Struggle for Emancipation (1961) by David Alfaro Siqueiros
“At what time our merchants perceived the commodities and wares of England to be in small request with the countries and people about us, and near to us, and that those merchandises were now neglected, and the price thereof abated, certain grave citizens of London, and men careful for the good of their country, began to think with themselves, how this mischief might be remedied.” - Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries
Capital is as irreducible to the many persons that comprise its social formation as much as it cannot be actualized apart from the concrete mediations carried out in and through those that assume the functions bequeathed them as its personifications in practice. Historiographic work on the origins of or “transitions” to capitalism often must walk such a balance in the assignment of determination to social and historical instances in the process of the mode of production’s formation. Of the utmost importance in any such active engagement with history is the resistance to mechanistic movements that assign causality in a manner which merely reinforces the present as the objective necessity of a natural social order, rather than the outcome of a determinate necessity in contention, imposed as the outcome of struggle in which contingency rears its head for but a moment in the conjuncture, to vanish once more in the process of reconstruction. The emphasis on placement of contingency and necessity is often flattened into an attempt to read history as a struggle against a notion of teleology, yet the appearance of a determinate direction in the historical development of capitalism is the assertion of a distinct telos of social life in the course of its reproduction, its form not a matter to be fulfilled to the contours of a preconceived outline, but the question of such limits’ active construction in time and space, the specific aspects of moments and encounters that animate them and imbue an abstraction with life.
Our engagement last week with Marx’s historical material on so-called primitive accumulation and Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of Marx, by way of extending the initial violent and forced dispossession of such accumulation as an ongoing feature of capitalist reproduction as capital accumulation, evidenced by the modern colonial policy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is an attempt to thread this concern of abstract conceptions of capital’s formal determinations and the concrete instances in which the unity of such determinations is operative in practice. Through this, such aspects of capitalist social and historical development can be understood as not merely features of an operative logic, but constitutive of the actuality of such logic as the product and result of historical class struggle, the concrete articulations and mediations of class as enacted by those methods within which capital’s partisan necessity asserts itself historically. Where Marx’s initial conception appears an invitation for the error of an independently national formation of capital in the English context, Luxemburg’s critique makes explicit the global interrelations of surplus-value’s relational coherence between empire and colony a necessary moment in advancing the critique of political economy through attention to historical actuality. It is with such attention to these dynamics that the stirrings of the proletariat of 19th century Europe, so formative to Marx’s thought, must also be observed in tandem with those of an anticipated proletariat in the disintegration of peasantries in colonial peripheries, both gradually and in leaps. These historico-geographic particularities of capital’s constitutive social antagonisms are essential to the concrete knowledge of the capital-relation’s contested claims to universality, and that immanently-posited beyond it.
Of interest to this path of investigation is Marx’s conceptions of the organic composition of capital and its relation to the process of capitalist accumulation, and how we may develop these processes of the capitalist mode of production’s specific directionality in the reproduction of social and material life to its historical development. Of this thesis thus far, we may say of our findings at present that, for Marx, the organic force of capital is surplus labor-time, given by labor’s relation to its conditions of existence as a process that is reproduced through self-alienating objectification. In developing this endeavor, the historical production of labor-power as commodity necessarily places this work in a position to confront the complex relation between capitalist and pre-capitalist social formations, and the role of the dynamic subsumption of the labor process to the requirements of valorization. These series of concrete mediations through which capital comes to its realization in historical actuality are what concern us at present. In this post, the reality of an abstract world-capital will be explored through instances of the concrete processes of capitalist subsumption and accumulation in Britain’s colonial exploitation of India in the 19th century.
Marx’s much-maligned chauvinism, in his apprehension of India’s disintegrating traditional social and economic relations as an “Oriental despotism” that “restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies”, did not prevent him from correctly perceiving that the dissolution of forms of traditional social organization in colonial India had arrived through “the working of English steam and English free trade [...] actuated only by the vilest interests”.1 His 1850’s articles on India for the New York Daily Tribune track the ongoing movements of the Crown’s political consolidation of colonial rule over the subcontinent, absorbing the infrastructure of commercial conquest laid out by the English East India Company (EIC) in order to directly organize a path for more stable global industrial integration. The establishment of the British Raj was seen by Marx as a period in which the old forms of social life, in their encounter with the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization”, provoked the question, “can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?”2 These earlier notions of a path from India’s industrialization into an emancipatory horizon finds articulation by Marx in this striking passage, where the scope of history widens:
“The devastating effects of English industry, when contemplated with regard to India, a country as vast as Europe and containing 150 million acres, are palpable and confounding. But we must not forget that they are only the organic results of the whole system of production as it is now constituted. That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world does but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized town. The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world - on the one hand the universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”3
The dynamic of this statement appears at first a technological determinism, given by the modernization of productive infrastructure in India soon to be brought about by the consolidated colonial administration of the British Raj, but it must be remembered that, even when painting the possible future beyond such horrors, Marx had in mind the mutually-entwined destinies of the Indian and English proletariats, combined and uneven as they were within this matrix of exploitation, preceding this unfolding with the declaration that “[t]he Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether.”4 Industrialization’s strides in technological “advancement”, the material basis for a new phase of human social organization, would still be bound of necessity to the exigencies of political organization, a fate only possible through a collective overcoming across continents within the belly of industrial empire. The question then of the failure to see such advances taken in British India in the 19th century comes to our attention, and it is one that is bound up with the specific organization and deployments of international political organization and structuration, both in the form of the state and the organization of the labor processes involved in its social-material constitution.
