A conversation with Jairus Banaji

This is a recorded discussion with Jairus Banaji, a Marxist historian known for his work on merchant capitalism and agrarian history. His book "Theory as History" is a key contribution to historical materialism. In this discussion we have covered topics ranging from the labour movement, its history, India’s ‘promoter capitalism’ model, fascism, feminism and various related themes.

Q: Is there a particular period in the history of the labor movement that you would consider unique? If so, what specific political dynamics, events, or developments during that time set it apart from other points in history?

Banaji: Globally, I think the period just before the First War and down into the 1920s was unique in many ways, because it threw up a specifically working-class politics which was not preempted or hegemonized or dominated by the party left, that is to say, by so-called revolutionary parties of the left. So you have the kind of Left Communist tradition emerging, which was largely from the experience of workers. The workers councils that Gramsci was talking about is another example of this. The shop stewards movement in Britain around the First World War is a further example. I mean, there's a brilliant history of the shop stewards movement written by Hinton, a British labor historian called James Hinton. So I mean, it's possible to map a whole range of movements which were genuinely driven from below by workers themselves in this unique span of time, from just before the first war down into the 1920s. And then, of course, you have the Russian Revolution, sort of more or less coalescing into Stalinism by the mid 20s, so that the experience even of Russian workers in the revolution is something that, to some extent, can be captured, and has been captured by people like Brinton. You had factory committees in the Russian Revolution, but they were rapidly dismantled. By 1918 the Bolshevik leadership had decided they didn't want the factory committees to play much of a role. So they were more or less dismantled. So I think the years from the first war to the 1920s were a unique period. Then, to some degree, there were possibilities in the 1940s when you had an upsurge just after the war, and you had very strong Communist parties emerging in both France and Italy. But then again, within about 10 to 15 years, all of that popular base was more or less lost. And while that was happening, and because it was happening, you had the left turning to more autonomous forms of workers action, namely, operaismo and kind of workers inquiries at the factory level, etc., those kind of traditions that that we saw emerging in in Italy in the 60s and 70s’. Again, that to some degreeis a unique moment. Once the 70s comes, we are dealing with the watershed. It's a turning point for labor worldwide. Labor is being progressively smashed, okay, from the 1970s onwards, and still hasn't recovered today. So the real turning-point comes around the mid 70s. A good example of this Stephen Hymer, the Canadian economist who taught at the New School in New York . As late as 1974, just a year before he died, as late as 74 he was predicting a massive upsurge of the workers movement. Whereas within a year, everything was going downhill. Stephen Heymer was a Canadian who worked on multinationals, migrated to the States and got a job teaching economics at the New School. In one of his last papers he predicts that there's going to be an intensified battle between labor and capital in the coming years in which the unions will have to challenge control over companies. Now what what we actually saw was large firms shaking out labor in a big way and starting to rationalize, and this inevitably had an impact on the unions, in the sense that it destroyed them. It lowered union densities in most industrialized labor markets in the world, and led eventually to a decline, or an atrophy, of the unions themselves. Now that process was repeated in India about maybe ten years later, here companies started shaking out labor as early as the 80s, and outsourcing extensively, and creating these kinds of parallel production networks, and effectively Bombay was destroyed as a leading industrial center, it was de-industrialized. By the 1990s you had practically no manufacturing left in the city, and that meant that you had practically no union movement left in the city either. So I would say that the turning point into the modern period comes around the 70s and 80s.

Q: I think you had mentioned to me before that India never focused on building economies of scale. So was there a large industrial labor movement in India prior to the 1980s?

Banaji: No, I mean, you had, you had reasonably strong unions in what was then called Madras city, Chennai today, right? And in Bombay, and in the sprawl of industry around Bombay, well organized, quite combative. Many of these were self-managing unions, namely employees unions. They weren't controlled from the outside. So in that sense, you did, but you never had. What you never had in India were very large concentrations of workers, such as you saw in South Korea, for example, in the Hyundai shipyards, massive concentrations of labor, which went together with combativity, high levels of combativity in the 90s and so on. You never had that in India, even in infrastructure industries like the docks and so on. You never had very large concentrations of labor pitted against capital in some kind of obvious class conflict, that never occurred. The labor movement in cities like Madras and Bombay was always quite fragmented. It lacked overall coordination, and it wasn't led from the outside by very large unions. So the industries were advanced, but because of government policy, you never had systematic exploitation of economies of scale. We never saw the emergence of very large, globally competitive companies in this country. I mean, the only example I can think of is Reliance building its petroleum refinery in Gujarat, in Jamnagar, starting with textiles and then moving into synthetic textiles and through synthetics ultimately into the oil industry. That was a rather exceptional pattern of growth. By and large, the Indian business houses spread their capital across sectors, undermining any sense of, specialization. This dispersal of capital was a legacy from the past. It was a legacy from the managing agencies, because the managing agencies, which were strong in Calcutta, invested in a range of industries, of different industries. So it was a kind of diversification across sectors, as opposed to concentrating capital in highly specialized large units of production in one industrial sector, the way Reliance did.

