The Long Ecological Revolution by John Bellamy Foster Monthly Review › 2017 › Volume 69, Issue 06 (November 2017) ›

 The Long Ecological Revolution

by John Bellamy Foster

Monthly Review › 2017 › Volume 69, Issue 06 (November 2017) ›

Cuban farmers planting sweet potato crop.

Aside from the stipulation that nature follows certain laws, no idea was more central to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and to the subsequent development of what came to be known as modern science, than that of the conquest, mastery, and domination of nature. Up until the rise of the ecological movement in the late twentieth century, the conquest of nature was a universal trope, often equated with progress under capitalism (and sometimes socialism). To be sure, the notion, as utilized in science, was a complex one. As Francis Bacon, the idea’s leading early proponent, put it, “nature is only overcome by obeying her.” Only by following nature’s laws, therefore, was it possible to conquer her.1

After the great Romantic poets, the strongest opponents of the idea of the conquest of nature during the Industrial Revolution were Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of classical historical materialism. Commenting on Bacon’s maxim, Marx observed that in capitalism the discovery of nature’s “autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs,” particularly the needs of accumulation. Yet despite its clever “ruse,” capital can never fully transcend nature’s material limits, which continually reassert themselves, with the result that “production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.” Its treatment of natural limits as mere barriers to be overcome, not as actual boundaries, gives capital its enormously dynamic character. But that same refusal to recognize natural limits also means that capital tends to cross critical thresholds of environmental sustainability, causing needless and sometimes irrevocable destruction.2 Marx pointed in Capital to such “rifts” in the socio-ecological metabolism of humanity and nature engendered by capital accumulation, and to the need to restore that metabolism through a more sustainable relation to the earth, maintaining and even improving the planet for successive human generations as “boni patres familias” (good heads of the household).3

In his Dialectics of Nature, written in the 1870s, Engels turned the Baconian ruse on its head in order to emphasize ecological limits:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first…. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.4

Although key parts of Marx and Engels’s ecological critique remained long unknown, their analysis was to have a deep influence on later socialist theorists. Still, much of actually existing socialism, particularly in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, succumbed to the same extreme modernizing vision of the conquest of nature that characterized capitalist societies. A decisive challenge to the notion of the domination of nature had to await the rise of the ecological movement in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Here criticism of the ecological destruction brought on by modern science and technology and by unbridled industrialism—associated with a simplistic notion of human progress focusing on economic expansion alone—led to an alternative emphasis on sustainability, coevolution, and interconnection, of which ecology was emblematic. Science was said to have been misused, insofar as it had aided in the violation of nature’s own laws, ultimately threatening human survival itself. Through the development of the concept of the biosphere and the rise of the Earth System perspective (in which Soviet ecology played a crucial role), science increasingly came to be integrated with a more holistic, dialectical view, one that took on new radical dimensions that challenged the logic of the subordination of the earth and humanity to profit.5

Recent years have brought these issues renewed relevance, with the climate crisis and the introduction of the Anthropocene as a scientific classification of the changed human relation to the planet. The Anthropocene is commonly defined within science as a new geological epoch succeeding the Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years; a changeover marked by an “anthropogenic rift” in the Earth System since the Second World War.6 After centuries of scientific understanding founded on the conquest of nature, we have now, indisputably, reached a qualitatively new and dangerous stage, marked by the advent of nuclear weapons and climate change, which the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson dubbed “Exterminism, the Last Stage of Imperialism.”7

From an ecological perspective, the Anthropocene—which stands not just for the climate crisis, but also rifts in planetary boundaries generally—marks the need for a more creative, constructive, and coevolutionary relation to the earth. In ecosocialist theory, this demands the reconstitution of society at large on a more egalitarian and sustainable basis. A long and continuing ecological revolution is needed—one that will necessarily occur in stages, over decades and centuries. But given the threat to the earth as a place of human habitation—marked by climate change, ocean acidification, species extinction, loss of freshwater, deforestation, toxic pollution, and more—this transformation requires immediate reversals in the regime of accumulation. This means opposing the logic of capital, whenever and wherever it seeks to promote the “creative destruction” of the planet. Such a reconstitution of society at large cannot be merely technological, but must transform the human metabolic relation with nature through production, and hence the whole realm of social metabolic reproduction.8

No revolutionary movement exists in a vacuum; it is invariably confronted with counterrevolutionary doctrines designed to defend the status quo. In our era, ecological Marxism or ecosocialism, as the most comprehensive challenge to the structural crisis of our times, is being countered by capitalist ecomodernism—the outgrowth of an earlier ideology of modernism, which from the first opposed the notion that economic growth faced natural limits. If ecosocialism insists that a revolution to restore a sustainable human relation to the earth requires a frontal assault on the system of capital accumulation—and that this can only be accomplished by more egalitarian social relations and more consciously coevolutionary relations to the earth—ecomodernism promises precisely the opposite.9 Ecological contradictions, according to this ideology, can be surmounted by means of technological fixes and continued rapid growth in production, with no fundamental changes to the structure of our economy or society.10 The prevailing liberal approach to ecological problems, including climate change, has long put capital accumulation before people and the planet. It is maintained that through new technologies, demographic shifts (such as population control), and the mechanisms of the global “free market,” the existing system can successfully address the immense ecological challenges before us. In short, the solution to the ecological crises produced by capitalist accumulation is still more capitalist accumulation. All the while, we have been rapidly nearing the “climate cliff” (i.e., the breaking of the carbon budget) represented by the trillionth metric ton of carbon released into the atmosphere, now less than twenty years away if current trends continue.11

In these dire circumstances, it is dispiriting but not altogether surprising that some self-styled socialists have jumped on the ecomodernist bandwagon, arguing against most ecologists and ecosocialists that what is required to address climate change and environmental problems as a whole is simply technological change, coupled with progressive redistribution of resources. Here again, the Earth System crisis is said not to demand fundamental changes in social relations and in the human metabolism with nature. Rather it is to be approached in instrumentalist terms as a formidable barrier to be overcome by means of extreme technology.

The best current example of this tendency on the left in the United States is the Summer 2017 issue of Jacobin, entitled Earth, Wind, and Fire. According to the authors in this special issue and their related works, the solution to climate change and other ecological problems is primarily one of innovation in the development and application of new technologies and does not require a critique of the process of capital accumulation or economic growth. Activist groups such as Greenpeace and most ecosocialists come under attack for their “catastrophism” or apocalypticism, their direct action, and their emphasis on the need for qualitative changes in the human relation to the environment.12 The entire issue, packed with colorful charts and graphics, espouses a techno-optimism in which ecological crises can be solved through a combination of non-carbon energy (including nuclear power), geoengineering, and the construction of a globe-spanning negative-emissions energy infrastructure.

If this stance is “socialist,” it is only in the supposedly progressive, ecomodernist sense of combining state-directed technocratic planning and market regulation with proposals for more equitable income distribution. In this vision, ecological necessities are once again subordinated to notions of economic and technological development that are treated as inexorable. Nature is not a living system to be defended, but a foe to be conquered. As if to punctuate this position, the Jacobin issue includes as an epigraph a quotation from Leon Trotsky, taken from his Literature and Revolution (1924):

Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing “on faith,” is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad.13

Trotsky was hardly alone in promoting such reckless productivism in the early 1920s, and can be at least partly excused as an individual of his time. To repeat the same error nearly a century later, however, when we face the destabilization of the world’s ecosystems and human civilization itself, is to capitulate to the forces of destruction. The current attempt to claim the conquest of nature and ecomodernization as a “socialist” project is dangerous enough that it warrants a thorough critique. Otherwise, we risk turning back the clock on the vital political and theoretical advances made by the ecological left over the last half-century.

The New Promethean Socialism

The first half of Jacobin‘s playfully titled Earth, Wind, and Fire issue is fairly uncontroversial from a left standpoint, cataloguing capitalism’s environmental depredations and calling for radical change. However, editorial board member Connor Kilpatrick sets the tone for the issue’s second part when he suggests that Donald Trump and capitalist entrepreneurs appeal to a broad public by promising a future of economic growth and new technology, while the ecological movement offers only “a politics of fearmongering and austerity.”14 The second half makes the implications of Kilpatrick’s criticism explicit, developing over the course of several articles a thoroughly ecomodernist, techno-utopian vision that is ultimately incompatible with the goals and methods of the grassroots ecological movement.

The penultimate article in the issue, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski’s “Planning the Good Anthropocene,” along with Phillips’s prior work, captures the essence of this putatively progressive ecomodernist perspective. Phillips is the author of the 2015 book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts, and Rozworski is a Toronto-based union researcher and commentator, who frequently writes for Jacobin.15 In his book, Phillips directs polemical attacks on such varied left thinkers, living and dead, as Theodor Adorno, Ian Angus, Brett Clark, David Harvey, Max Horkheimer, Derrick Jensen, Naomi Klein, Annie Leonard, Herbert Marcuse, Bill McKibben, Lewis Mumford, Juliet Schor, Richard York, and myself. He also challenges the concept of planetary boundaries of leading Earth System scientists. At the same time, Phillips gives his ecomodernist seal of approval to Erle Ellis, Roger Pielke, Jr., and the Breakthrough Institute (where both are senior fellows); Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, authors of the Accelerate Manifesto; and Slavoj Žižek (for his attack on the notion of Mother Earth).

