What in the hell …

I found a reference to this book, Provincializing Europe, by Dipesh Chakrabarty, in one of the two passages from Mezzadra that I’m still finishing translating for the birthday gift to Marx. I dug the reference so I got the book out from the library. I’ve only just started it but I’m liking it.

Hobsbawm’s category “prepolitical” revealed the limits of how far historicist Marxist thought could go in responding to the challenge posed to European political thought by the entry of the peasant into the modern sphere of politics. Hobsbawm recognized what was special to political modernity in the third world. He readily admitted that it was the “acquisition of political consciousness” by peasants that “made our century the most revolutionary in history.” Yet he missed the implications of this observation for the historicism that already underlay his own analysis. Peasants’ actions, organized - more often than not - along the axes of kinship, religion, and caste, and involving gods, spirits, and supernatural agents as actors alongside humans, remained for him symptomatic of a consciousness that had not quite come to terms with the secular-institutional logic of the political. He called peasants “pre-political people who have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express themselves. [Capitalism] comes to them from outside, insidiously by the operation of economic forces which they do not understand.” In Hobsbawm’s historicist language, the social movements of the peasants of the twentieth century remained “archaic.”

The analytical impulse of Hobsbawm’s study belongs to a variety of historicism that Western Marxism has cultivated since its inception. Marxist intellectuals of the West and their followers elsewhere have developed a diverse set of sophisticated strategies that allow them to acknowledge the evidence of the “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. These strategies include, first, the old and now discredited evolutionist paradigms of the nineteenth century - the language of “survivals” and “remnants” - sometimes found in Marx’s own prose. But there are other strategies as well, and they are all variations on the theme of “uneven development” - itself derived, as a Neil Smith shows, from Marx’s use of the idea of “uneven rates of development” in his Critique of Political Economy (1859) and from Lenin’s and Trotsky’s later use of the concept. The point is, whether they speak of “uneven development” or Ernst Bloch’s “synchronicity of the non-synchronous,” or Althusserian “structural causality,” these strategies all retain elements of historicism in the direction of their thought (in spite of Althusser’s explicit opposition to historicism). They all ascribe at least an underlying structural unity (if not an expressive totality) to historical processes and time that makes it possible to identify certain elements in the present as “anachronistic.” The thesis of “uneven development,” as James Chandler has recently observed in his perceptive study of Romanticism, goes “hand in hand” with the “dated grid of an homogenous empty time.” (11-12.)

“A history of political modernity in India could not be written as a simple application of the analytics of capital and nationalism available to Western Marxism. One could not, in the manner of some nationalist historians, pit the story of a regressive colonialism against an account of a robust nationalist movement seeking to establish a bourgeois outlook throughout society. For, in Guha’s terms, there was no class in South Asia comparable to European bourgeoisie of Marxist metanarratives, a class able to fabricate a hegemonic ideology that made its own interests look and feel like the interests of all (…) in Guha’s famous terms, “dominance without hegemony.” One cannot think of this plural history of power and provide accounts of the modern political subject in India without at the same time radically questioning the nature of historical time. (15.)