Q: Are there any historiographical works on the unions and industrial relations of India that you would personally recommend?

Banaji: Nothing comparable to the kind of work that's been done in the US, for example, or in the UK, nothing, or France for that matter. I mean, there's Chitra Joshi’s work on Kanpur, Dilip Simeon’s book on Jamshedpur, The Politics of Labour under Late Colonialism, or Rohini’s more contemporary study Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism. But there's no sustained tradition of labor history, not as yet anyway. And as I said, partly it's because historians don't actually interact with workers and find out their experiences. So far as they rely on published sources, there's an automatic limitation there from the start. I mean, you have conventional, very conventional kinds of accounts, like Karnik’s study of strikes in India. But that's hardly comparable to the kind of work that, for example, Michelle Perrot did on French strikesat the start of the seventies . I think there's nothing comparable to that kind of of work.

Q: There were two works of yours in Marxist mosaic, the final two chapters, which dealt with industrial relations.

Banaji:. Yes, I mean, one of those was purely based on ‘oral’ sources, namely, on our discussions and conversations with the unions. We would take down notes as those unfolded, and then a more coherent picture was reconstructed from the notes we took. That's the shorter chapter on the history of the employees’ unions, the long chapter, the analysis of industrial conflict, was based on strike records compiled and kept in the Labour Commissioner's office, and based on actually getting access to the strike records, which was easy. I mean, they weren't very cagey about giving us access to the strike registers . If you had the patience to sit there and transcribe from them, they would give you the clerical records. So those chapters were based on two very different sorts of material. And yes,, I mean, they would count as a contribution to a kind of labor history. But there’s also one quite fine study of the Bombay textile strike by a then young Dutch scholar called Van Wersch.. So as I say, it's all very sporadic.

Q: Your understanding of modes of production imply a conception of historical progress that is non-linear. To what extent does this affect your views on standard crisis theories?

Banaji: First of all, about Marx, insofar as one can construct a theory of crisis from Marx, which is what Henryk Grossman tried to do in The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system. Marx himself didn't actually leave us with a well-written final draft of his theory of crisis. But insofar as you can reconstruct one from his work, there's Grossman’s book. And of course, Grossman is often criticised for being too ‘deterministic’ or ‘mechanical’ about the end of capitalism. I don't think Marx believed that capitalism would collapse because of a crisis, I don't think that was Marx's view, and I don’t think it is Grossman’s either. I think Marx's general view was very clearly set out in the Manifesto where he sees the working class growing progressively stronger, because it is schooled by capital itself. It's employed in increasingly largee enterprises and acquires a new kind of confidence on the shop floor . Of course, there is always the reserve army of labor, which is the way the market controls and even punishes labor,. Unemployment and the mass redundancies during slumps act as a disciplining mechanism on labor. But in the long term, in a more linear sense, Marx sees the working class growing in strength, becoming more and more combative and intelligent about politics and about class, class relations and class struggle. And then eventually, at some stage, it's strong enough to be able to challenge capital, socially and politically. That is, if you like, the picture handed down from the Manifesto, which more or less goes down to his notes for volume three of Capital, where he talks about the role that credit plays in socializing production, and about workers’cooperatives taking over and being able to run the same socialised enterprises. Large capitalist enterprises become so highly socialized under capitalism that workers simply take them over. So this very optimistic, almost linear view of capital is counterpointed by the notion that crises are endemic to capitalism and run cyclically through the history of accumulation, so that profitability constantly has to be restored, and the idea that these cyclical restorations of profitability, as Grossman pointed out, inevitably involve a restructuring of capital, sweeping reorganizations, and and so forth. Now the precise form of reorganization is an empirical matter, but, for example, when I referred to the watershed of the 1970s that's precisely what we see. We see a new cycle of sweeping reorganization, massive shedding of labor, deunionizing of the labor market, etc, That leads us into the next 50 years, more or less. And as I say, we're at the tail end of that period, which started in the mid 70s and early 80s. The way capital comes out of a crisis of overaccumulation is through the restructuring of accumulation and its wider logistical setup. Now what the vision of the Manifesto discounts is the idea that managements are actually able to make decisions which can affect production and workers in a significant ways. Okay? Marx completely abstracts from managerial discretion. There is no sense in the Communist Manifesto that you're going to have industrial enterprises where managements have considerable latitude in terms of the kind of decisions they make about how production will be structured.

Q: To what extent do you agree with the radical feminist position on the creation of private property? Radical feminists believe that female subjugation, on the reproductive control of women, preceded private property, which overturns Engels' theorization of the topic.

