Reply to V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai - response to article by V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai in this issue, p. 35

One does not quite know how to respond to a communication so very intemperate. I will try to extract a few points of general interest and say something useful.

1. Capital has always been "inventive, dynamic and extremely flexible." One need go no further than The Communist Manifesto to know that. By the time Marx came to write Capital he had also realized that the concrete form of capitalist alienation - the constitutive element in the false consciousness specific to this mode of production - was what he called "commodity fetishism." In brief, universalization of capitalist production corresponds, in the spheres of culture and consciousness, to a universalization of commodity fetishism. This capitalist universalization can be lived through all sorts of differences and diversifies: religious, linguistic, racialistic, communal, colonial, postcolonial, local, national, trans-national, and so on. Retaining and exploiting local difference is actually fundamental to the capitalist marketplace in which the uniformities of commodification must always be concealed through the formal differences of little objects, without which the illusion of choice cannot be maintained. Furthermore, in a world in which authentic humanity is obliterated, ethnic and other kinds of differentialisms must be preserved and even invented - the more, the better - in order to manufacture illusory and competitive authenticities. Be it in the sphere of production or of culture, capitalism unites and fragments at the same time. Multiplicities of consumption patterns and authenticist ideologies do not obliterate the uniformity of the commodity form.

2. The past of a society, Indian or any other, is a complicated thing, and a socialist project must take from it whatever is useful for the furthering of that project while jettisoning all the rest. To say that the politics of secularism in the United States must strictly enforce the constitutionally required separation between Church and State, or that constitutional governance there has had a rather longer history than in most other places in the world, does not amount to denying the fact that the United States is the leading imperialist country or that, internally, it is ridden with religious bigotry and racism. Similarly, to speak of humanist and universalist traditions in the Indian past, or to speak of certain kinds of cultural and religious diversifies as a possible resource for struggle against the burgeoning religio-fascistic tendencies in Indian politics today, does not amount to denying the fact that caste divisions are and have been historically constitutive of relations of production and power in Indian society. These are somewhat distinct matters and one cannot say everything about every subject in the course of a brief interview. I have published a great deal about the past and present horrors of Indian society, precisely with reference to religio-cultural fascism, Brahminical High Hinduism, upper class nationalism, etc., in such Indian journals as Social Scientist and Economic and Political Weekly. Roughly half of my recent and inordinately lengthy book, Lineages of the Present, is devoted to these issues. I did not think that I had to recapitulate that whole argument as a preface to the simple point I was making, namely that "cultural diversity," which is so much the fashion in North American academic circles these days, is not a fresh, postmodernist discovery but a very vivid and complexly lived experience in societies such as India that have very old histories, very considerable geographical extent, dense demography, great variety of languages, belief systems, aesthetic and cultural traditions. I might add that many of these diversifies are indeed hierarchically structured, but many others are not. For example, I am a speaker of Urdu from North India, while the authors of the communication at hand appear to be Tamil writers from the South. Our respective linguistic experiences and literary traditions are very different, but this difference is not hierarchically structured, because Urdu and Tamil are not related to each other in a relation of dominance. This is simply a fact, and I am rather glad for it. As for Hindi "being imposed with impunity on non-Hindi speaking peoples," I could hardly be unaware of this fact, considering that Hindi is imposed with far greater "impunity" on speakers of Urdu than on speakers of Tamil (see, on this subject, my lengthy essay "In the Mirror of Urdu" in Lineages, cited above).

Some other aspects of this diversity are politically more significant, however. Hindu majoritarianism, fascistic to the core, is on the offensive in the country. It propagates the ideology of a uniform Hinduism, Brahminical in essence and based largely on the Ram cult, denying the diversities of belief among those very people who get called "Hindu." This revivalist movement of religious bigotry and masculinist aggressivity has indeed become culturally and politically dominant in much of Northern India, the heartland of Brahminism, where the Ram cult has become much more powerful than ever before. In this situation, one is rather grateful for the fact that Ram has no such status in Bengal; that Tamil Nadu has a past history of more successful anti-Brahminical movements; that there are, even in Northern India, many existing traditions within Hinduism, descended from medieval devotionalisms and humanisms, which find such aggressivity very repugnant. To say so does not amount to defending Hinduism. The point, rather, is to affirm a certain law of historical motion: that Hinduism, like all phenomena social and historical, is internally contradictory, and that one needs to keep in view the whole complexity of such contradictions.