One chapter in Phillips’s book, criticizing Greenpeace’s Leonard, is titled “In Defense of Stuff”; another, attacking the work of several thinkers associated with Monthly Review, is called “There Is No ‘Metabolic Rift.'” Phillips dismisses the idea that Marx advanced ecological values, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and accuses the entire ecological left of “doom-mongering” and “catastrophism.” Klein is said to promote an “eco-austerity” that is ultimately no different from the neoliberal version. Phillips flatly rejects the notion that there are limits to economic growth, asserting that “you can actually have infinite growth on a finite world,” by making more with less. According to some estimates, he informs us, “the planet can sustain up to 282 billion people…by using all the land.”16

For Phillips, bigger is beautiful: “The socialist must defend economic growth, productivism, Prometheanism.” The former Soviet Union, for example, is faulted not for its extreme productivism, but only for its lack of democratic planning and insufficient concern for human welfare. He presents a sweepingly anthropocentric definition of nature: “We are nature, and all that we do to nature is natural.” It follows that “our skyscrapers are not separate from nature; they are nature.” (By the very same logic, one might add, so are our nuclear weapons.) Human progress means transgressing all purported natural limits. Viewed in these terms, “energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.” Other species have value only insofar as they provide utilitarian benefits to society. Thus “we should care when species go extinct, not because of their intrinsic worth…but because the loss of species means a decline in the effectiveness of the services that living systems provide to humans.”17

Overall, the New Left of the 1960s and its successors are faulted for rejecting the “Promethean ambition” of ever more production—”more stuff.” Likewise, Phillips sees the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement as out of step with social needs, precisely because it attempts to reconnect workers to the land. What is required is “a high-energy planet, not modesty, humility and simple living.” Ecomodernism would concentrate the land and rely on large-scale agricultural production.18

So enamored is Phillips of nuclear power as the solution to climate change that he says that “a substantial, global reversal of neoliberalism and an embrace of a strong, democratic public-sector ethos” is climatically advantageous mainly because it will allow us to deploy “what is absolutely the strongest weapon we have in our arsenal against global warming,” namely nuclear power. No mention of Fukushima here.19

Phillips and Rozworski bring this same perspective to their contribution to Jacobin‘s special issue—and were no doubt enlisted for that precise purpose. They tout nuclear power as a viable alternative to fossil fuels, as part of a broader ecomodernist fantasy in which economic growth has no limits and humanity rules as the “collective sovereign of Earth.” Although they endorse some form of state planning, they raise no direct objection to the commodification of nature, labor, and society under capitalism, and seem unconcerned by the ways that existing structures of production and consumption distort and exploit human needs. Instead, the future lies entirely with the new machines that can provide humanity with ever more goods, while commanding on an ever-increasing scale “the biogeophysical processes we must understand, track, and master” in order to “coordinate ecosystems.” The goal is self-consciously one of Promethean control of nature through science and technology. It is hardly surprising therefore that Phillips’s outlook, as first articulated in Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts, has been lauded by the premier corporate-funded ecomodernist think tank, the Breakthrough Institute, or that the title phrase of the Phillips and Rozworski piece, “The Good Anthropocene,” is lifted directly from Breakthrough Institute’s An Ecomodernist Manifesto.20

In another bold appropriation, Peter Frase, author of the 2016 book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, entitles his contribution to the issue “By Any Means Necessary”—a phrase made famous by Malcolm X, but here denoting planetary-wide interventions in nature. Four Futures shows Frase to be enamored with the idea of the Promethean mastery over the earth. The “grand future” he depicts in what purports to be a realistic ecosocialist scenario (albeit drawing on science fiction) consists of “terraforming our own planet, reconstructing it into something that can continue to support us and at least some of the other living creatures that currently exist—in other words making an entirely new nature.” Like Phillips and Rozworski, Frase has no interest in reducing our impact on nature or treading lightly on the earth; rather we must “manage and care for nature”—the better to serve our own interests. Following the conservative philosopher of science and Breakthrough Institute senior fellow Bruno Latour, Frase insists that in the face of the global ecological crisis we need to be engaged in “Loving Our [Frankenstein] Monsters.” That is, we must learn to identify with the technological-industrial world we have created (or are in the process of creating), with its planned markets, smart parking meters, robo-bees, and new potentialities for geoengineering the planet—all viewed as perfectly compatible with “socialist ecology.”21

In “By Any Means Necessary,” Frase focuses on climate change. Chiding the ecological movement for its “green moralizing,” he calls on the left wholeheartedly to embrace attempts to geoengineer the planet. He praises Oliver Morton’s 2015 book The Planet Remade, which proposes to inject sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays (though scientists have pointed out that the added calamitous effects of this are likely to be far worse than global warming alone).22 Frase himself makes a case for “cloud brightening,” by which clouds can be made to reflect more sunlight away from the earth. “We have to recognize,” he writes, “that we are, and have been for a long time, the manipulators and managers of nature.” If the left fails to embrace planetary geoengineering, “the bourgeoisie will simply carry out their work without us.” In Frase’s view, socialists have no choice but to climb onto the geoengineering bandwagon, even if this means going against the ecological movement. Still, “the purpose of raising the prospect of geoengineering in a left context,” he says, is “not as a substitute for decarbonization, but as part of a larger portrait of ecosocialism.”

There is no danger, Frase assures us, to be found in geoengineering technology itself, only in how it is managed (a sophism akin to “guns don’t kill people, people do”). Defending himself in advance against “the charge of hubris and Prometheanism,” he states—no doubt with an eye on Engels—that “the socialist project does not aim at controlling nature. Nature is never under our control, and there are always unintended consequences.” But missing from his analysis is any notion that social relations themselves must change in order to effect qualitative shifts in the human metabolism with nature. Rather, the object seems to be keeping the whole juggernaut going as much as possible, with neither social nor ecological relations seriously addressed in what amounts to a technological tinkerer’s solution. The only alternative to such an extreme ecomodernist strategy, we are led to believe, is a “hair shirt” austerity—a term that Frase uses in common with Phillips to ridicule the ecological movement.23

Daniel Aldana Cohen’s article “The Last Stimulus” promotes a form of Green New Dealism. Against those on the left who argue for the need to develop a steady-state economy—a system no longer governed by the drive for unsustainable and destructive economic growth—Cohen insists that we should take seriously the hype surrounding green capitalism:

Global political and financial leaders now want to invest a trillion dollars a year in clean energy alone. The budget for climate adaption policies will be comparably huge…. Business as “usual” is changing fast…. Thanks to political pressure, millions of workers’ retirement funds are already investing in a happy old age in a stable climate. Globally, trillions of dollars in workers’ retirement savings are up for grabs…. Regional and national governments all over the world are setting up green banks, financial institutions to help shape the booming investment in the energy transition…. This past year, employment in the solar sector expanded seventeen times faster than in the economy as a whole.

From this, Cohen derives his thesis that “so far, green capitalists are the ones shaping the future. They get it. We could too.” While not an advocate of unbridled Prometheanism like Phillips and Frase, he nevertheless sees the solution largely in the fairly conventional terms of state management of technology, the market, and urban development.24

Christian Parenti, a Nation columnist and author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2012), is the best-known of the Earth, Wind, and Fire contributors. The foreboding title of his article, “If We Fail,” refers to the worst-case scenario of unmitigated climate change, namely the Venus Syndrome. As described by climatologist James Hansen and recounted by Parenti, the earth would end up “a lifeless rock swathed in boiling-hot, toxic, water vapors.” Parenti seizes on this apocalyptic image to urge the left to accept drastic technological solutions, which fortunately, he says, are well within reach. Citing an experiment in Iceland, he advocates the building of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) plants that would strip carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it by depositing it in basalt rock. This CCS-in-basalt approach, he claims, offers a “fairly simple,” readymade solution to the climate problem. The only difficulty he sees is that such a CCS scheme must be sponsored by the state rather than left to private enterprise, since it offers few opportunities for profit. And this is where progressives with their support of affirmative government have an essential role to play. The “good news” is that “a radical climate solution, counterintuitively perhaps, requires that we use more, not less, energy. But energy, in the form of solar energy, is the one economic input that is truly infinite.”

Parenti does not, however, address the immense obstacles to the building of CCS plants on the scale and with the speed he imagines. As the energy analyst Vaclav Smil has pointed out, “In order to sequester just a fifth of current CO2 emissions we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering-compression-transportation-storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry, whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storage took generations to build.” CCS technology requires unimaginable quantities of water: as much as 130 billion tons every year, or about half the annual flow of the Columbia River, would be needed to capture and sequester carbon dioxide equal to the annual emissions of the United States alone. And the problems only start there, since the larger technological, economic, and ecological obstacles to such massive attempts at negative-emissions technologies are gargantuan, raising unimaginable difficulties.

If Phillips in his analysis argues that all is nature—that everything in society, from farms to factories to skyscrapers, is “natural”—Parenti suggests the opposite: all is society, to the point that the natural world can scarcely be said to exist at all. It is easy from this standpoint to argue, as he does, in favor of meat factories and fish farms as partial solutions to our ecological problems—while the consequences for ecosystems and the animals themselves are rendered invisible. “Our mission as a species,” he writes, “is not to retreat from, or to preserve, something called ‘nature,’ but rather to become fully conscious environmental makers. Extreme technology under public ownership will be central to a socialist project of civilizational rescue, or civilization will not last.” In both these views (all is nature and all is society), employed in this way, the object is identical: to wish away ecological contradictions and seek the total conquest of the environment, effectively maintaining, rather than fundamentally transforming, existing social and economic structures.25

In her short article “We Gave Greenpeace a Chance,” cultural critic Angela Nagle takes that organization and the broader ecological movement to task. She rejects what she calls Greenpeace’s “diminutive direct action” and the “‘deep green’ primitivism” often associated with the radical environmental movement. Instead she opts once again for hyper-technological solutions to environmental problems, including the global expansion of nuclear energy plants, declaring that “human interference in the natural world is now the only way to save it.” With respect to Trump’s claim that global warming is a myth concocted by China “to make US manufacturing noncompetitive,” Nagle quips that on first hearing this her “only sense of shock…was that someone was actually talking about manufacturing again.” Like Phillips, Rozworski, Frase, and Parenti, she urges the left to abandon its “aversion to ambitious technologies and Promethean modernity” and to love our monsters.26

Other articles in the issue launch similarly one-sided attacks on the Sierra Club (Branko Marcetic, “People Make the World Go Round”) and food cooperatives (Jonah Walters, “Beware Your Local Food Cooperative”). In the latter article, we are led to believe that some of the more radical food cooperatives in the 1970s were simply the product of “Maoist true believers” and “self-styled guerrillas, schooled in the messianic Marxism-Leninism of the late New Left” and “following the model of the Black Panther Party”—in a series of pejoratives designed to throw scorn on these experiments.27

What is remarkable about the contributions to Jacobin‘s special issue on the environment and related works by its writers and editors is how removed they are from genuine socialism—if this involves a revolution in social and ecological relations, aimed at the creation of a world of substantive equality and environmental sustainability. What we get instead is a mechanistic, techno-utopian “solution” to the climate problem that ignores the social relations of science and technology, along with human needs and the wider environment. Unlike ecological Marxism and radical ecology generally, this vision of a state-directed, technocratic, redistributive market economy, reinforced by planetary geoengineering, does not fundamentally challenge the commodity system. The ecological crisis brought on by capitalism is used here to justify the setting aside of all genuine ecological values. The issue’s contributors instead endorse a “Good Anthropocene,” or a renewed conquest of nature, as a means of perpetuating the basic contours of present-day commodity society, including, most disastrously, its imperative for unlimited exponential growth. Socialism, conceived in these terms, becomes nearly indistinguishable from capitalism—not a movement to replace generalized commodity society, but homologous with the fundamental structure of capitalist modernity. At best, this represents a foreshortening of the socialist vision for the sake of success in the liberal political arena. But the cost of such a compromise with the status quo is the loss of any conception of an alternative future.

