"Presentist" Some of the tangents from my reading of the criticism of Gilman

     Judith A. Allen's biography, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism largely operates as an apologia for its central figure.  Within that process, Allen offers a substantial exploration of Gilman's political and literary work, linking her reform Darwinist analytical approach that runs through her sociological work with her literary works, particularly the utopias.  The best moments of her work put Gilman's work within the context of her times, both in terms of the larger intellectual, political, and social formation that she lived in, as well as her interpersonal relations.  However, this same approach leads Allen to a strange reading of the recent critical trend in Gilman scholarship, defined by the work of Gail Bederman, Alys Weinbaum, and Louise Michel Newman.

      The immediate point of conflict is contained in the evaluation of Gilman.  Allen wants to defend Gilman against the various accusations of racism and classism introduced by recent feminist critics, but there is also a methodological conflict as well.  For Allen, the various critics of Gilman fall into the trap of what she calls 'presentism.'  The various critics judge Gilman's works on the basis of a set of standards that are incongruous with the world that Gilman lived in.  She makes some interesting points in this argument, pointing out that Gilman avoided many of the static assumptions made by her contemporaries about hierarchical racial categorization.  It's also significant for Allen that Gilman's contemporaries, including critics such as W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, didn't target her for criticism despite their focus on 'racial subjugationists.'  At the same time, Allen's definition of racism is limited, defining the term in purely genetic or hereditary terms, effectively ignoring modes of racialization that don't operate within those limited terms.  Perhaps more significantly, Allen never deals with the deeply embedded racial assumptions contained in Gilman's reform Darwinism, as well as her latent Lamarckism.

     But perhaps more significantly, Allen makes a substantial misreading of the revisionists that she is debating.  She is correct in diagnosing that her opponents are interested in the present, but not quite in the way that she assumes.  Rather than statically placing a set of present assumptions on the past, these thinkers are interested in posing the question, how did we get to the present that we exist in?  And perhaps more significantly, how has the feminist movement contributed to the reproduction of forms of racism, rather than opposing them?  Allen places the revisionists within the debate between the 'second' and 'third' waves of feminism, but I would argue that these works are more influenced by the interventions by Black feminists such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde in the late 1970's and early 1980's.  These works are historical in nature, but they are not 'historicist' in nature.  Instead, they offer an engagement with history that has a linkage with the concept of history taken up by Michel Foucault, and theorized by the literary critic, Walter Benjamin, in his "On the Concept of History."  Benjamin notes in his oft quoted passage,

        "Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it "the way it really was."  It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.  Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger.  The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it.  For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes." (Benjamin 391)

     Within this context, we can see the 'revisionist' interventions as a set of interventions into the present.  Rather than operating within the historicist context of Allen, these authors attempt to shift the feminist movement of the present through a set of engagements with the history of that movement.  The moment of danger, 'the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes' is the way that the intertwined history of feminisms and racisms have shaped and constructed the institutions and forms of collectivity and subjectivity in the dominant structures of feminism.  It allows for a critical reassessment of current practices, as well as the sort of examination of familiar assumptions that Hegel puts at the center of critical theory.  On the other hand, we need to recognize a sort of pitfall in this approach.  To often academics have seen these sorts of interventions as a politics in and of itself.  No history is going to change social formations in and of itself, and those who think so are bound to end in either despair or self-deception.  Instead, we can think of these engagements as a sort preface to political engagement, a form of framing and conceptualizing projects and interventions.

