Reading Dipesh Chakraborty's 'Provincializing Europe'- part IV

In discerning a causative factor in History, we automatically create two types of History. History 1 is the trajectory that would arise if only the causative factor we discern operates. History 2 is what actually happens- viz. that other causative factors reinforce or outweigh the causative factor we have picked.

Thus, if I believe that History is caused by Energy's ineluctable tendency to make cat like noises, then I posit a History 1, where technological progress, which changes the amount of Energy available to Society, only expresses itself in more people making cat like noises. The world I actually face represents a History 2, where though some people do make cat like noises and use modern technology to disseminate cat like noises- for e.g. through You Tube videos and smartphones- still all sorts of other causative factors operate and, what's more, do so in a manner which damps down the production of cat like noises. Consider the case of Trump. No question, he'd like to make cat like noises on a continual basis. However, the exigencies of plutocratic power politics and geopolitical considerations and so forth considerably damp down his proclivity in this respect.

Still, what can not be gainsaid is that the propensity to make cat like noises exists and though it finds Technology and Social Media already in existence, it does not do so as part of its own existence but rather as independent forms. The coercive power of the State is required to destroy the independent existence of Technology and the Social Media and subordinate them to the making of cat like noises.

Dipesh quotes Marx-

“[Capital] originally finds the commodity already in existence, but not as its own product, and likewise finds money circulation, but not as an element in its own reproduction. . . . But both of them must first be destroyed as independent forms and subordinated to industrial capital. Violence (the State) is used against interest-bearing capital by means of compulsory reduction of interest rates.”

Dipesh tells us a ' logical fable to do with the category “labor power.” Let us imagine the embodiment of labor power, the laborer, entering the factory gate every morning at 8 A.M. and leaving it in the evening at 5, having put in his/her usual eight-hour day in the service of the capitalist (allowing for an hour’s lunch break). The contract of law—the wage contract—guides and defines these hours. Now, following my explanation of Histories 1 and 2 above, one may say that this laborer carries with himself or herself, every morning, practices embodying these two kinds of pasts, History 1 and History 2. History 1 is the past that is internal to the structure of being of capital. The fact is, that worker at the factory represents a historical separation between his/ her capacity to labor and the necessary tools of production (which now belong to the capitalist) thereby showing that he or she embodies a history that has realized this logical precondition of capital. This worker does not therefore represent any denial of the universal history of capital. Everything I have said about “abstract labor” will apply to him or her.

So people carry within themselves practices embodying two different types of History- one which is determined by a single causal factor, whatever that might be, and one which in all genuine causative factors are expressed. In the case of my theory re. Energy's ineluctable teleology as making cat like noises, the thing is feasible. Factory workers know how to make cat like noises. They don't know how to use machinery in the best possible way. That is something they have to be taught or which they must learn by themselves otherwise they will be sacked.

Workers do represent a denial of the 'universal history of capitalism' which is why we don't see a Marxist History 1 in operation anywhere. Nor do we see my cat noise producing History 1. But, it is feasible that everybody might suddenly choose to make cat like noises. It is not feasible that they would turn into Liebnizian monads endowed with an incompossible knowledge of Marxian Capital's ideal trajectory.

While walking through the factory gate, however, my fictional person also embodies other kinds of pasts. Nonsense. When walking through the factory gate, the worker embodies only one type of past- viz. that in which he was hired to work in the factory and was assigned a badge or key-card. If he does not embody such a past, his walking through those gates may be physically obstructed. 

These pasts, grouped together in my analysis as History 2, may be under the institutional domination of the logic of capital and exist in proximate relationship to it, but they also do not belong to the “life process” of capital.

This is true only in the sense that everybody's past may be 'under the institutional domination of the logic of Energy's ineluctable tendency to express itself as cat like noises'. 

