On The Class Structure of India
A hundred years ago, Karl Marx was a regular correspondent of the
New York Tribune, one of the direct ancestors of today's New York
Herald-Tribune. Among his communications was one, published on August 8, 1853, entitled "The Future Results of British Rule in
India." Though he knew little
of India's past, and though some of
his predictions for the future have not been borne out by subsequent
events, Marx nevertheless had a remarkably clear insight into the nature
and potentialities of Indian society as it existed in his time. "[The
British] destroyed [Hindu civilisation]," he wrote, "by uprooting
native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the
native society." Political unity was imposed by the Indo-British army,
strengthened by the telegraph, the free press, the railroad, and ordinary
roads that broke up village isolation-all noted by Marx as instruments of
future progress. But he stated clearly:
All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither
emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the
people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but
of their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is
to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done
more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and
people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation? The Indians
will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among
them by the British bourgeoisie, ti!l in Great Britain itself the now
ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or
till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the
British yoke altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a
more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting
country...
A hundred years have passed, including nearly a decade of freedom
from British rule. What is the situation today and the outlook for the
period ahead?
One frequently hears the argument that India still has a backward economy
combining elements of different historic social forms, that feudalism is
still powerful, that the country has not outgrown its erstwhile colonial
framework, and that it is relapsing into the status of a dependency of the
great imperialist powers, Great Britain and the United States.
We shall comment on these various questions as we proceed. But
one point needs to be made with all emphasis at the outset. There can be no
doubt, it seems to me, as to who rules India today: it is the Indian
bourgeoisie. True, production is still overwhelmingly petty bourgeois
in character. But this cannot be more than a transitory stage, and already
the nature of the class in power casts a pervasive influence over the
political, intellectual, and social life of the country.
THE DECLINE OF FEUDALISM.
Feudalism's decline in India may be said to date from the
inability of Indian feudalism to defend the country against British
penetration. To be sure, the British conquered and held the country by
means of an Indian army, paid from India's resources and under British
discipline; though in this respect the feudal powers of the day were not so
different as might at first appear, since their own armies, also maintained
at Indian ex pense, were often staffed by European drill sergeants and
artillery experts. The difference-and it was a crucial difference- was that
the British paid all their soldiers regularly in cash every month, in war
or peace, paying also for supplies acquired during the march or for the
barracks. The contrast is pointed up by the opposing Indian factions that
fought the Battle of Panipat (A.D. 1761). Ahmad Shah Durrani's soldiers
mutinied after winning the battle because they had not been paid for years;
while their opponents, the Marathas, maintained themselves by looting the
countryside. Faced with opposition of this kind, British-led arms were
bound to triumph. (The same contrast-again involving the spoils of India, though indirectly- could be
observed a few years later when the British defeated Napoleon in Spain; the French army lived off
the countryside while the British used their superior wealth, much of it
extracted from India, to pay the very Spaniards
they were defending for all supplies.)
Indian feudalism tried its strength against the British
bourgeoisie for the last time in the unsuccessful rebellion of 1857. Soon
thereafter, the British abandoned their long-standing policy of liquidating
feudal principalities and instead began to bolster up remaining regimes of
this kind-provided they were weak enough to be dependent and hence
compliant. Marx noted that the very same people who fought in the British
Parliament against aristocratic privilege at home voted to maintain far
worse rajahs and nabobs in India-as a matter of policy, for
profit.
Despite British support, and in a sense because of it, Indian
feudalism no longer had any independent strength and vitality of its own.
Its economic basis had been ruined by the construction of railroads, the
decay of village industry, the establishment of a system of fixed
assessment of land values and payment of taxes in cash rather than in kind,
the importation of commodities from England, and the introduction of
mechanised production in Indian cities. The role of the village usurer
changed. Previously he had been an integral part of the village economy,
but he had been legally obliged to cancel a debt on which total repayment
amounted to double the original loan: there was no redress against default since
land could not be alienated nor could a feudal lord be brought to court.
With British rule came survey and registry of land plots, cash taxes, cash
crops for large-scale export to a world market (indigo, cotton, jute, tea,
tobacco, opium), registration of debts and mortgages, alienability of the
peasants' land-in a word, the framework within which land could gradually
be converted into capitalist private property which the former usurer could
acquire and rent out and exploit.