The Long Ecological Revolution

How then are we to see the necessary ecological and social revolution of our time? In the nineteenth century, Engels emphasized the imperative for society to develop in accord with nature as the only genuine scientific view: “Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves—two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality.”28 Moreover, there was no way to shortchange natural necessity. Engels argued that the Baconian ruse of the conquest of nature—obeying nature’s laws for the sole purpose of promoting capital accumulation—would ultimately prove disastrous, since it ignored the larger consequences in the pursuit of short-term gain. In contrast, the object of “scientific socialism” was not a vain attempt to conquer nature, but rather the advancement of human freedom in accord with the conditions imposed by the material world.29

Today, the growing awareness of such problems, and of the inescapable human connection to the natural world as a whole, has led scientists to explore more sustainable forms of development, as in agroecology, biomimicry, and systems of ecological resilience. “The overarching goal of an ecological society,” Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams write in their new book Creating an Ecological Society, “is to maintain the long-term health of the biosphere while equitably providing for human needs.”30 This is not an impossible task, but it does require the development of science at a higher level—one not simply concerned with mechanical manipulation of the earth and its inhabitants for private gain, but founded on the understanding and concern for the complex collectivities that constitute living systems and human life itself. This requires ecological planning, but that in turn is only possible if social relations also change, reconceiving freedom in terms of needs deeper and wider than those of individual self-interest in a commodity economy.

What this means is that we should not be stampeded by the climate crisis—however catastrophic its likely consequences—into embracing the very same attitudes toward the human relation to the natural world that generated the current unprecedented threats to human civilization. To do so is to seal our fate. We cannot escape the long-term ecological consequences of capitalist development through the Faustian bargain of building more and more nuclear power plants around the globe, or by recklessly injecting sulfur particles into the atmosphere—all for the purpose of infinitely expanding commodity production and capital accumulation. Beyond their technical and economic infeasibility, such plans must be opposed because of the immense, unforeseen repercussions that would inevitably result. To argue, for example, for CCS technology as the primary solution to the climate crisis (there is no question that such technology might play a positive role at some level) is to argue for devoting an immense share of resources to such plants, rivaling in scale the world’s entire existing energy infrastructure, with all sorts of added ecological and social costs and consequences.31

There are better and faster ways of addressing the climate crisis through revolutions in social relations themselves. Moreover, any purportedly socialist approach to environmental problem that focuses only on climate change, ignoring or even rejecting the idea of other planetary boundaries, and sees the solution as purely technological, represents a failure of nerve. It constitutes a refusal to embrace a new, wider realm of freedom, to meet the challenge that historical reality now imposes on us.32 Humanity cannot continue to develop in the twenty-first century without embracing more collective and sustainable forms of production and consumption in line with biospheric realities.

Here it is important to recognize that today’s monopoly-finance capitalism is a system built on waste. The larger part of production is squandered on negative (or specifically capitalist) use values, in such forms as military spending; marketing expenditures; and the inefficiencies, including planned obsolescence, built into every product. The consumption of ever more meaningless and destructive “goods” is offered as a substitute for all those things that people truly want and need.33 Indeed, as Marxist economist Paul A. Baran wrote, “people steeped in the culture of monopoly capitalism do not want what they need and do not need what they want.”34 Beyond the mere physical necessities of food, shelter, clothing, clean water, clean air, and so on, these include love, family, community, meaningful work, education, cultural life, access to the natural environment, and the free and equal development of every person. The capitalist order drastically limits or perverts all of this, creating artificial shortages in essential goods in order to generate a driving desire for non-essentials, all for the purpose of greater profitability and polarization of income and wealth. The United States alone currently spends more than a trillion dollars a year both on the military and on marketing—the latter aimed at inducing people to buy things that they would not otherwise be disposed to purchase.35

There is no doubt that the current planetary ecological crisis requires technological change and innovation. Improvements in solar and wind power and other alternatives to fossil fuels are an important part of the ecological equation. It is not true, however, that all the technologies needed to address the planetary emergency are new, or that technological development alone is the answer. The wonders of smart machines notwithstanding, there is no solution to the global ecological crisis as a whole compatible with capitalist social relations. Any ecological defenses erected in the present must be based on opposition to the logic of capital accumulation. Nor can intervention by the state, acting as a kind of social capitalist, do the trick. Rather, a long ecological revolution adequate to the world’s needs would mean altering the human-social metabolism with nature, countering the alienation of both nature and human labor under capitalism. Above all we must be concerned with maintaining ecological conditions for future generations—the very definition of sustainability.

From this standpoint, a multitude of things can be done now, if humanity mobilizes itself to create an ecological society.36 Given the vast waste inherent in the regime of monopoly-finance capital, which has penetrated into the very structure of production, it is possible to implement forms of revolutionary conservation that both expand the realm of human freedom and allow for rapid readjustment to the necessity imposed by the Earth System crisis. It is far more efficient and feasible to cut carbon emissions drastically than it would be to construct a globe-spanning CCS infrastructure, which would rival or exceed in size the current world energy infrastructure. It would be far more rational to carry out a rapid, revolutionary phase-out of carbon emissions than to risk imposing new threats to the diversity of life and human civilization through attempts to geoengineer the entire planet.

Ecological Marxism offers an opening-up of human freedom and creativity in manifold ways, calling upon humanity as a whole to rebuild its world on ecological foundations in line with the earth itself. Promises of a global technological fix—which becomes more nonsensical if one looks beyond climate change to the numerous planetary boundaries threatened by the capitalist “conquest of nature”—can only lead to elite politics and elite management. It is the ultimate hubris, the final call for the human domination of nature as a means of class domination. Such Promethean views are designed to avoid the reality of the contemporary social and ecological crisis—namely, that revolutionary changes in the existing relations of production are unavoidable. Modernizing the forces of production is not enough; more important is establishing the conditions for sustainable human development. Much can be learned from indigenous and traditional forms of working the land: because human society under capitalism has become alienated from the earth, it follows that less alienated societies offer vital insight into the practice of a more sustainable existence.

Critics on both left and right might reply that it is “too late” for an ecological revolution. The answer to this, as Magdoff and Williams eloquently state, is:

Too late for what? To struggle for a better world means taking the world as it is and working to transform it. Although the ecological and political conditions and trends are in many respects quite desperate, we are not condemned to continue degrading the environment or our social conditions…. A certain amount of global warming will continue regardless of what we do with all of its negative side effects…. However, we can stop the slide to an even more degraded Earth, poorer in species and in the health of remaining species. We can use the vast amount of available human and material resources to reorient the economy to benefit all people. An ecological society will allow us to do all the things that are currently off the table, that capitalism has repeatedly shown itself unable to achieve: providing all people with the ability to develop their full potential.37

But to achieve these things, we will need to break with “business as usual,” that is, with the current logic of capital, and introduce an entirely different logic, aimed at the creation of a fundamentally different social metabolic system of reproduction. To overcome centuries of alienation of nature and human labor, including the treatment of the global environment and most people—divided by class, gender, race, and ethnicity—as mere objects of conquest, expropriation, and exploitation, will require nothing less than a long ecological revolution, one which will necessarily entail victories and defeats and ever-renewed striving, occurring over centuries. It is a revolutionary struggle, though, that must commence now with a worldwide movement toward ecosocialism—one capable from its inception of setting limits on capital. This revolt will inevitably find its main impetus in an environmental proletariat, formed by the convergence of economic and ecological crises and the collective resistance of working communities and cultures—a new reality already emerging, particularly in the global South.38

In the long ecological revolution before us, the world will necessarily proceed from one earthly struggle to another. If the advent of the Anthropocene tells us anything, it is that humanity, through a single-minded pursuit of economic gain benefitting a relative few, is capable of producing a fatal rift in the biogeochemical cycles of the planet. It is time therefore to find another path: one of sustainable human development. This constitutes the entire meaning of revolution in our time.

