Marx after Marxism: A Subaltern Historian's PerspectiveAuthor(s): Dipesh ChakrabartySource: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 28, No. 22 (May 29, 1993), pp. 1094-1096Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4399780Accessed: 22/10/2008 17:32

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- PERSPECTIVES

Marx after Marxism A Subaltern Historian's Perspective Dipesh Chakrabarty

The old certitudes which once made Marxists feel like they belonged to one international tribe have to be rethought. But this rethinking has to issue from our own positions as intellectuals who think out of a real or imaginary base in India, and its tasks cannot be deduced from contemporary European and Anglo- American theory in any formulaic manner. An attempt at outlining a possible approach to this question.

AT the outset I should make it clear that my remarks do not in any way implicate the Subaltern Studies collective. What follows are my own reflections on some current problems of Marxist historio- graphy as they appear to me, and they arise from an interest in writing histories of subaltern classes and of the phenomena of subordinaton and domination in gene- ral. But they also arise at a particular time when Marxisn is- being seriously ques- tioned in avant-garde western theorising. Since to be a Marxist is to work within European traditions of thought anyway, one can ignore the challenge of what generally pass under names like 'post- structuralism' or 'deconstruction' only at one's peril. The old certitudes that once made Marxists feel like they belonged to one international tribe have to be rethought. (This at any rate is one of the assumptions on which this short inter- vention is basd.) But this rethinking has to issue from our own positions as intel- lectuals who think out of a real or imaginary base in India, and its tasks cannot be deduced from contemporary European and Anglo-American theory in any formulaic manner. What follows is an attempt at outlining a possible approach to this question.

Many readers will recall that Subaltern Studies began as an argument within. Indian Marxism and in particular against the teleologies that colonialist and nationa- list-Marxist narratives had promoted in the 1970s in the field of Indian history. Initially, we %anted to oppose the metho- dological elitism of both varieties, but our aim was also to produce %better' Marxist histories. It sooiv had become clear, however, as our research progressed, that a critique of this nature could hardly afford to ignore the problem of univer- salism/Eurocentrism that was inherent in

Marxist (or for that matter liberal) thought itself. This realisation made us receptive to the critiques of Marxist historicism-in particular to the message advocating an attitude of 'incredulity toward grand narratives'- that French post-structura list thinkers increasingly made popular in the English-language academic world in the 80s. But there have always remained important and crucial differences. Unlike in the Paris of the post- structuralists, there was never any question in Delhi, Calcutta or Madras of a whole- sale rejection of Marx's thought. Foucault's scathing remark in The Order of Thir.gs that "Marxism exists in nineteeth-century thought as a fish in water, that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else", may -have its point (however exaggerated) but it never resonated with us with anything like the energy that anti-Marxism displays in the writings of some post-modernists.

This was so not because we believed in any Habermasian project of retrieving Enlightenment reason from the clutches of an all-consuming instrumental rationa- lity. Our attachment to Marx's thought has different roots. They go back to the question of European imperialism from which the problem of Indian modernity cannot* be separated. (The question of colonial modernity, or I might say the question of colonialism itsdf, remains an absent problem in much post-structura- list/post-modern writing.) However, for a modem Indian intellectual-that is, some- one who engages in serious commerce with the thought-products of the European Enlightenment and with their inheritances and legacies but someone who is also aware, from the cultural practices of Indian society, of there always being other possi- bilities of 'worlding' that now exist in uneven and often subordinate relationship

to 'Western metaphysics' (forgive this summary expression)-it is difficult to trash Marx's thought quite in the manner of a Foucault. Again, not because it is difficult to sympathise with the intel- lectual criticisms of historicism. (I will in fact go on to argue here that these criticisms have to be made central to our reading of Marx.) It is because critical narratives of imperialism are constitutive of our collective origin-myths. The story of becoming an 'Indian' academic-intel- lectual and having to (because there is no other realistic option!) deal in and with thoughts that never fail to remind you of their European origins, does not make sense without there being a concomitant narrative locating the emergence of such an intellectual class in the history of capitalist/European imperialism. To say this is not to claim the privileges of the 'victim'. Imperialism enables as much as it victimises. Without English imperalism in India and a certain training in Anglo- Euro habits of thought, there would not have been any Subaltern Studies. The story of 'capital' and that of the emergence of the market-society in Europe-undeniably a historicist narra- tive in the most popular recensions-have a central place in our collective self- fashioning. It follows then that Marx's critique of capital and commodity will be indispensable for any critical understand- ing we might want to develop of ourselves. How can a critique of modernity in India ignore the history of commodification in that society? But, at the same time, this relationship to Marx cannot any longer be the straightforward one that the Indian communist parties once encouraged, where the scripting of our histories on the lines of some already-told European drama posed no intellectual problems for self-understanding.

