Ramachandra Guha as the new huccha Venkat

Ramachandra Guha writes-

In the course of doing two degrees in economics I was taught to regard Karl Marx as, in the words of the Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, a ‘minor post-Ricardian’.

Guha studied Econ first at St. Stephens and then at the Delhi School of Economics in the late Seventies. It seems odd that he was not taught about Socialist Economics of the sort that Kantorovich had gained a Nobel Prize for and which informed the official ideology of the Planning Commission. In particular, it seems strange that the D.School's own strengths in Project Evaluation using shadow prices should have made no impression on Guha.

Odder still, is his quoting Samuelson who was very much in the dog-house by then. The Indians remembered that he'd got factor price equalisation wrong and then his student got run over by Sraffa, again for an elementary  mathematical error, over the 'reswitching' debate, and finally, and most fatally, the fellow had been stupid enough to think the Soviets could overtake America.

Samuelson's critique of Marx's Transformation algorithm could just as well be made of Walras or Arrow-Debreu or any Equilibrium theory. They all have the same sort of Post Res mathematical structure which, however, has no independent existence. But that isn't a scandal for Marxism precisely because General Equilibrium was known to be 'anything goes' by the early Seventies.

I suppose what Guha really means is that the Indians realised that the Planning Commission was a swindle by the time the D.School's own Sukhamoy Chakroborty was appointed its head to do the bidding of Sanjay Gandhi and his vile coterie.

Moreover, no Indian had any illusions about Communism- they were all queuing up for a Green Card if they were capable of donkey work or, if not, seeking some shaded place within Ind's indolent Academy to write journalistic shite of a hectoring, bien pensant, sort.

Guha goes on to say of Marx-

His labour theory of value was rejected by my teachers; and his predictions about the immiserization of the proletariat and the imminent death of capitalism appeared to have been falsified. 

The Labour theory of value is a tautology. There will always be some post res numeraire to make it consistent. But this true of any theory of value. That's why Economists dropped the subject.

However, I then went on to study sociology and history, where I was obliged to take Marx seriously. For, in these domains, his ideas and insights proved to be of more enduring value.

WTF?! Sociology and History showed that Marxism was a pile of shite because both subjects are wholly idiographic and empirical. Economics, on the other hand, can be purely mathematical and nomothetic. Economics can't say 'Marxism is wrong' anymore than it can prove General Equilibrium isn't 'anything goes'.  Sociology can say- Soviet society is fucking horrible. People want to run away from there. History can say, Capitalism can do Social Insurance and Kuznets curve redistribution in favour of Labour because the Historical record confirms this.

Why is Guha pretending otherwise? T

This fortnight we mark the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. What remains of relevance in his thought? I would like to single out three ideas in particular. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society’, wrote Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, ‘is the history of class struggles’. This is a simplification; for sometimes caste and religion serve as more important markers of social identity than class.

So history is not about class struggle. Classes cooperate. Castes or other coalitions compete and do struggle against each other. Sometimes this means 'ethnic cleansing'- as happened in Pakistan and Bangladesh and the very Delhi where Guha was studying. By contrast, there had never been any 'class struggle' in India or England or anywhere else Guha was familiar with.

But the basic premise is accurate; namely, that social conflict is a major motive force in human history.

Class conflict is not the same thing as social conflict. It is a wholly different premise. If poor Hindus kill and drive out poor Muslims from their land or homes, that is Religious conflict- which India had witnessed.
If poor people rise up and kill rich people- that is class conflict. It hasn't happened in India. Some small landlords had their heads cut off. But their income was very low. By contrast, no Indian billionaire needed to worry. J.R.D Tata went to Rome for some plutocratic junket in the Seventies. He was asked where his security retinue was. He said he had none. The Italians were amazed. Was Tata not afraid of being kidnapped? Had no Red Brigade, claiming to represent the toilers in his factories, not put a price on his head? Tata assured his worried hosts that things like that don't happen in India. The truth is, during the Emergency, Communist M.Ps had helped the Tatas fight off some extortion attempts by the camp followers of the dynasty. Why? Because the workers would get less if the Netas took a bigger cut.

Shared interests and identities bring different individuals together on a common platform, to struggle against groups composed of individuals whose identities are or seem to be different from theirs. Hence the struggles of workers vs capitalists, Dalits vs Suvarnas, and peasants vs landlords, which have all been such a visible feature of life in modern India.

Where is the struggle between workers and capitalists in India? The most that happens is that some H.R Director gets killed by a crooked Labour lawyer or bunch of extortionists.
What about this struggle between Dalits and Suvarnas? When has a Tambram like me or Guha been threatened by Dalits? Thugs from a dominant caste linked to the ruling party may cut off our sacred threads, but they bash in the skulls of Dalits. Why? We are not a threat. Our sociopaths don't become gangsters- they join the World Bank or write worthless shite.
I

What about the struggle between peasants and landlords? Where has it occurred? Only in those places where kidnapping is the primary service industry. No doubt, criminal gangs terrorise whomsoever they can but that has nothing to do with Society and everything to do with the deliberate failure of the State.