Banaji: How is one supposed to resolve something that goes back, you know, millennia, so to speak. Engels was basing his own reconstruction on Morgan, the American anthropologist. I think it's important to see these as a sort of co-determining, in the sense that notions of patriarchy and property are mutually implicated with each other. Patriarchy is essentially a form of asserting property over the labor and labor power and sexual services of women, okay? And of the labor of youth, by the way, within the family. So it's not as if we're talking about separable phenomena here. We're talking about essentially, very closely related phenomena, especially in peasant households, where large families enable better cultivation and so on. Right, large families are critical to the survival of a stable peasantry, and therefore patriarchy is built into the whole idea of a peasant economy. It’s hard to imagine a peasant economy operating outside the bounds of patriarchal control. And as I say, the control extends not just over the labor of women, but also of young persons in the household. So rather than seeing this as a genetic dispute about which comes first, it's better to see these notions of property as bound up with culturally specific ideas of patriarchy. Now the key thing about the feminist critique is that authoritarianism was something that the left downplayed throughout its previous history, until feminism emerged in the 60s, or re emerged in the 60s. That was partly because a kind of authoritarianism was built into left politics through the idea of the party. Now, if you're going to subscribe to a notion of the party, you're subscribing to several other things as well. You're subscribing to a notion of truth, that the party is the repository of truth, that consciousness comes to the working class from the outside, namely from the party. You're also subscribing to notions of hierarchy, which is the how the party is organised. In order to function like a machine efficiently, it has to be structured in a certain way from the top down, so to speak, there are levels of order giving and order taking within a party. So the model is essentially hierarchical and authoritarian, and that is a major part of the Left Communist critique of vanguardism, basically the idea that somehow the party is pivotal to revolutions and to the revolutionary process, as opposed to, say, various organs of mass democracy, namely the workers councils, the workers committees, the factory committees, and so on, which are organs of mass democracy where the class is actively involved in shaping the revolutionary process. So this whole debate about party and class has profound implications for the way we understand power, authority, hierarchy and relationships among comrades, between comrades and workers, and so on and so forth. Since the mid 70s, at least, I've always subscribed to this critique of vanguardism as an unviable formula for left politics. I mean the vanguardist model which is sometimes derived from What is to be done? and Lenin's idea of the professional revolutionary. The Indian left seems to think that this is how a party is built, as a set of professional revolutionaries. Feminism develops a more wide ranging critique of authoritarianism, not just the critique of male chauvinism, male domination, misogyny and so on, but beyond that, the idea that authoritarian cultures are incompatible with all forms of emancipatory politics.

Q: So when we spoke first, you talked about an example of South African workers and their families being exploited, their children being exploited as a response to this question, can you reiterate that?

Banaji: On white farms in South Africa in the late 19th and early 20th century, there were essentially two forms of black labor. There were sharecroppers and there were labor tenants. Now a labor tenant is essentially quite an ambiguous category, because a labor tenant household combines the characteristics of a wage-laboring household and a peasant household. Why it's called labor tenancy is that in return for service, that is to say, employment on the white farmer’s farm, a plot of land is conceded to the family. Now, if the background is a grazing economy, a pastoral economy, then access to grazing becomes the crucial factor in this contract between the white farmer and the black labor tenant. It's essential for black families to be able to retain possession of livestock. In order to be able to do that, they have to have access to grazing. And if much of the land is monopolized by white farmers, then that can only come through these particular ‘tenancy’ contracts. And so what the head of the household, of the tenant household, does is promise the employer a certain quantity of labor across the year in return for access to grazing rights and cultivation rights. But what matters most is grazing, so that's the foundation of the labor tenancy contract. If you compare the two groups, namely black sharecroppers and black labor tenants, the sharecroppers were generally much better off. They were even able to accumulate capital when grain prices were high; then sharecroppers did well. It depended a lot on the market, of course, but even intrinsically in abstraction from the market, there was a big difference between the independence of sharecroppers on one side and the coerced and dependent nature of the labor tenant household. Labor tenants were effectively wage laborers disguised as tenants. So that's what I was talking about. Now the contract is between the white farmer and the head of the household. The head of the household does not do the work himself. He gets the work done mainly through the young males in the family, right? And so there was a lot of tension built into the labor tenant family. And eventually what happened was that these youngsters simply quit. They left the farms, they deserted the countryside en masse, and they went into the urban areas to find jobs there. And that brought about a crisis in the whole system of labor tenancy which was clear by the 1920s.

Q: Do you think women were subjugated even in primitive tribal societies?

Banaji: Well in so-called primitive societies, what was equally essential about women was that they were part of a system of marital exchanges, right? If you like, that is a form in which women are being controlled by men in those societies, namely, the alliances which are struck between different clans and lineages and so on depend very much on women being married off to other lineages and clans. So what matters here is not just production, whatever that may be in a primitive society, what matters is the matrimonial system and these exchange systems, namely the marriage exchange systems which are described in great detail by Levi Strauss in his first book, Elementary structures of kinship.

Q: The reason I felt that it's important to raise it up. This debate leads up to the conception nowadays that we do not need to specifically focus on gender related issues, because ultimately class politics is to be determinant in all struggles. So what essentially people think is if we carry on the primacy of class politics, we will essentially reach a stage of socialism where there will be no oppression of women so we don't have to bother about specifically gender related issues.

