Ahmad, The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature'

The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature'
Author(s): Aijaz Ahmad

Source: Social Scientist , Jul. - Aug., 2000, Vol. 28, No. 7/8 (Jul. - Aug., 2000), pp. 3-30
Published by: Social Scientist
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3518232
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AIJAZ AHMAD*
The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature'
Marx was twelve years old at the time of the revolutions of 1830 and
thirty when he drafted the Manifesto, with some assistance from
Engels, barely a few weeks before the revolutions of 1848 broke out
first in Paris and then across much of Europe. The originality of the
Manifesto is that Marx sought for the revolution a clearly proletarian
orientation. For the rest, the idea of a revolution, of one kind or
another, seemed, as he was growing up, as natural as the prospect
that the sun would set in the evening and rise in the morning. Even
'socialism' was something of a password among many of those whom
the Manifesto calls "would-be universal reformers". Part of the
purpose in drafting the document in fact was to spell out the ways in
which the Communist League, whose manifesto it was to be, thought
itself different from those other tendencies in the democratic
movements which also considered themselves socialist.
This is important to remember in a time such as ours, when a
whole new generation is growing up in an environment where, perhaps
for the first time in roughly two hundred years, the idea of revolution
has been made to seem implausible, however much there might be
aspirations for liberal democracy, social change and the like. That
there would be revolution was clear to everyone in Marx's generation
of students, intellectuals and activists who identified themselves with
the spirit of 1789. In deed, a careful reading of the main documents
of the French Revolution, notably the famous 'Declaration of Man
and the Citizen', had been crucial in Marx's own philosophical and
political evolution.1 It was here, well before drafting the Manifesto
that he had drawn two conclusions: that the abstract universal rights
contained in the 'Declaration' were everywhere sacrosanct in theory
* Till recently fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
Social Scientist, Vol. 29, Nos. 7- 8, July-August 2000

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4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
but always denied in practice; and that it could n

because the 'Declaration' itself guaranteed ineq
guaranteed the right to property. Paraphrasing A
Constitution of 1793, the youthful Marx wrote: "The
is therefore the right to enjoy and dispose of one
wills, without regard for other men and independent
right of self-interest."2 This triumph of possessive in
the ideology of the revolution itself explained, in
that although it was the militancy and the soc
proletariat that accounted for the success of revolutio
in France, it was always the possessing classes
movements and benefited from them.3 Immanent
the idea that the revolution that the young Marx
transcend the logic of the French Revolution by
radicalizing it and taking it to the very end of this log
humanity in general, irrespective of class or natio
emphatic stress on universality rather than on indivi
are seen as building blocs of universal rights; hence, a
of socialist politics as 'the fullest form of democra
the first point. Drafted some sixty years after th
Bastille in France, some seventy years before the tak
Palace in Russia, the Manifesto assumes the realit
indeed, something resembling permanence-of r
long-term dynamic of modern history, even as it ser
of a connecting link between the democratic revo
inherited and the proletarian one that it was groping
that eventually came to connect 1789 with 1917, fleet
considering that revolutionary visions were quickl
the USSR as doggedly as revolutionary potentials
earlier in postrevolutionary France, first unde
monarchy and then, more fully, with the Restora
Between the revolutions of 1830 and those of 1
undergone an arduous apprenticeship. The last fiv
had yielded, even before his partnership with En
1844, quite an array of formidable texts: Critique
of the State, A Contribution to the Critique of He
Right: An Introduction, The Jewish Question,
Philosophical Manuscripts, and the famous Theses
The main collaborative work of Marx and Engels
years was of course to be the German Ideology, whic
unfit for publication, but Marx himself went on, soo

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THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND WORLD LITERATURE 5
met, to expand Engels' brief draft of fifteen pages into a major book
The Holy Family, in 1845 and wrote-two years later, in Fren
Poverty of Philosophy which he regarded as the first scienti
exposition of his theory.
With all this achievement behind him, the Communist Manifes
was not only the first relatively mature text of this very young man
who had nevertheless written thousands of pages before turning thir
but also a text that distilled, in prose of great brevity and beauty
wide range of themes-from history, philosophy, political econom
philosophy of history, socialist theory, and much else besides-t
had preoccupied him at much length previously. This greater maturit
would be evident from even a cursory comparison of this text wi
let us say, "Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith" and "Principle
of Communism", which Engels had drafted in June and October 1947
respectively, as obvious prelude to the drafting of the Manifesto itse
which began in December that year.6 Yet, it would be wrong to tr
this as the text of some final illumination. For, if we judge
Manifesto from the standpoint of his own more mature texts-Capital
The Eighteenth Brumaire and Civil War in France, or Critique of
Gotha Program-it turns out to be more of a transitional text.
II
It is very well known, and we therefore need not offer any extended
comment on the fact, that for all the originality and magisterial sweep
of the materialist conception of history which Marx had worked out
in his earlier texts and which is stated in the Manifesto with such
brevity and brilliance, the essential categories of his economic analysis
had not until then gone much beyond the familiar categories inherited
from classical political economy. It was only during the next fifteen
years that some of the distinctive categories of Marxist economic
analyses, such as the distinction between 'labour' and 'labour power',
or the shifting balance between absolute and relative surplus value in
the history of capitalism, fully emerged.7 It is equally worth
emphasizing that until well into the 1850s Marx understood
colonialism in the most general terms, simply (though crucially) as a
globalizing tendency in the capitalist mode of production but with
virtually no understanding of what it was to eventually mean for the
objects of this globalization in the colonized world. Prabhat Patnaik
puts the matter succinctly:
The Manifesto, notwithstanding a reference to the United States, was

