteran revolutionary, Politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) President of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions.

The present lecture, on ‘Problems of Marxist Historiography by Prof. Irfan Habib, is the second in this series. Prof. Irfan Habib, one of our most eminent historians today, teaches at the Aligarh Muslim University; he is also the Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. Apart from innumerable scholarly articles in reputed journals. Prof. Habib also has to his credit a number of important books: His ‘Agrarian system of Mughal India is widely recognised as a classic in the field, his Atlas of Mughal India. is regarded as path breaking, monumental piece of work; he is the co-editor of the widely acclaimed Volume I of the Cambridge Economic History of India. A top-ranking academician, Prof. Habib is also well known for the active interest he has taken in the struggle for democratic causes and against communalism of all hues, in particular.

In this lecture Prof. Habib takes an incisive and searching look at a number of important issues concerned with Marxist Historiography. His canvas in the lecture is wide ranging: He has dealt with very fundamental issues relating to ‘Mind and Matter in History’, ‘Social Formations and class struggles’, ‘Capitalism and Colonialism’, ‘National Movement’ and ‘Historiography of Socialism’.

One perhaps cannot think of a better tribute to VPC-a man who was profoundly interested in the development of scientific ideology; a man for whom education was a passion; someone who took criticism and self criticism seriously; a man of unflinching loyalty to the cause of the working people and for whom Marxism Leninism was not a dogma, but a guide to action.

K. Nagaraj

On behalf of the

Indian School of Social Sciences, Madras.

PROBLEMS OF MARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY

I should start by saying that I feel particularly privileged to have been invited to deliver a lecture which is dedicated to the memory of Comrade V.P.Chintan. Comrade Chintan was a very colourful figure of the Communist movement. I cannot clair: to have known him very well. The only occasion that we met was when he came with Comrade A.K.Gopalan to Aligarh, where I work. Comrade Gopalan was inaugurating our University Employees Union Office, 16 years ago. Ours is a small union with a membership of only about 2,500 – nothing like the great unions of Madras city, I am sure. I was translating Comrade Gopalan’s speech into Hindi and in my youthful enthusiasm made his speech far more revolutionary in the translation than it actually was, even omitting certain things which I felt should not be there in a revolutionary speech! Probably Comrade Gopalan was right the audience was of employees and was not a particularly revolutionary one. But I gave a very militant translation, thinking that Comrade AKG would not understand Hindi. But Comrade Chintan was there, and must have either understood Hindi, or perhaps somebody told him, because at the end of the speech he patted me on the back and said smilingly ‘You did a nice job of translating there! That was our only encounter. But who, within the Communist movement, cannot be grateful for the great work that Comrade Chintan did for the movement to which he dedicated his life? His death was a severe loss to the movement not only in Tamil Nadu but throughout the country. It is very gratifying that the Indian School of Social Sciences, Madras, should cherish his memory through this course of lectures and certainly, as I have said earlier, it is a great privilege for me to deliver the Second V.P.Chintan Memorial Lecture.

In one of his theses Marx said: Philosophers have so far interpreted the world. The point is to change it.’ Marxism sees an innate unity between the perception of the past and present practice. This unity implies continuous interaction: as time passes and history (human experience) lengthens, we draw greater lessons from it for the present and as our present experience tells us more about the possibilities and limitations of social action, we turn to the past and obtain fresh comprehension of it. Consider Marc Bloch’s understanding of the French Revolution as representing continuity and not a break in French agrarian history- an understanding reached after the Soviet Revolution of 1917; similarly our new perception of the limitations of Soviet peasant mobilisation following the success of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, a massive ‘peasant revolution’. It is inherent in the unity of past and present that Marxist historiography must continuously uncover fresh aspects to explore and re-explore, and fresh questions to answer. Nothing is more illustrative of this need than the history of Socialist societies since 1917. That history cannot be meaningfully studied only on the basis of what the classics tell us Socialism should be. The lengthening, complex history of Socialism is of great significance. not only for the peoples of Socialist countries, but also for all those who aspire for Socialism in their own societies.

There are other factors, too, which should prompt continuous reconsideration of positions previously taken. Research expands, in the process exposing facts we did not know of before: without undue modesty, we can say we know more about India’s past than Marx did. Can his statement on India be accepted as the last word, especially when we recognise that the information available to him was limited? Naturally, extended knowledge imposes on us the task of testing our older interpretations against our present level of information. It has to be an unceasing process.

If this is so, we must not go to our history with a set theology. When I joined the Students’ Federation, which was led by the Communist Party, I had to attend meetings where we were taught ‘Marxism’. In those meetings we were told that when man came into the world, he was a communist of a primitive type. Slavery followed this primitive communism. This was followed by feudalism, capitalism, and, whatever happened, there would be socialism. This is a kind of theology, and it is not Marxism. Marxism teaches that we should go to real life, to our actual past, and that our knowledge of the past extends as our experience extends.