How thoroughly British rule undermined Indian feudalism has been
dramatically demonstrated by events of recent years. The police action
undertaken in 1948 by India's central government against
Hyderabad, the largest and most
powerful remaining feudal state, was over in two days. Political action in
Travancore and Mysore, direct intervention in Junagadh and Kashmir,
indirect intervention in Nepal, the absorption of Sikkim, the jailing of
Saurashtra barons as common criminals- all these events showed that
feudal privilege meant nothing before the new paramount power, the Indian
bourgeoisie.
It should not be overlooked, however, that the decline of Indian
feudalism had another side to it-the partial amalgamation of the old ruling
class into the new. Just as the rise of factories and mechanised production
converted primitive barter into commodity production and the usurer's hoard
into capital, so too it opened a way for the feudal lord to join the
capitalist class by turning his jewellery and his hoarded wealth into
landed or productive capital. What the feudal lord could not do was
to claim additional privileges not available to the ordinary investor, or
any rights that would impede the free movement of Indian industrial or
financial capital. This process of converting feudal lords into capitalists
began relatively early: even before World War I, the Gaekwar of Baroda
became one of the world's richest men by investing his large feudal
revenues in factories, railways, and company shares.
Another process involving the liquidation of feudalism is
exemplified by what has been happening since independence in the Gangetic
basin. There the East India Company had created the class of Zamindars, tax
collectors whose function was to extract tribute in kind from the peasants
and convert it into cash payments to the company. As time went on, the
Zamindars acquired the status and privileges of landholders and in return
provided valuable political support for British rule. In recent years, a
new class of capitalist landlords and well-to-do peasants of the kulak
variety has been substituted for the zamindars by legislative action (the
zamindars, of course, receiving compensation for their expropriated
holdings) .
Everywhere in India, by one means or another,
feudal wealth has already become or is rapidly becoming capital, either of
the owner or of his creditors. [Every feudalism known to history rested, in
the final analysis, upon primitive handicraft production, and upon a
special type of land ownership. The former of these is no longer basic in India, and the latter does not
exist.] Talk of fighting feudalism today is on a level with talk of
fighting dinosaurs. No part of the mechanism of coercion is now in feudal
hands. The legislature is bourgeois (and petty bourgeois) in composition.
The armed forces, the police, the judiciary are all directly under
bourgeois control, where these functions would formerly have been carried
out by feudal levies, retainers, or the feudal lords themselves. Even the
beginnings of capitalist production in agriculture may be seen, notably the
introduction of tractor cultivation in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, but with
smaller manifestations all over the country, especially where industrial
crops like cotton are grown and where transport conditions are
exceptionally favourable.
The liquidation of Indian feudalism, then, is general and
complete. But it is necessary to guard against drawing unwarranted
conclusions from this undoubted fact. The older privilege is being replaced
or expropriated only with the due compensation. No basic improvement has
been effected in the condition of the rural population, still the
overwhelming majority of the Indian nation. All agrarian reforms-community
schemes, voluntary (bhoodan) redistribution of land, scaling- down
of peasant indebtedness, counter-erosion measures, afforestation, and so
forth-have turned out to be piddling. Hunger, unemployment, epidemic
disease remain the permanent and massive features of Indian society. The
sole achievements have been the elimination of older property forms (with
recruitment of most former owners into the bourgeoisie) and the creation of
a vast class of workers with no land and no prospect of absorption into
industry as long as the social structure of India remains what it is.
BOURGEOISIE AND PETTY BOURGEOISIE.
Except possibly in a few negligible corners of recently
integrated backward areas, Indian production today is bourgeois 'in the
sense that commodity production is prevalent and even a small plot of land
is valued and taxed in rupees. But it is still petty production, consisting
for the most part of the growing of foodstuffs from small holdings by
primitive, inefficient methods; the produce is still largely consumed by
the producer or in the locality of production. Nevertheless, the petty
bourgeoisie, inhomogeneous as it is in all but its greed, completely
dominates food production and, through middlemen, controls the supply to
towns and cities. Though roads and other means of communication have
increased, still the density of the transportation network i$ very low by
American, British, or Japanese standards. The present national Five Year
Plan estimates the annual national income at 90 billion rupees (one rupee
equals 21 cents), which it proposes to increase to 100 billion by 1956. But
the total value of all productive assets in private hands (excluding
fields and houses for rent, but including plantations) is estimated at no
more than 15 billion rupees, while the central and local governments' own
facilities are worth more than 13 billion rupees in the field of transport,
electricity, broadcasting and other means of communication, and so on.
These figures prove conclusively the petty-bourgeois nature of the economy
as a whole and indicate clearly that the industrialisation of India under bourgeois management
can proceed only through tight co-operation between government and private
capital.