addressed essentially to Europe. Moreover, it was addressed not even

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6 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
to the whole of Europe, but only to Western Europe w

countries were Germany, England, France and Ita
vast expanse of colonies, semi-colonies, dependenci
World' countries, it did not even stretch to Russia
of capitalism had still not been carried to the point w
with pre-capitalist modes, as in the colonies, or it
form of a backward capitalism, as in Russia, coul
comprehended.8
Nor did that analysis yet anticipate that capita

with precapitalist modes' in the colonies would be
a different, much more distorting and devastat
been the case within Western Europe, precisely be
that 'interaction' in the colonies was determ
determined, by the fact of conquest and by the poli
cultural apparatuses that arose on the prior basi
Colonialism was not to be the industrializing for
early Marx had anticipated, and it therefore help
productivity rates, hence the gap in levels of ec
development, between the colonizing countries
quite aside from the transfer to the colonizing coun
which otherwise could have been used for de
productive forces indigenously. From the mid-18
began studying and thinking about colonialism
way, in greater detail and with much more theor
aspects of this later, more mature thinking sta
Marx largely abandoned the hope that colonialis
substantial degree a progressive force within the
think of it, increasingly, as "a bleeding process w
Second, there is in both Marx and Engels increas
anti-colonial resistance and the right to national
there was also a growing sense that the expansio
the vast expanses of the Americas, Asia and Afr
containing the revolutionary movement with
follows:
The specific task of bourgeois society is the establ

market. As the world is round, this seems to hav
The difficult question for us is this: on the Continen
imminent and will immediately assume a socialist
bound to be crushed in this little corner, considering
territory the movement of bourgeois society is still
That was in 1858, barely ten years after the

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Manifesto, and the terms of reference are virtually reversed: Europ

is what is now described as "this little corner", while the colonies
and semi-colonies where capitalism was then spreading were being
recognized as "far greater territory".12 This idea-that the histori
task of establishing the world market in its basic form was well nigh
complete and capitalism was ripe for overthrow in its historic place
of origin, and that the interaction' between capitalism and non
capitalist modes was giving the European bourgeoisie the means t
crush the revolution at home-was to re-surface in Lenin and, wit
special force, in Luxemburg.
Thus, within the over-all architecture of Marx's thought, the
Manifesto remains a transitional text in relation both to the
fundamental theoretical apparatus of Marxist political economy a
well as the historical understanding of the role of colonialism in giving
to actually existing global capitalism the core-periphery structure that
it came to have. His thought on both counts was quite advance
already in 1847 but key breakthroughs in both these areas came ove
the next decade or so. But, then, what about the philosophical method
and use of the dialectic? Here, too, the transitional nature of the text
in Marx's overall work, not to speak of an occasional mark of hasty
formulation, is quite visible. Essentially, we find two rather different
and mutually incompatible approaches to the processes at work in
trajectories of historical change, side by side as it were. In som
passages-where Marx writes about the impact of capitali
globalisation for matters of culture, for example-the narrative tak
a curiously teleological form, unfolding in terms of an expressiv
unilinear causality which yields us something resembling a theory o
reflection, plain and simple. Capitalism seems to spread across th
world in unbroken motion, producing the same effects everywher
so that everything appears to be really quite predictable and ther
emerges a perfect correspondence between a world market and a
'world literature', the latter produced by and in turn reflecting th
former. This quite conventional understanding of the principle o
causality appears, however, alongside-and therefore remains
unreconcilable with- a most subtle dialectical operation whereb
Marx requires us to take a leap of imagination so unsettling as to b
virtually impossible.
For, in essence, what he requires us to do is to view capitalism a
both-simultaneously- the best as well as the worst thing that eve
happened to history, to the modes in which human beings hav
organised the production of wealth and, therefore, to what he had

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8 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
Theses on Feurbach called 'social humanity'. What

us, in other words, is that we grasp this ambiguity o
historical motion not in terms of a ledger of goo
the progressive and the destructive, which could be m
for dissection-at the end of which one could, in the manner of
accountancy, then calculate whether or not capitalism itself has been
good or bad in the long run-but as a single process in which an
infinity of good and bad effects appear as so many links in a complex
chain, with no isolable moments which could simply be subtracted
from the whole. In deed, the good' and the 'bad' stand in a relation
of mutuality and reciprocity so integral that one could not have the
one without the other, so that the interlocking of the destructive and
the progressive itself cannot even begin to be undone without a
revolutionary rupture.
This operation of the dialectical method-which I have here,
following Jameson, called a virtually impossible leap of the
imagination-has little to do with the dictum of Liebniz that 'the
existing world is the best of all possible worlds' or even with Hegel's
association of the Real and the Rational. In this side of his operation
Marx appeals neither to the cunning of Reason nor to the hidden
grace of God's Will, but to historicity, and to the essential multiplicity
of contradictions that gives to the historicity of the modern its special,
unique character of unequal and combined development. The Real
of capitalism is not the Rational but a fierce embrace of the rational
and the irrational which lends itself not to an improved balance
through more doses of the rational but only to the rupture-which is
what one would mean by the word 'revolution'-in the embrace itself;
nor is the existing world the best of all possible ones, it is rather the
best and the worst at the same time. Hence the mixture of exhilaration
and terror in the way Marx encapsulates the fundamental motions of
history in the capitalist epoch.
What difference does it make whether we adopt the one method
rather than the other, i.e., whether we adopt the method of what I
have here called expressive causality and straightforward reflection,
or the method of the materialist dialectic which is the only possible
answer to notions of immanent teleology?
III
I should want to answer that question in the shape of a close

reading of, and then a rather extended commentary on, some very
famous sentences of the Manifesto:

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The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe ...
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given
a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every
country... All old-established national industries have been destroye
or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries
that no longer work up indigenous raw materials, but raw material
drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products ar
consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. .. I
place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, w
have intercourse in every direction, universal dependence of nation
And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectua
creations of individual nations become common property. Nationa
one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more
impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there
arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie . . . compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to

adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce
what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois
themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
We begin here, first of all, with the objective nature of the process
of globalization itself. We begin, in other words, not with the intention
of the bourgeoisie or some plans it has conceived, but with 'the need
of the constantly expanding market' which compels, even 'chases
the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe'. In a curious
reversal of the hunter and the hunted, it is not so much a confident
bourgeoisie that goes out into the world in pursuit of profits but an
anxious and restless class itself being hunted and 'chased' by a need
that has taken hold of it and without the satisfaction of which the
class itself would perish. Capitalism is seen here, already, as the first
mode of production in history that has an inner logic to break the
boundaries of exclusively national economies and cultures.
Yet, when Marx speaks here of 'every country', he is so clearly-
with the taken-for-grantedness of a historical reflex- speaking of a
small number of European countries and, at best, Northern United
States, since 'production' had undoubtedly not taken a 'cosmopolitian
character' in the colonies, nor even much of Europe itself. Similarly,
'old-established national industries'-in the broadest sense of
'national' and 'industries'-had undoubtedly been 'destroyed' in the
colonies but the 'new industries' that had 'dislodged' them were

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10 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
located in the colonizing centres but not in the colon

that it was quite fanciful to speak of a 'universal
nations', in the sense of mutuality and reciprocity, if w
into consideration the colonized countries as well.
were in fact coming to be highly dependent on a few
and those core countries were connected with each oth
relation of free-floating mutual 'intercourse' but als
unstable and violent conflict over colonial possessions
numerous local and regional wars throughout the 19t
two world wars in the 20th.
The problem here is not simply that Marx could n
foresee the shape of things as they were to emerge later
imperialism in the proper sense, whose beginnings Le
from about the 1880s. One can hardly be faulted for
clairvoyance to foresee structural and qualitative cha
not yet come about. Rather, there were two quite differ
related problems. One is that the emphasis shifts so dras
different passages of the Manifesto that conclusions t
been drawn from one far-reaching formulation are not p
into its subordinate clauses or into another, more or
passage. Thus, an earlier passages specifies 'the discove
the rounding of the Cape ... the East Indian and Chi
[and] trade with the colonies' as crucuial elements in
unprecedented 'increase in the means of exchange and in
generally' but then focusses exclusively on 'an impu
developments provided 'to the revolutionary element in
feudal society'. Now, it was very uncommon among
the mid-19th century, when Marx wrote these words, t
and emphasize this role of the Americas, Africa a
stupendous growth of European mercantile capit
European transition from feudalism to capitalism as s
and novelty of Marx' perception ought not be underrate
a whole new academic industry has developed in our
only among bourgeois liberal writers but among infl
of 'Western Marxism', to deny or greatly under-emp
this role.
However, within the formulation at hand, Marx se
extend his thought to cover the other side of this coin:
this growth upon 'the East Indian and Chinese' region
regions appear here simply as 'markets' where, appa
takes place among equals, presumably on the basis of val

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and/or comparative advantage, for the mutual benefit of all. M

does not actually say so, but there is nothing in the formulation w
would suggest that the young author of these words is aware that t
benefits entailed in the opening up of these 'markets' were ve
unevenly distributed. Even the phrase 'trade with colonie
ambiguous, in two ways. The word 'colony' was those days
primarily for the temperate zones of white settlement outside Euro
and among those settler colonies Marx was even then q
knowledgeable about the United States of America.. He was
probably thinking here of the extensive and highly profitable t
between capitalist centres in Europe and the Northeastern Uni
States. It is not at all clear, however, whether among the 'colo
here are included the quite extensive territories that the Euro
colonial powers had by then acquired in parts of coastal Afric
mainland Asia, notably India. Nor is it clear whether the word 't
here included the slave trade from the African west coast which was
so important a component in the famous 'triangular trade' between
Europe, Africa and the Americas. Had Marx at that time and in the
same sweep also looked at this other side of the 'trade with colonies',
the Manifesto would have undoubtedly given us a fuller picture not
only in terms of being more well-rounded but also, most crucially,
one that could also convey the reality, more or less dialectically, that
the same globalizing market forces which impose upon the world a
historically unprecedented unity also divide and fragment the world
so drastically that economic inequality, hence the maldistribution of
cultural goods, between the core countries of capitalism and the rest
is still very much on the increase.
This partial nature of the formulation then means that the 'world
market' itself remains curiously disembodied, as an ever-expanding
structure of production and exchange encompassing more and more
parts of the world, more or less uniformly, as if the various regions
and national units within this structure were either comprised of equals
or, as the highly metaphorical language of the Manifesto repeatedly
suggests, this 'market' was creating a uniform world civilization by
bringing the 'barbarian nations' into its orbit. Now, one need not get
inordinately exercised about the highly provocative use of words like
'civilized' and 'barbarian'. In one register, undoubtedly, these words
embody the whole baggage of Eurocentricity that Marx had inherited
from such illustrious figures as Montesquieu and Hegel. In context,
though, these words connote the fundamental difference between
capitalist and precapitalist modes of production and social formations.