Background on UAW Structure and Functioning, AKA “Why Is Our Union So Messed Up?” (Barry Eidlin)

     This is the first essay on this blog that I haven't written myself.  This was written a couple months ago by Berkeley AWDU activist, Barry Eidlin for the internal discussions within the reform effort.  Obviously, the essay was written before the recent changes to our local within the recent elections, and some of the material in the essay about campaigning is of historical interest only.  But, the essay is one of the few efforts to put the recent conflict of the union within a larger context of the history of UAW, and therefore it seemed to be of continued relevance.  It struck me that the conversation about the larger context of our election should be discussed outside of the small circle of activists that this was distributed to, and therefore I asked Eidlin if I could put this material on my blog.  He gave me permission.  In any case, here's the work, which offers an excellent analysis of the historical context of the conflict of the past year.  robert wood  

Barry Eidlin

Department of Sociology

University of California, Berkeley

[Note: The following was written in response to questions I received from a new union activist with extensive previous experience in campus organizing]

 The historical background of the leadership culture of the UAW.  Why does it seem that their biggest priority is maintaining their own power, even if it contradicts with the needs/rights of the rank-­and-­file?  How is this non-­democratic culture maintained through the meeting structure, controlling internal communications, and bringing in new recruits?

While some aspects of the structure and functioning of the UAW bureaucracy are common to union leaderships more broadly, other aspects are very particular to the UAW’s history.  The key to understanding the UAW bureaucracy is understanding the role of the Administration Caucus (AC).  Essentially, the AC Functions as the one party in the UAW’s one-party state.  Since 1947, virtually all top UAW officials and most local union officers have been members of the AC.  All major decisions regarding union leadership and policy are first vetted by the AC before being presented to the membership at conventions.  The AC Controls all flows of information inside the union, and acts to defend the union leadership’s interests at all costs.

It wasn’t always this way.  Prior to 1947, the UAW was actually a vibrant, rough‐and-tumble, democratic organization. Members exercised power on the shop floor, engaged in militant actions like the 1937 Flint sit--‐down strikes (factory occupations), and built the union from virtually nothing into a powerful force within a few short years.  Politically, there was room for many different groups to advance their program for the union, including Communists, Socialists, and other independent radicals.  However, through skilful political maneuvering, Walter Reuther, a former socialist who rose through the ranks to become the union’s GM Director, then President, was able to consolidate control over the union.  He ultimately purged or otherwise neutralized all internal political opposition, cementing the Administration Caucus’ dominant position within the union.  UCSB labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein lays out this story in intricate detail in his award--‐winning book The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. 

Why does the AC Act to defend the leadership’s interests at all costs?  It starts with a sincere belief that they, the leadership, are the guardians of the union, and the not-unreasonable belief that the union is under constant threat of attack from all quarters.  However, the problem arises from the fact that the AC/leadership comes to view itself as “the union.”  Given this conflation of the leadership with the union as a whole, combined with the aforementioned fear of attack, it is not too hard to see how any proposal or action that doesn’t emanate from the leadership is viewed as an attack on the leadership, and thus by extension an attack on the union.  As such, rank and file members who might have different ideas from the leadership as to how the union should be run or what the union should do are seen either as misguided members who must be properly “educated” about the issues, or, if the members persist in making their demands, as a divisive “faction” that poses a mortal threat to the future of the union, and must be crushed at all cost. 

Of course, the best--‐case scenario for the leadership is one in which they are left alone to play their role as guardians of the union.  This leads to tight controls over the flow of information and the establishment of strict, precisely delimited channels for involving new members.  The goal is to reproduce the existing leadership as much as possible while minimizing the possibility for independent initiatives that might lead the union astray (since they don’t emanate from the leadership, which alone has the true interests of the union at heart).  In terms of information, this is why we see the reluctance to make basic information about the union available in writing, whether that be executive board minutes, financial reports, etc.  It also is why the union leadership is very reluctant to pursue any kind of communications strategy beyond what they call “one--‐to--‐one organizing,” where a trusted key leader, usually a paid staffer, interacts one--‐on--‐one with a specific member.  To the extent that they disseminate information, they want it to be in one direction: from them to the membership, preferably in a carefully scripted form.  Thus the almost exclusive preference for phone banking and department walks over leafleting, e--‐mail campaigns, or even department--‐level meetings not organized by the top leadership.  We have started to see the local leadership loosen up with regard to e--‐mail and Internet communications, but this has largely been in response to the effective use of such communications strategies by reform forces in our union. 