As deconstructive political philosophy increasingly ponders the intractable problem of genuinely 'non-violative' relationship between the Self ('the West') and its Other, and turns to questions of difference and ethics-questions made urgent by th current globalisation of capital, information and technology-the task for students of Marx in my part of the world does not seem to be one of improving 'Marxism' in order to make it impregnable against further assault from the post-modernists. Much in Marx is truly 19th-century, gender-blind and obviously Eurocentric. A post-colonial reading of Marx, it seems to me, would have to ask if and how, and which of, his

1094 Economic and Political Weekly May 29, 1993

categories could be made to speak to what we have learnt from the philosophers of 'difference' about 'responsibility' to the plurality of the world. The age of multi- national capital devolves on us this res- ponsibility to think 'difference' not simply as a theoretical question but as a tool for producing practical possibilities for action.

The talk of 'difference' often elicits hostile response from Marxists. There appear to be a couple of things at stake. There is, first of all, the long-ingrained habit of thinking the world through the common, and seemingly universal and solidarity-producing, language of Marxist prose. Secular history itself is a master- code implicit in modern political thought. Historians are comfortable with the talk of difference so long as the talk does not threaten the very idea of history itself. This produces a second-order problem to which ther is no quick and readymade solution and which therefore looks to many like an intellectual dead-end. How wouwld conversation proceed between two historia if 'differences' could not be contained within the sameness of the very code (i e, history) that made the conver- sation possible in the first plce? One may legitimately ask: How can one write/ think/talk the non-West in the academia without in some sense anthropologising it? Most historians would prefer to stop at this point and simply get on with the job. Progressive historians would perhaps even endorse the strategy of 'anthro- pologising': it is part and parcel, they would in effect argue, of the struggle to make the world more democratic. After all, what material benefits can the subaltern classes gain from imaginations in which gods, spirits, humans and animals cohabit the same world? Pointing out that a secular and modern historical consciousness is itself part of the problem of 'colonisatiDn of the mind' for many 'traditions' such as those of the 'Hindus' I am not making a universal claim and I have put the word Hindu in quotes to indicate its socially constructed and contingent nature-is often of no help to these historians.

Yet, as an Indian historian, this is where I think we confront an almost insoluble problem in writing subaltern history. The problem is also of some critical urgency in India given the current wave of Hindutva. Let me explain the problem of method by referring to this group we have called 'Hindus. For most Hindus, gods, spirits and the so-called supernatural have a certain 'reality'. They are as real as 'ideology' is-that is to say, after Zizek, they are embedded in practices. The

secular calendar is only one of the many time-worlds we travel. The bringing together of these different time-worlds in the construction of a modern public life in India has always had something to do with all the major crises modem India has had to endure, the most recent being the current upsurge of a fascistic Hindu movement that has already caused enor- mous sufferings to the Muslims. The usual vocabulary of political science in India, which discusses this problen in terms of European categories of the secular and the sacred and makes this into a question (recycled fromn European history) of 'religion' in public life, is pathetically inadequate in its explanatory capacity. The word 'meligion, everybody agrees, captures nothing of the spirit of all the heterodox Hindu practices it is meant to translate. For however cynical one may be in ones analysis of the 'reasons' why the Hindu political parties may want to use the 'Hindu' card, one still has to ask questions about the many different meanings that divine figures (such as the god-king Rama) assumes in our negoti- ations of modernity. But this is where I return to the dilemma I posed in the previous paragraph: Do we, in the already universal language of Marxist prose, simply anthropologise these meanings, or do we, in developing a Marxist prose suited to our struggles (i e, the struggles that arise for modern Indian intellectuals from their being situated in a colonial modernity) also struggle to inscribe into the visions of Marx's critique of capital, horizons of radical otherness?

I cannot pretend to escape these pro- blems any more than other Marxists can, nor do I aspire to do so. The very limited question I can deal with in this short space is: Do Marx's categories allow us to trace the marks of what must of necessity remain unenclosed by these categories themselves? In other words, are there ways of engaging with the problem of 'univer- sality' of capital that do not commit us to a bloodless liberal pluralism that only subsumes all difference(s) within the Same?