 They enable the human bearer of labor power to enact other ways of being in the world—other than, that is, being the bearer of labor power. Which is why they may get sacked. We cannot ever hope to write a complete or full account of these pasts. Unless we were historians who believe they have found genuine causative principles.  They are partly embodied in the person’s bodily habits, in unselfconscious collective practices, in his or her reflexes about what it means to relate to objects in the world as a human being and together with other human beings in his given environment. It is these habits and practices and reflexes which are suppressed in Social interactions. If invited to a dinner party, I am obliged to suppress my bodily habit of micturating in the sink, and my unconscious social habit of punching people and my reflex of snatching food. I may fail to do any or all these things but the upshot would be exclusion from future dinner parties.

Nothing in it is automatically aligned with the logic of capital. True, because 'the logic of capital' has no habitus. Making cat like noises does.

The disciplinary process in the factory is in part meant to accomplish the subjugation/ destruction of History 2. No. It is meant to get the workers to do the jobs they are paid to do. Consider the case of Hindu workers at a Japanese owned factory who wish to interrupt the work schedule in order to celebrate Visvakarma Divas by applying 'teeka' to their supervisors by smashing their heads in and setting fire to a Human Resources Manager. What does the management do? Does it destroy or subjugate the workers' 'Hindu history'? No. It runs away. The local people, who rent rooms to the workers beat the fuck out of them. The State police arrests and tortures a whole bunch of them. Why? Are the local people anti-Hindu? No. They are concerned that workers continue to earn money in the factory so they can pay their rent. The Police wants the factory to stay open so that it pays its taxes and cesses. 

Capital, Marx’s abstract category,  says to the laborer: “I want you to be reduced to sheer living labor—muscular energy plus consciousness—for the eight hours for which I have bought your capacity to labor. I want to effect a separation between your personality (that is, the personal and collective histories you embody) and your will (which is a characteristic of sheer consciousness). My machinery and the system of discipline are there to ensure that this happens. When you work with the machinery that represents objectified labor, I want you to be living labor, a bundle of muscles and nerves and consciousness, but devoid of any memory except the memory of the skills the work needs.”

Similarly baby says to Mummy 'I want you to be reduced to sheer maternal nurture. Gimme your booby. Change my nappy. My body and my wailing are here to ensure that you don't rush off to Safeway to do a nude interpretative dance critiquing Butler's flawed notion of performativity.

“Machinery requires,” as Horkheimer put it in his famous critique of instrumental reason, “the kind of mentality that concentrates on the present and can dispense with memory and straying imagination.”

This is nonsense. Every type of work requires some degree of concentration on the present. No type of work- certainly not factory work- dispenses with memory and imagination. Both are required to diagnose and fix problems, actual or potential. A straying imagination is a valuable work skill because it it previsions improvements or prophylactic measures.

 To the extent that both the distant and the immediate pasts of the worker—including the work of unionization and citizenship—prepare him to be the figure posited by capital as its own condition and contradiction, those pasts do indeed constitute History 1. 

If this were true, Capitalism's 'History 1' is simply all human history. But so is that of making cat like noises. What can be claimed for the one can be claimed for the other. Ergo, it is a pointless and stupid claim.

But the idea of History 2 suggests that even in the very abstract and abstracting space of the factory that capital creates, ways of being human will be acted out in manners that do not lend themselves to the reproduction of the logic of capital.

Factories lost salience long ago. Only a small proportion of the population works in factories. History 2 does not matter because we know that a factory in Bristol can relocate to rural Poland or coastal China or anywhere else with little friction. Indeed, by the Seventies, big manufacturers had developed a preference to relocating in agricultural areas precisely because the work force was more flexible.

It would be wrong to think of History 2 (or History 2s) as necessarily precapitalist or feudal, or even inherently incompatible with capital. If that were the case, there would be no way humans could be at home—dwell—in the rule of capital, no room for enjoyment, no play of desires,no seduction of the commodity.

Commodities pre-exist Capital. So- d'uh!

Capital, in that case, would truly be a case of unrelieved and absolute unfreedom. The idea of History 2 allows us to make room, in Marx’s own analytic of capital, for the politics of
human belonging and diversity. 