These immediate facts raise a broader question about a materialist attitude toward the past. The problem with what Benjamin once called the "anachronism of sectarian language" is that, in its haste to regard all past history as a history of oppression, it is much too willing to concede the whole of the past to the revivalist Right, which does indeed wish to colonize not only our future but also our past. But, as Benjamin also warned, "a no-saying form of historical knowledge is meaningless." For the practice of a politics that is free both of the revivalism of the Right and rejectionism of the ultra-Left, "contradictoriness of the real" (Marx) is the only possible starting-point in our understanding of the past. In such a dialectic, a timeless opposition between 'popular culture' and 'elite culture' shall not do. One would have to acknowledge that there is much in the culture of the popular classes which reflects the alienations that oppression imposes upon them, and one would have to interrogate the dominant culture for the sake of those elements that can be redeemed for a counter-history of the oppressed. Upper class culture cannot be conceded to the upper classes, because it is the toil and blood of the working classes that has made that culture at all possible.

3. Is the Indian bourgeoisie "comprador"?. In pre-Revolutionary China, the term "comprador" had a very specific meaning; in looser formulations that now abound in India and elsewhere, the word becomes a mere metaphor. India is governed today not from London but according to a Constitution that was framed, after Independence from colonial rule, by the same Dr. Ambedkar whom my interlocutors cite as more or less the Indian Lenin. Governments come and go not by appointment from a foreign country but by virtue of national and regional elections. The Indian Army, one of the largest in the world, is led by officers selected and promoted strictly within the country. No law applies in India to which the Indian state is not a party. Not some foreign "masters" but the Indian state itself, the Indian ruling class itself, is responsible for the whole bloody mess they have made of the country. To say that they merely carry out orders of their "masters" is also to absolve them of the responsibility for their own crimes.

4. The issue of "sovereignty" is likewise quite simple. It is the logic of capitalism as a global system that weaker capital shall be compelled to accept an inferior position in relation to stronger capital, on pain of extinction. This applies rather more clearly to individual firms, but national capitals are also subject to that same logic, in the longer run. If this unequal relation between masses of capital were to be adopted as the test of "sovereignty," Canada could not be viewed as a sovereign state either; nor, then, is any European country "sovereign" since all are pressed by the Bundesbank. In this inflationary rhetoric, the word 'sovereignty' loses all its meaning. It is best to return to the real world, in which the end of colonial rule created a large number of states that were sovereign but also, to a lesser or greater degree, weak: a state can be both sovereign and weak at the same time. For a variety of historical reasons, India emerged at that juncture as a relatively less weak state, with a relatively stronger bourgeoisie than was the case in most newly independent states in Africa and Asia. Hence this bourgeoisie's path of protectionism in the initial years of Independence as well as its substantive attempt at that time to use the Soviet Union as a counterweight against the imperialist countries. In more recent years, four quite different factors have combined to spell out a drastic change of policies: (a) the Indian bourgeoisie has reached a level of accumulation and technological sophistication where it can assume the role of junior partner in the exploitation of the Indian market, while also taking advantage of advanced technology offered by transnational capital; (b) despite this level of accumulation, however, the structural crisis of Indian capitalism, including the fiscal crisis of its state, is such that it must make very extensive concessions to foreign capital; (c) the collapse of the COMECON bloc has left the Indian bourgeoisie with no external counterweight against advanced capital, thus further weakening its bargaining power; and (d) this capitalist crisis is fully reflected in the degeneration and inner erosion of the institutions of governance, indicated for example in the extent of the corruption prevailing in all the bourgeois parties, which further erodes the possibility of formulating coherent policies that can stand up to foreign pressure. If the Indian state has not been "sovereign," and if the Indian bourgeoisie is merely "comprador," always carrying out the orders of foreign "masters," the historic shift from a very high degree of protectionism to complete surrender to imperialist capital becomes opaque and inexplicable.