Moreover, Marxism, understood as the ideology of the working class, does not exist alone and in isolation. There are rival interpretations arising all the time. The authors of these interpretations might not accept the basic premises of a class approach: and therefore for us simply to dismiss them as ‘bourgeois’ and ignore them carries no conviction. We must contest and meet the challenge of opposing ideologies. If Marxism were to live in isolation, if a Marxist never had to engage in argument, we would all be very happy. But we would not persuade anyone. If you want to persuade, you must argue, and if you argue you must listen to the other person’s argument, to see what you have to answer. We must argue with communalist, regionalism and casteism opponents, and for that we must be able to correct our mistakes, otherwise we will be held to account by our opponents.

But there are other, more fundamental challenges too. Gramsci, criticising Bukharin’s ABC of Communism. said that in the war of ideas, unlike in ordinary warfare, you have to attack the enemy’s strongest, not his weakest points. This, of course, demands constant preparation and self-examination: the refining and extension of Marxist positions. This examination must cover everything from general principles to specific facts, because such categories are all the time being brought into question by others. We have to answer not by denunciation that is always a bad counsellor and course — but by careful scrutiny and investigation.

Finally, I believe that Scientific Socialism requires constant debate within itself, even without the pressure of polemics from outside. Long before the current recognition of the virtues of ‘plurality’. Mao Tse-tung urged that truth could belong to a minority and that all truths are first espoused only by a minority. This applies to a revolutionary party as well as to society at large.

It is from this point of view, friends, that I place before you what I see to be the major problems confronting Marxist historians. I present my own opinions with a view to inviting discussion and without necessarily total conviction in their correctness.

MIND AND MATTER IN HISTORY

One of the common misperceptions in popular understanding of Marxian historiography has been caused, I believe, by the textbook view of Marxism as ‘determinism. While Marxists have protested against this characterisation, their own descriptions of historical materialism (for example, Stalin’s essay on Dialectical and Historical Materialism) are often in fact couched in deterministic terms. We are told that the production technology (‘forces of production’) of a particular era determines social relationships (‘relations of production’). These together constitute the ‘mode of production’, which in turn determines the world of ideas and culture (the ‘superstructure’). For has not Marx said, ‘it is (men’s) social being that determines their consciousness? Clearly, the interplay of technique, class relations, mode of production and culture is crucially important, but in what way can it be said that one part of the relationship ‘determines’ the configuration of the remainder? It has been said that Marxism is a product of capitalism; it could not have arisen before capitalism created the working class. But that the different aspects of Marx’s thoughts were inevitably or automatically formed just as they were, created directly by the conditions generated by capitalism, would be very difficult to substantiate. One would rather propose that capitalism set the context, not the structure-for Marxism and this is very different from determinism of any recognisable kind. (For the moment, I am not going into Althusser’s discussion of ‘determination and ‘overdetermination’).

A great communist, Gramsci-one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, who was put in jail by Mussolini- once said that the inevitability formula is always very helpful for Marxists in defeat. When the reactionaries have thrown us out, have put us in prison, have slaughtered us, we keep our morale high by saying that revolution is inevitable. But Gramsci went on to say that although this is a way of keeping up spirits, the idea that socialist revolution is inevitable is a very dangerous idea for Communists and workers. There is nothing inevitable about revolution. What makes revolution inevitable is not capitalism but your struggle against it.

Marxist textbooks often suggest that the mode of production, and especially the forces of production, represent the material base, whereas ideas form a separate superstructure seated upon it. But long ago the archaeologist Gordon Childe, in the very title of his work, Man Makes Himself, showed that production technology is after all inseparable from ideas. Matter does not create technology; human ideas, reflected in skill, dexterity and science, create it. When Maurice Dobb argues in his Studies in the Development of Capitalism that the inventions which triggered the English Industrial Revolution in the 18th century came not earlier, but only then, because the surrounding economic circumstances were not favourable earlier, is he not suggesting a reverse determination of forces of production – the supposedly material base-by social relationships?