British colonial control of the Indian subcontinent was a centuries long process of conquest, the specific agents of its execution birthed from inter-state mercantilist competition between international merchants’ associations chartered by their governments, the European state formations’ administration and appropriation of these chartered company endeavors, and India’s indigenous class formations and their stratification. First, let us observe the English formation of company-capitalism that would come to carry out the colonization of India. The English East India Company, founded through a charter procured from the Crown by the Levant Company in 1599 as they sought to expand their operations from Near to Far East, became the armed commercial vessel advancing English trade against that of the Dutch and the French. Rather than developing overland routes to the Indies, the English Levant Company merchants advanced a sea route that in turn strengthened their control over Levantine trade. In line with the construction of yet another chartered merchant enterprise, “the Crown expected a financial quid pro quo for privileges granted. Despite the inevitable frictions, the result was a further consolidation of the Crown-company partnership.”5
In Robert Brenner’s monograph Merchants & Revolution, the sociopolitical dynamics driving the 16th-17th century period of English commercial expansion demonstrate the particular manner in which the Crown and greater City merchants developed “the most intimate and symbiotic relationship”, as these London merchants, with operations spanning the known world, “secured their profits as much through collective political initiative and organization as through individual economic enterprise.”6 For much of the period where English mercantilism formed the basis for a concrete accumulation strategy, it was strengthened and necessarily immanent to the political constitution of its administration, as the “material foundations of the merchant community’s alliance with the Crown” rested upon an intercourse wherein “the Crown could, and did, create economic privileges for the merchants; the merchants offered loans and taxes, as well as political support, to the Crown.”7 The particularly strong role of merchant’s capital in this period of English economic development, their prominence in state financing which granted them such favorable political conditions from the Crown to whom their favor in turn was essential, had much to do with the specific composition of England’s commercial activity during this period. Of this, Brenner’s thesis demonstrates the practices of this expansion:
“The fact is that the substantial growth of trade with southern and eastern regions during the first half of the seventeenth century was not motivated by the profits to be made from cloth exports, and it cannot properly be interpreted as an adaptation by English commerce and manufacturing to the disastrous decline of the old cloth trade. The problems and possibilities of the cloth export trade were no more central to the Stuart commercial expansion than they had been to the Elizabethan commercial expansion. Imports and reexports continued to provide the real dynamic, and for this reason the commercial growth of the early Stuart period must be understood as an extension of the Elizabethan expansionary thrust. By the time of the Stuarts, however, it was no longer a question merely of qualitative shifts - of the establishment of new trading routes and the growing independence of English merchants from their former European suppliers of imports. From the late sixteenth century, growing English (and European) demand provided the foundation for an impressive overall quantitative increase in total imports (and reexports) from the newly developing commercial areas.”8
Thus English mercantilism in this period of expansion was a continuity with the previous formation of merchant’s capital, where buying cheap overseas and selling dear to domestic markets and the European continent established England’s commercial economy as a nexus of trading supremacy, where maritime labor was perhaps the primary form of wage labor to develop in a manner which would inform industrial development on a national scale. According to Brenner, then, this period of the English formation of capitalism cannot yet be attributed to a dynamic of industrial development, but of mercantilist accumulation derived from the concentration of trade networks carried out by a political symbiosis of Crown and merchants’ associations, a mutually-dependent relationship which articulated the particular dynamic of the absolutist state form of this time. The particular manner within which colonization developed initially as a mode of commercial practice within this framework of import-for-reexport merchant capital can then inform our understanding of the totality of world-capital which England formed and its reflexive relation to the development of English national industrialization.