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12 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
Throughout his writings, Marx uses also the choice

abuses against those traditional propertied classes w
'the tottering feudal society', as he puts it in the passag
quoted-that were ranged against 'the revolutiona
industrial capitalism. The primary contrast on his m
words, is not between Europe and non-Europe but be
production. The real problem lies not at this rhetorical
deeper: in the assumption that the perfection of the
leads, more or less logically and spontaneously, to t
unified global culture. Let us look at this assumption a
in relation to our actual historical experience over the p
and fifty years.
IV
The power and accuracy-and a feeling bordering

that prophetic formulation is undeniable:
The bourgeoisie... compells all nations, on pain of exti
the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to
it calls civilization into their midst... In one word, it
after its own image.
That ironic phrase 'what it calls civilization' alr

toward that superbly contemptuous phrase-'civiliza
that Engels was to later use for the colonizing powers i
of the Boxers' Rebellion in China. More than ever befor
more so than in Marx's own time, we now live, glo
Samir Amin was the first to designate as a 'capitali
One could also fruitfully ponder another of Amin's for
he argues that we now actually have a global civi
capitalist civilization, within which the various natio
for all their profound differences, so many units whic
albiet differentially-constrained by the values, c
illusions of that unitary and predominant civilizatio
no means being spurious, nor has his prediction gone
insists in the Manifesto on the globally unifying p
And, as the phrasing of the sentences cited above sug
no means an unconditional admirer of that 'civiliza
regarded the creation of such a civilization as a comp
by one class against 'all nations'. The problem, again
not take the next step and see more accurately tha
created under such a 'compulsion' could hardly

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'interdependence of nations'. It is in this other sense that the sent

which precedes this prediction turns out to be so highly proble
National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and mo
impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, th
arises a world literature.
That phrase 'world literature', and the vision that the creatio
such a thing was desirable, Marx had taken from his favourite
Goethe. And it was a common belief among German Romantics
Orientalists in the first half of the 19th century that some of
world's best literature was to be found not in Europe but in the cl
languages of the East: Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese,
somewhat later, Japanese. Persian was a special favourite of Go
and in the Indian context William Jones was to remark that n
Greek nor Latin nor Hebrew could match Sanskrit for subtlety
beauty. Macaulay's later assertion that not all the books writt
these languages could match a single shelf of European literatur
thus not an Orientalist position, as Edward Said says, but an explic
anti-Orientalist one. Marx had inherited that liberality of spi
However, the materialist that he was, he associated the creati
'world literature' not with the self-activity of a high-m
intelligentsia or as a mode of exchange among the principal classici
which is more or less what Goethe had in mind, but as an obje
process inherent in other kinds of globalisation where mo
cultural exchange follow closely upon patterns of political econ
And it is undoubtedly true that with increasing development o
means of commerce and communication on the global scale
circulation of literary texts across national frontiers has also b
ever more brisk with each passing decade since Marx wrote t
words.
Today, it is impossible to be a serious student of French literature
without having to come to terms with literature composed in the
language by Caribbean and North African writers. In English alone,
the most influential novelists of the past quarter century have come
from the former colonies of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Any
roster of the most widely read novelists of this same period, all
languages considered, would have to include Marquez (Colombia),
Gunter Grass (Germany), Achebe (Nigeria), Mishima (Japan), Rushdie
(India/Pakistan/Britain), Gordimer (South Africa), Morrison (United
States) and so on. Similarly, no roster of the pre-eminent modern
poets is conceivable without Mayakovsky (Russia/USSR), Cesaire

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14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
(Martinique), Vallejo (Peru), Neruda (Chile), Brecht (

(Ireland) and scores of others, from diverse regions
Translation has become in the second half of the 20
important and widespread an activity as original com
has transformed reading habits across the globe. Wit
speaking world Marquez and Rushdie are probably m
than any novelist born in the English Isles-and Mar
writes originally in Spanish, but then his work get
translated in a dozen languages across the world, not
and French which then accounts for his roughly eq
across continents. Libraries and bookshops all over
works of dozens of writers from diverse parts of th
language which has the widest readership in the co
where the library or bookshop is located, regardless
of original composition. It is possible that more peo
Marquez in a language other than Spanish than in Spa
Spanish is of course spoken across much of Latin Am
to Spain, so that one tends to either forget his Col
origin or to attach no particular significance to it: he b
a Latin American writer or a truly 'universal' writer
Nor is it a matter of mere quanities and circulation
more sizeable matter of what one can only call cros
within the internationalised literary field itself. As Ar
figure in French surrealism, once remarked, his enc
poetry of Cesaire, the Black Martinican communist,
his own evolution. In fiction, Rushdie, the Indo-Br
inconceivable without the prior, magistereal presen
the Colombian friend of Castro; one may justifiably
is just a 'poor man's Marquez'. The language of poetry
composed in the English language has been deeply m
translations of the great masters in other languages
or Cesaire. Closer to home, there is no major litera
India whose modern literature has not been fundamentally
transformed by external, principally West European and Soviet
influences. The literary movement of the 1930s and 40s which we
associate with the history of the Progressive Writers' Association
(PWA), and which was arguably the first self-consciously trans-Indic
literary movement since Bhakti (only wider), would be inconceivable
without a complex set of influences that included not only the direct
Soviet influence but also a much wider influence of a global cultural
front that came into being in consequence of the Comintern's turn to

