Ted wrote:
Several questions that might be asked are: (1) to what extent is the
philosophy of history underpinning claims such as these about India
true? (2) to what extent are the specific claims about Indian
conditions and the restraint they placed on the development of mind
true? (3) assumiing that the general idea that conditions can be more
or less conducive to the "development of the human mind," were the
conditions produced by the "vilest interests" in India more more
conducive to this development than those that were annihilated? Marx
describes the latter conditions, in part, as follows:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/state_and_revolution/ahmad.htm
Aijaz Ahmad on Marx's India articles
Aijaz Ahmad's "In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literatures" contains
an article titled "Marx on India: a Clarification," which serves as a
reply to Edward Said, who viewed Marx's early India articles as
Orientalist. Ahmad's main goal is to show the context in which Marx's
incidental journalistic pieces on India appear. This is totally
missing in Said's treatment of the subject. Said quotes the famous
paragraph from an June 10, 1853 Tribune piece that described Indian
village life as superstition-ridden and stagnant. The model that Marx
had in mind when writing this article was North America. Marx was
entertaining the possibility of capitalist economic development
within a colonial setting around this time. (Ahmad reminds us that
the gap in material prosperity between India and England in 1835 was
far narrower than it was in 1947.)
Part of the problem was that Marx simply lacked sufficient
information about India to develop a real theory. His remarks have
the character of conjecture, not the sort of deeply elaborated
dialectical thought that is found in Capital. And so what happens is
that enemies of Marxism seize upon these underdeveloped remarks to
indict Marxism itself.
Ahmad notes that Marx had exhibited very little interest in India
prior to 1853, when the first of the Tribune articles were written.
It was the presentation of the East India Company's application for
charter renewal to Parliament that gave him the idea of writing about
India at all. To prepare for the articles, he read the Parliamentary
records and Bernier's "Travels". (Bernier was a 17th century writer
and medicine man.) So it is fair to say that Marx's views on India
were shaped by the overall prejudice prevailing in India at the time.
More to the point is that Marx had not even drafted the Grundrisse at
this point and Capital was years away. So critics of Marx's writings
on India are singling out works that are not even reflective of the
fully developed critic of capitalism.
Despite this, Marx was sufficiently aware of the nature of dual
nature of the capitalist system to entertain the possibility that
rapid capitalist development in India could eliminate backward
economic relations and lead to future emancipation. His enthusiasm
for English colonialism is related to his understanding of the need
for capitalist transformation of all precapitalist social formations.
His animosity towards feudal social relations is well known. He
regards them as antiquated and a block on future progress. The means
by which they are abolished are universally cruel and inhumane such
as the Enclosure Acts. What he is looking for in this process is not
a way of judging human agencies on a moral basis, but what the
dynamics of this process can lead to. That goal is socialism and the
sole measure of every preceding historical development.
A few weeks later, on July 22nd, Marx wrote another article that had
some more rude things to say about India and England as well. But
here he was much more specific about the goal in question. He says
that the English colonists will not emancipate the Indian masses.
That is up to them to do. Specifically, Marx writes, "The Indian will
not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among
them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new
ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial
proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong
enough to throw off the English yoke altogether."
So unless there is social revolution, the English presence in India
brings no particular advantage. More to the point, it will bring
tremendous suffering.
Furthermore, there is evidence that Marx was becoming much more
sensitive to the imperialist system itself late in life. He wrote a
letter to Danielson in 1881 that basically described the sort of
pillage that the socialists of Lenin's generation were sensitive to:
"In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in
store for the British government. What the British take from them
annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless for the
Hindoos, pensions for the military and civil servicemen, for
Afghanistan and other wars, etc. etc., -- what they take from them
without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to
themselves annually within India, -- speaking only of the commodities
that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send over to England
-- it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of the 60
million of agricultural and industrial laborers of India. This is a
bleeding process with a vengeance."
A bleeding process with a vengeance? Make no mistake about this. Marx
did not view England as on a civilizing mission.
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