The English experience in colonial practice was chiefly informed by the American colonies of the early 17th century, where, at the outset, these enterprises were initiated by Crown charter, but remained ventures that procured little state support, most often left to individual colonists and enterprises capable of establishing an outpost. The brutal dispossession and enslavement of indigenous peoples and Africans procured in the slave trade installed a means of organizing the raw material, human and natural, for commodity production. Yet the planning required of such enterprises was not fully anticipated at the outset. The example of the Virginia colonies is thus instructive, as the “decay of the Virginia Company and the subsequent weakness of royal control from England engendered a chaotic pattern of social, political, and economic development in the Virginia Colony.”9 This tenuous political connection to the Crown’s control and merchant coordination had much to do with the emergence of new merchants, both of new associations and within the old, that in turn was a reflection of the lessons learned of colonial practice in the Americas. “The treatment of colonization as a total process combining production and trade had provided the basis for the new merchants’ success in the Americas during the 1620’s and 1630’s. Starting in the late 1630’s, and especially after the Civil War had created a greater opening, they resolved to extend the same approach to the East Indies.”10 The synthesis of production and trade and its internalization to the administration of the colonial enterprise would develop in tandem as the living condition of capital’s formation as a total process of production, integrated within all moments of the circuitry carved across the seas by mercantilism.
Yet the development of this insight in the organization of capitalist accumulation as a total process of economic integration would not cohere fully from the lessons of the Virginia Colony alone. Decades after the East India Company’s initial formation, its officers would remain “hostile to any expenditures not immediately productive of profit and were constantly urging their agents to spend as little as possible on fortifications or buildings of any sort.”11 Whereas Dutch colonial practice at the time involved an intensive development of forts, armed naval development, and the encouragement and direct support of settlements in distant regions destined for extraction, the English companies still retained a commitment to immediate profit with minimal cost exposure, leaving their efforts fundamentally unstable for some time. Attempts to establish an outpost in Madagascar in order to maintain contact with the Indian subcontinent never came to fruition, despite plans to develop it as a site of colonial production, as “crops failed; provisions ran short; many of the planters fell ill; and none of the other prospective sites for colonies panned out.”12 While this could be attributed to, on the one hand, the lack of experience and capacities of the East India Company to establish colonial production, Brenner traces a through line to domestic political alliances in England that contributed more to the capacities necessary for colonial success, in the case of the new merchant interlopers that possessed a stronger interest in developing colonization:
“[T]he new-merchant leaders were able to stretch their sphere of influence far beyond that of mere colonial traders. On the one hand, they were closely related to that loosely defined middle layer of London shopkeepers, ship captains, and domestic traders, which, once organized, would be capable of challenging the City’s political order. On the other hand, they were tied to that group of colonizing aristocrats who would help lead the parliamentary attack on the Caroline regime. It was thus their dual role-not only as leaders of an American colonial interest, but also as partners with and mediators between the parliamentary leadership and the City popular classes-that gave the new-merchant leaders the strength in the following years to launch powerful initiatives not only in the sphere of commerce, but also in politics and religion. In these revolutionary decades, successful campaigns in one sphere were often impossible without correspondingly effective initiatives in the others.”13
The historical development of English colonization was not only reliant upon overseas activity, but the sociopolitical tumult within the struggles between the Crown and Parliamentary reorganization in England, predominantly its City political formations, during the 17th century. Procuring the means of expanding colonial settlement and production was not merely a matter of strengthening the petitions to the established political order, but of a contest within the organs of the state that in turn produced a self-transformation of the state form through its active constitution in dominant class organization. The characterization of this class struggle constitutive of the state in the English context became less a maneuvering of influence between the Crown and various mercantilist interests, but most importantly of a Parliamentary structure that could accommodate the mediation of the new merchants’ interests and the developing domestic landed aristocratic bourgeoisie, itself coming to rely upon a dynamic of accumulation derived from a tenant-farmer/wage-laborer relations of agricultural production induced by enclosures and influenced by the market pressures introduced by commercial expansion. The political accommodation of the East India Company within the previous absolutism was far from advantageous to all of the new merchants’ interests.14 Thus the City parliamentary movement, according to Brenner, “brought the incursion of new socioeconomic forces into City and national political life and represented a shift in the locus of power within the City, not only away from the City’s traditional elite merchant rulers but away from the company merchant community as a whole.”15
England’s capitalist development was not entirely the creation of merchants’ interests, as much as it was in turn impossible without them. The advancements of colonial practice, in what we could see as a strain of originary or “primitive” accumulations across the globe, in the partitioning of labor from its objective means of subsistence and thus conditions of existence, refracted back upon domestic industrial development, necessitating sociopolitical cohesion between nascent capacities for domestic manufacturing and mercantile commercial expansion within a new form of state as the formation of a distinct national capital complex capable of combining production and trade with free labor into a singular process of social metabolism. Brenner attributes this domestic industrial subordination of mercantile interests to the particular advantages of organization achieved through the rules of English landed property, declaring that “capitalism developed in England from the end of the medieval period by means of the self-transformation of the old structure, specifically the self-transformation of the landed classes. As a result, the rise of capitalism took place within the shell of landlord property and thus, in the long run, not in contradiction with and to the detriment of, but rather to the benefit of the landed aristocracy. At the same time, the ‘commercial classes,’ far from uniformly capitalist or ideologically unified, were divided from, and indeed in crucial ways set against, one another in consequence of their diverse relationships to production, property, and the state.”16
What interests us here then is the specific manner in which the 17th century self-transformation of the English political and economic structures in the movement of class struggle would in turn inform the concrete formation of a world-capitalism in the successive integration of colonial domination and exploitation. This is not to say here that the sole attribution for capitalism’s origins lies with England, but that its modern form and the accelerating solidification of capitalist development revolves upon this historical axis. The emergent capitalist industrial subsumption and concretization of these foundations for accumulation, established by the existing infrastructures of commercial expansion and trade, offer us a conception of the formative class antagonism of capitalist development as not a mere reduction to the crystallized forms observed in England’s dispossession of its peasantry, but through that forced proletarianization’s concurrent development with the incursions of colonial accumulation. Both national and international productions of labor-power as commodity share a mutually-entwined and reciprocally-determining originary dynamic.