Looking back at some work I did on (Indian) 'working class' history a few years ago, I only seem to have half- thought the problem. I documented a history whose narrative(s) produced seve- ral points of friction with the teleologies of 'capital' In my study of the jute mill workers of colonial Bengal I tried to show how the production relations in these mills were structured from the inside as it were by a whole saies of relations that could only be consdered 'pre-capitalist'. The coming of 'capital' and 'commodity' did

not appear to lead to the politics of equal rights that Marx saw as internal to the categories. I refer here in particular to the critical distinction Marx draws between 'real' and 'abstract' labour in explaining the production and form of the commo- dity. This is how I then read the distinction (with enormous debt to Michel Henry and I I Rubin):

Marx places the question of subjectivity right at the heart of his category 'capital' when he posits the conflict between 'real labour' and 'abstract labour' as one of its central contradictions. 'Real labour' refers to the labour power of the actual indi- vidual, labour power 'as it exists in the personality of the labourer' that is, as it exists in the 'immediate exclusive indivi- duality' of the individual. Just as per- sonalities differ, similarly the labour power of one individual is different from that of another. 'Real labour' refers to the essential heterogeneity of individual capacities. 'Abstract' or general labour, on the other hand, refers to the idea of uniform, homogeneous labour that capita- lism imposes on this heterogeneity, the notion of a general labour that underlies 'exchange value. It is what makes labour measurable and makes possible the gene- ralised exchange of commodities. It expresses itself... in capitalist discipline, which has the sole objective of making every individual's concrete labour-by nature heterogeneous 'uniform and homogeneous' through supervision and technology employed in labour process. ... Politically, . . the concept of 'abstract labour' is an extension of the bourgeois notion of the 'equal rights' of 'abstract individuals: whose political li fe is reflected in the ideals and practice of 'citizenship'. The politics of 'equal rights' is thus precisely the 'politics' one can read into the category 'capital'... (Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940, Princeton University Press, 1989, pp 225-26.) It now seems to me that Marx's cate-

gory of 'commodity' has a certain built- in openness to 'difference' that I did not fully exploit in my exposition. My reading of the term 'pre-capital' remained, in spite of my efforts, hopelessly historicist, and my narrative never quite escaped the (false) question, Why did the Indian working class fail to sustain a long-term sense of class-consciousness?, the meta- problem of 'failure' itself arising from the well known Marxist tradition of positing the working class as a transhistorical subject. Besides, it is also clear from the above quote that my reading took the ideas of the 'individual' and 'personality' as unproblematically given, and read the word 'real' (in 'real labour') to mean something primordially natural (and therefore not social).

Economic and Political Weekly May 29, 1993 1095

But my larger failure lay. in my inability to see that if one reads the 'real' as socially/culturally produced-and not as a Rousseauvian 'natural' something that refers simply to the naturally different endowments of different, and ahistorical, individuals-other possibilities open up, among them the one of writing 'differ- ence' back into Marx. For the 'real' then (in this reading) must refer to different kinds of 'soaal' and.hence to different orders of tanporality. It should in principle even allow for the possibility of these temporal horizons being mutually incommensurable. The transition from 'real' to 'abstract' is thus also a question of transition from many and possibly incommensurable temporalities to the homogeneous time of abstract labour, the transition from 'non-history' to 'history. 'Real' labour, therefore, is precisely that which cannot not be enclosed by the sign, commodity, while it constantly inheres in the latter. The gap between real and abstract labour and the force constantly needed to close it, is what introduces the movement of 'difference' into the very constitution of the commodity and thereby eternally defers its achievement of its true/ideal character.

The sign 'commodity, as Marx explains will always carry as parts of its internal structure certain universal emancipatory narratives. If one overlooked the tension Marx situated at the heart o f this category, these narrati%es could indeed produce the standard teleologies one nonnally encoun- ters in Marxist historicism: that of citizen- ship, the juridical subject of Enlighten- ment thought, the subject of political theory of rights, etc. I do not mean to deny the practical utility of these narratives in nmdern political structures. The more interesting problem for the Marxist historian, it seems to me, is the problem of tanporality that the category 'commodity: constituted through the tension between 'real' and 'abstract' labour, invites us to think of. If 'real' labour, as we have said, belongs to a world of heterogeneity whose various tempo- ralities-Michael Taussig's work on Bolivian tin miners clearly shows that they are not even all 'secular' (i e, bereft of gods and spirits)-cannot be enclosed in the sign History, then it can find a place in a historical narrative of capitalist transition (or commodity production) only as a Derridean trace of something that cannot be enclosed, an element that constantly challenges from within capital's and commodity's-and by impli- cation, History's-claims to unity and universality.