No. The politics of human belonging and diversity encompasses slavery and gangsterism and Voodoo and so forth. Marx has a critique of 'false consciousness' which is relevant in these contexts. Capital may come into existence through slavery or gangsterism or witch-doctors enriching themselves, but this does not affect its trajectory according to Marx.

It gives us a ground on which to situate our thoughts about multiple ways of being human and their relationship to the global logic of capital. But Marx does not himself think through this problem, although his method, if my argument is right, allows us to acknowledge it.  If your argument is right, Marx was an idiot. There is a blind spot, it seems to me, built into his method—this is the problem of the status of the category “use value” in Marx’s thoughts on value. Let me explain.

Consider, for instance, the passage in the Grundrisse where Marx discusses, albeit briefly, the difference between making a piano and playing it. Because of his commitment to the idea of “productive labor,” Marx finds it necessary to theorize the piano maker’s labor in terms of its contribution to the creation of value. But what about the labor of the piano player? For Marx, that will belong to the category of “unproductive labor” that he took over (and developed) from his predecessors in political economy. Let us read closely the relevant passage:

What is productive labour and what is not, a point very much disputed back and forth since Adam Smith made this distinction, has to emerge from the direction of the various aspects of capital itself. Productive labour is only that which produces capital. Is it not crazy, asks e.g. . . . Mr Senior, that the piano maker is a productive worker, but not the piano player, although obviously the piano would be absurd without the piano player? But this is exactly the case. The piano maker reproduces capital, the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue. But doesn’t the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear, does he not even to a certain extent produce the latter? He does indeed: his labour produces something; but that does not make it productive labour in the economic sense; no more than the labour of the mad man who produces delusions is productive.

Marx is making a distinction between 'goods' (like pianos) and 'services' (like playing a piano for paying customers). He was wrong to make that distinction but he wasn't the only one to do so. It is unfair to fasten onto this failure on his part to anticipate how Economics would develop in order to show that his entire oeuvre is nonsense on a par with Heidegger's. 

This is the closest that Marx would ever come to showing a Heideggerian intuition about human beings and their relation to tools. He acknowledges that our musical ear is satisfied by the music that the pianist produces. He even goes a step further in saying that the pianist’s music actually—and “to a certain extent”—“produces” that ear as well. In other words, in the intimate and mutually productive relationship between one’s very particular musical ear and particular forms of music is captured the issue of historical difference, of the ways in which History 1 is always modified by History 2.We do not all have the same musical ear. This ear, in addition, often develops unbeknownst to ourselves. This historical but unintended relation between a music and the ear it has helped “produce”—I do not like the assumed priority of the music over the ear but let that be—is like the relationship between humans and tools that Heidegger calls “the ready to hand”: the everyday, preanalytical, unobjectifying relationships we have to tools, relationships critical to the process of making a world out of this earth. This relationship would belong to History 2.

Nonsense! An Englishman, an Eskimo and an Eritrean have different History 2s  but pick up and use a hammer in the same way.  I pick it up and use it in a different way- not because of my History 2- but because I know my g.f will snatch it from me and complete the task herself thus permitting me a little leisure to open a beer can or two. 

 Heidegger does not minimize the importance of objectifying relationships (History 1 would belong here)—in his translator’s prose, they are called “present-at-hand”—but in a properly Heideggerian framework of understanding, both the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand retain their importance; one does not gain epistemological primacy over the other. History 2 cannot sublate itself into History 1.

History 1 is based on a causal theory of (if other causes are suppressed or subjugated) everything. The present-at-hand, by contrast, arises in a field where no such theory of everything exists. For History I, everything is 'ready-to-hand' because it can be used immediately for an ineluctable purpose.