Therefore, the fact that the government is the biggest
capitalist, the main banker, the greatest employer, and the ultimate refuge
or ineffable solace of the bootlicking intelligentsia makes for only a
formal, superficial, difference. The main question to ask is: what special
class-interest does this government serve? Whenever it seems to rise above
the classes, or act against the bourgeois interests, does it go beyond regulating
individual greed, or at most holding the balance between the petty and the
big bourgeoisie? Do the government's ineffective food regulations and
costly food imports mean anything beyond assuring the petty-bourgeois
food-producer his pound of vital flesh while the cities are supplied with
food cheap enough for the industrial labourer to maintain himself at
subsistence level on the wages the factory owners are willing to pay? The
government today is undoubtedly in the hands of the bigger bourgeoisie, a
fact which is shown no less by its personnel than by its policies which
favour Big Business and impose only such restraints as serve the interests
of the sub-class as a whole and prevent any single capitalist group from
dominating the rest. Moreover, there is no question that the big
bourgeoisie wants industrialisation.
In this connection, it is interesting to recall the economic plan
hopefully drawn up (with the aid of tame economists) by the biggest
capitalists and promulgated in 1944 (published at that time as a Penguin
Special, No. S148). The scheme, to be financed from unspecified sources,
called for a 500 per cent increase in industry, a 130 per cent increase in
agriculture, and a 200 per cent increase in "services" within 15
years. The basic figures used by planners, however, related to the year
1932 and were hence way out of date. Not only did wartime inflation and its
aftermath balloon the national income beyond the dreams of the capitalist
planners, but the planned agricultural output would not have sufficed to
feed the population even at starvation levels (for some years after the
war, India was obliged to import a billion rupees worth of food annually
and the imports still continue irregularly) .
To a far greater extent than is generally realised, the big
Indian bourgeoisie owes its present position to two war periods of heavy
profit making. World War I gave Indian capital its first great impetus and
initiated the process of Indianising the bureaucracy. World War II vastly
expanded the army and Indianised the officer corps; further, it swelled the
tide of Indian accumulation and enabled the capitalists, by rallying the
masses behind the Congress Party, to complete the process of pushing the
British out of the country. How great the accumulation was during the most
recent war and postwar period of inflation is indicated by changes in the
relative importance of different taxes as sources of revenue: the
agricultural (land) tax now accounts for less than eight per cent of total
state revenue as compared to 25 per cent in 1939, while taxes on what by
Indian standards may be called luxury goods (including automobiles) rose
from negligible importance to 17 per cent of the total in the same period.
[The government asked in 1957 for appropriations about 100 times the
central budget at the beginning of World War II. The other side of the coin
as always in periods of marked inflation, has been a decline in the real
income of workers and other low-income groups. It is interesting to note
that the current national Five Year Plan aims to restore the general
living standard of 1939-then universally recognised as totally
inadequate-without, of course curtailing the immense new power and wealth
that have accrued to the bourgeoisie in the intervening years.
We encounter here one of the basic contradictions of the Indian
economy, the decisive roadblock to rapid development under present
conditions. The civilised money-makers of advanced capitalist countries are
accustomed to looking on a five percent return as something akin to a law
of nature, but not so their Indian counterparts. The usual rate of return
on black- market operations in recent years is 150 percent, and even the
most respectable capitalist's idea of a "reasonable" profit is
anywhere from 9 to 20 percent. [The very same capitalists who ask for and
obtain tariff. protection for their manufactures even before beginning to
produce them for the market do not hesitate to hoard smuggled gold and
jewellery to the tune of (a reasonably estimated) 100 million rupees per
year. This not only shows their contempt for their own government, its
laws, and its plans for industrialisation in the 'private sector', but
further illustrates the petty bourgeois mentality even in the wealthiest
Indians.]
This kind of profiteering, however, is incompatible with the
balanced development of India's economy as a whole. Seventy percent of the
population still works on the land or lives off it, holdings being mostly
less than two acres per family and cultivated by primitive methods. Wages
are low and prevented from rising by the relative surplus population which
is always pressing for available jobs. In the countryside, at least 50
percent of the population is made up of landless labourers. These
conditions spell low mass purchasing power and restricted markets. When
even these restricted markets are ruthlessly exploited by a capitalist
class snatching at immediate maximum profits, the result can only be
industrial stagnation and growing poverty.