Marx’s view of historical development is clearly far more refined and persuasive than a mere extension of materialist determinism to social evolution. For example, his observation: ‘Just as we cannot judge an individual by the opinion he has of himself, so we cannot judge a period of social transformation by its own consciousness. This statement means that the intricacies of earlier modes of production and social relationships could not be seen by observers living in those times: they were always misconceived. To Marx, such misconceptions or imperfect perceptions set limits to the growth of further ideas and circumscribed action during the process of transformation. When he said that ‘ideas become a material force once they have gripped the masses’, he surely meant that consciousness, once generalised, itself delimits the range of individual ideas and of social action. Religion, as well as race or community prejudices, could colour class struggles and shape their results (a reality we can illustrate only too readily from our own history). What happened in the epoch of capitalism, and as a consequence of the simultaneous or attendant scientific revolution, was the creation of a possibility, realised in Marxism, of a more accurate, approximately closer perception of the mode of production and social relationships with a view to far more resolute guidance of transformation or social revolution. It is in this sense that the achievement, by the working class, of a true perception of the real world around it and the potentiality of its own revolutionary role – its class consciousness-has been given such signal importance in Marxist practice. But this surely means that the role of ideas in the modern age, compared with their role in earlier periods, has been substantially enlarged: blind struggles have been replaced by sighted ones. Can we not go further and say that this has been a feature of human development, and that the bourgeoisie-which, according to the Communist Manifesto played such a revolutionary role-was responsible for the previous enlargement. By creating the nation state, by creating parliamentary democracy, by creating the equality of the ballot box between men and women, the bourgeoisie contribute greatly to the role of ideas.

And now, with Marxism and socialism as its guiding theory, the working class has created new ideas: of economic equality, equality of opportunity, the responsibility of the State towards the well-being of its citizens. Accordingly, the Marxian theory of History is not just materialist determinism; rather it identifies in human progress the growing role and contribution of ideas.

I think this principle has particular importance to us today in India. Our Left movement proceeds with the understanding, true as far as it goes, that to organise the workers and middle classes, we have to organise them around salary and wage demands, bonus demands and so forth. These are all very correct demands, because if we do not raise them we have no access to the working class. However, if we do not use these struggles as ways of providing access to ideas, the ideas of Scientific Socialism and particularly the idea of the People’s Democratic Revolution, then our efforts will be wasted. Mere trade union action unites everyone on a trade union demand from the BJP to those who are Congress – I supporters. I feel that a correct understanding of the Marxist approach to history, and the role of ideas in that particular approach, is very important here.

If we go on teaching ‘inevitability’ and ‘determinism’ as the hallmarks of history, then these become rationalisations, excuses for our trade-union-focussed economism. If we persist with trade union activities while our workers still believe in caste and religious differences; if we turn away when a person from another religion is killed in our workers’ locality or basti, or our comrades participate in communal riots, then it is not the working class that is to be blamed. It is we who are to be blamed because we have not spread the correct ideas amongst the working class. In this connection I am particularly glad to see that the Indian School of Social Sciences, Madras, brings such a large number of trade unionists under its auspices. It is a very great step that you have taken and should be done throughout the country. It is in the battle of ideas against casteism, communalism and regionalism that the victory of the Left movement in India is assured.

I feel convinced that Marx believed that ideas would attain ever-growing importance in the future. When he spoke of the future as one where mankind marched from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom’, I feel convinced (in spite of Engel’s unfortunate gloss on freedom as the ‘recognition of necessity) that Marx looked forward to ideas at last gaining ascendancy over matter, not by any spiritualist exercise but by the abundance of material wealth which Communism would ultimately produce.

Far, therefore, from being a theory of materialist determinism, Marxism sees the past of humanity in its true relationship to the material world and looks forward to humanity’s ultimate sovereignty. This is to be achieved by progress through Socialism and Communism – the twin stages, present and future, of social evolution that Marx confidently charted in his Critique of the Gotha Programme.

It goes without saying that, for us today, liberation from the textbook ‘inevitability’ theory erroneously ascribed to Marxism is a major necessity. Capitalism and other exploitative systems are not going to break down by their own weight or by any ‘General Crisis of Capitalism’. There is no alternative to entering the battle of ideas: economic action on behalf of labour, from toilers to teachers, is a help but can be no substitute for class consciousness.

SOCIAL FORMATIONS AND CLASS STRUGGLES

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. These ringing words of the Communist Manifesto seem quite often lost in the long debates among Marxist historians over modes of production, social formations and especially Feudalism. I myself cannot protest too much about this, since I have also participated in these debates. Nor do I think that they are irrelevant – although it does seem to me that we should be careful not to lose sight of the wood for the trees..

Now, any Marxist approach to the past which does not relate to class struggle is, in my opinion, an incomplete approach. Take the work of D.D.Kosambi, for whom I have the greatest respect. He made Marxism a respectable trend in Indian historiography. But if you read D.D.Kosambi’s book An Introduction to the Study of Indian History. you have all the elements of Marxian historiography except class struggle!