History 2 does not matter enough to require sublation. Suppression or subjugation are good enough. Dipesh confesses as much-

But see what happens in the passage quoted. Marx both acknowledges and in the same breath casts aside as irrelevant the activity that produces music. For his purpose, it is “no more than the labour of the mad man who produces delusions.” This equation, however, between music and a madman’s delusion is baleful. It is what hides from view what Marx himself has helped us see: histories that capital anywhere—even in the West—encounters as its antecedents, which do not belong to its life process. Music could be a part of such histories in spite of its later commodification because it is part of the means by which we make our “worlds” out of this earth. The “mad” man, one may say in contrast, is world-poor. He powerfully brings to view the problem of human belonging. Do not the sad figures of the often mentally ill, homeless people on the streets of the cities of America, unkempt and lonely people pushing to nowhere shopping trolleys filled with random assortments of broken, unusable objects—do not they and their supposed possessions dramatically portray this crisis of ontic belonging to which the “mad” person of late capitalism is condemned?

No. These guys need medical attention and proper housing and so on. If they were deprived of such help by some malign action of the Market or the State or some Criminal Gang, then their plight calls forth some political action on our part. They themselves may take a vanguard role in such political action. There is no 'crisis of ontic belonging'. There is a crisis of mentally ill people being denied proper care.

Marx’s equation of the labor of the piano player with thatof the production of a madman’s delusions shows how the question ofHistory 2 comes as but a fleeting glimpse in his analysis of capital. Itwithdraws from his thoughts almost as soon as it has revealed itself.

History 2 does not matter if you believe in a History 1. It is a 'carmen solutum'. A madman's howls which he himself may hear as a Mozartian symphony but which should call forth a compassionate medical response not some worthless verbiage whose purpose is to equate the deeply silly writings of various Bengalis with some sterile marriage between two worthless adademic availability cascades- viz. that of Marx and Heidegger.

If my argument is right, then it is important to acknowledge in historical explanations a certain indeterminacy that we can now read back into Thompson’s statement at the beginning of this chapter: “Without time-discipline we could not have the insistent energies of the industrial man ; and whether this discipline comes in the form of Methodism, or of Stalinism, or of nationalism, it will come to the developing world.”

Time discipline didn't matter provided there were no caste or gender based barriers to employment. The Japanese found that unmarried peasant girls came under 'time-discipline' almost frictionlessly. Indian industrialists could not hire unmarried peasant girls and so faced a different problem- except in Bengal where the State co-operated with the, generally White owned, Jute factories, etc.

If any empirical history of the capitalist mode of production is History 1 modified—in numerous and not necessarily documentable ways—by History2s, then a major question about capital will remain historically undecidable.

An ergodic system may grow to include elements which exhibit hysteresis but, provided, that hysteresis disappears within a few iterations, no 'undecidability' will feature. Otherwise, it is not a system. Similarly, any History I which is modified by History II is not a History I at all.

Even if Thompson’s prediction were to come true, and a place like India suddenly and unexpectedly boasted human beings as averse to “laziness” as the bearers of the Protestant ethic are supposed to be, we would still not be able to settle one question beyond all doubt. We would never know for sure whether this condition had come about because the time discipline that Thompson documented was a genuinely universal, functional characteristic of capital, or whether world capitalism represented a forced globalization of a particular fragment of European history in which the Protestant ethic became a value.

Rubbish! We know that the 'time discipline' of Chinese migrants from the countryside has nothing to do with 'a particular fragment of European history in which the Protestant ethic became a value'.
It has everything to do with the nature of the capital goods installed by their employers.

A victory for the Protestant ethic, however global, would surely not be victory for any universal.

Urm.. Yes it would. It would be a victory for the Universal Protestant Church.

The question of whether the seemingly general and functional requirements of capital represent specific compromises in Europe between History 1 and History 2s remains, beyond a point, an undecidable question. The topic of “efficiency” and “laziness” is a good case in point. We know, for instance, that even after years of Stalinist, nationalist, and free-market coercion, we have not been able to rid the capitalist world of the ever present theme of “laziness.” It has remained a charge that has always been leveled at some group or other, ever since the beginnings of the particular shape that capital took in Western Europe.