In terms of leadership recruitment, the desire to protect the leadership (i.e. the union) at all costs influences both the type of people the leadership seeks to bring into the union, as well as the way in which they go about this leadership recruitment and development.  Again, the goal here is leadership/organizational stability and continuity.  As such, the  leadership wants to recruit people who are “team players,” and will accept the existing way of doing things without asking too many questions.  The result is that they generally target for leadership recruitment people who are well--‐meaning, pro--‐union liberals, but with little prior activist or union experience.  This provides them with a “blank slate” which they can then mould in their own image through careful, close, one--‐on--‐one mentoring.  It also means that they actively seek to exclude from involvement people with previous activist experience, at least those who think that they can use that previous activist experience to shape how the union should be run.

The contrast between the UAW's progressive side projects (in racial justice, immigrant rights, solidarity with other workers) and inactivity on our own campus.  Superficially from the e-­mails and website, it seems like the UAW supports progressive causes, but then again, hardly any of the progressive activists at UCLA have been involved in our local.  Why doesn't the UAW do more to organize its own members on our own campus to fight for their own rights?  People at UCLA have been fed the same argument over and over by Jorge that our campus is "just too difficult to organize" but then again we saw how they somehow turned out an unprecedented number of people to vote yes for the contract vote.  Why is this?

Historically, the UAW has a track record of being on the right side of social justice issues outside the labor movement.  Perhaps the best example of this was the union’s consistent support for the civil rights movement in the 1960s.  In the 1980s  the union was also a strong voice in the struggle against South African apartheid.  However, this commitment to social justice and democracy has never extended to the union itself.  To go back to the example of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Reuther and the AC were quite willing to bankroll community organizers conducting voter registration drives down in Alabama.  But later on in the 1960s, when African-American UAW Members started organizing themselves on the shop floor in Detroit as members of DRUM (the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement), asking why they were still the “last hired, first fired,” and why they still got stuck with the hardest, dirtiest jobs, the attitude of the UAW leadership was much less sympathetic.  In response to wildcat strikes by African--‐American UAW members protesting appalling shop floor conditions, the UAW International sent armies of paid staff to the picket lines, baseball bats in hand, to break the strikes and force the UAW members back to work.  This story is told in the book Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution, by Dan Georgakas And Marvin Surkin. 

While the level of overt physical violence may have subsided in recent years, the same schizophrenic attitude towards movements for democracy and social justice within and outside the union remains. Our union leadership will gladly pass resolutions in favor of exploited carwash workers and farmworkers, as we saw at the recent Joint Council meeting.  What they will not do is mount any sort of campaign that might involve mobilizing the union membership on a large scale.  Based on the material we covered in answer to the previous question, the reason for this should be clear: any mass membership mobilization that goes beyond simply rounding up bodies to show up at rallies runs the risk of giving rank and file members the idea that they might have a say in how their union is run.  This in turn might lead to members organizing independently of the leadership, thus placing the union in danger.  Since It poses such a threat to organizational stability and continuity, member mobilization is generally kept to a minimum.

This is not to say that members have no role in the union—they do.  However, that role is very narrowly defined: they are to be foot soldiers for the union, taking orders from the top leadership to enact the plans that the leadership has already laid out.  This type of “mobilization” involves very low levels of information sharing and low levels of required commitment.  The classic example of this is the strategy the leadership pursued for turning out the “yes” vote in the recent contract ratification vote: simply round up voters by placing union staffers at strategic campus “chokepoints,” give them a quick spiel about why they should vote “yes,” and direct them to the polling location.  In this scenario, there is no need or desire for any further follow--‐up; the members have performed their assigned task of ratifying the leadership’s decisions, and can then go back to being disengaged, uninformed members. 

