Reading Marx in Singur

Marx opens his discussion of primitive accumulation, in the last section of Capital, Vol.I, by asserting that the origins of capitalist private property lie in ‘conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder’, even though, ‘(i)n the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.’

He further remarks that,

“The process…that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process that takes away from the labourer the possession of the means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-labourers.“

He goes onto add that the so-called primitive accumulation is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. Marx acknowledges that the process also embodies, alongside this enslavement and robbery, ‘their [the serfs’] emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds.’ However, unlike his later day followers, he is not content to see only one side of this process. He pours scorn over ‘our bourgeois historians’ for whom ‘this side [the emancipatory side] alone exists’. In other words, even when he sees the emancipatory dimensions of Progress and Development, his moral revulsion against the violence and injustice of this process remains apparent. It is for this reason that, contrary to the somewhat uncritically celebratory tone of the Communist Manifesto, Marx is indignant: “…this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”

In the rest of the discussion, Marx takes up the specific case of England for discussion. It is important that through this reading of English history, he lays bare the way in which capitalism came to its own through the forcible dispossession of the erstwhile peasant communities. Unfortunately, he universalizes that process with disastrous consequences but for the time being that is beside the point. He traces the history of the usurpation of common lands first by individual feudal lords through the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The “new nobility”, seen by Marx as the bourgeoisie in embryo, was the chief executor of this process. “The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable lands was, therefore, its cry.”

The 18th century marks a fundamental change in the process, in Marx’s perception. While the 15th and 16th centuries saw the process being carried on through individual acts of violence, the “advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself becomes the instrument of the theft of the people’s land.” This is embodied in the Acts of parliament for the enclosure of the Commons.

By the time we reach the 19th century, he remarks, ‘the very memory of the connection between the agricultural labourer and the communal property had vanished.’ The so-called ‘clearing of estates’ is then described by him as the ‘last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil.’

His indignation is further summed up when he asks: “to say nothing of more recent times, have the agricultural population received a farthing of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the landlords?”

21^st century West Bengal, ruled by the disciples of Marx, does not compare too badly with 19^th century England it is interesting to notice. However, one caveat is necessary here. Reading Marx today and recalling his reading of English history must not be understood as some kind of recourse to a sacred text. It must not be seen as an attempt to recover some Universal History that is ostensibly in operation: what they have already gone through, we must too! On the contrary, it is to underline that once presented as Universal History by Marx and his generation, the self-fulfilling logic of capital and modernity is such that Marxists can only act in this way; every other way is reactionary and against the logic of History.

[It is interesting that the Marx who wrote these lines actually went into a deep crisis many years later, when he received a letter from the Russian Narodnik (populist) turned Marxist, Vera Zasulich regarding the fate of Russian peasant communes. After a prolonged turmoil he amended his thesis and suggested that Russia (thanks to its peasant communes) need not pass through capitalism and could go over directly to socialism. Alas! he was too late. His disciples had already internalized the positivist version of Universal History. They could not really stomach this – after all they were in serious political and intellectual conflict with the populists. They therefore, suppressed the reply. Haruki Wada and Teodor Shanin tell us this fascinating story and of the eventual discovery and publication of this letter by B.I Nikolaevskii, a Menshevik in 1923]

Marx also goes on to discuss the ways in which, from the end of the 15th century onwards, bloody legislations were enacted to keep the displaced population in check. The population which was rendered destitute was ‘disciplined and normalized’, to use a Foucauldian expression, through these laws. The ‘free’ proletariat, created by the ‘forcible expropriation of the people from the soil’, which ‘could not be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world’, was turned ‘en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from the stress of circumstances.’

This is the background of the ‘bloody legislation against vagabondage’ throughout Western Europe. It would actually be interesting to see the evolution of the legal and political discourse of that time to understand how the notions of ‘work’ and ‘vagabondage’/ ‘idling’ were being constructed and how the global disciplinary mechanisms of power were acting themselves out. The representation of the ‘vagabonds’ as shirkers, idlers and criminals was a characteristic feature of these discourses. Marx therefore, remarks that ‘legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.’

Thankfully for us, such bloody legislations are no longer possible. This of course, does not mean that the desire is not there. If the ‘law itself becomes the instrument of the theft of people’s land’, it is because everybody from the law makers to the judiciary (and mainstream political parties), all institutions in contemporary India are instruments of this theft. Yet, the fact is that there are protest movements and an electoral democratic process in existence, unlike in England where, as social theorist Sudipta Kaviraj puts it, the population was ‘disciplined’ long before democracy came into being. Precisely because of this different sequentiality between industrialization and democracy, it might not be possible to carry on the theft and loot endlessly.

What however is likely to happen of course, as millions of development refugees from Narmada and Singrauli to Singur are thrown into the cities, is that the city elite will have to run for cover. Not today maybe, but in the not so distant future. You will not have to brand idlers and vagabonds ‘criminals’; you will simply have forced them to become them. The more the planners and the judiciary want to cleanse Indian cities, of such poorer, labouring populations, the more likely they are to see increase in crimes. Indian cities have been by far the most benign so far, compared to, say South American or US cities. That may soon change.