This is sheer stupidity. Dipesh thinks that if people are lazy then some grave scandal arises for the ethic of their Religion or the 'logic' of the specific type of Economy in which they find themselves. This is not the case. There would be no need for Organised Religion or Incentive Compatible Mechanism design if such were the case. People go to Church to be admonished against laziness. They accept rewards and punishments at work because they recognise that they might slack off otherwise. Indeed, people who want to lose weight or run a marathon, admonish themselves with 'mantras' and reward and punish themselves in order to stick with their diet or training schedule.

No historical form of capital, however global its reach, can ever be auniversal.

So what? A 'universal' which is a historical form is can become global. It might be encoded in a heuristic- e.g 'buy low, sell high'- and prevail everywhere. Everybody might accept it. It might reinscribe itself in every subsequent state in a manner we could call 'capital'. What is there to stop this happening?

No global (or even local, for that matter) capital can everrepresent the universal logic of capital, for any historically available formof capital is a provisional compromise made up of History 1 modified bysomebody’s History 2s.

Mathematics has a universal logic. Ramanujan's History 2 was different from Hardy's. So what? We can now see that History 2 makes no difference to History 1. It is, to employ Henry Ford's term, simply 'bunk'.

The universal, in that case, can only exist as aplace holder, its place always usurped by a historical particular seekingto present itself as the universal.

If I am queuing for theater tickets and am suddenly caught short I may pay a homeless guy to keep my place for me in the line.  If, because of his History 2, he decides to buy a ticket himself, he may usurp my position. But, in that case he won't be a place holder at all.

Can the 'universal' exist as a place-holder? Nope, unless it is homeless and someone will employ it to stand in a queue while they go to the toilet. Nobody would do that because the Universal being fictitious might well fictitiously buy a ticket for itself while giving you the cold shoulder.

This does not mean that one gives away the universals enshrined in post-Enlightenment rationalism or humanism. Marx’s immanent critique of capital was enabled precisely by the universal characteristics he read into the category “capital” itself. Without that reading, there can only be particular critiques of capital. But a particular critique cannot by definition be a critique of “capital,” for such a critique could not take “capital” as its object. Grasping the category “capital” entails grasping its universal constitution. My reading of Marx does not in any way obviate that need for engagement with the universal. What I have attempted to do is to produce a reading in which the very category “capital” becomes a site where both the universal history of capital and the politics of human belonging are allowed to interrupt each other’s narrative.

But, Marxism says it has a narrative which explains everything and that other narratives are the ravings of lunatics. Why interrupt sense with nonsense? Would Dipesh like it if I interrupted his lectures with cat like noises?

Capital is a philosophical-historical category—that is, historical difference is not external to it but is rather constitutive of it. Its histories are History 1 constitutively but unevenly modified by more and less powerful History 2s. Histories of capital, in that sense, cannot escape the politics of the diverse ways of being human.

Yes they can because those diverse ways don't affect how human beings use machines as workers. Either they do it the right way or they get fired.

Capital brings into every history some of the universal themes of the European Enlightenment, but on inspection the universal turns out to be an empty place holder whose unstable outlines become barely visible only when a proxy, a particular, usurps its position in a gesture of pretension and domination.

In other words, when people talk about 'universal themes' or 'the European Enlightenment', they are indulging in pretentious one-upmanship of a wholly worthless sort.

And that, it seems to me, is the restless and inescapable politics of historical difference to which global capital consigns us.

Not us, it consigns you, Dipesh because you are part of a Globalised Credentialist Ponzi scheme based on whining about being Black or Female or Gay or whatever so as to get tenure and sell copies of your worthless books.

At the same time, the struggle to put in the ever-empty place of History 1 other histories with which we attempt to modify and domesticate that empty, universal history posited by the logic of capital in turn brings intimations of that universal history into our diverse life practices.

So Dipesh says that struggling against something that does not exist causes intimations of that non existent thing to somehow change our lives. This is not a sensible view. I may spend my time struggling against Lesbian Space Vampires. This may affect my day to day life. However, since Lesbian Space Vampires don't exist no 'intimations' emanate from them. The hallucinations I experience arise out of mental illness. Psychiatrists don't try to find the Lesbian Space Vampires and ask them to stop intimating things to me. Instead, they prescribe medication which will suppress my symptoms.