Real organizing is hard, often plodding work, sustained over a long period of time.  But that doesn’t mean that it is impossible, either at UCLA or at any other UC campus for that matter.  It’s simply a matter of making that type of grassroots organizing a strategic priority.  That’s the model that we have seen emerge at the Berkeley campus after years of inactivity, and there is no reason to believe that it can’t develop on other campuses as well.

In running for head steward and other positions, how and what chances do we have to change this culture?  What is the potential of reforming and democratizing our union from within?

With the emergence of Academic Workers for a Democratic Union (AWDU) over the past few months, we have a very real and concrete opportunity to change the culture of secrecy and distrust that currently pervades our local.  We can do this not only by getting different leaders elected—although that certainly won’t hurt—but by showing how a different way of doing things might actually work in practice.  AWDU is made up of rank and file members and officials who actually believe that the key to a stronger union is an informed, activist, and involved membership. We have been putting that belief into action in our campaigns against the contract ratification and to elect new leadership, as well as in our day--‐to--‐day union work on campuses where reform activists are currently in control.  As our movement grows, we will continue to put that belief into action. 

In terms of the current vacancy election, with the 26 candidates we are fielding, we have the chance to win as many as 38 Seats on the union’s Joint Council, which would give us a majority position.  This in turn would give reformers a strong voice in setting the overall direction for our union.  The next step will be the leadership elections in May, When the entire Joint Council and Executive Board will be up for election. 

Of course, if we win, we can expect to take a lot of heat from the UAW International.  It will take a lot of member education and mobilization to counter this attack.  However, by mobilizing our members and creating organic connections with other unions and social justice organizations, we can build the strong organization we need both to fend off potential problems from our union leadership, as well as to participate in the movement to fight against the cuts and for a more just, more democratic University.

By trying to change our union, aren’t we in danger of playing into the right-­wing critique that unions are inherently corrupt and an outdated form of collective organization?

Absolutely not.  To the extent that anything about unions is outdated, it is the idea common within the UAW leadership that the way forward is to leave everything up to them.  By fighting for a more open, democratic, member--‐run union, we are playing a key role in injecting new ideas and a new vibrancy into the labor movement.  If we look at examples from U.S. labor history as well as examples from abroad, we see that unions are strongest when they mobilize with broader forces as a movement for social justice.  As I write this, we can see how powerful that kind of organizing can be by looking at the mobilizations in the streets of Tunis and Cairo, which have been bolstered by strong support from trade union activists. 

In sum, the fight for a more democratic union is the fight for a stronger union that can be a better ally in the broader struggle for social justice.

An untitled essay on Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty

 
      “All the world must suffer a big jolt. There will be such a game that the ungodly will be thrown off their seats, and the downtrodden will rise.”
      --Thomas Munzer

       Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe represent two different significant moments of the Subaltern Studies project. Guha’s book, in many ways, opens the project, and Chakrabarty’s book constitutes the latest shift in the project. Both books ultimately focus on the category of the peasant. This category has been a problem for the methodology of historical materialism for some time because of the contradictory analysis offered on this question, which has occurred because the peasant as a figure is outside of both the logic of industrial capitalism and is outside of the hyper-real Europe. To put it more bluntly, it points to a tension within the Marxist tradition, precisely because it is an immanent critique of capital. This allows it a unique perspective on its inner-logic, but it creates a limitation when one wants to grasp at its outside. In this sense, the subaltern studies project finds its origins in a set of question posited within the Marxist tradition, even if it doesn’t stay fully within that tradition.

      I want to focus on that engagement. In order to do this; it is crucial to begin with a brief discussion of how this question has been taken up within the Marxist tradition before the current moment. There has been more of an engagement that one would initially think, although one needs to look outside the academic tradition. It is also not without it’s contradictions. After that, the paper will shift to discuss the manner that this problem is taken on by Ranajit Guha. This work is clearly a response to the English tradition of history from below tradition as developed by figures such as E. J. Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. We will see that it both is indebted to that tradition and deeply critical of it. We will then move into the critical engagement of Dipesh Chakrabarty into the project begun by Guha. Chakrabarty engages in a similar maneuver as Guha, although this moves the project out of a purely Marxist trajectory into the space of post-structuralism. In following this trajectory, we see a pair of attempts to resolve the tension in Marxist thought. Which on one side, must take the Eurocentric logic of capitalism seriously, and on the other side, must push against this structure towards a radical alterity designated under the name of communism. In order to do this, they break away from the problematic Marx posed, but not to the extent imagined by Marxism’s liberal opponents.