Notes

1. ↩Francis Bacon,Novum Organum (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 29, 43. On the Baconian “ruse” and Marx’s response, see William Leiss,The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon, 1974). In Latin, as in most languages with gendered nouns, “nature” (natura) is feminine, bringing out the patriarchal aspects of Bacon’s views. For a powerful ecofeminist critique, see Carolyn Merchant,The Death of Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).
2. ↩Karl Marx,Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 334–35, 409–10. Oddly, Michael Löwy quotes this same passage from Marx as a “good example of the sections of Marx’s work that bear witness to an uncritical admiration for the ‘civilizing actions of capitalist production,'” and the overcoming of natural boundaries. Though plausible on its face, Löwy’s position reflects a deep misunderstanding of Marx’s argument, part of a dialectical critique of the Baconian “ruse”—that nature is to be conquered by a kind of subterfuge—and of the general attitudes of bourgeois science. Equally important is the theoretical context in which Marx wrote, namely the dialectic of barriers and boundaries first introduced in Hegel’sLogic. Based on this dialectical understanding, Marx insists that capital is ultimately unable to overcome natural boundaries, even as it temporarily surmounts them by treating them as mere barriers. This overarching contradiction leads to perpetual, recurrent crises. Michael Löwy, “Marx, Engels, and Ecology,”Capitalism Nature Socialism 28, no. 2 (2017):10–21. For a comprehensive treatment of Marx’s argument, see John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’sGrundrisse and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism,” in Marcello Musto, ed.,Karl Marx’s Grundrisse (London: Routledge, 2008), 100–02. See also István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 568.
3. ↩Karl Marx,Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 636–38;Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 754, 911, 949; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
4. ↩Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 460–61.
5. ↩John Bellamy Foster, “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,”Monthly Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 1–20.
6. ↩Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?”Anthropocene Review 3, no. 1 (2015): 67; Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
7. ↩E. P. Thompson,Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 41–80; Rudolf Bahro,Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster (Bath: Gateway, 1994), 19.
8. ↩For the larger theoretical implications of the question of the relation of social relations to forces of production, and its connection to recent disputes in Marxian theory, see John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff, and Robert W. McChesney, “Socialism: A Time to Retreat?”Monthly Review 52, no. 4 (September 2000): 1–7. The concept of “social metabolic reproduction” is central to the work of István Mészáros, beginning with hisBeyond Capital.
9. ↩The notion of a long ecological revolution is meant to draw on Raymond William’s earlier notion of a “long revolution.” For Williams, cultural and ecological materialism were always intertwined, reflecting the long convergence of the Romantic and Marxist traditions. See Williams,The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), andPolitics and Letters (London: New Left, 1979).
10. ↩For critiques of ecological modernization theory, see Richard York and Eugene A. Rosa, “Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization Theory,”Organization and Environment 16, no. 3 (2003): 273–88; John Bellamy Foster, “The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism,”Organization and Environment 25, no. 3 (2012): 211–37; and Jeffrey A. Ewing, “Hollow Ecology: Ecological Modernization Theory and the Death of Nature,”Journal of World-Systems Research 23, no. 1 (2012): 126–55.
11. ↩Trillionthtonne.org.
12. ↩Peter Frase, “By Any Means Necessary,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 81.
13. ↩Leon Trotsky,Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957), 251.
14. ↩Connor Kilpatrick, “Victory Over the Sun,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 22–23.
15. ↩Leigh Phillips,Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2015).
16. ↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 9, 23, 32–33, 39–40, 59–63, 67–68, 88, 132, 217–34, 246–49, 252; Leigh Phillips, “Why Eco-Austerity Won’t Save Us from Climate Change,”Guardian, November 4, 2015. In attacking the notion that Marx developed an ecological critique through his theory of metabolic rift, Phillips claims incorrectly that the concept of metabolism in science is restricted to chemical operations within the body, in isolation from its “exchange” with its environment. He also rejects recent scholarship (beginning with Hal Draper) suggesting that the famous phrase “the idiocy of rural life” in the standard English-language edition of theCommunist Manifesto was a faulty translation. In nineteenth-century usage, the German wordIdiotismus retained the meaning of its Greek origin,idiotes (a private or isolated person) and is more correctly translated as “isolation”—conveying the idea that rural workers were isolated from thepolis. Phillips simply declares that since Marx was not afraid of being politically incorrect he would not have shied away from calling rural workers “idiots” (in the contemporary English-language sense). Here one can only quote Spinoza’s famous phrase: “Ignorance is no argument.”
17. ↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 60, 76, 85, 252–63. It should be noted that “Prometheanism” has two historic meanings. The first, derived from Lucretius, associates the Promethean myth with the Enlightenment and seventeenth-century scientific revolution. The second and more common contemporary meaning, used here, uses it to denote extreme productivism or industrialism. Marx referred to Prometheus in both senses, lauding Epicurus as the Prometheus of the Enlightenment in antiquity, and later criticizing Proudhon for his mechanistic Prometheanism. See Foster,Marx’s Ecology, 10, 59, 126–30.
18. ↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 89, 190, 255.
19. ↩Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 202-03.
20. ↩Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, “Planning the Good Anthropocene,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 133–36; Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 67–68; “The Year of the Good Anthropocene: Top Breakthroughs of 2015,” Breakthrough Institute; “Leigh Phillips, Science Writer and Journalist,” Breakthrough Institute http://thebreakthrough.org/people/profile/leigh-phillips;Ecomodernism Manifesto, 7.
21. ↩Peter Frase,Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (London: Verso, 2016), 91–119. Frase’s notion of “Loving Our Monsters” is taken from Bruno Latour’s article “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children,” Breakthrough Institute, Winter 2012.
22. ↩The most popular geoengineering solution, the injection of sulfur particles into the atmosphere (sometimes euphemistically called “solar radiation management”) is widely regarded in the scientific community as a solution more dangerous that climate change itself, since it would do nothing to stop the build-up of carbon emissions in the atmosphere, while creating whole new planetary dangers. The moment such sulfur injection stopped, climate change would resume on higher levels than ever before, as determined by the higher carbon dioxide concentration in the environment. The dangers of this form of geoengineering include a drier planet with more severe droughts and monsoons, possible erosion of the ozone layer, and disruption of photosynthesis. Further, it would do nothing to mitigate ocean acidification. Cloud brightening, endorsed by Frase, raises similar objections: if done over the Atlantic, it could contribute to the desertification of the Amazon, introducing new global ecological problems without alleviating any of the underlying causes of climate change. Nicolas Jones, “Solar Geoengineering: Weighing the Costs of Blocking the Sun’s Rays,” Yale Environment 360, January 9, 2014, http://e360.yale.edu; Christopher Mims, “‘Albedo Yaughts’ and Marine Clouds: A Cure for Climate Change?”Scientific American, October 21, 2009.
23. ↩Frase, “By Any Means Necessary,” 73–81; Phillips,Austerity Ecology, 105.
24. ↩Daniel Aldana Cohen, “The Last Stimulus,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 83–95.
25. ↩Christian Parenti, “If We Fail,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 114–27; “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis,”Dissent (Summer 2013);Tropic of Chaos (New York: Nation, 2012); Andy Skuce, “‘We’d Have to Finish One New Facility Every Working Day for the Next 70 Years’—Why Carbon Capture is No Panacea,”Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 4, 2016; “The Quest for CCS,” Corporate Knights, January 6, 2016, http://corporateknights.com; Vaclav Smil, “Global Energy: The Latest Infatuations,”American Scientist 99 (May–June 2011): 219.
26. ↩Angela Nagle, “We Gave Greenpeace a Chance,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 130–31. One might think that Parenti’s references to the Venus Syndrome would leave him open to charges of “catastrophism.” But such criticisms are seldom levelled at those taking ecomodernist stances, precisely because they tend to present ready-made technological solutions that minimize challenges to the status quo.
27. ↩Branko Marcetic, “People Make the World Go Round,”Jacobin 26 (2017): 106–07; Jonah Walters, “Beware Your Local Food Cooperative,”Jacobin (Summer 2017): 137–38.
28. ↩Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25, 105.
29. ↩Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25, 461–63.
30. ↩Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 247.
31. ↩Carbon capture technology is most likely to be effective in the form of bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
32. ↩The conception of freedom as the recognition of necessity is fundamental to Marxist theory. It was first introduced in Hegel’sLogic and was incorporated into the materialist conception of history by Engels inAnti-Dühring. See Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25, 105–06.
33. ↩John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy,”Monthly Review 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 1–16.
34. ↩Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 30.
35. ↩On military spending, see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,”Monthly Review 60, no. 5 (October 2008): 1–19. On marketing, see Michael Dawson,The Consumer Trap(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1. The total quantities of both military spending and marketing have increased massively in the years since these works were written.
36. ↩On the possibilities presented by an ecological revolution, see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 124–33; Magdoff and Williams,Creating an Ecological Society, 283–329.
37. ↩Magdoff and Williams,Creating an Ecological Society, 309–10.
38. ↩On the concept of the environmental proletariat, see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 398–99, 440–41.

Caste In Indian History, Irfan Habib

Caste In Indian History,

Irfan Habib

[“Caste in Indian History” is a brilliant essay on the evolution of caste in India, written by renowned Marxist historian Prof. Irfan Habib. It is the text of the Inaugural D.D. Kosambi Memorial Lecture delivered in Bombay in March 1985, and was published in Prof. Habib’s book ‘Caste and Money in Indian History’ (1987). It was reproduced in the collection of Prof. Habib’s essays titled ‘Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception’ (1995), published by Tulika Books, New Delhi. Anticaste.in republishes this classic essay with the author’s permission, for the benefit of a larger readership. The text is from the seventh reprint (2007) of ‘Essays in Indian History’.]

Caste is the most characteristic — and many would say, unique — social institution of India. No interpretation of our history and culture can demand a hearing unless it encompasses the caste system. One of the abiding achievements of D.D. Kosambi’s scholarship was his ability to unite a lively spirit of anthropological investigation with a critical analysis of historical evolution. I hope that by choosing the role of caste in Indian history as the theme of this lecture, I may be able to touch on some of Kosambi’s most valuable insights.

Any such endeavour must, first, come to grips with the problem of definition. It is not surprising that this should be difficult, but perhaps a working definition could still be attempted to serve us as a point of departure. Caste, we may say, is a fairly well-marked, separate community, whose individual members are bound to each other through endogamy (and hypergamy), and very often also by a common hereditary profession or duty, actual or supposed. Many sociologists, however, appear to regard this definition as quite insufficient. They would add that we must also stipulate the existence of a perception of the rank of one caste in relation to other castes, a ranking which finds expression in the degree of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’ of the other castes in relation to one’s own, and in specific rites and practices followed by, or assigned to, each caste.[1] Louis Dumont, in his Homo Hierarchicus [2] considers, as the very title of the work shows, the hierarchical principle to be the very core and heart of the caste system; without it, there would be no caste.