Developing this investigation further, we can turn to the specific manner by which British India developed a preeminent position of power in the colonial trades, and how the English, through the East India Company, the Crown, Parliament, and British Raj political forms of state, operated in relation to the exapted class stratifications of Indian agricultural production and monetary economy. Given the earlier stated mutually-dependent, yet still often antagonistic, dynamic between colonial company interests and English state appropriations, the East India Company resisted the absorption of its functions by the State well into the early 19th century, fighting off attempts in 1783 to transfer the functions of administration to a Parliamentary body. After the conflicts of conquest in 1799 and 1803, Britain solidified its hold as the pre-eminent power in the Indian subcontinent through the East India Company’s merceranization, though the British state would not assume control of colonial government until the 1850’s.17 This necessity of class consolidation from the Imperial state asserted itself against the threats of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny and other rebellions from the indigenous population through the pre-existing political forms of Mughal and Mahratta rule, an internal contestation for influence that the English would exploit to their benefit. Much of the success of colonial government’s continuity in India resided in the establishment of a provincial administration that built a collaborative relationship between the zemindar landholding classes and moneylenders to peasants, exapting pre-capitalist forms of exploitation into a global continuum of surplus-value. In The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg would articulate this process with a focus upon this active political construction:
“As early as 1793, the British in Bengal gave landed property to all the zemindars (Mahometan tax collectors) or hereditary market superintendents they had found in their district so as to win native support for the campaign against the peasant masses. Later they adopted the same policy for their new conquests in the Agram province, in Oudh, and in the Central Provinces. Turbulent peasant risings followed in their wake, in the course of which tax collectors were frequently driven out. In the resulting confusion and anarchy British capitalists successfully appropriated a considerable portion of the land. The burden of taxation, moreover, was so ruthlessly increased that it swallowed up nearly all the fruits of the people’s labour. This went to such an extreme in the Delhi and Allahabad districts that, according to the official evidence of the British tax authorities in 1854, the peasants found it convenient to lease or pledge their shares in land for the bare amount of the tax levied. Under the auspices of this taxation, usury came to the Indian village, to stay and eat up the social organisation from within like a canker. In order to accelerate this process, the British passed a law that flew in the face of every tradition and justice known to the village community: compulsory alienation of village land for tax arrears. In vain did the old family associations try to protect themselves by options on their hereditary land and that of their kindred. There was no stopping the rot. Every day another plot of land fell under the hammer; individual members withdrew from the family unit, and the peasants got into debt and lost their land.”18
The lessons of the chaotic period of the Virginia Colony’s informed a colonial practice in which pre-existing political foundations from a region featuring a more robust prior class society could be leveraged to build out a more stable path for accumulation. Of this, the debt relations of small-scale peasant agricultural production played an important role in the dynamics of concentration and centralization of landed property and expropriation that would characterize the capitalist subsumption of the Indian subcontinent. Jairus Banaji shows that the process of the formal subsumption of labor to capital was operative in the Indian Deccan region, in opposition to the characterization of the Indian ryot peasant formations and labor processes as non-capitalist, illustrating a qualitative transformation in the debt relationships of peasants that preserved the pre-existing forms of financing small scale agricultural production in the Deccan in and through the transformation of its reproduction of production relations into a process of successively intensifying dispossessions.19
According to Banaji’s study, what becomes apparent, despite the peasant form of appearance of the labor process in agriculture from 1850-1890, “the capital/wage-labour relationship was [...] widespread throughout the Deccan”.20 The articulations of commodity production in the Indian ryot systems and the zemindar administration of tax collection did not bear the appearance of industrial capitalist relations, yet nonetheless operated in a manner in which the wage-form articulated the movement of reproduction within Indian agriculture’s relation to world capital. Of this dynamic, where “[c]ommodity-relations of production are never directly reflected in consciousness” but “their forms of appearance mediate their reception into consciousness”,21 the global composition of world-capital encircling Indian peasant production is crucial:
“[T]he determination of capital as a social reproduction-process or of capital as social capital reflects itself most adequately in the form of world-capital, and this composed the deeper framework of the process of commodity-expansion that started in the Deccan around the 1850s. Well before the cotton-boom, every poor cotton harvest in America, for example in 1836, 1838, 1845, 1846, 1849, had revived and stimulated the interest of British capitalists in an Indian cotton-supply. After 1848, the Manchester Chamber of Commerce began a systematic and concerted campaign to secure Government interest in a supply from India. This agitation occurred against the background of a steady rise in the price of the standard American quality. By 1861 the programme of the Cotton Supply Association included as its major objectives the conversion of land into a commodity, the establishment of effectual courts of law with the power to enforce contracts, and massive state-expenditure in public works that would link the cotton-districts to the port of Bombay.”22