Banaji: Which is a completely obsolete model, because class has no reality outside of all these other structures. Okay? Class has no reality outside of gender, no reality outside of race, etc, etc. So now I'm not sure what the alternative to this sort of simplistic, one-sided class determinism is. In America, you had a very influential black feminist movement, which was built around the idea of intersectionality, the idea that these different forms of oppression super impose themselves upon each other, so that the concrete is always a kind of ‘synthesis’ of all these different ‘determinations’. Class in the abstract can be defined in the way that Marxists tend to define it, or conventional Marxists tend to define it, but class in the concrete can't be defined in that way. Sartre insisted that when you deal with class in the concrete, you're dealing with all these other mediations or structures or determinations. So there is no abstract working class in the US. There is a black working class and a white working class, and even within the white working class, you have very different degrees of job security, different skills and different relationships to the labor market. Okay, just as in agriculture, you don't have an abstract working class, you have workers who are migrants in the US, workers migrating from across the border in Mexico. All of California’s intensely capitalist agriculture was and is based on migrant labor, and that labor was overwhelmingly Mexican labor. When you look at the condition of these Mexican seasonal laborers in Californian agriculture, they're vastly out of sync with anything that you find in in the industrial working class of the cities. So there is no abstract working class in any part of the world, alright, the working class as a concrete, living entity is always a complex or amalgam of all these different forms of oppression and ‘determinations’. As I say, gender and race being the two key ones. Does that make sense to you?

Q: Yeah, it does. Also the determination of nations, where there is an aristocracy of nations, if we are to imply Emmanuel’s theory of unequal exchange into this.

Banaji: Sure, absolutely yes.

Q: What role does caste play in Indian capitalism?

Banaji: I think it plays an essential role in the sense that, as I explained last time, if you imagine caste as a hierarchy, as a social hierarchy, then at the top and the bottom, at the extremes, you have a very close correlation between class and caste. The ruling class in this country is very largely recruited from the the upper castes. And the vast mass of the most impoverished and disenfranchised sections of the working class are recruited from Dalits. And in between, you have an amorphous and messy category of the middle castes, OBCs, etc, etc. And the OBCs themselves are divided, in administrative terms, into an upper layer and a lower layer and so on. So the backbone of the caste hierarchy lies in the middle. As a hierarchy, it lies in the middle. And the middle is the messiest part of this system where class and caste don't correlate in any obvious way. One of the great strengths of Paul Brass work Indian castes and their political role was precisely to show how when Charan Singh deserted the Congress Party in 1967 he unleashed the flood gates to an entirely new era of politics in India. One which which culminated with Mandal and the assertion, the political assertion, of some of the stronger middle or ‘Other Backward’ castes. But essentially, the correspondence between caste and class broke down once this happened, because the Jat farmers, for example, who are economically dominant in western UP, are essentially rich and middle farmers. You know, they no longer have a kind of clear correlation between their location within the caste hierarchy and their position within the agrarian class structure. So there was and is an asymmetry or a tension in these middle ranges of the hierarchy. And that's essentially true of, and also reflected in, the relationship between these rich peasants and agricultural laborers. In so far as agricultural laborers are drawn from the lowest castes, class domination often appears as caste violence in terms of the atrocities committed by dominant castes in the middle range against SCs who form a large part of the agrarian labor force. So class and caste relate to each other in these complex ways, especially in the middle. I mean, at the bottom, there's a stronger correlation between class and caste, and at the top, likewise, but much less so in the middle where much of the peasantry has likewise been proletarianised. I think Barbara Harriss-White's work on caste and class is good. And you can look at India Working where she discusses some of these issues.

Q: What do you think of the Comintern analysis of fascism, and how do you differ from it? And how do you characterize fascism as you see in the present context, happening in India and other countries?