Marx was a great theoretician, an immense systematiser, a fine logician whose framework of ideas comprised well-fitting elements. Look at the way Capital ends with the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation. It ends with a call for revolution: the expropriation of the expropriators’. Capital is a total analysis leading to a particular conclusion-the overthrow of the capitalist class. Our study of Indian history should not overlook the fact that we are living in a society of class exploitation and therefore also of class resistance and struggle; also that such was our past society.

The relevance of defining social formations arises because you cannot study class struggle without discerning classes: and classes belong to structures which we call social formations. Social formations constitute successive organisations of society; the classic order of succession has been Primitive Communism-Slavery Feudalism-Capitalism. Whether the classic order is also universal is a question on which there has been much controversy. Marx did not think that pre-colonial India was feudal: it lacked serfdom, and there was identity between tax and rent. The ‘Asiatic Mode’ which Marx speculated on in the 1850s, has been resurrected as the Tributary Mode’ by Samir Amin, and sub-classified into ‘feudal’ (based on rent) and ‘despotic’ (based on tax) by Chris Wickham. Kosambi and R.S.Sharma have argued that India did not witness the stage of Slavery, but had forms of Feudalism from the first millenium or thereabouts right up to the colonial conquest.

While the controversy is not likely to cease, I do not wish to discuss it here at length. My own views are against a universalisation of Feudalism as an umbrella to cover all pre-capitalist systems, whatever their actual modes of surplus-extraction. I agree that failure to universalise Feudalism would lead us to accept a multiplicity of social formations over different territories: but I see no scandal in that. I would reassert that this is also implicit in the Communist when it treats Capitalism as the first universal mode of production, and speaks of the complex class structures preceding it.

What I think needs correction is the view, tacitly accepted by many Marxist historians, that every social order is created exclusively by the internal contradictions of the previous one-and only at the apex of its development. Thus Slavery-Feudalism-Capitalism are seen to form a unilinear succession which, if confined to Europe, would show that the higher reaches of social evolution have been confined to Europe alone. I would contest such a premise. Marx and Engels were conscious, as many of their statements show, of the backwardness of European feudal society when compared with contemporaneous societies in other parts of the world. In terms of commodity production, productivity and other facets, European feudalism was by no means the most advanced social formation in the world of its day. That it was ultimately transformed into Capitalism was not simply the result of the development of its internal contradictions. Joseph Needham has rightly emphasised the importance of Chinese technological discoveries-for example, paper, the printing press. pedals. belt transmission using the fly-wheel, the mariner’s compass, gunpowder and so forth- for technological development in late and post-feudal Europe. Indeed. without these, the technological base for the Industrial Revolution would have been inconceivable. Clearly, while human advance has been on a universal scale. different regions in different periods have been ahead of others: China was so clearly ahead of Europe before 1200. Yet China failed to generate Capitalism. Other factors were required for its genesis: overseas plunder (a European practice from the close of the 15th century onwards) and the ravaging of Africa for slaves on the one hand, and scientific revolution on the other.

We may, by labelling India or China feudal societies.

imply that those societies possessed the potentiality of developing capitalism had colonialism not intervened. Despite the seductiveness of this notion, I hope we will resist it, not only because the factual base has been lacking (despite my colleague Iqtidar Alam Khan’s firm arguments), but also because a universal feudal system would go so strikingly against the law of uneven development which is so vital a part of Marxist dialectics.

All social formations contain contradictions; the most important revolve around classes and express themselves in the form of class struggles. In India, it is important to remember that there was a system of class exploitation before the British came. There were class struggles in which the peasantry and the town poor participated. While it is the task of Marxist historians to present the story of the poor and downtrodden to the people of India, it is certainly not their task to establish facts about the class struggle which never existed. For example, several ‘learned’ Marxists have joined the Maharashtra chauvinists in celebrating ‘Chatrapati’ Shivaji as the leader of a peasant uprising! Now this is the celebration of an unhistorical fact. In the early 1960s, the Peoples Publishing House published a Sanskrit poem in praise of Sivaji’s accession (a poem which, incidentally, didn’t refer to the peasantry at all). I am always amused by the fact that an institution built by the working class out of its own finances saw fit to invest in the celebration of a prince!