In order to further elaborate this understanding of the development of commodity economy in the formal subsumption of the peasant labor process in the Deccan, resisting the abstract determinations that would produce an effect wherein the “concrete processes by which capitalist relations evolved in various parts of world economy are simply dissolved in the abstract identity of world-capitalism”,23 Banaji establishes the essential connection of commercial to industrial capital as merely transmuted forms of capital as derived from commodity relations of production, constituted of the inter-relation of production sites to each other that both articulates the commodity form of the product and the commodity form of production through this practice of social production’s organization. Most importantly here is that Banaji attributes this feasibility of formal subsumption to the existing forms of state-exploitation of the peasantry exapted in English colonization, and not wholly the invention of it.24 Given the formal subsumption of the Indian Deccan to commodity economy, its process of expansion would then imply “that labour-power is itself, increasingly, a commodity. It would imply the conversion of the small producer into a wage-labourer, even if not necessarily into a ‘productive worker’, i.e., one employed by capital.”25 Banaji’s schematization of the class stratification of the 19th century Indian Deccan is crucial here to understanding these dynamics of subsumption.
Of these, three classes of capitalists are said to have been most operative in the “expanding monied capitals on one side, and indebtedness on the other” that was constitutive of the “chain-like structure of operation of ‘mercantile’ capital.”26 The most numerous consisted of small traders and moneylenders of the Deccan villages, the second the richer bankers and traders primarily situated in the larger towns, and the third of cultivators that had been able to avoid indebtedness.27 Banaji regroups an account of these three classes of capitalists into two types:
(1) Merchant-moneylending-banking businesses organised on a caste-basis, divided internally into a larger, town-based capital, more widespread in its range of operations, and a small ‘sponsored’ capital, operating locally, resident in the village itself, generally controlling a portion of its retail-trade, started with capital borrowed from kinsmen, and directly in contact with the peasantry.
(2) Moneylenders sprung from the mass of the peasantry itself, by and large big peasants, a lot of them of the Kunbi caste.28
Of the peasantry, he offers us the following schema:
(1) A big peasantry – exploiting small peasants as monied capitalists and employing hired labour in cultivation;
(2) A small peasantry, differentiated internally into:
(i) an independent middle peasantry that incurred loans to meet occasional expenses of an economic or social nature;
(ii) a more depressed and dependent middle peasantry regularly exploited by monied capitalists, from whom it derived much of its means of subsistence and production;
(3) A semi-wage-labour peasantry – structurally dependent on hiring out its labour-power and not generally ‘creditworthy’.29
This categorization of class stratification and peasant differentiation allows for Banaji to illustrate the extant relations of exploitation through which the formal subsumption of peasant labor into global circuits of commodity-capital were operative. Thus of the Indian moneyed classes, their capitalist transformation existed through this successive global commercial integration and was formalized as a “sector of capital and of society [that] as a whole would have been the ‘greatest beneficiary’ of British rule”, as their successive integration within the colonial economy and subordination to the state would only see them shift “their preferences from mortgages to direct sales”, due to the “structural role that this class played within the framework of colonial domination.”30 The mediation of state-exploitation of the peasantry through these classes of moneyed capitalists established the means by which these extant forms of debt relationships could be exapted into a dynamic of labor-power’s production through a dynamic of dispossession not entirely dependent upon direct expropriation, but a cyclical expropriation conditioned by this structural mediation of agricultural production:
“On contracting a debt, the household would in most cases find itself incapable of reimbursing it unless, as happened occasionally, a good harvest coincided with a year of high prices. Years of scarcity and famine, of which there were several, would drive these households only further into debt, so that finally they would often have to confront several creditors. Over time, a household in this position would find itself subsisting ‘at the mercy of’ its creditor, who would in this way come to establish control over its reproduction process from one cycle to the next. Elements of the production-process would be ‘advanced’ to the peasant either in money-form or directly in material form, and the peasant would then surrender the whole of his crop by way of ‘interest’-payments. Where these payments included those portions of the means of production over which the small producer still retained control, e.g., bullocks, which was frequently the case, this would only intensify the dependence of his process of production on the advance of elements required for its reconstitution.”31
Even pre-dating this dynamic, however, the formal subsumption of peasant production by means of commodity-expansion could operate in such a manner that rising prices from relatively abundant harvests compelled producers to sell more in order to recoup costs, causing peasant holders to fall further into debt as markets became overstocked, and these peasants would further resort to assistance from moneylenders and be forced to “alienate their means of production in distress sales.”32 Thus we can observe the primacy of the commodity form of social production and the formal subsumption of the labor process in this period as the social origins of proletarianization in the English colonization of India, a process in which the colonial state form operated as a mediating structure between existing relations of exploitation and class antagonisms to buttress accumulation in the commodity matrix of world-capital.