Banaji: The Comintern’s analysis was simply wrong. It was wrong because they saw fascism as a kind of political reflex of finance capital in Germany, the banks were quite powerful, and they saw it as having no kind of deeper roots within German society than simply the kind of control and domination of the of the finance capitalists that was Dimitrov’s famous definition of fascism in one of the congresses in the early 30s. The hallmark of fascism is that it only succeeds in so far as it has a mass movement. It mobilizes a mass movement. Now the key question then becomes: For in terms of fascist politics, how is this achieved? Namely, how is a mass base actually mobilized? How is it constructed by the far right? And this is where the family, ideology, culture, authoritarianism, all come into play. So it seems to me, the Comintern simply didn't understand the roots of fascism, the notion that what enables the fascist seizure of power is a pastiche of ideological delusions of the kind you can see in other contexts as well, in the US today as well as in India, of course. In France and other parts of western and central Europe the Right uses the issue of immigration to create such mass support. In other words, racism. Racism and xenophobia have been central to the mass appeal of fascist movements in the U.S. and India. There is no coherent fascist ideology as such. It's simply a pastiche of all these different motifs of xenophobia, racism, nationalism, ultra-nationalism, patriarchy, misogyny, et cetera. And you know, you can basically see it across the world operating with nuances and variations around these themes. Wilhelm Reich’s Mass psychology of fascism exists in two very different editions. The original edition has never been translated into English. It was written in 1933. It’s a slim text, about 120 or 150 pages, whereas the one that came out in English in the mid 40s in the U.S. is a much bigger text, because Reich kept adding different chapters to it later on, after he left for the U.S. and diluted his own argument as a result of that. But the original text contains these first two chapters by Reich, which precisely discuss the role of patriarchy, family authoritarianism and sexual repression as crucial factors in the growth of a fascist psychology. The idea that the mass base of fascism consists only of a middle class on the verge of dispossession is too simplistic, because fascism has a wider, more heterogeneous mass appeal than that. It can comprise a whole lot of strata. It is true that dispossession is a major theme, you know, within all right-wing movements as well. And then the Left equally can mobilize groups that are dispossessed. So there's no kind of there's no one-way causality, that dispossession only works in favor of the far right. The left can equally well work with, say, a dispossessed small peasants and so on but the idea that the Mittelstand, the middle class is somehow the kind of primordial base of fascist movements is too simplistic. In India, for example, how would you explain the the mass base of the RSS? In the in the 1960s it was recruiting largely from the upper castes. The finances of the movement came from Marwari industrialists in Calcutta. That was shown by Stanley Kochanek. He showed this in his book, Business and politics in India. He interviewed many of these industrialists who were directly supporting the RSS in the 1960s; they were socially conservative Marwari businessmen. Social conservatism has always been a key aspect of fascist politics. So I think the idea that somehow there's a primordial middle class looking down the abyss of dispossession which is the core of any fascist movement is untenable. The social base is much more heterogeneous, which is something that Arthur Rosenberg argued strongly in his essay. But of course, in fascist propaganda, those themes were extraordinarily important, that the threat of big business, the threat of large retail stores taking over the retail sector and dispossessing small shopkeepers, the threat of big landowners dispossessing smaller landowners, etc., all those themes played out in fascist propaganda. In terms of the cultural background of fascist politics, the mass psychology of fascism, there is nothing to parallel the first two chapters of of Reich's book in depth of analysis. Chapters one and two are very important. In a capitalist society, with growing concentration, with the rise of big business, of corporate lobbies and so on, middle classes are gripped by mounting insecurities. Just this kind of profound angst or anxiety is reflected in the charisma of the leader, who makes magical promises and offers magic solutions. So there is a correspondence, a kind of isomorphism, between the fascist leader on one side, and the psychology of the masses that vote fascism to power. Now, all of this relates to fascism in its classic sense. If you want a more modern discussion that breaks loose from the classical debate and relates more to our situation today, then have a look at Alberto Toscano’s Late fascism. It's a brilliant book. It was published by Verso, and deals with ‘American racial fascism’ and arguments within Black Marxism as much as it discusses the way Marcuse saw fascism emerging in the U.S. Toscano points out that “It was largely due to the [Black] Panthers that fascism returned to the forefront of radical discourse and activities in the late 1960s”.

Q: I haven’t read this book in particular but I have read things from Toscano. He's a really good guy.

Banaji: Then try and get this book. There is also the earlier book by Chris Hedges, American Fascists, which was published much earlier but deals with the religious strand in American fascism. Now, at another level, in confronting fascism, one has to bring in Sartre’s ideas about how organized groups manipulate and dominate unorganized masses. Sartre's idea of seriality is essential to any understanding of fascism. The dividing line runs between the group and the series. A group, by its very nature, is organized. A series, by its very nature, is unorganized, disorganized, dispersed, fragmented, subject to all kinds of manipulation. The series is structured in terms of otherness, of alterity, the group manipulates this sense of otherness and alterity by projecting all kinds of scapegoats, right? Jews, Blacks, Muslims, ethnic minorities, migrant workers, immigrants, foreigners, homosexuals, the disabled, etc. all function as ‘Others’ in one context or another. Scapegoating only works if you're dealing with a power relationship between groups and series. Groups being highly organized, powerful entities, series being essentially powerless, fragmented, dispersed, and vulnerable to domination through the media and otherwise.

Q: How do you feel about leftist movements in South Asia, and what are your views on Marxist theories on that region?

Banaji: I think the old movements of the Left have more or less died out in South Asia. That is certainly true of India. Even in Sri Lanka, the party which is currently in power was at one time decades ago, a left-wing party. The JVP saw itself as part of what was then seen as the revolutionary Left, but when it comes to power today, after decades when its cadre suffered brutal massacres in the 1980s and the leadership wiped out, it's not projecting itself in those terms anymore. It no longer sees itself as overthrowing the capitalist state by armed struggle. What's happened in Sri Lanka is very important, this massive electoral victory, which is a victory of the democratic forces against an oligarchy that bankrupted the country. But beyond the name, there is no continuity with the former ‘radical’ JVP. In India the Communist parties today have more or less relapsed into a deafening silence. This to me is a result of decades of theoretical stagnation as much as anything else, of the inability to develop a strategy to consolidate positions that were won or expand the reach of the party further. The final chapter starts with the loss of Bengal. In two successive state elections there a lot of their electoral base simply deserted and went over not so much to the TMC but to the BJP!