And indeed this is precisely what we observe in fact. Idle plant
is widespread; night shifts have disappeared in most textile mills; other
industries show machinery and equipment used to 50 percent of capacity or
even less. It is the familiar capitalist dilemma, but in a peculiarly acute
form: increase of poverty and idle resources but with no adequate
incentives to invest in the expanded production which is so desperately
needed. This is the pass to which bourgeois rule has brought India. There
is no apparent escape within the framework of the bourgeois mode of
production. [The situation was changed for a while by the
"pump-priming" of the First Five-Year plan- a curious jump from a
colonial to a pseudo-New-Deal economy; but future prospects are decidedly
gloomier.]
COLONIALISM AND FOREIGN DOMINATION.
In a sense the tragedy of the Indian bourgeoisie is that it came
of age too late, at a time when the whole capitalist world was in a state
of incurable crisis and when one-third of the globe had already abandoned
capitalism forever. In fact, the Five Year Plans mentioned above are
self-contradictory in that they are obviously inspired by the great
successes of Soviet planning without, however, taking any account of the
necessity of socialism to the achievement of these successes: effective
planning cannot leave the private investor free to invest when and where he
likes, as is done in India, nor can its main purpose be to assure him of
profitable opportunities for the investment of his capital.
The Indian bourgeoisie cannot be compared to that of England at
the time of the Industrial Revolution, nor to that of Japan during the late
19th and early 20th centuries, nor again to that of Germany from the time
of Bismarck. There are no great advances in science that can be taken
advantage of by a country with preponderant illiteracy and no colonies to
exploit. Under the circumstances, as we have already seen, rapid
industrialisation runs into the insuperable obstacle of a narrowly
restricted domestic market.
Do all these unfavourable facts mean that capitalist India must
inevitably fall under the domination of foreign industrialists and
financiers with their control over the shrinking capitalist world market?
Must we see signs of such a relapse into colonial status when, for example,
the Indian government invites powerful foreign capitalist groups to invest
in oil refineries on terms apparently more favourable than those granted to
Indian capital, including guarantees against nationalisation?
The bogey of a new economic colonialism can be quickly disposed
of. For one thing, the Indian bourgeoisie is no longer bound to deal with
one particular foreign capitalist power, and the answer to stiff terms from
the United States and Britain has already been found in the drive to
recovery of Germany and Japan. The Indian government has invited
Krupp-Demag to set up a steel plant; the Tata combine comes to quite
reasonable terms with Krauss.Maffei for locomotive works and foundries, and
with Daimler-Benz for equipment to manufacture diesel-engine transport. The
more advanced capitalist powers, in short, can be played off against each
other (and even better against the USSR ) , as they could not be in the
days of British rule. And for another thing, the guarantees against
nationalisation granted to the great British and American oil monopolies
are really no more than Indian Big Business itself enjoys. The only
industries that have been nationalised in India are those which, in private
hands, hinder the development of larger capital (for example, road
transport in Bombay State, taken over without compensation) or those in
which there was danger of big investors losing money (for example, the
nationalisation of civil aviation, with heavy compensation to the former
owners). The Indian bourgeoisie has taken its own precautions against
genuine nationalisation and hardly needs to give itself the formal
guarantees demanded by foreign capitalists. [Perhaps, the strongest of
these, and the most crippling to the supposedly planned advance towards
socialism, is the systematic creation of revenue deficits. The first
deliberate step in this direction, taken as a sweeping measure in Bombay
state (where the bourgeoisie is at its strongest) was the costly, wasteful,
and palpably inefficient prohibition policy. Now, deficit state budgets seem
quite the normal fashion, while parallel outcries against the Five Year
Plan become louder].
No, the invitation to foreign capital does not mean sudden,
unaccountable lunacy on the part of those now in power, those who fought so
desperately only a few years ago to remove foreign capitalist control from
India. Entry is not permitted in fields where Indians have investments and
mastery of technique, as for example in textiles. Even in the new fields
opened up to the foreigners-fields in which Indians lack both know- how and
the assurance of sufficiently large and quick returns to justify heavy
investment-a "patriotic" strike or two could ruin the foreign
enterprises should they ever become a threat or a nuisance to the Indian
bourgeoisie. Fissionable materials (uranium, monazite, ilmenite) which
foreign interests wanted to buy at the price of dirt are being processed by
a company financed by the government and directed by Tatas. (On the other
hand, high-grade Indian manganese ore is still being exported unrefined for
lack of a sufficiently strong profit incentive to Indian capital).