For Marxist historians, it is important not only to rescue from oblivion the narratives of the rebellions of the subjugated classes but also to analyse their nature and the extent to which their participants were aware of their true class affiliations. For there can be class struggles without the participants even realising that they are such. Unfortunately many of the uprisings are written about by those who opposed them, by scribes who were themselves partisans of the ruling classes; as a result, we often have no means of knowing what the rebels really thought. Even so, one becomes aware that there was greater class-consciousness in the peasant rebellions of China, or of England in 1381, than in the agrarian uprisings of 17th century India. When Chinese peasants, in great cycles of insurrections, rose against their rulers, their main demands were for the reduction of land-tax, and rent and for the curtailment of oppression by the gentry. These were the demands up to the time of the Taiping rebellion in the 1860s; at this point the Chinese peasants added the demand for equality in the distribution of the land. When in 1381 the English peasantry rose up in insurrection, they demanded the abolition of serfdom. But when we look at the history of class struggles in India, we see a different picture. Peasant uprisings took place but the peasantry rose in blind defiance, without the consciousness that they were peasants. They rose in insurrection because their village was oppressed; they rose as caste or communal groupings, plundering other castes and communities. For them, the opponent was not just the Government which collected the tax but any person who belonged to another caste or community. They even took zamindars as their leaders and joined them in large numbers. Now, why did our rebellious peasantry lack class consciousness? The reasons for this backwardness, (for example, the possible contribution of the caste system) must be investigated; such factors may well have lessons for us today in our organisation of the peasantry.

We should also not forget that class struggles appear on two planes: risings of the oppressed (for example, peasant wars), and conflict between two ruling classes (as. say, between the French aristocracy and the bourgeoisie at the time of the French Revolution). The latter may involve the other classes in an auxillary capacity: we should consider if this has not been true of certain uprisings in India where, as in the case of Sivaji and his bargis, the peasants were used to establish a zamindar style state.

In this connection, Gramsci’s view that peasants are incapable of creating an ideology of their own is an interesting thesis to test. We may here remark that Professor Ranajit Guha and other scholars of the ‘subaltern school’ (who use Gramsci’s terminology, but in a peculiar way and with additions like ‘elite classes’) lay particular stress on the alleged ‘autonomy’ of the subaltern classes in ideology and culture. I do not know if there is any representative of that school here in Madras, but they have published a great deal – five volumes under the general title of Subaltern Studies have already appeared. For these historians, however, the term ‘subaltern class’ is often used to denote not a class as such but merely a caste, tribe or community: often no attempt is made to differentiate between peasants and zamindars. Such historians argue that all these subaltern ‘classes’ enjoy a certain ideological and cultural autonomy and that we should respect their right to form a particular perspective on caste and superstition; through such views, the argument goes, they create ‘history from below. This school argues that one of the important features of the Indian NationalMovement was that the subaltern classes maintained their autonomy, that their resistance assumed traditional forms; there is an almost mystical love of the traditional ideology of the so-called subaltern classes, a reverence which permeates the contributions of this school of history.

It is clear that, for the subaltern historians, Marxism – which they call ‘National Marxism’ – is an alien ideology. One of them, in an official restatement, has urged that when subaltern classes espouse regionalism, casteism or communalism, all this should be seen and studied as part of an expression or assertion of ‘autonomy’ against alien ideology. I think that the entire subaltern thesis is in total opposition to Marxist theory. The view that these composite groups necessarily developed ‘autonomous’ ideologies (as Marxism under stands the working class to have done) lacks any convincing substantiation. If religion is, indeed, the opium of the people, a religion that attaches itself only to the ruling class and does not command the loyalty of the subject people is of little use to the ruling class. The hegemony of the ruling class in any stable social formation is only partly based on armed power; it must also be an ideological hegemony. The truth is that so long as the ‘subaltern classes’ accept the supremacy of the ruling classes, their class and ideological exploitation, they can never be autonomous. How could a rent-paying peasant be autonomous in relation to his landlord? To talk of cultural autonomy in a system of class exploitation is absurd. In fact, to believe that subaltern classes have developed deep-rooted, subterranean ideologies of their own is belied by the universal prevalence of caste ideology-an ideology which these classes have shared with the ruling classes. The subaltern historians are,indeed, happy narrators of tragedy; it is not their task to look for salvation.

But let me emphasise that we are not going into this business of history as scribes. We want the liberation of these ‘subaltern classes’, whom we call the toiling classes. We must show that the so-called ‘autonomy’ thesis is historically wrong; but we must at the same time spread modern ideas and modern culture amongst the toiling people. And the core of these ideas must be Scientific Socialism. Today, ‘autonomy’ is used as a cloak for the preservation of backward ideas. To take one example: the assertion of muslim autonomy be comes a justification and alibi for the continued suppression of muslim women according to the ‘subaltern’ dictates of Muslim Personal Law. But muslims have no autonomous right to suppress women! The equality of men and women overrides all forms of supposed autonomy. For toiling people, liberation can only be achieved through casting off old parochialism, espousing the ideology of the working class and coming together to form a single United Front for People’s Democracy and Socialism.