Q: Do you relate the stagnation to the genesis of the undivided Communist Party itself?

Banaji: Do you mean would I trace its stagnation back to that?

Q: Yeah because it was more or less a voice of the Comintern, it didn’t have any independent analysis of the situations.

Banaji: That's absolutely true. The weight of Stalinist tradition in Indian politics was massive. It was absolutely massive. There was always this kind of congenital dependence on an external power, whether it was Russia or China. Even the division within the undivided party, when it culminated in the early sixties, was related to international geopolitics, to the division between the Soviet bloc and Communist China. But there was an interview that K. Damodaran gave to the New Left Review in 1975 which is worth reading because Damodaran says there that, in fact, the international split didn't matter so much to what was happening in India. More important was the kind of divergence of position that emerged within the undivided party on how to relate to Congress, and that was it was this factor which drove the split within the undivided party, the the emergence of two groups, one of which was hostile to the idea of any kind of working arrangement with Congress, and the other of which saw Congress as a progressive social democratic or centrist formation the Left could work with. So Damodaran believed the division was mainly about how you related to Congress as the dominant political force in the country. This was what caused the split within the ranks of the Indian Communist Party, not the Sino-Soviet dispute. That I think, is an interesting position. It's a credible position.

Q: Don't you think they have taken a complete 180 degree turn from that time to now?

Banaji: Throughout the history of the party, whether it was undivided or divided, they always had twists and turns in relation to Congress. I mean, in the late 40s, there was extreme hostility to Nehru from Ranadive ? The Ranadive line was precisely one of no compromise with Congress. That was grounded in Stalin's view that India hadn’t really obtained Independence and was somehow still under the grip of British colonialism. And then you had another group emerging within the party which was much more sympathetic to Congress and to Nehru and saw them as true standard bearers of Indian nationalism, of national independence, etc. In the late 60s, you again had divisions around how to relate to Congress, partly driven by the fact that Congress and CPM were actually competing for votes in Bengal. And the more recent rapprochement that one saw between Congress and the Left during UPA 1 when you had the CPM supporting Congress, that rapprochement was largely driven by the threat of the BJP, until Karat put an end to that. The idea then was that there had to be some degree of unity of the opposition parties to be able to ward off the threat of fascism. So there have always been these twists and turns ever from ever since the late 40s down into the early 2000s. The CPI was strongly committed to the idea of a national bourgeoisie, and saw the national bourgeoisie in positive terms. I don't know what the CPM’s position was, but it talked about a bourgeois-landlord state. Whether that bourgeois element in the bourgeois landlord state was comprador, how far it was comprador, how far it was national, was never clearly explained and, of course, the ML simply dismissed the Indian bourgeoisie as comprador. So there was never much clarity about any of this. The fact is that they none of them ever came up with any ideas about how Indian capital could be challenged in a practical way. They never came up with any ideas about that. Even so far as they built trade union movements, those movements were simply used as transmission belts, in the sense of ways of mobilizing electoral support and not seen in terms of the dynamics of trade unionism (of worker organization) itself. Namely, what would a radical union movement look like? How could union rights be extended to a wider mass of wage earners? How could union struggles be supported to succeed? None of that was seriously debated. The unions were seen as passive, as mobilizers of electoral support for these parties.

Q: The CPM saw the national bourgeoisie as a largely quote, unquote, ‘progressive’ element in the whole Indian national movement.