The prefiUx 'pre' in 'pre-capital:, it could

be said siniilarly, is not a reference to what is simply chronologically prior on an ordinal, homogeneous scale of time. 'Pre-capitalist' is a hyphenated identity, it speaks of a particular relationship to capital marked by the tension of differ- ence in horizons of time. The 'pre-capita- list' can only exist within the temporal horizon of capital and is yet something that disrupts the continuity of this time precisely by suggesting another time that is not on the same, secular, homogeneous calendar (which is why what is pre-capital is not chronologically prior to capital). This is another time which, theoretically, could be entirely incommensurable with the godless, spiritless time of what we call 'history'

Subaltern histories, thus conceived in relationship to the question of difference, will have a split running through them. On the one hand, they are 'histories' in that they are constructed within the miaster- code of secu lar History and use the accepted academic codes of history- writing (and thereby perforce anthropo- logise all other forms of memory). On the other hand, they cannot ever afford to grant this master-code its claim of being a mode of thought that comes to all human beings naturally, or eveWn to be treated as something that exists cut there in nature itself (remember the telli-tale title of J B S Haldane's book, Everything Has A History?). Subaltern histories are therefore constructed within a p)articular kind of historicised memory, one that remembers History itself as a violation, an imperious code that accomp?anied the civilising process that the European Enlightenment inaugurated iri the 18th century as a world-historical task. This memory does not have the chiaracter of nostalgia for it bespeaks a pain that is in no sense historical in our parts of the world.

Of course, the empirical hi storian who writes these histories is not .i peasant or a tribal (and often not even a woman) himself. He produces History-as distinct from other forms of memory-precisely because he has been transposed and inserted-in our case, by Emngland's work in India-into the global narratives of citizenship and soialism. Hie writes history, that is, only after his own labour has entered the process of being made abstract in the world-market for ideaional commo- dities. The subaltern, then, is not tle empirical peasant or tribal i n any straight- forward sense that a populi st programme of history-writing may wat it to imagine. The figure of the subaltern is necessarily mediated byr problems of ri presentation. In terms of the analysis th'a t I have trying

to develop here, one might say that, subaltern is what fractures from within the signs that tell of the insertion of the historian (as a speaking subject) into the global narratives of capital. It is what gathers itself under 'real' labour in Marx's critique of capital, the figure of difference that governmentality-in Foucault's sense of the term-all over the world has to subjugate and civilise.

There are implications that follow: subaltern histories written with an eye to difference cannot constitute yet another attempt-in the long and universalistic tradition of 'socialist' histories-to help erect- the subaltern as the subject of modern democracies, that is, to expand the history of the modern in such a way as to make it more representative of society as a whole. This is a laudable objective on its own terms and has un- doubted global relevance. But thought does not have to stop at political demo- cracy or the concept of egalitarian distri- bution of wvalth (though the aim of achieving these ends will legitimately fuel many immediate political struggles). But, fundamentally, this thought is insensitive to philosophical questions of difference and can acknowledge difference only as a practical problem. Subaltern histories will engage philosophically'with questions of difference which are elided in the dominant traditidns of Marxism. At the same time, however, just as 'real' labour cannot be thought outside of the proble- matic of 'abstract' labour, the subaltern cannot be thought outside of the global narrative of capital though it does not belong to this narrative. Stories about how this or that group in Asia, A frica or Latin America resisted the 'penetration' of capitalism do not constitute 'subaltern' history for subaltern histories do not refer to a resistance prior and exterior to capital. Subaltern Studies, as I think of it, can only situate itself theoretically at the juncture where we give up neither Marx nor 'difference', for the resistance it spaks of is something that can happen only within the time-horizon of capital and yet disrupts the unity of that time Unconcealing the tension between real and abstract labour ensures that capital! commodity has heterogeneities and incommensurabilities inscribed in its core.

Or, to put it differently, the practice of subaltern history would aim to take history to its limits in order to make its unworking visible.

11 am grateful to Fiona Nicoll, Rajyashree Pandey, John Rundell, Sanjay Seth and Rachel Sommerville for criticisms of an earlier draft. A slightly different version of this piece will appear in Poty.raph, USA.]

1096 Economic and Political Weekly May 29, 1993