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an anti-fascist popular front after 1935-not to speak of even a

web of influences that ranged from Balzac to Chekov. We co
on multiplying the examples. The main point, in any case, is
something resembling a 'world literature' is now part of the c
experience of the literate classes across the globe, in a way th
unthinkable in Marx's own time but which Marx deduced from the
logic of capitalist universalisation itself.
Before proceeding any further, it is useful also to put in perspective
Marx's unease with-perhaps even denigration of-'numerous
national and local literatures'. The attitude seems dreadfully harsh,
and in some degree it is. The moment of 1848 was, however, for an
internationalist such as Marx, a difficult moment. Unlike India, where
modern nationalism, which initially arose in the crucible of the anti-
colonial struggle, had been from the beginning polyglot and
multi-cultural, the consolidation of the nation-state form in Europe
during the 19th century-and that was the century of nationalisms
in Europe!- went together with the idea of a single national language,
a unique national culture, and a consolidated national literature which
was said to signify a unique national character; literature, culture
and character were often associated, in fact, with 'race'. The worst
consequences of that kind of nationalism we are currently witnessing
in the savage regimes that have arisen on the ashes of former
Yugoslavia, from Croatia to Kosovo. It is difficult for us, in India, to
even comprehend the potential for genocides inherent in this
exclusionary notion of 'national' literature because every variant of
the definition of 'Indian literature' that we have at our disposal
presumes multi-linguality. However, purification of the 'national
language/literature in tandem with the purification of the population
itself, through eviction or/and eviction of those considered outside
the charmed circle of the nation', was an ever-present danger in the
nationalisms of Marx's time, as they have remained in many a
nationalism up to-and into-our own time. Marx's association of
'national and local literatures' with 'national . narrowmindedness'
needs to be viewed in this perspective.
He was groping toward a universalist antidote against the narrow-
minded nationalist bigotry that was so evident all around him as he
raced through the writing of the Manifesto so as to have it printed
and distributed before the actual outbreak of the revolution that
everyone knew was coming and which was likely to be split up in so
many nationalist revolutions, as indeed happened. In later
historiography, the nationalist revolutions of 1848 have been

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16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
frequently celebrated as a 'spring of the peoples'

rose up to gain their rights. Marx's fear, as he dra
was that a common revolution of working masses
classes of all the European nations was likely to b
mobilization of the masses in a variety of cultural
would end up by strengthening the ruling elements i
What appears in the Manifesto as predictio
internationalist solidarity was, in a curious and pal
an inverse expression of a fear that "narrow-min
might actually prevail. The formulation is directly
other formulations where the working class is urg
the nationalism of its own people ('become the na
create solidarities beyond the nation, since 'the wor
country', for the good reason that 'we cannot tak
they have not got' (i.e., the bourgeoisie wants to
itself but uses its own nation-state to impose a nation
for the working class; hence, socialist internat
capitalist globalisation). One needs to keep in view
of concrete pressures of the time, and the ideas inev
of those pressures, in judging the value of individ
Nor is all this a matter of the past only. Let
example, traversing across and connecting Marx's t
It was in his time- and very much in the time of
the middle of the 19th century-that a whole ran
for cultural consolidation arose in those province
Empire which were later to be integrated into Yug
Croatia and Slovenia in particular. The moveme
literati in each case and took the consolidation of
and literatures as the core issue in national consolidat
for the creation of sovereign states on the ba
consolidations of language and literature arose late
years of the Empire. We might add that the theoretic
Marxism on the cultural aspect of the nation
well-developed in the work of Otto Bauer, then c
replacement of the Empire by a multi-national a
socialist state with maximum degree of regional c
for each language/literature cluster. In the annals
this was until that time possibly the mo t far-rea
reconcile cultural particularity with multi-linguality
of an overarching socialist civilization. And, of cou
years when the revolutionary legacy was still virile i

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is precisely the combination that the Bolsheviks had attempte

practice. The distance between Lenin and Bauer on the questio
cultural self-determination was not as great as it is comm
supposed.
Be that as it may. When socialist Yugoslavia came into being after
the victory of the Partisans under Tito's leadership, Serbo-Croatian,
a mixed bi-national language spoken by vast majority of the people
in the federation, was of course recognized as the national language
but autonomous development of regional languages and literatures
was guaranteed and liberally financed by the federal state, with each
regional language having extensive role in the administrative and
professional life in their respective regions as well as at the federal
level. In the process, not only did the ruling party itself get organised
on the federal basis but the literary intelligentsias associated with the
various languages also received enormous resources and privileges.
In context, then, it is a great historical irony that by the 1980s, the
opposition not only to socialism but also to the very territorial integrity
of Yugoslavia came to be centred in precisely those various Academies
of Arts and Letters to which the Yugoslav state had given such power,
prestige and prominence. All the nationalist mythologies which
eventually led to mass murder-the idea that the Bosnian Muslims
were the descendants of foreign invaders who had always suppressed
the Serbs; the idea that Serbo-Croatian was an 'artificial' language
and that both Serbia and Croatia needed to gain their own respectively
'purified' languages; that the whole map not only of Yugoslavia but
also of the federating units had to be re-organised, with violence and
mass evictions if necessary, to obtain the consolidation of these
competing culturally defined nations; and so on-were forged in and
propagated by these very Academies, with the literary intelligentsia
playing the leading role and groups of historians in each region
bringing up the rear. This experience shows that the idea of a 'national
literature' can quite easily cease to represent the legitimate cultural
rights of a people and become a retrograde-even murderous-force
as soon as it gets sundered from the more progressive moorings in
ideas of cultural diversity and universalist civilization. Marx's hope
that a 'world literature' would arise as an antidote against 'national
one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness' was not, if we remember this
whole history, nearly as naive as it might seem.
V
The problem lay elsewhere, in the assumption that the

