DISCUSSION

p redominant and has helped establish original accumulation as a key term in Marxist theory. The term has three basic components: (a) creation of the wage worker through processes of dispossession which cut-off access to the means of production; (b) creation of the capitalist via processes of concentration of capital and the internalisation of market discipline;

(c) as a combined result of both (a) and (b), the creation, spread and sustenance of capitalism. It is noteworthy that DET deals only with (a) leaving (b) and (c) implicit.

If each of these components is a necessary feature of original accumulation, what if the historical processes that are sought to be given this name fail to fulfil one or more of them? For example, Chatterjee (invoking Sanyal) suggests that the first requirement of creating wage labourers is not being fulfilled in the classical manner, i e, dispossession is being “reversed” by the ameliorative sustenance of otherwise unviable livelihoods through state and non-corporate initiatives. Does this mean that, while the means of production are indeed being concentrated and centralised in capitalist hands, the concomitant emergence of the “free” l abourer is being thwarted? Or does it mean that the emergence of capitalist a griculture is also jeopardised? In other words, what is the implication that protection of livelihoods holds for the development of capitalism in Indian agriculture today? Needed also is an accompanying account of what precisely is new in the r ecent phase of the development of capital in agrarian India, and at the broadest level, a description of the new wrinkles and folds in the shape of contemporary capitalist society.

Because the argument of DET has not been located in relation to the rich literature on the development of capitalism in Indian agriculture, it is possible that an argument that is actually about incremental changes (i e, about the most recent phase of this long process) can be mistaken for an argument about the larger trajectory as such (the history of modes of production). This becomes all the more important in the light of the well-known “peculiarity” of agriculture and its refusal or inability to follow classical paths of capitalist development. A lot more is needed on the specifics

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of agriculture before the modular account in DET can be put to work.

Transition Narratives and Language of Politics

DET suggests that the loss or unavailability of a transition narrative is a significant thing, but does not make explicit the consequences of such a loss. What could such consequences be? For example, it could be said that successful transition narratives link the past to the future, and thereby invest the present with meaning and purpose. They enable us to give the future a name and thus harness its teleological e nergy; they offer, in short, the promise of praxis. Not having such a narrative robs the present of initiative and direction. Are these the sort of consequences that DET wishes to invoke? Given that Chatterjee’s account is intended to be primarily about the structure of power and the shape of politics, the absence of explicit discussion of these questions makes for an avoidable and debilitating ambiguity. O ften, the vantage points adopted in DET (other than that of capital) are not quite clear. For the sort of overview that is a ttempted here, it may be necessary to outline the possible futures of different groups, classes or class fractions.

If the classical narratives of transition are no longer the only ones available, can some of the significant socio-political trajectories of today qualify as transition narratives? For example, could we conceive of the desire for the city on the part of rural youth as a sort of script for other futures? Or what of some other narratives of transformation not considered in DET – from exclusion to power-sharing in contemporary demands for reservations, for instance?

Given his own concerns, it is reasonable to expect a broader and richer account from Chatterjee of changing modes of power in the countryside today, even at an indicative and modular level. It could be argued that DET is too narrowly economic, even economistic in its interpretation of primitive accumulation. The term needs to be applied to modes of power rather than to modes of production alone. Would we not then require a much more wide- ranging description of the multiple axes of power and domination, such as those based on caste, ethnicity, or region?1

We said at the beginning that in Chatterjee’s (2006) mode of theorising, examples are not merely illustrative but constitutive. Here we discuss some discrepancies in the “work” that examples do in DET as compared to his earlier writings on the city. The earlier urban examples described how marginal urban groups such as v endors and squatters were able to carve out a space for themselves within the distinctive modalities of political society. These examples take the form of effective “thin descriptions” of very specific groups that occupy a liminal zone framed by the tension between their formal illegality (in terms of civil society) and electoral i mportance (within political society). This liminal zone is dominated by noncorporate forms of capital (petty production in the service or unorganised sectors) but is also able to create and sustain e ffective forms of political mobilisation through local associations and links to mainstream parties.

In contrast to this fairly detailed depiction of the urban scene, the rural situation (in DET) is rendered in much broader strokes. As against relatively specific and “micro” groups like vendors or slumdwellers, here we have only the macro sweep of a peasantry assaulted by capital and fragmented by governmentality. This “big picture” is on a scale that is not commensurate with the scale of the argument in DET, and this discrepancy, given the constitutive status of examples, threatens the viability of the argument. Could some of the passing references in DET be reworked into effective examples? For example, widespread suicides by indebted f armers could become illustrations of the tragic and extreme breakdown of political society, while disenchantment-triggered migration to the city could be an example of alternate transition narratives.

Though DET does not compare them, it is noteworthy that its urban and rural scenarios seem like mirror images of each other. Vendors and squatters are to one side of govermentality – without legal status and yet able to negotiate a precarious yet resilient existence through political mobilisation. Rural beneficiaries of the reversal of primitive accumulation, on the other hand, have a well-established de jure status in policies sanctioned by the state

DISCUSSION

and international agencies, but have to continually struggle to c onvert this into de facto survival.