     The profound ambiguity of the Marxist position on the non-European can be found within Marx’s own journalistic work on English colonialism in India. On one hand, Marx emphasizes the brutality of English colonialism. He notes, “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”[1] This element of his analysis emphasizes the brutal rapacity of bourgeois society, revealing the inherently exploitative nature of the society. It is linked to a figuration of barbarism traditionally associated with the non-western. This element is very close to the view of Franz Fanon, when he says, “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.” At the same time, Marx sees this process as linked to a global teleology. “England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”[2]

      To push beyond Marx’s work, the question of capitalist subsumption has been taken up elsewhere, particularly in its triumph within Europe itself. The question of peasant insurgency has deep roots within the Marxist tradition, albeit not within its academic roots. Marx himself was not inclined to look into such matters himself. There is only a slim volume on the question, published posthumously. However, one can come across a number of important works on the matter from the beginning of the Second International. Karl Kautsky discusses it in The Precursors to the New Socialism. It is also covered in the popular histories written by E. Belfort Bax, The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, and The Peasant War. Friedrich Engels wrote on the question as well in The Peasant Wars of Germany. All these works push the critique of the triumphal entry of capitalism farther the ambiguity presented in Marx’s journalism by presenting peasant insurgency as the precursor of the proletarian revolution, rather than an aberration. However, these analyses never entirely abandon the progressivist tradition associated with Marx.

      Ranajit Guha intervenes in this Marxist tradition, by framing his work with the research done by historian E.J. Hobsbawm, particularly Primitive Rebels and Captain Swing, his collaboration with George Rude. Guha immediately diagnoses the developmentalist logic of their work. “He finds the ‘traditional forms of peasant discontent’ to have been ‘virtually devoid of any explicit ideology, organization or programme’. In general, ‘pre-political people’ are defined as those ‘who have not yet found, or have only begun to find a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world’.” Hobsbawm effectively places these rebellions into the waiting room of history. They are the not yet, not yet disciplined, not yet ideological, and not yet properly socialist. Guha immediately expresses a discontent with this logic, noting that Hobsbawm and Rude contradict these assertions themselves by pointing to the political structures that come out of this social banditry and revolts.

     But Guha focuses his largest intervention within the colonial scene in India. He notes that “whatever its validity for other countries the notion of pre-political peasant insurgency helps little in understanding the experience of colonial India. For there was nothing in the militant movements of its rural masses that was not political.”[3] The resistance within the colonial scene necessarily took on a political dimension, producing both structures of organization and goals for a new society. This resistance had a double function. It both resisted against the elite of Indian society, the landlords and the moneylenders as well as against the colonial apparatus that legitimated them. Guha points out that the reforms of the Raj contributed to the intensification of the exploitation of the peasantry. This intensified exploitation was linked to the process of rationalization introduced by colonial officials. They did so by replacing the old aristocracy with “a solvent and relatively vigorous set of landlords.”[4] These landlords were dependent on the Raj and at the same time, the Raj rewarded the landlords by supporting their collection of “abwab and mathot.”[5]

     The primary site of investigation may be colonial India, but it is clear that Guha is questioning the transition to capitalism on a global scale from this site. The experiences of the peasants are continually linked to early European struggles, whether the struggles of the Jacquerie in France, the German Peasant Wars or the struggles of the English peasants in the English Civil War. These aren’t introduced to create a progressive schema of history. Instead, they are introduced to show a pattern of peasant resistance in the face of a growing capitalist power. This asserts itself through a number of factors, from the enclosing of the commons to the erosion of informal rights and the increased enforcement of the law.