Yet it is also necessarily the case that the dynamics of colonial administration throughout this process of formal subsumption, as itself a moment of the heavily inter-mediated series of class differentiation and antagonisms that conditioned and articulated India’s colonial domination, played a crucial role as a force of class organization capable of asserting English interests over the forms of indigenous production relations that it transformed to its benefit. To develop this we turn to a dynamic conception of the process of subsumption in the Indian Deccan, brought into relief through the various conflicts that would come to characterize the denigration of peasant agricultural subsistence into the intensifying famines of the late 19th century brought about by the reproduction of dispossession conditioned by commodity-capital expansion. Crucial to this development is the relations between formal subsumption in the Deccan to the real subsumption characteristic of the industrialized English economy of the 19th century, and the development of a theorization of dynamic subsumption that observes these as mutually-constitutive moments in the articulation of capitalist reproduction as accumulation in the social mediation of social labor as abstract labor’s instrumentalized form, the commodity labor-power.
Contrary to Marx’s relatively optimistic prognoses of technological modernization in India, the rationalization of commodity production and circulation through irrigation and railways would be far more destructive than anticipated. Luxemburg’s critical analysis of English colonial policy observed this distinction, where, contrary to the actions of previous state conquests by the Mughals, Mahrattas, and Afghans of the Indian subcontinent, the “British were the first conquerors of India who showed gross indifference to public utilities.”33 Marx was not blind to this dynamic necessarily, as even in 1853 he was able to observe the relationship between the English state and the East India Company as one in which “[o]ligarchy absorbed all of its [the EIC’s] power which it could assume without incurring responsibility.”34 Mike Davis’ essential account of the “political ecology” of famine in Late Victorian Holocausts would also make note of this distinction, as the specific manner of England’s imperial consolidation of state power by the mid-19th century, a precursor and precondition of the establishment of the kind of productive infrastructure required to supply English domestic industrial production with raw materials for its own export, would be clearly distinct from the less frequent famines of pre-colonial India.
Central to this intensification of peasant subsumption and its global integration with the English home manufacturing base as a movement of dynamic subsumption was the “creation of a railroad-girded national market in grain”35 that demonstrated the political-economic reality of technological development and implementation. Of these rail infrastructures, Davis tells us that:
“The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation.”36
In Davis’ history of the famines of the Indian Deccan, these famines were actively intensified by a negligent colonial administration that quite consciously chose the route of profit maximization and intensified expropriation of grain harvests over any efforts of famine relief, demonstrating a social-material symbiosis between the imperatives of capitalist commodity economy and ecological devastation. As “food prices soared out of the reach of outcaste labourers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and poor peasants”, colonial state forces would deploy armed force to secure agricultural products as commercial property, and masses of starved peasants seeking relief and possible expropriation of grain to survive were met with state violence.37 In the case of agrarian unrest during the famine of the late 1870’s, “Sepoys [...] encountered increasing difficulty in enforcing order in the panic-stricken bazaars and villages as famine engulfed the vast Deccan plateau. Roadblocks were hastily established to stem the flood of stick-thin country people into Bombay and Poona, while in Madras the police forcibly expelled some 25,000 famine refugees.”38
The resistance to relief policy in combination with the growing pressure to impose order upon the restive masses in the countryside threatening to spill over into the central towns of their districts resulted in extremely harsh restrictions on minimum rations that could guarantee the continuity of production, and thus followed in the direction of intensifying the dynamic of expropriation constitutive of labor-power’s production. In the case of Sir Richard Temple’s assumption of the duty to establish some form of famine relief, what came to be known as the “Temple wage” established a daily rice ration with no additional protein, leading to a rapid degeneration. On the conception of this standard, its origins are instructive to its design:
“In a lightning tour of the famished countryside of the eastern Deccan, Temple purged a half million people from relief work and forced Madras to follow Bombay's precedent of requiring starving applicants to travel to dormitory camps outside their locality for coolie labor on railroad and canal projects. The deliberately cruel "distance test" refused work to able-bodied adults and older children within a ten-mile radius of their homes. Famished laborers were also prohibited from seeking relief until ‘it was certified that they had become indigent, destitute and capable of only a modicum of labour.’”39