Second, Marx may have been the first major thinker who focused on the vital importance of technology in shaping social life.

An absurd suggestion! Marx came from a relatively backward country to London after the big Railway boom.  Emerson remarked the 'boosterism' of the English merchant from the new industrial towns. Macaulay painstakingly chronicles the rise in national wealth created by new technology. But this type of thinking can be found in Defoe and Petty and was well developed by the second half of the eighteenth century.
Among Indians, 'the vital importance of technology in shaping social life' was known to people like Raja Rammohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore before Marx was out of swaddling clothes.

As he put it in The Poverty of Philosophy: ‘Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.’

Well, we know Marx was wrong. Egypt under Muhammad Ali had taken a different course but came a cropper. Still, it was perfectly feasible to have a command economy under a 'feudal' ruler.

Marx keenly appreciated what the more conservative thinkers of his time didn’t: namely, that the introduction of a new technology can profoundly alter how humans relate to one another.

 Conservative thinkers in Germany opposed the introduction of railways, as opposed to canals, precisely because they appreciated how the introduction of a new technology was bound to hasten 'mediatization'- i.e. the elimination of the old feudal class. Disreali makes this point in Vivian Grey which came out in 1826 when Marx was 8 years old.

He would not have been surprised that, first, the personal computer, and second, the personal cell phone, have so radically reshaped individual and social behaviour in the 21st century.

My 'individual and social behaviour' have not been very radically reshaped. Some industries have been radically reshaped. But then industries are always being radically reshaped whereas Human Nature hasn't.

These two insights of Marx are, of course, generic, relevant to humans wherever they live. The third insight relates specifically to India. While Marx never visited the subcontinent, in a series of articles published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1853 he commented on its past and its future. Here, he was unsparing in his criticisms of the rule of the East India Company. ‘There cannot’, he wrote, ‘remain any doubt that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before’.

What great and unprecedented misery did the British inflict on India? None at all. Marx writing a silly article about a country he had never seen is one thing. Why is Guha, writing in English in an Indian newspaper repeating his absurd lie?

In these newspaper articles, Marx accused the British of plundering India’s resources through war and profiteering.

The British could only turn a profit on India by increasing production. Even supposing they engrossed an unfair share of that profit, once they left, the productive base must have been higher than when they came unless, of course, the British paid themselves starvation wages so as to slave away in India and die of cholera or malaria.

The question is why did agriculture become less profitable after Independence than before? The answer is not far to seek. Overseas aid- especially PL480 food shipments. To really impoverish a country you have to give it stuff it ought to be making for itself. Fostering dependency is the only way in which you can harm a country. Robbing it will encourage it to defend itself which in turn will lead to endogenous growth.

Because the colonialists had ‘neglected entirely’ public works, they had caused the deterioration of Indian agriculture.

In which case the population would fall, which in turn would mean less revenue, which in turn would mean, at the margin, either abandoning territory or else investing in public works. The British were forced to do some public work and encourage agriculture to some extent so as to turn a profit on their presence in India. Later on, once the Indians realised that foreign aid was a poisoned chalice, they too were forced to allow some amelioration in the lot of the peasants. The alternative was less food for themselves. Under Lal Bahadur Shastri, there was a 'skip a meal' program- restaurants were closed on certain days. Thus if the shitheads at the D. School, or the Planning Commission, wanted their biryani or pilau, they had to permit some agricultural development of a genuine, not theoretical, type.

Further, the British destroyed our vibrant craft traditions, and disorganised our village communities.

Very true! We could have been as prosperous as Nepal but for those dastardly Brits!

They introduced a stifling, soul-destroying bureaucracy, which served to ‘paralyse its [India’s] administration and perpetuate its abuses as the vital condition of their own perpetuation’.

If Guha is correct then there must have been some moment when India's bureaucracy stopped being 'stifling' and 'soul destroying' because, he tell us, this was a vial condition for the perpetuation of British rule.
The truth is Indian bureaucracy got worse, not better, after the Brits left. We all know this. So he is telling a stupid lie for no other purpose than to show he is a stupid liar.

Marx was clear that the ruling classes of Britain saw the people and territory of India only as a vehicle to enrich themselves. As he put it: ‘The aristocracy wanted to conquer it [India], the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it’.

A 'stationary bandit' has to do more than plunder otherwise it collapses.  Underselling is a good thing- it means cheaper stuff. But, you can't sell to someone with no money. So the millocracy- represented by the Manchester Guardian- had to demand reforms which would boost India's productive base.
It seems, even in the case of the Brits and the Indians, cooperation not conflict was required to make the relationship endure.