Banaji: But I think the emphasis, as far as the CPM was concerned, was on monopoly capital versus the rest, right? The category national bourgeoisie was what appealed most to the CPI, which always had a stronger liberal streak within its politics. The CPM emphasized a kind of anti-monopoly politics. So there was that nuance, at least, between those two parties. And as I say, that the ML simply dismissed the whole lot of them as agents of foreign capitalism, or agents of foreign imperialism. But even on the issue of monopoly capital, you've had interesting developments within India, say, in the last 20 years, which the left doesn't seem to have taken on board, other than simply repeating this cliche about crony capitalism. This cliche of crony capitalism, which you find in relation to Adani, etc, doesn't get to the heart of the political economy of corporate India today. I'll tell you three things which matter here in so far as we're talking about political economy. One is economies of scale. We've never seen a systematic exploitation of economies of scale by Indian capital, except in limited sectors such as cement. The cement industry, because of the huge domestic market for cement, did see economies of scale being generated, and so you had very strong positions being built up by the key players within that industry. But by and large, economies of scale is not something you associate with most big capitalists in India. They diversified investments across sectors rather than concentrating investments on just a handful of important sectors. Secondly, the dependence on public sector funding, which was what eventually brought down a lot of these new business groups when the recession began in 2011, they accounted for a major share of the massive bad loans which were building up.. That's because under UPA 1, you had an infrastructure boom, and through corrupt means or otherwise, these new corporate groups were encouraged to actually access credit on a big scale, to take credit from the public sector banks, to finance their infrastructure investments. And all of that came crashing down in 2012. Something like eight out of ten of the biggest infrastructure firms collapsed in that period, including Anil Ambani. His liabilities mounted rapidly and he became bankrupt by 2017.. So this cuts to the heart of the political economy in India. This kind of corrupt nexus between private capital on one side and the public sector banks on the other. It works in a corrupt way, because not everyone has access to public sector funding. That is something that is available politically, so to speak. It's the politicians who open the doors of public finance. So the implication of the first point, is that Indian capital could not be globally competitive because it lacked economies of scale. The implication of the second point is that one never saw an independent development of finance capital in India, unlike Europe, for example, or the U.S., because the banks were always subaltern in relation to both promoters and the political class. It never developed solid leverage of its own.. So India has never had finance capitalism in that sense, never had a layer of which can be described as finance capital in the strict Marxist sense. That's the second point. The third point is the unshakeable dominance of promoters over the ownership of capital. We’ve always had a corporate sector which is dominated by business families, even the handful of independent firms, those not controlled by any of the business families, most notably Larsen and Toubro, became the target for hostile takeovers by groups like the Ambanis in the 1990s, and had the then Congress government not intervened to tell the financial institutions, the domestic institutions, not to allow the Ambanis to take over, Larsen and Toubro would today be part of the Ambani fold. So these three factors — the failure to build economies of scale, the lack of finance capital as a powerful fraction of capital, and the absence of widely-held companies within the corporate sector, — these are the biggest drawbacks of industrial capitalism in this country. Now the Left hasn't put these ideas together in a critique, an ‘immanent’ critique, of industrial capitalism in India. Instead, it repeats clichés about crony capitalism, as if that is the heart of the crisis today.

Q: And also the theory of imperialist capital penetrating in India.

Banaji: Yes, also that. Capital is international by its very nature. Integrationism of the kind that modern capitalism works through (individual capitals collaborating across boundaries) is not tantamount to ‘imperialism’. This is just wrong.

Q: Why do you think that finance capital remains subordinated in India?

Banaji: It is because you never had the development of powerful banking groups in this country. I mean, when the banks emerged, they were largely taken over by the business families, and then they were suddenly nationalized by Indira Gandhi. They were nationalized but they retained the old culture of banking. You had a few new private banks emerging later which were successful, like HDFC Bank. But banking as a whole, banking capital as a whole, was too fragmented, not sufficiently concentrated, to act as a powerful influence on its own. I mean, the public sector banks did retain nominee directors on the boards of private-sector companies, but the nominee directors played a largely passive role. They didn't act as a major opposition or counterfoil to management decisions that were being made in the interests of promoters. They were too passive. The financial institutions tend to be much stronger in a corporate system that is ‘widely held’. In Asian capitalism, where promoter groups are dominant, where family businesses are strong, you tend to have a weaker development of independent financial institutions, independent banking, so that either the banks are part of the family conglomerate, as in Japan, for example, where banks were part of the Zaibatsu, or they simply cease to exist as independent monitors of capitalism, which is the case in India.

Q: What books can one read to understand more about Indian industrial capitalism or ‘promoter capitalism’?

Banaji: I think to start with to understand the historical background, Kidron is quite important, Foreign investments in India, because he maps the kind of reaction that domestic businesses made to the entry of foreign firms in the fifties. More recently, we’ve had Nasir Tyabji’s Forging capitalism in Nehru’s India, which goes up to 1970, and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta’s Gas wars, which deals with the rift in the Ambani family. There's not a vast amount of literature, but these are among the best pieces you could look at. Remember today, you have to discuss Indian promoter capital against the background of offshore finance as well. Namely, a lot of these business families also have holdings in ‘shell companies’ abroad, where vast sums of money are laundered. It's hard to discuss the way family business operates in India without discussing corporate governance and discussing money laundering.

Q: Also Hamish McDonald’s book

Banaji: Yes, that book, McDonald’s Polyester Prince, was actually banned in India when it first appeared. Every copy which existed was pulped due to threats from the Ambanis. McDonald gives us a good insight into how Dhirubai built up his empire in its early stages, using a network of contacts in Congress and the bureaucracy .

Q: What are your thoughts on the relation between democracy, fascism and Maoism in the Indian context, how should communists approach these movements?