The demonstration of labor capacity in tandem with the qualification for relief tied an intrinsic relation to the capacity to work and the worthiness of famine relief, all administered by authorities that would do so comfortably from behind a line of armed Sepoys. The advantages of this desperation to capital accumulation in colonial India was not only derived from grain speculation, but the political chaos internal to the famine-stricken population that would allow for the English to further solidify their position. “The Deccan's villages were also now rent by desperate internal struggles over the last hoarded supplies of grain. A social chain reaction set in as each class or caste attempted to save themselves at the expense of the groups below them. As David Arnold has shown, collectively structured, "moral-economic" dacoities (expropriations) against moneylenders and grain merchants tended to degenerate in the later stages of famine into inter-caste violence or even a Hobbesian war of ryot against ryot.”40 Davis shows us the broader movements by which this chain of global commodity integration reacted back through from English industrial conditions, to the contemporaneous abundant harvests of the Northern provinces, and the decimation of peasants in the South:
“In contrast to the south, the northern harvests were abundant in 1874-76 and ordinarily would have provided ample reserves to deal with the kharif deficit in 1878. But subsistence farming in many parts of the North Western Provinces had been recently converted into a captive export sector to stabilize British grain prices. Poor harvests and high prices in England during 1876-77 generated a demand that absorbed most of the region's wheat surplus. Likewise, most of the provinces' cruder grain stocks like millet were commercially exported to the famine districts in Bombay and Madras Presidencies, leaving local peasants with no hedge against drought. The profits from grain exports, meanwhile, were pocketed by richer zamindars. moneylenders and grain merchants - not the direct producers.'”41
After the 1870’s famines, a boom cycle emerged within the sphere of English capital’s hegemony, and “[w]ith British demand for food imports soaring, massive amounts of London-generated capital flowed into the railroads that opened up the American Great Plains, the Canadian Prairie, the Argentine pampas, and India's upper Gangetic plain. Maxim and Gatling guns efficiently eradicated the last indigenous resistance to the incorporation of these great steppes into the world economy.”42
The arteries of capitalist expropriation that were constituted by railroad construction in India operated in a manner that we may understand as an aspect of “combined and uneven development,” in the dual function it served as both critical infrastructure that saw its surplus-value given productive actuality in the implementation of its investment and construction globally, and vehicle for intensified agricultural expropriation, as a technological apparatus of capital concentration resistant to Indian appropriation in times of their distress. However, this dimension of “combined and uneven development” may still be yet merely descriptive. Here we propose this conception of real and formal subsumptions’ uneven and combinatory historical actuality as a process of dynamic subsumption where the totality of these relations of production, their political forms of struggle and consolidation, represent a full process of social metabolism conditioned around a reproduction of material life predicated upon the production of labor-power in its commodity form as a pre-condition for the viability of capital as the form of production and its appearance as autonomous monetary wealth.
The colonial question is not distinct from that of the class struggle, as if we could distill a separate essence of social antagonism from the institutionalization of the class antagonism within the state form in its exploitation of England’s domestic working class, and the state form as a generality composed of the national capital complex’s operation in the subsumption and exploitation of the Indian ryots. The differential composition of exploitation, the intensified rate of exploitation that develops in a racialized hierarchy of international labor, poses the same antagonism, though in a matter of degrees, a managed exploitation, that leverages the social chaos of the capitalist form of production in the universal commodity to pose the class antagonism of capitalist reproduction and accumulation as an antagonism internal to social labor subsumed in this form. Colonial domination is both condition and consequence of the capital-relation’s dynamic formal constitution as relations of the valorization of capital. It is the history of capitalism’s formation as we receive it in its historical actuality, and thus cannot be made distinct from except in terms of its relation to a fragmentary process of separation and the self-alienation of humanity’s species-being. Form must be derived from content as content is in turn made intelligible through form.