5. On the issue of caste, I shall not repeat the obvious, except to note the fact that as one not born in a Hindu household I don't even qualify for membership within caste society even though I too live within the belly of the beast; I am, in the strict sense, a melichch, an outcast. As such, I could hardly be unaware of the cruelties of this system. Even so, I should like to stress something not very fashionable these days. The fundamental fact about caste society is that it is hierarchically structured and atomized at every level of the hierarchy, thus creating social fractures vertically as well as horizontally. That is one of the reasons why caste divisions may approximate to class divisions but do not coincide with them. Consequently, the difficulty of the politics of caste is that in the actual social field, at least in Northern India about which I am somewhat more knowledgeable, the acutest conflicts tend to occur between and among castes and sub-castes that are adjacent to each other, not necessarily between the highest and the lowest, even though it is obviously the uppermost stratum of caste society which is the real beneficiary of the system as a whole. The result is that the upper castes are often able to utilize the anger of the poorest castes against the middling ones, and of all the sub-castes against each other, to successfully fragment the struggles of the most deprived as well as to forge alliances between the uppermost castes and the poorest ones. In the case of Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in India, the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) - the public and democratic face of Brahminism and fascistic majoritarianism - includes within its own ranks a substantial number recruited from the middle and even the lower castes; and it rules the State today in alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a party overwhelmingly of North Indian Dalits, the most oppressed in the traditional caste system. This is, in its own manner, an alliance of the upper and the most oppressed castes against the middle ones, while the middle ones themselves get re-distributed into competing clusters. This is happening in the context of a capitalism that leaves nothing intact: it decomposes but also re-composes whatever comes under its dominion. Within this capitalist condition, primordial caste identity does not become a modern political identity except through the action of very modern, usually upwardly mobil class agents that are thrown up at the very intersection of the old caste system and the new class system. This interface is both complex, played out very differently in different clusters and regions, and almost always pernicious. Potentially revolutionary energies are often mobilized for deeply counter-revolutionary ends. The communist Left needs to know a lot more about castes than it does presently, and it needs to be far more sensitive to the caste issues than it has been heretofore. Even so, it is best to remember that populisms of the oppressed have an odd way of sometimes converging with populisms of the Right.

6. It is difficult to speak of nationalism without speaking of capitalism, for which we have no space. Suffice it to say that nationalism is not a class ideology and that the political character of any given nationalism depends on the nature of the power bloc that takes hold of it and utilises it for its own dominance. As such, there are progressive nationalisms and retrogressive nationalisms; more frequently, any given nationalism tends to be progressive and retrogressive at the same time. Among the many processes that have gone into the making of this complex history, I should want to isolate two conceptual moments that are analytically separable but appear in real history in varying combinations.

On the one hand, the modern constitutional state that rests upon the idea of the nation arose initially as a profane civil entity, against religious authority and monarchical or feudal or even colonial autocracy. This emergence marks the transition from subjection to citizenship, from obligation to rights, and constitutes a realm of political action and legislative function based on some modern conception of legitimacy, associated usually with popular representation. This type of nation-state is traceable to the French Revolution, as a realm of citizenship and an active agency for social change, be it revolutionary or reformist. From Hegel to Croce to Gramsci, there is a strong tradition of regarding the state as an ethical, pedagogical function designed to serve people's needs for reform and progress in the various social and economic domains. One may designate this as the Enlightenment conception of the state, in the original sense of a rationalist project that was often expressed in Idealist terms. Even the Leninist conception which squarely identifies the revolutionary moment as the moment of the smashing of the state rests on the notion of the need to create an alternate form of state, the proletarian state, as the ethical form for the transition toward a classless society. In none of these conceptions is the nation-state regarded as the expression of an ethnos, a condition of the soul, an expression of culture. From Rousseau and Kant to Lenin, this type of state has been associated with rational plans for creating the good society, while citizenship in a nation is seen as transitional toward an eventually universal society. In Marx, of course, there is a deep distrust of the division of humanity into nations and states, even though, as the Manifesto emphasized, every proletariat has to settle accounts, first of all, with its own bourgeoisie.