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18 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
globalization of the capitalist mode of production would

this historic task of ensuring that a universalist cultu
aspiration would prevail over national or local 'narrow
the assumption, in other words, that there was some
one relationship between a 'world market' and 'world lite
could somehow be accommodated within the socialist
progressive force. The methodological problem of cour
the 'world market' and 'world literature' are viewed h
wholes, without internal tensions and contradictions
opposites of 'national economy' and 'local and nation
so that the rise of one pole presumes the demise
Subsequent experience, thanks to colonization and im
thanks also to the nation-state form which has been a pu
of capitalism in all its locales, has been rather differe
The fact of the matter is that the 'world market' has
an interlocking system of national and regional mark
globalizing tendency inherent in capitalism, the bourgeo
had a profound connection with its national origin an
state; thus, the American bourgeoisie is no less Ame
French aristocracy was French. The British bourgeo
win for itself a world empire not as a universal class but
British one, in mortal competition with other nation
such as the French or the German. And when the co
collapsed they gave rise, in the former colonies, not to a
association of freed peoples but to whole array of nat
same goes for the self-organization of capital itself.
cursory look at the board of directors of not only sm
and corporations but even of major transnational corp
demonstrate this relationship between origins that
national and operations that tend to become transnat
of Microsoft, the paradigmatic transnational corporation
is an obvious illustration of this fact, as are those of Wa
or America-On-Line, the other information/commun
in deed, the very name 'America-On-Line', speaks volu
for all the brisk internationalisation of finance capi
important bank in any country is always its national
American Federal Reserve or the German Bundesbank. In
field, the 20th century has witnessed not the decline
state form but the emergence of more nation-states acr
including Europe itself, than ever before in history
nothing that the main international organization of

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of this century should be called United Nations.

If such is the structure of the capitalist political economy its
could the case of literature be otherwise? All literatures are above a
local and national. Only in the colonies did a foreign literature
to command more prestige than the national one, and even her
foreign literature could not obliterate the local and national o
Colonial India is a case in point. It is certainly true that the educati
apparatuses of the colonial state greatly privileged English litera
that a degree in English got one a more prestigeous and lucrativ
than a degree in any of the indigenous languages, and that somethi
resembling a class distinction arose between those who knew En
literature and those who did not. Even so, that same colonial pe
witnessed the rise of printing presses in all the languages that cam
be the dominant regional languages, and with this print techno
came great consolidation of those languages as well as very gre
expansion of literary production and dissemination of literary
in those languages. For every one person who composed a poem
English there were hundreds, probably thousands, who compose
Urdu or Bengali or Tamil. Furthermore, these indigenous p
languages had connections with traditions and practices of ora
and folk performance that the dominant colonial language could
have. In that sense too, the reach and depth of this dominant langu
was very restricted.
So, we had a complex structure. What we received throu
colonial globalization was not a 'world literature' but an 'En
literature' which was itself a national literature. English of co
offered some translations from other, mainly European, languag
well, but very much in a subsidiary register; a truly large-scale lite
industry in English itself is much more a phenomenon of the p
colonial period. Related to this dominance was the matter of s
and spread; although it was available to a small minority, Engl
literature was nevertheless the only literature that was available acr
the country. This predominance has had many far-reac
consequences. For example, with the expansion of the educatio
apparatuses of the postcolonial state in Independent India, and w
increasing levels of embourgeoisment, English has for the first
emerged as one of the genuinely Indian languages for liter
composition; the past decade alone has witnessed great accelera
in the composition and sale of literary texts in English. To the exte
that there is now a trans-Indic bourgeoisie with its own very distin
cultural forms and literary tastes, Indian English writing, though s

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20 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
based in rather a small literary community as

potential readerships in several of the other m
nevertheless emerging as culturally dominant. What
however, is the idea of an 'Indian literature' and t
English with it.
At a certain level, anything composed or writt
citizen is part of something called Indian literature. B
is essentially abstract, related as it is to the territori
the Indian nation-state-a claim at once geo
civilizational, but a mere claim nevertheless, obse
piety than in any degree of participation. I may d
Tamil literature is a part of an 'Indian literatu
knowledge of that literature is comprised of what
in English, as translation and commentary. English
not only as a major, perhaps culturally dominant l
its own right but also as the crucial language of
among all the other languages. A Dogri writer ma
that what she is writing is part of an 'Indian liter
Indians who know no Dogri that writing remains utt
palpable experience and active imagination. Nor do
it gets translated into Kannada or Hindi, except f
these other languages. The only way it could get c
country, even though within a restricted class of read
in English. Thus it is that an enormous archive of
is being created in English, from such diverse so
Sahitya Akademi, Kali for Women, the Katha colle
Penguin, academic conferences and seminars, and
these translations that a conviction that 'Indian
exists gets transformed, concretely, into a ma
however limited and second-hand.
This brief excursus on the ambiguities of the Indian literary
experience is meant to convey three things. One is that with
colonialism, the language/literature of the colonizing power indeed
became dominant in a variety of colonies, but this dominance took
the form not of a 'world literature' arising to transcend 'national and
local literatures' but that of the dominance of the colonizing nation's
national literature over those of the colonized ones; local and national
literatures continue, and may even be more voluminous, but they
occupy subordinate positions in the literary field as a whole. Only in
the extreme case of such settler colonies as the United States, where
the precolonial literary archive was oral rather than written, and where