Banaji: To start with Maoism. I don't think it has a viable political strategy for the Left. It believes in armed struggle, which is like effectively saying that a frontal assault on the Indian state will work. It won't work. The Indian state is massively militarized. An armed assault only increases the kind of culture of repression that exists as it is. See, there are two aspects to the state in India. You have democracy, the formal aspect of democracy as a Constitution and an electoral system on one side, and then you have the state in its hardcore sense. That's the state in Lenin’s sense of the state machine, which is profoundly authoritarian and well equipped to enforce repression and control. There is an obvious tension between these aspects of the Indian state, the formal aspect of India being a democracy with a constitution that guarantees equality and the upholding of individual freedoms, and believes in social justice, in the removal of poverty, and so on, That's one side of it. And there’s the ‘hard’ state which repeatedly violates all of those principles, violates the Constitution with its endemic infraction of individual rights and freedoms, and even acts as a colonising power in relation to various outlying parts of the country that are subjected to rule by the army. So first of all, Maoism doesn't have a viable political strategy and is itself a deeply authoritarian political formation. If it ever came to power in India, which is inconceivable, but if it ever came to power, it would actually establish an authoritarian state that would wipe out all opposition, not least that from other Left groups. What the Maoist armed struggle has triggered is a culture of counterinsurgency which has become so deeply institutionalised that it spills over into the way the judiciary is corrupted to allow for illegal detention, fabrication of evidence, and so on. The judiciary turns a blind eye to the way the state handles ‘dissenters’ and any opposition it sees as threatening. And then there's the issue of fascism, which is really about the long-term agenda of the RSS to abolish the Constitution as the ultimate guarantor of India’s democracy. Fascism remains unreconciled to democracy in a constitutional sense, even if fascist parties repeatedly use elections and the electoral system to consolidate a mass base and give themselves a veneer of legitimacy, as in India. Elections are crucial to the legitimacy of the right wing in this country. They're not going to do do away with elections, as long as they can control and subvert them from time to time. In fact, what we've seen in India is a much deeper subversion of democracy, given the way the law and the media have been subordinated to the charismatic will of fascism. The fascists have more or less conquered the whole terrain of the middle class, which has abandoned the goals of the Constitution decades ago, tolerates mass violence against minorities, is infected by a rampant egoism in Marx’s sense of a competitive, thoroughly money-minded civil society, and subscribes to the overt oppressions built into caste and gender hietrarchies. All of which adds up to a very complicated picture. The ‘revolutionary’ left is moribund, as I said earlier, the trade unions have been smashed, and there is almost no organizeed force in India today that can challenge the rule of capital. The bulk of India’s labor force remains ‘unorganised’ both economically and in terms of unions. When the unions were beaten back in Bombay, whatever culture of democracy the city enjoyed withered away. We used to have demonstrations of tens of thousands of workers, none of that has been seen since the eighties. The backbone of the unions was broken in the 1980s and 1990s largely through subcontracting and outsourcing. So that is the situation as it stands, the middle class has been won over by fascism through its pervasive culture of communal prejudice and hatred, commitements to democracy have withered, and there is no social force that stands openly for a vision of India as a modern, caste-free, democratic society committed to Ambedkar’s ideal of equality.

Q: Is Marxism humanist? If so, in what sense?

Banaji: Actually, to respond to that, I'd ask you to read one chapter in A Marxist mosaic which deals with the theses on Feuerbach. I mean Chapter 7 of that collection, which is a very long essay written in the late seventies. It's the longest essay in the book. Marxist Mosaic is the book I published in the HM series published by Brill that was published last year. Chapter 7 is called ‘A philosophy of revolutionary practice’ and deals with the meaning of Marx’s first two theses on Feuerbach. That's where I spell out my view of what humanism in a Marxist sense would mean. Rather than rehearsing the answer, I'd rather you just read that. Before it was published in the book, it also came out on the HM blog so it’s easily accessible.

Q: What would you say is the precise relation between Marxist materialism and Hegelian idealism? Was the form of dialectical materialism that became popular in Russia and later the Communist international genuinely Marxist?

Banaji: Again, this is the kind of issue which is partly, partly discussed in the chapter I referred to. I think it's hard to even conceive of Marx's work without the hegelian influence. First of all, and rather than framing the issue in terms of materialism versus idealism, it's important to try and understand it in terms of Hegel's view of human consciousness and Marx's view of human capacities . Marx allows for a social determination of consciousness that Hegel abstracts from. There isn't a social determination of consciousness in Hegel but a dialectic of its evolution toward ever greater maturity. This is Hegel’s way of thinking history. Both Marx and Hegel have an idea of consciousness evolving through history across its successive forms or shapes of society. In any case, the Hegel of the Phenomenology is important for Marxist philosophy. The Hegel of the Science of logic is important for Marx’s method in Capital. So there are two streams of Hegelianism, if you like, which enter into Marx from very different angles. The Theses on Feuerbach sum up the first of these. And the way Marx developed the theory of value in Capital sums up the second . Both influence Marx in different ways. The Logic is crucial to understanding the method that Marx pursues in Capital, but Phenomenology is what determines his view of the nature of human consciousness as a striving for freedom that works itself out historically, in a material way, if you like. The Hegel literature is vast but Raymond Plant’s Hegel is one place to start.