Whether we should follow the very simple definition we have suggested, or the kind of definition that Dumont would approve of is not a mere matter of semantics: it is of crucial importance for understanding the history of our civilisation. I, therefore crave the reader’s indulgence for examining Dumont’s views in some detail.

To Dumont the caste system must be understood in terms of its essential religious (‘Hindu’) ideology, which pervades all the immense variety that it displays. It is reflected in the endless, complex, even conflicting, arrangements of ranks, the highest belonging always to the Brahmans, who are the ‘purest’ and command much of its ritual.[3] The ranking does not originate in, or correspond to, the actual distribution of power or wealth, but arises, so to speak, out of the basic elaboration of the basic principle of purity or pollution. Thus neither are castes ‘an extreme’ form of classes,[4] nor is the caste system a system of social stratification: it need not, and does not, correspond to the distribution of wealth or power.[5] Dumont insists that caste must be understood as ‘part of the whole’ (a favourite phrase of his), which means that the entire society must be divided up among castes, and there must be no significant residue. Thus, in effect, caste must exist as the sole or dominant form of social organisation, or not exist at all.[6]

If all this is to be accepted, if, that is, caste arose out of an ideology of ‘purity’ unfolding as an elaboration of hierarchy on the basis of relative ‘purity’, without any reference to economic phenomenon, then the economic impulse within Indian society must surely have been very weak. Further, if the caste system has given India an unchanging hierarchy, India can have had no history that one may recognise as such. Both these positions Dumont readily espouses.

‘I would like to raise, he says, ‘the very question of the applicability to traditional India of the very category of economics.’ He points, in justification, to the ‘elementary’ fact that ‘even in our own [western] society it was only at the end of eighteenth century that economics appeared as a distinct category, independent of politics’.[7] The argument is so illogical that one hesitates over whether one has understood Dumont aright. The fact that there was at one time no science of sociology does not mean that there have been no societies before the arrival of that science; similarly, because economics did not exist as a science before the eighteenth century, one is not excluded from speaking of the economic factors behind the English Civil War, or any other earlier historical process or event.

So too is India to be deprived of history:

The indifference to time, to happening, to history, in Indian literature and civilisation in general, makes the historian’s task very hard- But under these conditions, is there a history of India in a sense comparable to that in which there is a history of Christian civilisation or even [!] China? [8]

In other words, shall we say, no biography can be written of anyone who has not authored an autobiography!

Dumont offers here and there examples of how one can interpret India’s ‘non-history’. The most impressive example is his exposition of the rise and fall of Buddhism. The ideology of the caste system, he says, requires individuals’ renunciation of society.[9] Some of ‘the renouncers’ begin competing with the Brahmanas. Out of such competition, the Buddhists and the Jainas expounded the doctrine of ahimsa and condemned animal slaughter and meat eating as polluting acts. This led the Brahmanas to give up animal sacrifice and stress vegetarianism to a greater or more systematic degree than even their challengers.[10] The Buddhists were thus thwarted, vegetarianism became yet another symbol of purity, and the Brahmanas slept more easily until the next round of renouncers (e.g., the Lingaits) came round with some other eccentric competing propositions. Kosambi may point to the shift from pastoralism to agriculture, R.S. Sharma to the rise of towns and growth of commerce, in order to explain the success of early Buddhism; but their attempts are vain. The only factor behind it was a more successful appeal to the ‘idiom of purity’; and what made such an appeal at all possible was, again, the phenomenon of ‘renunciation’.

If such is to be history of India, to fit a contemporary western sociologist’s image of the caste system, is it not more likely that there is something wrong with this image rather than with Indian history? It may, in fact, well be that there is a good historical explanation for Dumont’s excessively narrow view of caste. During the last hundred years and more, the hereditary division of labour has been greatly shaken, if not shattered.[11] As a result, this aspect has increasingly receded into the background within the surviving domain of caste.[12] The purely religious and personal aspects have, however, been less affected. (One can see that this is by no means specific to India: religious ideology survives long after the society for which the particular religion had served as a rationalisation has disappeared.) It is obviously tempting to take the caste system’s surviving elements (mainly religious) as the sole or crucial elements, and the declining aspects (economic) as secondary and even superfluous. Dumont not only falls to the temptation, he builds a whole theoretical structure on a false premise to explain what India is. But then what he postulates about the hierarchical man in India is, perhaps, as difficult to accept as his other belief that western society today is ‘egalitarian’.

II

If then, Homo Hierarchichus fails to convert us, from where are we to begin? I think it is important to use the approach that Kosambi explicitly and consistently followed, the one that was introduced by Karl Marx. Caste should be viewed primarily in its role in different social formations that have arisen in a chain of sequence. A social formation, in so far as it is based on the form of the ‘labour process’, arises after the producers in society are able to provide a ‘surplus’. It is vain to expect a social institution like caste to exist before this stage has arrived. Indeed, Dumont himself recognises this, for he admits that the emergence of castes presupposes division of labour which cannot be found in primitive societies.[13] The purusasukta in the Rigveda, the original statement for the four varnas, is more a description of social classes than of castes: the rajanyas, aristocracy, the brahmanas, priests, the vis, people at large (mainly peasants), and the sudras, springing from the dasyus, servile communities. There is no hint yet in Vedic times of either a hereditary division of labour or any form of endogamy. The varnas thus initially presaged very little of the caste system that was to grow later.

Kosambi, in An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, offers the view that castes did not arise out of any internal division of the varnas in the original Vedic society, but from an external process altogether: ‘The entire course of Indian history shows tribal elements being fused into a general society. This phenomenon . . . lies at the very foundation of the most striking Indian social feature, namely, caste.’[14] For this insight one can adduce confirmation from the use of the word jati. When the Buddha is spoken of as belonging to the Sakya jati the word obviously means a tribe. When, in the same literature, we also read of ‘excellent as well as low’ jatis, castes are clearly implied.[15] Tribes are often rigorously endogamous: thus the Buddha’s story of the Sakya brothers who married their own sisters in order to avoid marrying outside the tribe.[16] Can we suppose that as the tribes entered the ‘general society’, they carried their endogamous customs into that society? If the tribe was already an agricultural community, it would simply turn into the peasant caste of its territory.

However, the tribes ‘entering the general society’ would include a large number of primitive hunting or food-gathering tribes living in forests, who would be subjugated by the advancing peasant communities. This may be illustrated by the struggle between the Sakyas and Kolis.[17] Kosambi has a long passage on the Nagas, the forest folk, who retreat before the Aryan advance, but leave their traces behind in brahmanical lore and later Vedic ritual.[18] As the food-gatherers were subjugated they were reduced to the lowest jatis, so low as to be outside the four varnas altogether.[19] The enumeration of the ‘mixed jatis’ in the Manusmriti shows a preponderance of such communities: the Sair Andhra ensnare animals, the Kawarta are boatmen; the Nisadas pursue fishing; the Medas, Andhras, Chunchus and Madgus live off the ‘slaughter of wild animals’; the Kshattris, Ugras and Pukkasas by ‘catching and killing [animals] living in holes’; the Karavara and Dhigvanas by working in leather; and the Pandusopaka by dealing in cane (Manu, X, 32, 34, 36-37, 48-49). The Chandalas and Nisadas both appear as hunters in Buddhist texts. These were the original ‘untouchable’ castes.[20] Since they were excluded from taking to agriculture, and their own original or altered occupations were of minor or seasonal importance, they became a large reservoir of unfree, servile landless labour available for work at the lowest cost to the peasants as well as superior landholders. It is difficult to avoid the view that the bitter hostility which the rest of the population has displayed for these menial jatis had derived from this fundamental conflict of interest. Concepts of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ were a rationalisation of this basic economic fact.

The separation of the peasant and menial jatis represents a division of labour in a very generalised form. But R.S. Sharma has called attention to a second urban revolution (the first being represented by the Harappan culture) which took place on the eve of the rise of Buddhism.[21] This implies that a multiplicity of productive skills must have developed. Gordon Childe has stressed the importance of ‘new tools and labour-saving devices, such as hinged tongs, shears, scythes, rotary querns’ for the emergence of ‘a number of new full-time specialists’.[22] Some of these tools (shears, rotary querns) appear by the first century AD at Taxila.[23] The Jatakas introduce us to the ‘manufacturers’ villages’, peopled by smiths and carpenters.[24] It is possible that tribes brought wholesale into the general society began to throw off splinters under the pressure of the emerging division of labour. Different craftsmen isolated from the original tribe were formed into specific jatis. Thus Manu (X, 47-48) includes among the ‘mixed jatis’ those of carpenters, charioteers and physicians. A similar process of differentiation, based on the growth of commerce, led to the mercantile castes, which are quite prominent in the Jatakas. In time, they would make the vaisya varna exclusively their own.

The position of the brahmanas in the caste framework derived naturally enough from their priestly functions, and their guardianship of the dharma protecting the caste system. Kosambi suggests that part of their position also derived from their grasp of the calendar, which was so essential for regulating agricultural operations.[25]

The one segment of caste structures most vulnerable to change was that of the ruling and warrior class, the kshatriyas (rajanyas). Invasions and rebellions made a hereditary monopoly of armed power extremely difficult, as the Puranas amply bear witness to. Thus where, logically, the caste system should have been strongest, in actual terms, it was the weakest- namely, in the stability of the ruling community. The entire caste structure has thus supposed a system of exploitation whose major beneficiaries, by its own terms, have so often been usurpers or outsiders.

III

Almost everyone seems agreed that in universalising the caste system within India, Brahmanas have played a key role, and that by integrating the caste doctrine into the dharma, brahmanas made the caste system and brahmanism inseparable. One result of these assumptions has been that the role of Buddhism in the process of caste formation has often escaped notice.