     Guha accomplishes this by a broad synthetic reading of peasant insurgencies. In order to do this he uses many of the techniques produced within both the history from below school of history in England, as well as cultural studies as well as the schematic logic of the Annales school, producing a narrative that doesn’t quite look like either one of them. From the Annales School, he takes from a sociological tradition starting with Emile Durkheim, emphasizing the structural elements of peasant insurgency. This places emphasis on the categories, such as Negation, Modality, and Territoriality, which cut across time and geography. At the same time, a number of elements are drawn from the British tradition. Most significantly is the emphasis on understanding the phenomenon from the ground up, rather from the traditional focuses for political history, that of politicians, bureaucrats, and the elite. In order to get at that, Guha must engage with a historical archive in which those figures are the primary agents. This requires that Guha read against the grain of these reports in order to get at his subject. This becomes an important element of the early Subaltern Studies projects. The other element drawn from the British cultural studies tradition is an increased dependency on semiotics to understand historical phenomena.

     This semiotic element is crucial to this understanding. It gives Guha an important tool to understand peasant conscious within its social context. Guha argues that this consciousness is defined negatively within this particular system of sovereignty. “It is not by insurgency alone that the peasant comes to know himself. In colonial India a sense of identity was imposed on him by those who had power over him by virtue of their class, caste and official standing. It was they who made him aware of his place in society as a measure of his distance from themselves—a distance measured in differentials of wealth, status and culture. In other word, he learnt to recognize himself not by the properties and attributes of his own social being but by a diminution, if not negation by those of his superiors.”[6]

     This becomes defined by a whole series of signifiers. Guha looks at a whole series of celebrations and festivals within both the Indian context and the non-Indian context. These ceremonies are inevitably structured in a manner that reverses the places of the most subaltern population with the dominant population. Guha argues that this is done in order to enforce the structure of the social order by enforcing the nature of the system by showing its reverse. This can be seen in everyday life. The rigidity in the social hierarchy is enforced by the rigid semiotic structure. “It is not only that icons and images figured prominently in religious expression, but politics, too, was highly semioticized. Liveries, colors, badges and party cries were conspicuously displayed in the course of public disputes, and notions of power and subalternity worked out in elaborate sets of symbols: for, ‘feudal or hierarchic thought expresses the idea of grandeur by visual signs, lending to it a symbolic shape, of homage paid kneeling, of ceremonial reverence’.”[7] Hierarchy becomes laid out by a text, easily read by the members of the society. This semiotic order was designed to enforce the inequality of the status quo. As Benedict Anderson points out about the non-literate of the feudal world, “This is not to say that the illiterate did not read. What they read, however, was not words but the visible world.”[8]

     The structures of revolt must be understood within this context. Details as minor as details in dress or the use of personal pronouns were proscribed by the order of the society, and breaking those rules could have serious consequences. For instance, insulting a Brahman could have a penalty ranging from fines to serious corporal punishment, depending on the social distance between the Brahman and the speaker.[9] This creates a strong, but ultimately brittle social order. As Guha points out, “in a land where the peasant could wreck his superordinate enemy’s prestige simply by walking past his house with an umbrella on his head or by substituting tu for vous in an argument with him, why should insurgency need killing to make its point in battle?”[10]

     The terms of revolt come out of this structure, out of its semiotics, its epistemology, out of its theology. This immanent quality is no different than the revolt presented by the industrial proletariat of industrial proletariat, who transforms the factory floor and its impoverishment into its tools of resistance. The fact that these subjects cannot imagine the modes of resistance and organization created through the subjection of the factory floor doesn’t mean that they didn’t have organizational structures or an idea of what they would want for a new society. Guha points out that the basis of this new society is contained within the reversal of order created in the carnival and in the festival. “For if the function of prescriptive reversal is to ensure the continuity of the political and moral order of society and sacralize it, that of peasant insurgency is to disrupt and desecrate it…. What is intended by such usage in many languages is to communicate the sense of an unforeseen break, a sharp discontinuity.”[11] This begins to strip the uniqueness of the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It becomes yet another resistance against a structure of domination; one that was foreseen by the revolts of the peasants.