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the colonized were largely exterminated rather than simply sub

do local literatures expire and national literatures of the co
fail to arise in any substantial degree. Second, 'national' lit
tend to arise in the language of the dominant class; to the exten
English is the medium of communication, administration and
transaction on the all-Indic level, an archive of 'Indian litera
more likely to arise in this language, through original compo
well as translation (especially translation), rather than in an
language, a host of other noble endeavours notwithstanding
that in multi-lingual societies such as ours, 'national' literatu
to subsume rather than actually destroy 'local' (in our case,
literatures. Of this process, there are two variants, the benign
obviously cruel, which one could schematically associate wi
names of the Sahitya Akademi and Salman Rushdie. Thus, th
version thinks of constituting an 'Indian' literature thro
industry of translation and commentary, at the core of which is
translation and commentary, some of which is done with gr
and distinction but most is accomplished with much enthus
little talent. The classic example of this largely sterile enth
the English-language journal, Indian Literature, that the
Akademi has been publishing for far too many years, with no n
consequence. The more cruel, metropolitanizing version is ev
the anthology of Indian writing that Salman Rushdie has ed
which a story of Saadat Hasan Manto stands for all the Indian w
done outside English and all the rest is comprised of origina
compositions, most of them mediocre. In words almost lifte
Macaulay's Minute, Rushdie remarks that he does not re
other languages but scholars he knows inform him that w
published in them does not compare with what gets compo
English.
Few enough Englishmen settled in India, and the pre-eminence of
English literature here was owed to the cultural underpinings of the
colonial state- in highly contradictory ways. Intimacy with English
language and literature was surely a class privilege and a means of
augmenting that privilege; the more this intimacy, the more cultural
capital one had at one's disposal. This knowledge also served as a
window on the world, however. Developments in arts and sciences
around the world could be brought home for indigenous developments
as well, so that the some of the worst but also the best ideas from
across the globe entered Indian national life through this medium
which served as a great modernizing influence against great many

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22 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
anachronisms and cruelties inherited from the past.

through English that Indian writers and intellectuals f
'world literature', and this has been a very great gai
period, and even more so since Independence, this co
of English language and literature as a structure-in
also as a modernising, internationalising force has b
case, not to any considerable degree of European s
the peculiar forms that our modernity has taken, incl
role that colonialism played in it.
VI
Contrasted to the Indian experience, however, there have been a

variety of other experiences in relation to colonialism itself, especially
in the settler colonies. Five variants here are notable. Where settler
colonialism eventually failed, the fundamental structure has not been
altogether different. In Algeria, for example, indigenous population
survived under the dominance of colon population itself, and French
policy of selective assimilation produced a three-tiered structure of a
French-speaking professional class alongside, and above, the much
larger numbers who were located in Arabic and Berber cultures. This
too has had contradictory effects. On the one hand, French plays a
major role in the intellectual life of the modern Algerian literati, with
some of them having a considerable presence in French literature as a
whole, not only among North African and other Francophone
countries but in the French metropolis as well. On the other hand,
however, the current Islamicist uprising in Algeria, which has taken
roughly 100,000 lives, can also be seen, in cultural terms, as the
assertion of the Arabic-speaking middle classes against the French-
speaking bureaucratic elite on the one hand and, on the other, against
Berber-speaking groups which have made major inroads into middle
class life and are asserting their cultural rights against their Arabic-
speaking compatriots.
Second, there's the peculiar case of Israel where the zionist settlers
revived a dormant classical language, Hebrew, which had been no
one's living language for great many centuries and re-invented it as a
modern state language uniting the whole of the settler population
and eventually producing quite a remarkable national literature which,
judging from English translations, is as vibrant as any. The Palestinian
population was either evicted or subjected to this dominance of
Hebrew, and different fractions of Palestinian writers who remained
inside Israel have responded to this situation by writing either in

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Arabic, to preserve their distinct cultural claim, or in Hebrew

order to communicate with and participate in the life of Israe
whole. We thus have a peculiar case of a settler colonial popula
drawn from across the world, inventing a national language, w
had been no one's spoken language in recent centuries,
subordinating to this 'national literature' another people's
literature' which refuses to die out and which connects itself, ra
with the larger cultural life of the Arab region in general.
In all other cases, the language that came with the colonizer
had a pre-eminent position, becoming a 'national' language, in t
ways. In Canada, which is constitutionally a bi-lingual state, b
the literary languages, English and French, have to do with the
settlement that was reached, through warfare, between British
French colonialisms. The literati of each, then, trace their cul
heritage from their respective 'mother' countries; France espec
in one case, but also overwhelmingly Britain in the case of Eng
speaking Canada though the U.S. has actually displaced Brita
recent decades. Indicative, however, is the fact that migrants
come from all over the world must then adjust themselves to o
the two national languages, depending on the region where they se
if they are to participate in the life of the 'nation'. Meanwhil
Brazil, the largest of the Latin American settler colonies, the langu
continues to be Portuguese, but the historic centre-periph
relationship has been reversed; precisely because Brazil was a co
of Portugal which itself was the least industrialized of the colon
countries, hence possessing very little exportable cultural capital, B
dominates Portugal in arts and letters while looking toward th
of Western Europe for intellectual capital.
Most significant, however, is the case of the United States
powerful has been its imperialism that one forgets that it was
settler-colony before it became an imperialist power. The
advanced capitalist country in the world, with no 'national' pa
its own, the U.S. drew settlers, slaves and immigrants from e
country in the world and could have been, in its cultural life, a
laboratory for the growth of a 'world literature'. Indeed, mu
what is today seen as 'world literature' is in fact produced, thr
translation and gloss, by the U.S. universities and publishing indus
To this significant fact, we shall return presently. Let us first obs
that the maintenance of the United States as a uni-lingual nat
which has a distinct literary-cultural heritage and public educ
which is available only in English, has been the principal mea