To anyone who reads Kautilya’s Arthasastra with its heavy stress on the varna system, and then turn to Asoka’s edicts, the contrast is a striking one. The word varna (or jati) never appears in Asoka’s texts; obedience to the varna rules does not form even implicitly a part of the dharma that Asoka propagated and whose principles he inscribed on rock and pillars. In so far as Buddhism rejected the religious supremacy of the brahmanas, it necessarily questioned the legitimacy of the varna division inherited from the Vedas.

And yet it may be asked whether Buddhism did not have its own contribution to make to the development of the caste system. The karma doctrine, or the belief in the transmigration of souls which formed the bedrock of Buddhist philosophy, was an ideal rationalisation of the caste system, creating a belief in its equity even among those who were its greatest victims. In the Manusmriti (XI, 24-26) it already appears as a firm part of the caste doctrine.

Second, there was the stress on ahimsa. Kosambi attributed the stress on avoidance of animal killing in Buddhism to the irrationality of large scale slaughter of livestock for sacrifice by Brahmanas, once settled agriculture had replaced pastoralism.[26] Kosambi did not of course, intend to disparage the sincerity of the Buddha’s disapproval of violence or cruelty (and, after all, Asoka condemned the massacres by his army in Kalinga).[27] What he implied was that any criticism of the large scale animal sacrifices would be popular among the ‘cattle raising vaisya’. But I would like respectfully to suggest what seems to me to be a more plausible reason why ahimsa should have become a popular doctrine. It provided reason for the subjugation and humiliation of the food-gathering communities. The Asokan edicts contain injunctions against hunting and fishing,[28] and the Buddhist texts look down on ‘animal-killing jatis’ as much as the brahmanical texts do.

Indeed, here Buddhism also contributed to the ultimate denigration of the peasantry in the varna structure. R.S. Sharma’s exposition of how the sudra and not the vaisya varna came to be regarded as the category to which peasants must belong is practically definitive.[29] In this denigration the ahimsa doctrine too was made to play was part. Manu (X, 84) condemns the use of plough for the injury that its iron point causes to living creatures. This is echoed in later Buddhism; I-tsing says that the Buddha forbade monks from engaging in cultivation because this involved ‘destroying lives by ploughing and watering field’.[30]

It would, therefore, be wrong to suppose that the caste ideology has been exclusively brahmanical in its development.

IV

The period from the rise of Buddhism (c. 500 BC) to the Gupta age (fourth and fifth centuries AD) may, then, be supposed to be the period of the formation of the caste system and its supporting ‘ideology’. It is significant that outsiders were struck not by the ‘hierarchy’ of the system, but by its hereditary occupations. Megasthenes (c. 300 BC), with his listing of the seven castes, and Yuan Chwang, both make unqualified statements in this respect, as do later foreign observers like Babur and Bernier.[31]

Being a relatively rigid form of division of labour, the caste system formed part of the relations of production. But the caste system operated in two different worlds of labour, and these two must be distinguished in order to better understand both the caste system and the social formation of which it was a part. Marx derived a very important insight from Richard Jones, when he distinguished the artisan maintained by the village and the artisan of the town, wholly dependent on the vagaries of the market. In one case the caste labour belonged to a natural economy, in the other to a commodity or monetised sector.[32]

Those who are familiar with Marx’s writing on the Indian village community may remember that he locates the base of its economy on two opposite elements existing side by side: ‘the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits’, limiting thereby the domain of exchange within the village, and ‘an unalterable division of labour’, with the artisans and menials belonging to particular castes as servants of the village as a whole, maintained through customary payments in kind or land allotments, dispensing, again, with commodity exchange.[33] Max Weber gave to this kind of caste-determined labour the name of demiurgical labour.

Modern sociologists since W.H. Wiser have been sprinkling cold water on this view. To them, the actual system was not of demiurgical labour, but the jajmani system, that is, a system of the artisans serving only particular families. For Louis Dumont, as one would expect, it becomes immediately a matter of a ritualistic relationship between certain upper caste families and the ‘purity’ specialists, viz. the brahmana and the barber, which was then extended to relationships with other artisans and labouring castes. So, we are told: ‘In the last analysis, the division of labour shows not a more or less gratuitous juxtaposition of religious and non-religious or “economic” tasks, but both the religious basis and the religious expression of interdependence. Further it deduces interdependence from religion.’[34] Dumont has apparently let his edition run on without paying much attention to current historical work. In 1972 Hiroshi Fukazawa published the results of his investigations in the eighteenth century records, in which Maharashtra is so rich. His definite conclusion, closely based on documentary evidence, was that the jajmani theory was applicable only to the family priesthood; the traditional twelve balutas (carpenter, smith, potter, leather-worker, barber, etc.) were basically village servants, paid through land allotments (watan) and out of peasant crops. So strong is Fukazawa’s evidence[35] that he is led to the perceptive comment that if modern village artisans appear to be servants of certain families alone, this is due to the decay of the old system under modern conditions.

Historical evidence for the village servants in fact goes back to a fairly early period. Kosambi cites epigraphic evidence attesting to carpenters’ plots in north Indian villages going back to the fifth century.[36] Similarly, B.N.S. Yadava draws attention to the Lekhapaddati documents (Gujarat, c. 1000), which speak of the five village artisans (pancha karuka), viz. the carpenter, ironsmith, potter, barber and washerman, entitled to receive handfuls of grains from the peasant.[37] The balahar, or the village menial, appears as the lowliest landholder in Barani’s account of Alauddin Khalji’s taxation measures (early fourteenth century).[38]

The hereditary artisan and servant, thus, was of crucial importance in sustaining the self-sufficiency as well as the internal natural economy of the village. Such self-sufficiency not only isolated the village, but enlarged its capacity to deliver a larger part of the surplus to the ruling class, since it did not need much extra produce to exchange for its own imports.

As the surplus was taken out of the village, it entered the realm of commodity exchange, as Marx particularly noted in his classic passage (already cited) on the Indian village community in Capital, Volume 1. Outside the village the artisan appears as an individual selling his wares on the market. The hereditary occupation by caste was necessary to enable ‘special skill’ to be ‘accumulated from generation to generation’.[39] The hereditary transmission sustained skill while excluding even horizontal mobility. In addition, the caste system possibly created another element of advantage for the ruling class, by giving a lowly status to many artisan castes. Artisan castes already appear among the mixed jatis in Manu; and in the eleventh century Alberuni classes eight professions, including those of weavers and shoemakers, among the outcaste antyajas.[40] Their depressed status and lack of mobility must surely have helped to curtail the powers of resistance of the artisans and so to keep wage costs low.

The caste system, in its classic form, could therefore function with as much ease in a natural economy as in a market-oriented one. In either case it helped essentially to maintain not a fabric of imagined purity (if it did, this was incidental), but a system of class exploitation as rigorous as any other.

V

In many ways the beginning of thirteenth century marks a ‘break’ in Indian history. This break arises not only from the intrusion of Islam: we begin to see a social formation which is at last close to Marx’s ‘Oriental despotism’ as against the preceding age of ‘Indian feudalism’ delineated by Kosambi and R.S. Sharma. We must, however, allow for a much larger extent of commodity production and urbanisation than Marx seems to have visualised for pre-colonial India.

The caste structure in both villages and towns continued essentially to be the same as in the earlier period. As will be seen from what we have said in the foregoing section, the evidence for hereditary caste labour in villages and towns is practically continuous from ancient India to the eighteenth century. It is true that Islam in its law recognises differences based only upon free man and slave (and man and woman); caste, therefore, is alien to its legal system. Nevertheless, the attitude of the Muslims towards the caste system was by no means one of disapprobation. When in 711-14, the Arabs conquered Sind, their commander Mohammad Ibn Qasim readily approved all the constraints placed upon the Jatts under the previous regime, very similar to those prescribed for the Chandalas by the Manusmriti.[41] Muslim censures of Hinduism throughout the medieval period centre round its alleged polytheism and idol worship, and never touch the question of the inequity of caste. The only person who makes a mild criticism of it is the scientist (and not theologian) Alberuni (c. 1030) who said: ‘We Muslims, of course, stand entirely on the other side of the question, considering all men as equal, except in piety.’[42] But such an egalitarian statement is almost unique; the fourteenth century historian Barani in his Tarikh-i iruz-Shahi fervently craved for a hierarchical order based on birth, although he was thinking in terms of class, rather than of castes, and does not appeal to the Hindu system as a suitable example.

In so far as the caste system helped, as we have seen, to generate larger revenues from the village and lower the wage costs in the cities, the Indo-Muslim regimes had every reason to protect it, however indifferent, if not hostile, they might have been to Brahmanas as the chief idol-worshippers. (Does not this also mean that the supremacy of the Brahmanas was by no means essential for the continuance of the caste system?) Nevertheless, the caste system had to undergo certain adjustments and changes, which must be recognised as important, not as a result of the policy of the Sultans, but of the new circumstances.

In the first place, the new ruling classes and their dependents brought not only demand for new products and new kinds of services, from their central and west Asian backgrounds, but also a fairly wide range of new craft technology. Kosambi, with his usual perceptiveness, spoke of the ‘Islamic raiders — breaking hidebound custom in the adoption and transmission of new techniques’.[43] Among the technological devices which came early (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) were right-angled gearing (for the final form of the Persian wheel), the spinning wheel, paper manufacture, vault construction, use of bitumen and lime-cement, iron horse-shoe, and so on.[44] These necessitated, in some cases, the creation of new professions (e.g., paper-makers, lime-mixers) and, in others, the learning of new devices; in general, one can postulate the need for a considerable expansion of the artisan population, to accompany what, in fact, may be designated the third ‘urban revolution’ in Indian history.