CAPITALISM AND COLONIALISM

Marx, in his contributions to the New York Tribune, and in Capital, and other writings. gave special attention to the relationship between the colonies and the emergence of capitalism in England. He framed the theory of Primary or Primitive Accumulation of Capital to explain how the Industrial Revolution in England was generated by colonial plunder. Nationalist economists since the time of Dadabhoy Naoroji have rightly made the tribute or drain of wealth a major Indian grievance against Britain. Unfortunately, British Marxist historians like Dobb and Hobsbawn have either omitted a consideration of this aspect of colonial relationships or have only assigned it a marginal role in the origins and sustenance of capitalist expansion in Britain. This lapse has surely to be rectified if the real significance of colonialism in the formation of the capitalist economy is to be properly assessed.

In still another matter, there has been a seeming lag in Marxist appraisals of nineteenth century colonialism. Some of the blame may go to the extreme popularity of Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism which was taken to suggest that imperialism, as a vehicle of capitalists’ striving for territory and wealth abroad, came only with the development of finance capital and monopoly. Indeed, Lenin went so far as to say that :

When free competition in Great Britain was at its height, i.e., between 1840 and 1860, the leading British bourgeois politicians were opposed to its colonial policy and were of the opinion that the liberation of the colonies and their complete separation from Great Britain was inevitable and desirable.

I am sure Lenin would not have written these words had he known that Marx had regarded the anti-colonial professions of the British Free Traders of that very period with healthy scepticism. When India had been in the process of annexation, everyone had kept quiet; once the ‘natural limits’ had been reached, they had become loudest with their hypocritical peace cant’. But, then, ‘firstly, they had to get it (India) in order to subject it to their sharp philanthropy.’ This was written in 1853, In 1859 Marx wrote that ‘the ‘glorious’ reconquest of India’ after the Mutiny had been essentially carried out ‘for securing the monopoly of the Indian market to the Manchester Free Traders’. He came perilously close to the conception of the imperialism of Free Trade, which John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson put forward a hundred years later (1953), but without Marx’s economic insights.

The importance of colonies for Free-Trade capitalism also poses for Marxists a simple theoretical problem. All surplus-value is produced by the worker. Thus surplus-values of manufactured goods exported from Britain to India represented the exploitation of the British, not Indian, workers. Yet, these very exports caused unemployment and vast artisan distress in India. Marx might have had this particular question in mind when he put forward the notion of unequal exchange (without use of the particular term) and said that ‘the richer country exploits the poorer one’. The precise mechanism, given Marx’s theoretical framework, still remains only dimly illuminated. Rosa Luxemburg came near to answering the question by asserting that there could be no extended reproduction in capitalism without exchanges with the non-capitalist sectors (including colonies) through which the additional surplus value would be realised.

Whatever the theoretical weaknesses of Rosa Luxem burg’s position (for which, see the sympathetic assessment by Joan Robinson and the harsher ones by N.Bukharin and Paul Sweezy), the question she poses does not go away. It is an area where Marx’s own historical understanding of a phenomenon has yet to be appropriately accommodated within his theory of capitalist production and circulation.

It is also time that we reconsider the question of export of capital as an important element of the colonial relationship. Outside the railways, much of British capital in India was not imported, but generated in India for official salaries and the mercantile activities of Englishmen. Its later transfer from India to Britain was not true repatriation but another aspect and element of the drain.

THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT

Since R.P.Dutt’s India Today (1940/46) there has been considerable writing on the Indian National Movement by Marxists, including a recent detailed survey by E.M.S.Namboodiripad, A History of India’s Freedom Struggle. It seems to me that there is now a general understanding that the National Movement was a united front of all classes of the Indian people – the peasantry, other sections of the petty bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie and the working class – excluding the big landowners and the princes. The major nationalist organisation, the Indian National Congress, did not always reflect this united front, although at times (for example, in the late 1930s) it came very close to such a position.

It is, of course, important in the light of this understanding to review many harsh criticisms of the leaders of the National Movement, which can be found in the documents of the Communist movement prior to the Dutt-Bradley thesis of 1936 and, occasionally, later. The correction of this attitude need not however, mean that the Communists or the other Left groups were incorrect in all the basic positions they took – for example, In 1942. When I was a student, the one thing that was much discussed was the so-called Communist Party ‘betrayal’ of 1942. ‘You betrayed the National Movement in 1942, and now you say you are for the National Independence?”. That was the question we were always asked. 1942 is long past, although Mr.Arun Shourie – who, though well guided on the Defamation Bill of 1988 was thoroughly misguided on the Quit India Resolution of 1942! – still finds it a good enough stick to beat the Communists with. I found nothing new in what Mr.Arun Shourie – wrote not so long ago. Many of the things he accused us of we are proud that we did. We are proud that we supported the war effort against Hitler’s Germany and Japan. We are proud that we helped the Soviet Union and China in whatever small way we could. There is a good defence for our stand in 1942. If fascist Germany had triumphed, where would the world working class movement have been today?