There are also other discrepancies that require attention. In Chatterjee’s essay on the city, political society first emerges in the 1970s and 1980s, out of the turmoil of the Emergency and the political movements of those years. Indeed, the 1990s mark a decisive shift as the urban middle classes and civil society become increasingly intolerant of political society. The essay on the city – without the benefit of the concept of the reversal of primitive accumulation – ended on a note of profound uncertainty about the future of hitherto relatively secure marginal groups in a newly bourgeois metropolis. DET does not echo this view and is content to present the urban underclass as h aving adequate resources for survival in petty entrepreneurship or non-corporate capital. Does this imply, then, that Chatterjee now sees the urban have-nots as being more secure than the rural have-nots? The last decade, how ever, provides evidence of the opposite trend: campaigns to evict the underclass from u rban civil society have generally succeeded, while attempts at land acquisition in rural areas have met with stiff resistance.2

In the context of his discussion of changes in the countryside, DET also mentions the idea of an “outside” to political society. The example given is that of sections of tribal communities at the margins of agriculture, excluded from political society b ecause they are electorally insignificant and hence unable to make claims on the state. This brief delineation remains unsatisfactory because it lacks positive content. Although the notion of political society coined by Chatterjee also began life as a negatively defined residual (that which is outside of and unlike civil society), it has since acquired enough descriptive content to render it workable. Something similar is needed for this third sphere.

In trying to provide positive content to the “underside” or “outside” of political s ociety, it may be useful to focus on mechanisms or processes of political disenfranchisement. Needless to say this has to be thought of in a sense broader than electoral politics as such. What are the processes of disenfranchisement that marginalise some segments of the population to such an e xtent that the political system can ignore them with impunity? Looking at the phenomenon from the opposite angle, why do the very modalities of politics that are effective elsewhere fail to work in this “outside” zone? Yet another way of thinking about such zones of disability is to see them as “proto-political” zones, where the struggles that secured the informal negotiations operative in political society are yet to begin or have not yet succeeded. Once we begin to think of what is happening within such zones, they prove to be much more than the mere “outside” of political society

– indeed, they point to the fact that the latter cannot be sustained as a single monolithic concept and is in need of disaggregation. An added advantage is that we are encouraged to think not just about the state and its actions or inaction, but also of forms of struggle, ideological contestation and related processes that help determine the shape of practical politics.

Examples of this kind of shadow zone could include the adivasi struggles that C hatterjee gestures towards but does not explicitly discuss (including the Maoist mobilisations in parts of rural India that have seen the worst forms of primitive accumulation and state repression). Another example on a much smaller scale is that of domestic workers in affluent and middle class urban homes, who could also be thought of as being outside political society. Since they work within individual households under conditions marked by “feudal” ties of servitude, and since they lack political organisation, domestic servants fall outside the usual definition of non-corporate capital. This is changing, as placement agencies begin to manage domestic workers (mainly adivasi girls), and as they begin to form unions of their own. It is possible – but far from certain – that such workers will be brought within the ambit of political society with the state recognising their claims for basic security. Finally, a third example of an entirely different kind could be Muslims in India t oday, who are slowly being pushed outside the frame of mainstream politics by the contradictory pressures of emasculation via “vote bank-isation” and radicalisation born of extreme deprivation and alienation. There are major variations across region, and by class and broad caste groups, but it could be argued that Muslims as a whole are currently enmeshed in processes of disenfranchisement of a quite profound sort.

Since this response has focused almost exclusively on the ambiguities and shortcomings in DET, it may be useful in conclusion to reiterate the reasons why we believe this kind of argument to be important. Social theory today needs to find strong and productive ways of linking the trajectories of rural and urban society. One-sided assertions – whether of the growing “disconnect” between the rural and the urban, or of the rapid industrialisation of agriculture and the death of the village – no longer suffice. We also need enabling analyses of the changing forms of political mobilisation and the transformed language of politics. How, for e xample, do we understand the “NGO-isation” of a wide variety of forms of collective action or political mobilisation? What are the implications of the shift from traditional class-based languages of p rotest or assertion to those based on “identity”? In what ways are our present and our possible futures affected by the d ominance of new vocabularies of discrimination over the older lexicon of e xploitation? DET invites engagement b ecause it enters this terrain and attempts to identify the strategic points where t heoretical forward posts need to be built. Moreover, it does this in an “open source” spirit that should provoke others to join in the effort.

Notes

1 For example, one could think of the 1950s and 1960s as a period when the original accumulation of “caste capital” took place. These decades witnessed the large-scale conversion of upper caste land rights into credential capital (in the form of higher and professional education), thus creating a middle class that was almost exclusively upper caste. Deshpande (forthcoming).

2 For example, the Delhi government drives to evict polluting industries and to clear large slum clusters were carried out with impunity, in spite of efforts to mobilise against them. On the other hand, the stories of sustained resistance (though at great cost) to rural land acquisition are many, the best known instances being Kalinganagar, Goa, Singur and Nandigram.

References

Chatterjee, P (2006): “Are Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Least?” in Mary E John, Praveen Jhan and Surinder S Jodhka (eds), Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Tulika Press).

Deshpande, Satish (forthcoming): Caste as Capital: Retelling the Story of Our Modernity, mss.