The pressure of the new circumstances led initially to large scale slave- trading and the emergence of slave labour as a significant component of urban labour during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The numbers of slaves in the Sultan’s establishments were very high (50,000 under Alauddin Khalji, and 1,80,000 under Firuz Tughluq). Barani judges the level of prices by referring to slave prices, and the presence of slaves was almost all-pervasive. Slaves were, in effect, deprived of caste and, converted to Islam, could be put to almost any task or learn any trade. Manumitted in course of time, they probably created, along with artisan immigrants, the core of many Muslim artisan and labouring communities. There was also in time a conversion of free elements, possibly in many cases sections of castes splitting off from their parent bodies in search of higher status or willing to take to occupations of practices not permitted to them previously. There thus arose, in course of time, a substantial Muslim population.[45]

Caste undoubtedly continued to exercise its influence on these communities. To judge from their practices as reported since the nineteenth century, weavers, butchers, barbers and others had strong tendencies to be endogamous. The menial castes duplicated themselves as kamin communities among Muslims, not untouchable but still kept separate and held in contempt. Nonetheless, it would still be correct to say that sectors of Muslim populations remained outside the caste framework even in its most rudimentary form; and in any case, the framework remained weak, since both shifts of occupation and deviations from endogamy could occur.[46] In other words, there was always a much greater degree of mobility.

It is questionable whether the presence of such relatively caste- free populations at all undermined the caste system. Such populations might indeed have reinforced it by providing reserve labour for new professions or occupations without causing any disruptions to the structure of existing castes. But it is also doubtful whether the caste system was so completely devoid of capacity for mobility as has been assumed by Max Weber. Morris D. Morris in a notable paper argues that in actual practice the caste system has been vastly different from how one thinks it should have operated on the basis of the law book — or what Dumont calls its ‘ideology’.[47] Castes divided to enable one section to take to new professions: Fukuzawa draws attention to a well-documented caste from eighteenth century Maharashtra, where a section of tailors took to dyeing and yet another to indigo-dyeing and set up as endogamous sub-castes.[48] A historically singular case is that of the Jatts, a pastoral Chandala-like tribe in eighth century Sind, who attained Sudra status by the eleventh century (Alberuni), and had become peasants par excellence (of vaisya status) by the seventeenth century (Dabistani-i Mazahib).[49] The shift to peasant agriculture was probably accompanied by a process of ‘sanskritisation’, a process which continued, when, with the Jat rebellion of the seventeenth century, as section of the Jats began to aspire to the position of zamindars and the status of Rajputs.

Moreover, where sanskritisation failed or was too slow a process, hearing began to be given to monotheistic movements, which condemned the ‘ideology’ of the caste system. It may be that the monotheistic belief of Islam and the legal equality of the Muslim community exercised a certain influence on these movements. But their stress on equality and condemnation of caste and ritual observance was certainly much greater than is to be found in any contemporary Islamic preaching. Most of its great teachers belonged to the low jatis: Namdev, a calico printer; Kabir, a weaver; Raidas, a scavenger; Sain, a barber; Dadu, a cotton-carder; Dhanna, a Jat peasant. In beautiful verse, composed in the name of Dhanna Jat, the fifth Guru of the Sikhs (Arjun) insists on God’s special grace for such lowly worshippers.

In these communities (panths) the doors were open to people of all castes. The Satnami sect (which arose in the seventeenth century, with some allegiance to Kabir), contained goldsmiths, carpenters, sweepers and tanners, according to one account,[50] and peasants and traders of small capital, according to another.[51] The Sikh community in the seventeenth century consisted in bulk of Jat peasantry; early in the next century, the complaint was being made that authority could be given among them to ‘the lowliest sweeper and tanner, filthier than whom there is no race in Hindustan’.[52] The practices of these panths forbade caste distinctions within the community, and, there was a tendency in the communities, as with the Satnamis, amongst whom this was prescribed by scripture, to become endogamous.[53] The net result was the creation of religious communities which drew their following from the caste framework but which ultimately returned to that framework though usually at a higher ‘rank’ than at the time of their departure from it. This had happened before, as in the case of the Lingayats in Karnataka; and these movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries similarly made necessary adjustments in the caste system, without however subverting it.

The caste system, therefore, remained an important pillar of the system of class exploitation in medieval India. As we have said before, its chief beneficiaries could only be the ruling classes; in the medieval case, these were, first, the nobility and, second, the rural superior class, the zamindars. To the extent that the political structure was sustained by the zamindars, caste again was important, since the zamindars, by and large, belonged to the ‘dominant castes’ which maintained their position by force. It is worth remembering that when Abu-l Fazl in his detailed statistical tables of the Mughal Empire in the A’in-i Akbari (1595-96) gives the caste of zamindars of each locality, this information is followed not by the area of land they held but by the numbers of their retainers, horse and foot.[54] There was, therefore, an undoubted connection between caste dominance and military power.

Barrington Moore Jr expresses some surprise that in his detailed descriptions of the Mughal Indian economy, W.H. Moreland should have had so little to say on caste.[55] This applies to some of my own work as well, the reason, perhaps, is that when one looks at the specific relations, such as those of the peasant and the tax appropriator, or the petty producer and the merchant, caste is not immediately visible. What it did mainly was to provide a large part of the setting for these relations. It divided the agrarian classes into two antagonistic camps, the caste peasants and the menial labourers; and it stabilised the division of labour in petty production. But it is questionable if these functions were crucial enough for us to propound that caste defined the form of the labour process in medieval India (c. 1200-1750). The factors of mobility and competition were present to a certain degree, as we have seen. Iran was very similar to India in its economic and political organisation in medieval times, but without the benefit of the caste system. Can we nevertheless say that Mughal India and Safavid Iran belonged to two separate social formations, just because one had caste and the other lacked it? Any comment on the matter can at present be only tentative, and one may look forward hopefully to more discussion on the subject.

But one final word, before we leave the question of caste in medieval India. Any class formation like medieval Indian society was bound to generate internal tensions, finding expression notably in the struggles of the oppressed. India has a history of peasant uprisings, going back to the revolt of the buffalo-riding Kaivartas of Bengal in eleventh century.[56] But it is from the seventeenth century that we get perhaps the richest evidence of peasant uprisings. One great weakness of these uprisings, when compared with those of Europe or china, is the rebels’ extremely backward class consciousness. Peasant rebels appear as zamindars’ followers (Marathas), or members of religious communities (Sikhs, Satnamis) or of castes or tribes (Jats, Afghans); they fail to see themselves as peasants or to raise economic or social demands for any section of the peasants. It seems to me that caste provides part of the reason for this failure. It prevented peasants of one caste from finding common ground with those of another, and so all the time undermined the growth of self-awareness of the peasantry as a class.

VI

The history of caste in the foregoing pages has been brought close enough to modern times. I do not intend to pursue it further, but a few concluding remarks may still be offered.

In 1853, discussing the results of British rule, Marx predicted that ‘modern industry, resulting from the railway system will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labour upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.’ It has become customary to deride this statement (vide Louis Dumont) as having been too optimistic.[57] But it will be futile to deny that modern conditions have gravely shaken the economic basis of the caste system. This is not only because workers of several castes come together on the factory bench; and once this happens the traditional division of labour begins to collapse. Even more important has been the fact that industrial production has destroyed the crafts of a whole series of professional or artisanal castes. This process began with the import of Lancashire cloth, even before Marx was writing. The basis of the caste division of labour has weakened due to one further factor. As Surendra J. Patel has pointed out, commercialisation of agriculture has converted large numbers of peasants into landless labourers, so that no longer does landlessness remain a monopoly of the ‘menial’ castes, though they still form in most areas its largest contingent.[58]

But if the economic base of the caste system has been shaken, can the same be said of its ideology? Endogamy continues to reinforce caste; and there has been a process of territorial enlargement of castes through mutual identification and absorption. ‘Sanskritisation’, which modernisation at one level strongly fosters, converts the erstwhile victims of the system into its votaries. So long as the conflict of interest between landless labour and landholding classes remains, there is an incentive for all castes to combine against the untouchables, whom we euphemistically call the scheduled castes. Caste still remains perhaps the single most important divisive factor in our country.

For all those who wish to see the Indian people united in a struggle for their material and spiritual liberalisation, it is of utmost importance that there be a renewed effort to eradicate the sway that caste continues to hold over the minds of our people. What Marx called the decisive impediment to Indian progress could only then be removed, and caste at last relegated to history, to which it properly belongs.

Notes

[1] See J.H. Hutton, Caste in India, fourth edition, Bombay, 1969 (reprint), p. 71 and passim.

[2] All my references are to the Paladin edition, London, 1972.

[3] Homo Hierarchicus, p. 300. (‘Hierarchy culminates in the Brahman.’)

[4] Ibid., pp. 288ff.

[5] Ibid., p. 300.

[6] Ibid., pp. 262, 274. Accordingly, to Dumont, ‘Hindus and Muslims form two distinct societies’ (p. 257).

[7] Ibid., p. 209.

[8] Ibid., p. 242

[9] Ibid., pp. 230-231.

[10] Ibid., pp. 192-95.

[11] Dumont shows an almost total lack of awareness of this development in his remarks on the unchanging caste framework. Ibid., pp. 265-66.

[12] So Dumont can now say: ‘In the caste system the politico-economic aspects are relatively secondary and isolated’. Ibid., p. 283.

[13] Ibid., pp. 260, 331-32. Compare Kosambi’s dictum that ‘caste is class on a primitive level of production’. Culture and Civilization of Ancient India in Historical Outline, London, 1965, p. 50.

[14] D.D. Kosambi in An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Bombay, 1956, p. 25.

[15] Narendra Wagle, Society of the Time of the Buddha, Bombay, 1966, pp. 122-23.

[16] Ibid., pp. 103-4.

[17] Kosambi, Introduction, p. 122.

[18] Ibid., pp. 121-23.

[19] See Kosambi, Culture and Civilization of Ancient India, p. 15.

[20] See Vivekanand Jha in Indian Historical Review (IHR), II(1), pp. 22-23.