THE ALTERNATIVE
Invitations to foreign capital, however, do have one function in
addition to that of giving a fillip to industrialisation (which could have
been secured by inviting much more technical aid from the USSR and the
People's Democracies). That additional function is to provide a measure of
insurance against popular revolt. The Indian bourgeoisie shows unmistakable
signs of fearing its own masses. The leading bourgeois party (the Congress)
has not yet exhausted the reservoir of prestige built up during the period
of its leadership in the struggle for national independence. In addition,
the bourgeoisie controls the bureaucracy, the army, the police, the
educational system, and the larger part of the press. And there are the
opposition bourgeois parties, like the Praja-Socialists, which can be
relied upon to talk Left and act Right, to win election on an anti-
Congress platform and then turn around immediately after to a policy of
co-operation with Congress politicians, as they did after the
Travancore-Cochin elections last spring. Nevertheless, "defence"
expenditures continue to take about two billion rupees a year, about half
the central budget (and a half that the Five Year Plans do not even
mention); and police expenditures mount strangely and rapidly under the
direction of those who took power in the name of Gandhian non-violence.
Extra- legal ordinances, (against which the bourgeoisie protested so
vigorously when the British first applied them to suppressing Indian
nationalism), are actually strengthened now for use against the working
class; the Press Acts remain in force; and on the very eve of the first
general election, important civil liberties were removed from a constitution
on which the ink was scarcely dry.
All these factors together, however, will not prevent rapid
disillusionment at promises unfulfilled, nor the inevitable mass protest
against hunger, the ultimate Indian reality. There may come a time
when the Indian army, officered by Indian bourgeois and aided by a
transport system designed for an army of occupation, may not suffice. The
Indian capitalists calculate, quite understandably, that it is safer to
have foreigners interested so that they could be called upon to intervene
with armed force in case of necessity.
But note that neither special political rights, nor monopolies,
nor military bases have been given to any foreign power, and that even
those (France and Portugal, backed by the United States and Britain) which
still have pockets on Indian soil are being vigorously pushed out, by
popular action as well as by politico-diplomatic demands. Colonial status
would mean foreign control of Indian raw materials and domination of the
Indian market, both today unmistakably at the hands of the Indian
capitalists themselves. And there is always the hope that a third world war
will lead to even more fantastic profits for a neutral India-as the ruling
class dreams of neutrality.
The solution for India, of course, would, be socialism, which
alone can create a demand rising with the supply, a solution which can be
utilised not only by advanced countries but by backward countries ( as
China is demonstrating) , and without which planning is futile. But just as
the Indian bourgeoisie imports the latest foreign machinery for production,
so, when all else fails, the latest capitalist developments in politics
will also be imported. And this means fascism, in the long run the only
possible alternative to socialism. Already the talk in circles that count
is of the need for a "strong man." And models are at hand, from
nearby Thailand to faraway Egypt and Guatemala.
Monthly Review (New York) , vol. 6, 1954, pp. 205-213. Nationalism,
and its logical extension provincialism, are manifestations of the
bourgeoisie. In the feudal period, the Peshwas defeated the Nizam more than
once, but saw nothing wrong in leaving Marathi-speaking regions in the
Nizam's possession. The political reorganisation of India on a linguistic
basis into new states was thus an index of bourgeoisie development and
competition. The in- violability of private property as guaranteed by the
Constitution no longer suffices. Each local bourgeoisie wants full political
control over its own hinterland to safeguard investments and to exclude
powerful competitors. This was seen in the bitter strife over the
creation-not even by pretence of freely expressed public opinion, but by
police action--of the new, enlarged, hybrid, anomalous, bi- lingual state
of Bombay. The quarrel passed off as one between Gujarathi and
Maharashtrian. The real fight, however, was between the veteran, entrenched
capital of Bombay city, and the newer money of Ahmedabad. The Maharashtra
petty-bourgeoisie remained characteristically helpless in disunity, to the
end. Those who doubt that the big bourgeoisie can do what it likes with the
government might give some thought to the TELCO affairs being discussed
publicly (for the first time) since September 5, 1957.
The chances of fascism have not been diminished by the 1957
election. These showed that the only state government able to show an
honest, incorruptible, bourgeois administration, able to raise funds
without deficit finance for an honest attempt to carry out the Nehru policy
was led by the communists in Kerala. In addition, this regime had at least
made a start towards dealing with the most serious fundamental questions:
food, agrarian production, re-division of land, employment, education, yet
within the bourgeoisie framework, without touching bourgeois property
relations. The dangers of this example cannot have escaped the brighter
minds of the ruling class, whose cleverness far outstrips their honesty.
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