The resulting process is what historians usually describe as “transition to capitalism.” This transition is also a process of translation of diverse life-worlds and conceptual horizons about being human into the categories of Enlightenment thought that inhere in the logic of capital.

Some historians wrongly thought there was a cultural component to the 'transition to capitalism'. However, recent Chinese history shows that those historians were barking up the wrong tree.

To think of Indian history in terms of Marxian categories is to translate into such categories the existing archives of thought and practices about human relations in the subcontinent; but it is also to modify these thoughts and practices with the help of these categories.

At one time it was thought that issues of caste, region and gender would have salience with respect to the burgeoning of the industrial proletariat in India. That view is no longer tenable. All that matters is if employers can freely hire and fire workers and are free from a license/ permit/ regulation based Raj. If they can't, industrialisation stalls and the industrial proletariat gets split between 'permanent' and 'casuals' in a manner described by Andrew Sanchez.

The politics of translation involved in this process work in both ways. Translation makes possible the emergence of the universal language of the social sciences.

Nonsense! Translation makes it possible for two Social Science Professors who share an office to never communicate with each other but only do so like-minded Professors in other countries who use the same stupid jargon.

But it must also, by the same token, enable a project of approaching social-science categories from both sides of the process of translation, in order to make room for two kinds of histories.

Rubbish! Every History 1 says History 2 does not matter. There is no need to 'make room for it'. Once Energy has reached a level where everybody only makes cat like noises, there is no room for anything else.

One consists of analytical histories that, through the abstracting categories of capital, eventually tend to make all places exchangeable with one another. History 1 is just that, analytical history. But the idea of History 2 beckons us to more affective narratives of human belonging where life forms, although porous to one another,do not seem exchangeable through a third term of equivalence such as abstract labor.

Abstract labour just means the money economy. There is a non monetary economy. Money may play an indirect part in this economy but the protocols are different. Thus, if you have good cocaine your Social life broadens even if you bought the cocaine for that specific purpose. Still, there is a different sort of 'implicit contract'. It would not be acceptable to demand fellatio as an immediate return for providing a bump. But, with free entry and exit, the chances of sex do increase.

Translation/transition to capitalism in the mode of History 1 involves the play of three terms, the third term expressing the measure of equivalence that makes generalized exchange possible. But to explore such translation/transition on the register of History 2 is to think about translation as a transaction between two categories without any third category intervening.

Why? Many translations are not direct but involve a third language. So what?

Translation here is more like barter than a process of generalized exchange. We need to think in terms of both modes of translation simultaneously, for together they constitute the condition of possibility for the globalization of capital across diverse, porous, and conflicting histories of human belonging.

This is crazy. It doesn't matter if my dialect of Tamil was first translated into Hindi and then into English before being translated into German provided the translation is checked by a competent person at each step.
We know for a fact that Britain colonised countries with widely different types of currency- cowrie shells and so on. This did not matter in the slightest.

But globalization of capital is not the same as capital’s universalization.

Obviously, Yoga and Kung Fu and Hip Hop are all global phenomena. They aren't universal.

Globalization does not mean that History 1, the universal and necessary logic of capital so essential to Marx’s critique, has been realized.

No one is suggesting that Marx was a true prophet. On the contrary, Marxism is as dead as a dodo. Not even Xi will be able to revive that corpse. All he will do is tighten Party 'residuary control rights' over everything.

What interrupts and defers capital’s self-realization are the various History 2s that always modify History 1and thus act as our grounds for claiming historical difference.

Either History 2 has causative factors or it does not. If it doesn't, it can't cause any interruption. Every causative factor in 2 can give rise to a History 1. So, what is 'interrupting and deferring' Marx's History 1, based on the Labour theory of Value,  is the superior History 1 based on the Marginalist Revolution in Value theory which achieved apotheosis in, that great Soviet Economist, Slutsky's fundamental equation.