[21] R.S. Sharma’s review of A. Ghosh, The City in Early Historical India (Simla, 1973), in IHR, I (1), pp. 98-103.

[22] V. Gordon Childe, Social Evolution, edited by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, 1963, p. 110.

[23] See Sir John Marshall, Taxila, II, Cambridge, 1952, pp. 486 (rotary querns) and 555 (scissors).

[24] R. Fick, The Social Organization of North East India in Buddha’s Time, English translation, Calcutta, 1920, pp. 280-85.

[25] Kosambi, Introduction, pp. 236-37.

[26] Ibid., pp. 158-59.

[27] Recorded on Rock Edict XIII.

[28] Especially P.E.V. and the bilingual Qandahar inscription.

[29] R.S. Sharma, Sudras in Ancient India, Delhi, 1958, especially pp. 232-34.

[30] A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago, translated by J. Takakusu, Oxford, 1986, p. 62.

[31] For Megasthenes see R.C. Majumdar, The Classical Accounts of India, Calcutta, 1960, pp. 224-26, 263-68; Yuan Chwang, Buddhist Records of the Western World, I, translated by S. Beal, London, 1884, p. 82; Babur, Baburnama, translated by A.S. Beveridge, London, 1921, p. 520; Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, 1655-68, translated by A. Constable, edited by V.A. Smith, Oxford, 1916, p. 259.

[32] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. III, English translation, Moscow, 1971, p. 435.

[33] Capital, I, edited by Dona Torr, translated by Moore and Aveling, London, 1938, p. 351.

[34] Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, p. 150.

[35] H. Fukazawa, ‘Rural Servants in the Eighteenth Century Maharashtrian Village – Demiurgic or Jajmani System’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics (HJE), XII(2), 1972, pp. 14-40.

[36] Kosambi, Introduction, p. 312.

[37] B.N.S. Yadava, Society and Culture in Northern India in the Twelfth Century, Allahabad, 1973, p. 267.

[38] Ziauddin Barani, Tarikh-I Firuz-Shahi, edited by S.A. Khan, W.N. Lees and Kabiruddin, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1860-62, p. 287. On balahar, see H.M. Elliot, Memoirs of the History, Folklore and Distribution of Races in the North-Western Provinces, II, edited by John Beames, London, 1869, p. 249; and Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, pp. 120-21.

[39] Marx, Capital, I, pp. 331-32.

[40] Edward C. Sachau, Alberuni’s India, I, London, 1910, p. 101.

[41] Anonymous, Chachanama, Persian version of the thirteenth century, edited by U-Daudpota, Hyderabad-Dn., 1939, pp. 214-16 (also see pp. 47-48). A later Arab Governor insisted that the Jatts should, as mark of identification, be always accompanied by dogs. See Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, I, London, 1867, p. 129.

[42] Alberuni’s India, I, p. 100.

[43] Kosambi, Introduction, p. 370.

[44] See Irfan Habib, ‘Changes in Technology in Medieval India’, Studies in History, II, NO. I (1980), pp. 15-39.

[45] This paragraph is based on evidence already presented by me in Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 89-93, where detailed references to sources will be found.

[46] See D. Ibberson’s remarks on conditions in western Punjab ‘where Islam has largely superseded Brahminism’, Punjab Castes, Lahore, 1916, pp. 10-11.

[47] Morris D. Morris, ‘Values as an Obstacle to Economic Growth in South Asia,’ Journal of Economic History (JEH), XXVII, pp. 588-607.

[48] HJE, IX(1), (1968), pp. 39ff.

[49] This evidence is examined in my paper ‘Jatts of Punjab and Sind’, Punjab Past and Present: Essays in Honour of Dr Ganda Singh, edited by Harbans Singh and N.G. Barrier, Patiala, 1976, pp. 92-103.

[50] Saqi Musta’idd Khan, Ma’asir-I Alamgiri, edited by Agha Ahmad Ali, Calcutta, 1870-73, pp. 14-15.

[51] Khafi Khan, Muntakhabu’l Lubab, edited by Kabiruddin Ahmad, Calcutta, 1860-70, Vol. II, p. 252.

[52] Muhammad Shafi Warid, Miratu’l Waridat, British Library (London), MS., Add. 6579, f. 117b.

[53] The Satnami scripture, containing these injunctions, is titled Pothi Gyan Bani Sadh Satnami, and is preserved in Royal Asiatic Library, London, MS. Hind. No copy is known.

[54] This point is lost in Jarrett’s translation of the A’in-i Akbari, since the translator has altered the arrangement of the columns. See my Agrarian System of Mughal India, Bombay, 1963, p. 139.

[55] Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1977, pp. 317-18 n.

[56] R.S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism, second edition, Delhi, 1980, p. 220.

[57] Homo Hierarchicus, p. 265.

[58] Surendra J. Patel, Agricultural Labourers in India and Pakistan, Bombay, 1952, especially pp. 9-20, 63-65.

Is Trudeau ready for a Middle East war? Posted on November 17, 2017 by Murray Dobbin

Is Trudeau ready for a Middle East war?

Posted on November 17, 2017 by murraydobbin

The world is now at the mercy of a coalition of three of the most dangerous autocrats on the planet:  Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s new absolute ruler Mohammad bin Salman, a name that will become increasingly familiar as the months go by. These three “leaders” are now collaborating in an incredibly reckless plan to permanently reshape the Middle East.

The final outcome will unfold no matter what Canada does. But unless the government of Justin Trudeau gets a grip on reality, Canada will be drawn into this potential catastrophe by virtue of foreign policy positions it has already taken. Geopolitics is getting incredibly complex and there is little evidence that the Liberal government has a clue how to navigate through the dangers. The problem is that despite all the hype about “being back”, Canada’s foreign policy under Trudeau and minister of foreign affairs Chrystia Freeland is still characterized by cynicism and ill-considered trade-offs on files within the broad spectrum of foreign affairs — including investor rights agreements like NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Obviously, a certain amount of realpolitik is inevitable and even necessary to protect Canada’s interests. But even so it begs the question of how Canada’s interests are defined. How much of the store is Trudeau willing to give away to buy favour with the U.S. on NAFTA, especially when it seems concessions like putting our troops on Russia’s border has gotten us nothing in return? With Trump and his redesigned U.S. empire, there is no quid pro quo.

The embarrassing “me too” gang-up on Russia is bad enough. The Canadian version of the U.S. Magnitsky Act is a pathetic effort to please the U.S. (EU allies in NATO are increasingly uneasy about Russophobia given their own particular national interests). And Putin can hurt Canada and Canadian businesses more than we can hurt Putin and his oligarchs — and he has promised to do so.

And the Middle East is a whole other question. Canada’s past sins, such as torture in Afghanistan, and the destruction of Libya, can be dismissed by the government as old news. Canada has thankfully avoided getting re-involved in the chaos that is Middle East politics. But with the coming to (absolute) power of the new and reckless Saudi ruler Mohammad bin Salman, Middle East policy is suddenly fraught with danger and risk for any country allied with the U.S. or with any claim to interests in the region.

The new Saudi prince (who has arrested everyone who might challenge his authority) is encouraging Israel to invade Lebanon, urging the Israelis to do what they want to do, anyway: deal a crippling blow to Israel’s most effective foe, Hezbollah. Hezbollah basically governs Lebanon and has its own well-armed force. Funded by and allied to Iran, it fought the Israeli army to a standstill in 2006. It is this fact that prompted the Saudis to force the resignation of the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri; he refused or was unable to curb Hezbollah’s political power. The Saudi government upped the ante saying the Lebanese government would “be dealt with as a government declaring war on Saudi Arabia.” It ordered all Saudi citizens to leave Lebanon.

For the Saudis, the ultimate target is Shiite Iran and its significant influence in the Middle East and presence, directly or indirectly, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. When bin Salman declared that a rocket attack on Riyadh by Yemeni rebels could be seen as an act of war by Iran, the U.S. backed him up, implicitly giving the Saudi dictator a green light for more aggressive action.

Given the political situations in the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia, all sorts of case scenarios are now being speculated, with the potential for a rapid escalation of military confrontations, to the point of risking a confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. The first would be an Israeli assault on Hezbollah and Lebanon’s infrastructure. That could be followed by a Saudi-led invasion of Qatar and the removal of its government. While less likely, another confrontation could see the U.S. launch a campaign to seize Syrian territory reclaimed by the Assad regime, on behalf of Israel and risking a direct confrontation with Russia.

All of this could be a prelude to an attack on Iran itself and possibly the use by Israel of nuclear weapons. The rich potential for unintended consequences includes World War III.

If all of this sounds fantastical, consider who currently runs Israel, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu is mired in his own corruption scandal and needs a distracting war to survive. Bin Salman has already demonstrated a stunning recklessness and ruthlessness: the brutal bombing of Yemen (and now a blockade of food and medicine), the blockade of Qatar, and the house arrest of another country’s prime minister. As for Trump (and some of his generals), he seems to genuinely believe that the U.S. is invulnerable, a truly suicidal assumption. All three heads of state adhere to the doctrine of exceptionalism: the normal rules of international behaviour don’t apply to them.

If one or more of these scenarios begins to play out just what will Trudeau do? His government’s policy towards Israel is driven by political cowardice, rooted in the fear of the Israel lobby in Canada. Towards Saudi Arabia, it is driven by sales of armoured personnel carriers, and a blind eye towards gross human rights violations. With respect to the U.S. it is characterized by ad hoc efforts to predict the unpredictable.

If any of this war scenario plays out, Trudeau will suddenly be pressed to come up with principled positions in response and not just political opportunism and calculated ambiguity. And he should take note: Canadians’ attitudes towards Israel have turned very critical, with 46 per cent expressing negative views and just 28 per cent positive views of that country.  As for our proposed $15 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, 64 per cent disapprove.

While these progressive attitudes lie relatively dormant at the moment another slaughter of innocents will bring them to life.  Is the prime minister prepared?