The ecological devastation of the famines were thus a result of colonial intensification of exploitation and the capitalist subsumption of peasant agricultural production. Social relations can be seen here to undergo a materialization of that very dynamic of human social metabolism organic to it, reproduced in its relation to inorganic nature. Matter echoes the black hole void of surplus labor-time into a contradictory appearance of organic annihilation for a fragment of humanity and exorbitant benefit to another. The state form’s relative dominance operates here as a matter of intensity relative to class composition, responding to the rhythms of the accumulation process and the racialized subjugation of its order. English state consolidation and transportation infrastructure demonstrate the dynamics of accumulation in the direction of capital’s organic composition, concentration of means of production into an infrastructure of mechanized expropriation. In relation to the peasant labor process, dispossession intensified and surplus value production developed as the constitutive form of the production process in opposition to subsistence needs of the Indian peasantry. Through the colonial relation and its internality to the totality of English empire, we can begin to observe a dynamic within which racial construction acts through class differentiation, a signification of functions as relations of the capitalist form of the production process, given at first by the appearance of geographic necessity for valorization, but revealed a contingent relation transformed into differentiation of commodity production’s diffusive fragmentation. Capital’s logic of separation beats out on the body of the species, attaching itself to appearance and constructing its essence through its exploitation.
Karl Marx, Political Writings (2019), “The British Rule in India” pp. 640-1
Ibid, p. 657, p. 641
Ibid, p. 659
Ibid, p. 657
Robert Brenner, Merchants & Revolution (2003) p. 65
Ibid, pp. 54-5
Ibid, p. 200
Ibid, pp. 24-5
Ibid, p. 116
Ibid, p. 170
Ibid, p. 171
Ibid, p. 177
Ibid, p. 184
An example from Brenner can demonstrate this often oppositional relationship: “[...] Buckingham’s financial extortions were causing serious damage to the whole East India Company operation. In 1622, ships of the East India Company had taken Hormuz from the Portuguese for the Shah of Persia, and, in the process, had seized a rich booty for the company itself. James I advised the company to make Buckingham, who was lord admiral, a present of some of the goods, and the company did offer him 2,000 pounds. But this was not nearly enough for Buckingham. He implied that 10 percent of the company’s profit on all prizes was due him as lord admiral. To induce the East India Company to increase its payment to him, Buckingham also claimed that the company’s seizure had been illegal, insisted that he had never issued it letters of marque, and actually charged the company with piracy before the High Court of Admiralty. To tighten the screws on the company even further, in early 1624 Buckingham did not hesitate to prevent the departure of a company ship bound for the East Indies. And, in the end, he managed to extract from the company not only a payment of 10,000 pounds for himself, but an additional 10,000 pounds for the king.” Ibid, p. 222
Ibid, p. 360
Ibid, p. 649
“The East India Company commenced by attempting merely to establish factories for their agents, and places of deposit for their goods. In order to protect them they erected several forts. Although they had, even as early as 1689, conceived the establishment of a dominion in India, and of making territorial revenue one of their sources of emolument, yet, down to 1744, they had acquired but a few unimportant districts around Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. The war which subsequently broke out in the Carnatic had the effect of rendering them after various struggles, virtual sovereigns of that part of India. Much more considerable results arose from the war in Bengal and the victories of Clive. These results were the real occupation of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. At the end of the Eighteenth Century, and in the first years of the present one, there supervened the wars with Tippoo Saib, and in consequence of them a great advance of power, and an immense extension of the subsidiary system.” Marx (2019) pp. 644-5
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1951) pp. 373-4
“Thus, the penetration of European commercial capital into the cotton-trade of districts such as Broach and Khandesh did not imply a tighter domination of the peasantry. The evidence seems to suggest that the reverse – the growing independence of the peasantry vis-à-vis local monied capitalists and the deeper entrenchment of European firms – were phenomena that coincided in time”. Jairus Banaji, Theory As History (2010) p. 298
Ibid, p. 325
Ibid, p. 306
Ibid, pp. 330-1
Ibid, p. 332
“[T]he whole system of state-exploitation of the peasantry – the system of ‘assessment’ and revenue-demand – depended crucially on the estimated level of commodity prices at the time of introduction of a settlement, and on the access of groups of villages to local markets, wholesale centres, or railway-stations. Both the Survey and its Revision based their classifications of such village-groups in the revenue-scale on the level of ‘exports’ that any given group was considered capable of sustaining – apart from the more general circumstances determining differential rent. Thus the commodity-economy was the basic premise of the revenue-system, just as the expansion of the market formed, in a broader sense, the nucleus of its programme of ‘civilising’ the country, that is, introducing the bourgeois mode of production into it.” Ibid, pp. 287-8
Ibid, p. 288
Ibid, p. 294
Ibid, pp. 294-5
Ibid, p. 295
Ibid, p. 317
Ibid, p. 301
Ibid, pp. 302-3
Ibid, p. 291
Luxemburg, (1951) p. 375
Marx, (2019) p. 644
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (2017) p. 302
Ibid, p. 31
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 32
Ibid, p. 42
Ibid, p. 53
Ibid, pp. 56-7
Ibid, p. 127