     It is precisely this concept of the resistant peasant that Dipesh Chakrabarty draws from the work of Ranajit Guha. He begins his book, Provincializing Europe with a reading of Guha’s work. This reading pushes the polemic with Hobsbawm even further than what is explicitly contained in Guha’s work. For Chakrabarty, the crucial element of his engagement with the Western Marxist tradition contained within Hobsbawm’s work was its challenge of the progressive historicist logic of “incompleteness” of capitalist transformation in Europe and other places while retaining the idea of a general historical movement from a premodern stage to that of modernity.”[12] This logic is dependent on the homogenous empty time of bourgeois society, and places alternative concepts of time and space into the category of the ‘survival’ or ‘remnant’. Chakrabarty argues that it is this critique, the critique of the category of the prepolitical, that most influences his own project. He notes that Guha “insisted that instead of being an anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary of colonialism a fundamental part of the modernity that colonial rule brought to India.”[13]

     This critique breaks up any “universal narratives of capital” and “fundamentally pluralizes the history of power in global modernity.”[14] Chakrabarty does this through his interpretation of the figure of the peasant, which takes on more than sociological significance. “The “peasant” acts here as a shorthand for all the seemingly nonmodern, rural, nonsecular relationships and life practices that constantly leave their imprint on the lives of even the elites in India and on their institutions of government. The peasant stands in for all that is not bourgeois (in a European sense) in Indian capitalism and modernity.”[15] Chakrabarty argues that these elements of society have been presented within the category of “inadequacy”. He notes that this both true for the radical historical project of Sumit Sarkar as well as the initial statement of the Subaltern Studies collective. He wants to reverse this interpretation, and begin to look at the categories of European thought as inadequate and “read “plenitude” and “creativity” where this narrative has made us read “lack” and “inadequacy”.”[16]

     Chakrabarty by no means wants to reject the concepts of European thought altogether. He notes that “modern social critiques of caste, oppressions of women, the lack of rights for laboring and subaltern classes in India, and so on—and, in fact, the very critique of colonialism itself—are unthinkable except as a legacy, partially, of how Enlightenment Europe was appropriated in the subcontinent.”[17] Instead, the purpose is to recognize that while this legacy contributes essential tools to the understanding of the world, they are not adequate to understand everything in the world. Chakrabarty states, “I want to discuss how it may be possible to hold together both secularist-historicist and nonsecularist takes on the world by engaging seriously the question of the diverse ways of “being in the world”.”[18] He does this by taking Heidegger’s categories of the fragmentariness of experience and the category of the not-yet seriously. This troubles the categories of the everyday of the social sciences. Whether this will lead to their death (and new categories) or not is up for grabs.[19]

     This challenge primarily occurs within the field of supernatural agency, the realm of gods and spirits. Traditionally, history has limited its investigation to the realm of human agency. This goes back to the work of Giambattista Vico, who argues to place the question of the divine to the side when producing histories. This secularizing pattern has been followed since then in most of the social sciences. There has also been a strong influence from the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued that the divine is primarily the alienated essence of man. In effect, this leads the translation of references to supernatural agency in one of two directions. Either, it is translated into the alienated political desires of human collectivities or its is translated as a pathology or a holdover from the past.