An overwhelming preoccupation with the ‘errors’ of the Left which surface in the volume edited by Professor Bipan Chandra (Bipan Chandra et al, India’s struggle for Independence. New Delhi. Viking, 1988) is unfortunate, since this very pre-occupation leads it to belittle the achievements of the Left during the National Movement, and its contributions to it. After all, the creation of the organised Kisan Movement and the trade unions was mainly the handiwork of the Communists and their allies; and that cannot be forgotten.

I urge that we treat the National Movement as a common heritage. All assessments of individuals who played important roles in the National Movement must be tempered by the realisation that they stood up in opposition to British rule. What right have we to sit in judgement on a person like Dadabhoy Naoroji, who, living under difficult conditions in London, spoke for the silent millions when he called attention to the poverty of the Indian people and posited its removal as a major issue between Imperialism and the Indian people? He is often criticised for having received money from Bombay factory owners for his upkeep. There was nothing wrong in that. He never made compromises. He said that there should be a Factory Act for Bombay workers; he wrote about the drain of Indian wealth to England. It is not important that he did not believe in armed struggle or that he did not mobilise the Indian workers to form trade unions. The important thing is that he stood up against British Imperialism at a time – the 1860s to the 1890s-when the latter had few critics. We are the inheritors of Dadabhoy Naoroji. Our answers may have been different but our questions are the same – questions relating to the condition of the Indian people and the reasons for their poverty.

Or take the case of R.C.Dutt. Just because he supported the Permanent Settlement, is it correct to say that he was a spokesman for the landlords? We forget that he was supporting the Permanent Settlement against Lord Curzon, the most dictatorial Viceroy in the history of India. We forget that he supported the rights of the peasantry in the Punjab against the interests of big landlords who were loyalists of the British Raj. He spoke against British interests.

Similarly, Gandhi. We ought certainly to be proud of what Gandhi did for the National Movement. He brought peasants into the movement; he stood later for total equality between men and women; he stood for communal peace, for the brotherhood of the peoples of the subcontinent. Let us remember that he set two conditions for calling off his hunger strike-that the slaughter of Muslims should stop in Delhi and that India must pay Rs.55 crores to Pakistan. What is, if not a total position against chauvinism? We must consider ourselves heirs to these positive achievements-popular mobilisation, struggle against communalism – that Gandhi gave to the National Movement. We have our differences with Gandhi; after all, he didn’t believe in many of the things in which Communists and Socialists believe. But these are differences within a particular framework. Gandhi was certainly no representative of today’s ruling class. Can you think of any representative of today’s ruling class risking his life to protect even a single Harijan life in any village? It is an absurd supposition! Gandhi succeeded in mobilising those millions – even if there were firm limits to the form that mobilisation took. These were undying, indestructible services to the cause of the Indian people. Marxists should be on their guard against efforts to treat these as illusory, or insignificant. This, indeed, is the drift of the writings of the Cambridge and Subaltern schools of Indian history-which, by the way, effectively treat the Left as part of the ‘elite’ leadership.

Although the leadership of the National Movement did its best to exclude our forebears in the Communist Movement, final success was in a large part due to the contribution of the Left. But there is no denying that it was also due in large measure to what we call the bourgeois leadership. Today, the positive aspects of the National Movement, its bourgeois democratic values (such as secularism, women’s rights, national unity, freedom of the press, and parliamentary democracy) need particular emphasis. For these can form the initial
points for a People’s Front, in which all classes may be united and can carry forward the cause of democracy and socialism. Such a front could be a worthy successor to our National Movement.

Even great Marxists. I am afraid, have made the mistake of treating Marxist historiography as outside the historiography of the National Movement. I am proud when the subaltern historians accuse me of being a ‘National Marxist’. The Indian people have used the word ‘nationalist’ in a different sense, and it is that sense in which the people use it: to denote a fighter against imperialism, a freedom fighter, a person who was part of the National Movement. Messrs. Subaltern historians, the Communists were nationalists ! We should be proud of our connection, our participation, our claim to the common heritage of the National Movement. Marxist historiography rose as part of nationalist historiography. It has much in common with other elements of liberal nationalist historiography, and it has nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with imperialist historiography.

HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOCIALISM

One of the admitted weaknesses of Marxist historiography is the limitations in its analysis of the history of socialist societies, whose existence began with the Russian Revolution of 1917. While in Marx’s Capital we have a theoretical framework for understanding the laws of motion of capitalist society, no such framework is available for socialism. It was for long thought sufficient that the state should own industry and agriculture should be collectivised so as to produce Socialism, Not until 1952 did the Soviet Union possess in Stalin’s pamphlet Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR an authoritative exposition of some of the most elementary questions relating to socialist economy. But Stalin left many important problems unresolved or omitted them from view altogether. The only objective that he set for Socialism was the enlargement of production on the basis of higher techniques. A more important breakthrough was made by Mao Tse-tung. Althusser commends Mao for making, in his essay On Contradiction, a basic addition to the Marxian theory of dialectics. And Oscar Lange commented as early as 1957 that it has been the merit of Mao Tse-tung to have recalled with emphasis that socialist society too develops through contradictions. What Stalin’s essay had indeed lacked primarily was the spelling out of the contradictions that beset socialist society in the USSR in the particular stage he was dealing with. In his speeches Correctly Handling Contradictions among the People and Ten Great Relationships in the late 1950s, Mao had clearly begun to evolve a theoretical basis for analysis of progress towards Socialism. But, unluckily, by the mid-1960s he seems to have altered his views so as to hold that the contradictions of socialism were being transformed in China into contradictions between Socialism and Capitalism; and he thereupon initiated and led the Cultural Revolution, which our Chinese friends now hold to have been an error.

It is, therefore, important to consider what specific contradictions need resolution in a socialist society. These are obviously to be considered in two major stages within Socialism: (1) Transition to Socialism and (2) Socialism, or what Marx called the lower stage of Communism. In the first stage there are obvious class contradictions between the proletariat and the former capitalists and landlords, and between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie (rich peasantry, etc.). There is little dispute involved here although the time is past when we should accept all the measures actually taken in the USSR and other socialist countries as the only ones possible. A comparison between the Soviet methods of collectivization and Chinese mobilisation for cooperatives and communes suggests important differences in outlook towards the peasantry, which could have important lessons for other countries building Socialism.

For the second stage, in which both the USSR and China are currently located, two basic contradictions may be defined by looking at the goals which Marx, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, set for ‘the higher stage of Communism’, the goal towards which socialist society would evolve.

(1) The contradiction between ‘mental and physical labour’: essentially the contradiction generated by higher incomes and authority for bureaucrats, managers, intellectuals, and so on, which has to be maintained in Socialism for quite a long time in the interests of higher production.

(2) The contradiction between town and country: This often arises in socialist countries in the form of pressure from industry upon agriculture. It was the source of the theory of Socialist Primitive Accumulation, abandoned in words but often pursued in practice to promote industrialization.

There are other contradictions, which also need to be examined. Socialism has come about in a system of nation-states, and when one large, economically powerful Socialist nation deals with others, national contradictions are bound to arise.

How such contradictions are to be resolved raises the problem of the political system of Socialism. In an old controversy (where Stalin was on the side of the angels), the question was raised whether the dictatorship of the proletariat meant the dictatorship of the Party and whether they were the same. Clearly, there must always exist contradictions between the ruling Party apparatus or leadership and the working class. These cannot be glossed over by a mere designation of the Party as a working class Party.

There is no doubt that until the abundance of material wealth ushers in the period of Communism, these contradictions would continue to exist. This has been proved amply by the Chinese measures after the Cultural Revolution, under which even individual farming has been restored. This is relevant to our Contradiction No.2, since both communes and collective farms could be made to surrender surpluses for industry more easily than individual farmers, who apparently produce more.

In the Soviet Union there has recently been more concern with the contradictions between the Party and the population, and measures similar to those of the Chinese are on agenda, relating to both our Contradictions (1) and (2). And yet, if what Marx called ‘bourgeois rights’ continue in Socialism, it is also important that as production advances they should be contained. Distribution is as important as production (a point not touched upon by Stalin in his essay) and ‘Equality Liberty and Fraternity’ should surely be more than mere slogans in a Socialist society far more than in Revolutionary France which gave birth to them.

A Marxist historiography of Socialism can be reconstructed on the basis of our comprehension of the various contradictions within socialism. The task can be eminently well performed by historians of the Socialist countries with direct access to archives and experience. But it is as crucial a task for Marxists outside the Socialist countries. One would differ from Charles Bettelheim in the stand he takes, but the task of analysing the Soviet experience from a Marxist point of view, which he aims at in his Class Struggles in the USSR. is in principle an unexceptionable one. The gauntlet has been thrown to those who could do it with a different perception of the evolution of Socialism. With Socialism a reality for the past seventy years, it is no longer enough to seek to arouse popular enthusiasm for it simply on the basis of the harshness and inequities of capitalism. It is surely obligatory on us Marxist historians to frame our own independent analysis of the history and experience of Socialist societies. For it is on this basis, and with the insights derived from it, that we can more convincingly define the contours of the Socialism we aspire to build in India.