The moralist in Marx was appalled at the amoral behaviour of the British in India.

Nonsense! Marx had no interest in India. He was a racist. But he had some bizarre beliefs- for example that Palmerston was in the pay of the Tzar and the whole thing was a Russian conspiracy.

Yet the historian in Marx saw some positive (if inadvertent) consequences of alien rule. As he wrote: ‘England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution’.

England did not cause any social revolution in Hindustan. Guha knows this. So do his readers. They also know that Japan could rise up without being occupied by a foreign power. All that mattered was that worthless shitheads, of the sort Guha was taught by and the sort he himself now teaches, were disintermediated from decision making.

History doesn't have tools anymore than it has an cat named Tabitha. Why does Guha pretend otherwise?

Some romantic nationalists have recently advanced the argument that India could have become a modern democratic republic under the auspices of Maratha or Mughal rule. This is pure poppycock.

Why? Are Indians genetically inferior to the Japanese?

Indian society was riven by caste and gender hierarchies, these thoroughly encoded in religious scripture as well as deeply embedded in social practice.

This was also true of Japan which had a beef ban (indeed a ban on the slaughter of all 4 footed animals) and Untouchability and so on.

Individual rights and freedoms were savagely suppressed by upper-caste men.

In India, under the Marathas, low caste men- including Dalits- were armed and participated in military operations as irregulars. In Japan, only the Samurai were allowed to possess weapons.

The ruler was the monarch of all he surveyed.

Japan actually restored the Emperor to an even higher position at the beginning of its resurgence.

It was the brutal fact of British conquest that provoked thinking, reflective, Indians to demand equal rights for women and Dalits, and to seek to replace absolutist and authoritarian forms of government with modern democracy.

Very true. What happened when the Marathas or the Sikhs or the Rohillas or the Mughals or anyone else lost some territory to the British is that 'the brutal fact of British conquest' immediately provoked 'thinking, reflective, Indians' to demand equal rights for women and Dalits. The Peshwa ordered the immediate ending of untouchability. The Ulema pronounced anathema upon the hijab. The various Maharajas immediately ordered free and fair elections.

What's that? Nothing of the sort occurred? Well, in that case, the people I mentioned weren't 'thinking and reflective Indians'. They were blockheads from Norway.

Challenged by the conquerors, reformers such as Rammohan Roy,

who collaborated very happily with the British and grew very wealthy

Jotiba and Savitri Phule,

who were not 'challenged by the conquerors' at all. Jotiba was educated at the Scottish Mission School. The work he and his wife did was greatly applauded and encouraged by Britishers. They grew rich and influential because of this support.

Tarabai Shinde and Gopal Krishna Gokhale helped prepare India for the challenges of the modern world.

Tarabai Shinde was the daughter of a head clerk to the British. She was not 'challenged by the conquerors'. They approved of what she was doing.
Gokhale is a different case but belongs more to the Twentieth Century. He was a moderate and wanted to work with the British but they were suspicious of him because he was a Chitpavan and former classmate of Tilak. Gandhi was his heir.

These great 19th century thinkers were followed by Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru, Periyar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and others, who in their different but complementary ways brought us a Constitution for which nothing in our tradition or heritage had remotely prepared us.

Every one of the people mentioned here was helped and encouraged by the British to some degree. None of them 'brought us a constitution'. Every country which became independent, between 1918 and 1963,  had more or less the same constitution. Why? Well it had worked for the Japanese hadn't it? Anyway, it was just one of those things you get at independence- like a national flag and a national anthem and so forth.

In this respect Karl Marx was absolutely right; the British conquered India with the vilest motives, but they were yet an unconscious tool of history, in that they compelled the best (and bravest) Indians to look into the mirror, to examine what was flawed in their society and their politics, and to work strenuously to correct this.

Actually, the names Guha mentions highlights the importance of British missionaries who set up Schools. No doubt, Guha thinks these missionaries 'had the vilest motives'. Still, by his account, Karl Marx was absolutely wrong. British concern for the souls of the heathen Hindoo, not rapacity, compelled the 'best (and bravest) Indians to talk worthless pi-jaw while Japan and then China and everywhere else forged ahead.

Pi-jaw does not examine flaws in actual societies. It just talks worthless shite. It has no mirror but is merely a parrot in a cage. It does not work 'strenuously to correct' anything at all. It doesn't matter in the slightest  if you denounce materialism or idolatry or Caste or Capitalism or Egotism or Sex or eating nice Food or not continually singing the praises of Gandhi, Godse and Ghalib or any other shite. All you are doing is virtue signalling. Everybody already knows this. So why bother?

The answer, in Guha's case, is, of course, that he is angling to become the huccha venkat of the bien pensant blathershite community. Either that, or he is an unconscious tool.