      Chakrabarty wants to challenge this reading of this agency. It becomes the space in which begins a critique of the work of Ranajit Guha. He pushes against the Guha’s project when he gets to the question of supernatural agency. Guha, in many ways, takes a traditional Marxist approach to this question. While he recognizes the importance of the god Thakur, he doesn’t or (from Chakrabarty’s perspective) can’t take Thakur’s agency into account. He insists that this element of peasant revolts cannot be ignored, but he sees it as a problematic element of the revolts. He links this element to a semi-feudal subservience, linked to an authoritarian world system. “Consequently, he tended to look upon man’s domination of man not as a process governed by the laws of the world but by those of the other world.”[20] Hence, the appeals to Thakur both relate to a subservience at the psychic level and a substantial alienation from the goals and desires of the subject.

      This is a serious contradiction in the project of Subaltern Studies from Chakrabarty’s perspective. The original intention of the project was to resurrect the voices of the subaltern from the representations contained in nationalist historiography. This effort can be found in Guha’s work; however, it runs into a serious roadblock when dealing with supernatural agency. As Chakrabarty notes, “What does it mean, then when we take the subaltern’s views seriously—the subaltern ascribes the agency for their rebellion to some god—and want to confer on the subaltern agency or subjecthood in their own history, a status the subaltern’s statement denies?”[21] In order to return the subjectivity of the subaltern to historiography, Guha, in effect, has to ignore the subaltern’s own representation of political agency. This agency doesn’t work within the logic of liberal subjectivity. Instead, it sees that agency as coming from the outside, both in the figure of the God, Thakur, and in the form of writing.

     As Chakrabarty notes, “the Santal leaders’ own understanding of the rebellion does not directly serve the historical cause of democracy or citizenship or socialism. It needs to be reinterpreted. Historians will grant the supernatural a place in somebody’s belief system or ritual practices, but to ascribe to it any real agency in historical events will be to go against the rules of evidence that gives historical discourse procedures for settling disputes about the past.”[22] The rules in which historians produce and judge narratives are drenched in the terms and logic of the contemporary society. It forces the historians to translate the logic of the past into the framework of the present. Chakrabarty wants to break out of this. In order to produce a narrative that would accomplish this, the historian would have to produce a radically different narrative, one that would not be recognizable to the current rules of evidence.

     Chakrabarty successfully points to the problem, but it is questionable whether his solution is pointing in the right direction. The positive element of his work is dependent on a number of conceptions of Martin Heidegger’s, drawn from his work in Being and Time. There is an extremely positive element to this work in its emphasis on multiplicity and the fragment. But Chakrabarty never deals with the problematic aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy, particularly the essentialism that frequently haunts his work. There is more than likely another way of approaching this problem in a way that would avoid those problems.

     In a sense, this returns us to the beginning of the conversation. Both Guha and Chakrabarty’s work explodes a certain ambiguity contained within the Marxist project. This is the value of both the enlightenment and the progressive role of capitalism. Guha’s project takes on the teleology contained within much of the Marxist work on peasant revolt. These acts can no longer be seen as a prehistory to either the proletarian revolution or the success of capitalism. Instead, this points to the extensive revolt against the development of capitalism even before its maturation. Chakrabarty pushes this to the question of the Enlightenment itself, questioning the universality of its rules. However, this work is far more modest than Guha’s in many ways. It seeks to provincialize Europe, rather than do away with it altogether. However, both are seriously dependent on Marxian methodology in a manner that would be uncomfortable to a figure such as Lyotard. Perhaps, this points towards a historical materialism that breaks out of its Eurocentric roots.


[1] Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India”
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 6.
[4] Ibid.
[5] fees and charges placed on peasants by landlords and government officials
[6] Ibid., 18.
[7] Ibid., 37.
[8] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 15.
[9] Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 46.
[10] Ibid., 166.
[11] Ibid., 36.
[12] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12.
[13] Ibid., 13.
[14] Ibid., 14.
[15] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11.
[16] Ibid., 35.
[17] Ibid., 4.
[18] Ibid., 21.
[19] When one reads the original draft of the first chapter “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History”, Chakrabarty seem to be arguing for the eventual death of these categories under the mark of the politics of despair, but he seems to be stepping away from this.
[20] [20] Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 265.
[21] Ibid., 103.
[22] Ibid., 104.