The other, contrasting moment in the making of modern nations and nationalisms is descended essentially from that tendency in German Idealism that is most forcefully represented by Herder and Fichte. In this alternative conception, the state embodies a general will arising not out of a common citizenship but out of a cultural essence, based on race, religion, language, or some other form of a primordial intimacy specific to an ethnic entity that by definition excludes others. In this conception, there is a sharp distinction between the national Self and the rest of the word; citizenship in such a nation is conceived not in terms of expanding toward a universalist inclusion but in terms of self-definition, enclosure, even self-purification. This conceptual universe rests, ultimately, on cultural wars and civilizing missions; and on the obliteration of heterogeneity to obtain homogeneous nations. More often than not, such conceptions of the nation have been prone to xenophobia, irrationalism, cultural differentialism, racism, and relativisms of all sorts.

Between these competing notions of the nation-state I prefer the universalist and inclusivist conception which rests on the criterion not of primordial difference but on modern citizenship.

7. On the issue of nation-states, I begin with two postulates of classical Marxism: that the task of socialists is to unite workers of different nationalities, not to accentuate their ethnic differences; and that, all else being equal, larger states provide a better framework for struggle against capital than do the smaller statelets. On the issue of self-determination, I am politically a Leninist whose theoretical positions are somewhat closer to those of Luxemburg. Judged from either the Leninist perspective or the Luxemburgist, or both, the conduct of neither the Indian state nor that of the Islamicist militants in Kashmir nor of the Khalistani terrorists in Punjab offers much to commend itself. As a socialist, I belong to a political minority that is today very much on the defensive against an international onslaught that would like to exterminate us. Thanks to my own socialist principles, I would be glad to offer solidarity to any minority - linguistic, religious, or whatever - whose rights of equal citizenship are threatened. However, such minorities would merit support from socialists much more if they were to join us in a common struggle against capitalism. Neither the right of national self-determination nor the minority status should be treated as a moral badge. These are political issues.

8. The history of modern Yugoslavia is a good instance of the two conceptions of nationhood I have outlined above. The state that arose out of the anti-fascist struggles of the 1940s was inclusive and universalist in inspiration. The disintegration of that multinational state more recently is connected politically with the defeat of socialism and ideologically with the power of the new elites that arose out of that defeat and have been carrying out their "ethnic cleansings" in the name of "national self-determination." This applies not only to the Serbian state but also to the Croat and even the Bosnian. The criminality of the majority nationality ought not be used to ignore or excuse the other criminalities. As murderous ethnicities arise where communist multi-nationalism and universalist civilities once were, each of us has to choose sides. I despise the state that the Indian bourgeoisie has cobbled together. But I also know that, as a creation of the anti-colonial movement, the state that came into being in India in 1947 was comparable, in its multinational dimension but on a somewhat larger scale, to the Yugoslavia that the partisans had created roughly at the same time. These were great achievements of the masses of people, mostly peasants, and we, the intellectuals of a later generation, should have the imagination to know how heroic the fight had been and how very humane those projects to build multi-national states were. Two of the great experiments in building multi-national societies that were undertaken during this century, in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, have collapsed into regimes of murder. We should ask ourselves why the defeat of communism has led also to the defeat of those experiments in multi-nationality, those modern forms of what in the pages of Monthly Review I have previously called "traditions of mercy." That phrase probably sounds quaint to those who wish to take nothing from our common past and who are untutored in traditions out of which socialism initially arose. Be that as it may, the main thing to do now in this regard is to prevent India from going the way of Yugoslavia, and we can do that only if we take the state away from the communal-fascists who are about to capture it and from a defunct bourgeoisie whose only god is money ("commodity fetishism" is what Marx called the consumptionist side of that worship). In this redemptive project, we need to affirm that, regardless of the fate of Yugoslavia, the objective of creating multinational socialist solidarities remains as the very horizon of decent life, in whatever place we happen to be. But this mutual mercy shall not be possible unless (a) we can share a modern project for creating radical equalities in the present and the future, and (b) we can recoup, refine, cherish a common past. In dreams begin responsibilities, as the poet said, but memory is the very stuff of which dreams are made. This, too, is a dialectic of our common humanity.

Aijaz Ahmad is senior fellow at the Center for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and author of In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992)

COPYRIGHT 1997 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group