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24 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
obtaining national integration among peoples

backgrounds; the children of these immigrants ma
inherit their parents' religion but not their langua
field, then, there's an interesting tension: enormous
in creating a distinctly American literature and d
the 'national' literature, but a very great energy is al
and universities to keep alive a connection with B
well, as background and patrimony. That the majo
are not of British origin matters little; American lite
is in the 'national' language of the U.S., must acknow
connection as the true origin. Interestingly, siblin
as the Australian or Canadian ones, who also grew
settings but have the same English background, get v
as such.
What about the core countries of capitalism? W
in all of them, it is the national literature that comm
in education, in the formation of reading publics,
so on. Virtually all of them, with a few exception
the rule, are uni-lingual states; that has been the
Until quite recently, the study of non-nationa
marginal activity: departments of comparative litera
of European literatures other than one's own, and ob
programs for the study of non-European ones. O
themselves were interested much more in religiou
cultural studies, anthropological research, or in the c
but hardly ever in the modern ones. In the second h
all this changed very considerably. Postwar years w
increases in the colonial migration into the core E
mostly working-class but with substantial- and r
numbers of the petty bourgeois professional strata i
their own cultural capital with them and demand
reward for it. That kind of migration then began fl
States after the 1960s; soon enough, and for the first
more migrants arriving there coming from the Thir
Europe. The formation of a 'world literature' thr
and commentary, which I have summarized in Sectio
essay, is a phenomenon of this particular phase,
this formation has been located primarily in
countries, even when much of the materials com
and, selectively, from the earlier half of the century

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VII
Nor could it be otherwise. If it is indeed true, as Marx suggests

that the making of a 'world literature' is intrinsically connected with
the making of a 'world market', it then necessarily follows that the
forces and countries that have played the leading role in the making
of that market will also play a leading role in the making of that
literature. By 'making' here I do not mean 'production'; commodities
that circulate in the world market are not always produced in the
capitalist centres. By 'making' here I mean evaluation, accumulation,
dissemination, and profit: both money-profit and cultural profit.
Virtually all literary texts are produced in local, national, regional
contexts, but a text thus produced becomes a text of world literature
when it arrives in the metropolitan centre, gets recognised as meriting
inclusion in the archive of 'world' literature, gets translated and
evaluated (by publishers, reviewers, critics, professors), and gets
shipped into the transnational book market. That Salman Rushdie
lives in Britain and Arundhati Roy in India makes no difference to
that fundamental process, even though living in one place rather than
another may position one differentially in relation to the market; the
main point, as regards our argument, is that Roy's novel, regardless
of its merit, could not become a document of 'world literature' if it
had not been taken up in the metropolitan centres. This is a structural
fact, and has nothing to do with the facts of her residence, intentions,
etc.
There is first of all the matter of investible resources. 'World

literature' is produced in the capitalist centres at two tiers of the
publishing industry-what Bourdieu has called the two circuits of
'mass production' and 'restricted production'. Simply put: the big
publishing houses, and the university presses: editions that come out
in hundreds of thousands, and editions that come out in a couple of
thousands; mass market, and academic market; the writer as celebrity,
and the writer as an object of obscure academic desire. The two may
in some cases converge-Rushdie and Roy traverse both markets-
but at the point of production the two circuits remain separate. The
key fact is that in the metropolitan countries-and above all, in the
United States-more in the U.S. than in perhaps all of Europe put
together-enough capital is available for both circuits to participate
in the process of accumulation. The sphere of restricted production,
e.g., the network of university presses, requires what are by U.S.
standards very small levels of capital-authors are paid virtually
nothing, and translators tend to be professors who do it not for much

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26 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
immediate payment but for academic distinction a

which is realized slowly but surely from inside the aca
market. The sphere of mass production requires
concentration of capital-author's royalties, agent
outlays for huge editions, publicity on a war footi
which then must be realized more quickly. Regard
prominence of a handful of Third World writers in th
and regardless of the great excitement this phenom
some Third World countries (India is notable for p
writers and excitements), the real market for both
within the metropolitan countries; no Indian writer
such large royalties if India itself was the target mark
markets absorb surplus production and contribute to m
most of those products, especially from spher
production, actually never make it into the Third W
Some other features of this market are notable. Firs
literary production in general, in the making of 'worl
restricted production matters more than mass produ
translated work of fiction that a big publishing house
are ten that are published by smaller publishing h
smaller numbers; this is all the more true of poet
restricted but reliable market exists for specific reason
of immigrant communities which want some sampli
from their mother countries, academic markets wh
universities have an expanded infrastructure of teac
and a small general reading public what has cultivat
taste. Third, most literary texts that circulate in t
actually produced and exchanged within the metro
For every Indian novel that gets translated into Eng
hundred French novels that too get translated; for sm
or countries less in the eyes of the metropolitan reader
be even more unfavourable. Fourth, a certain degre
connection persists. Few of the African writers who
make it into English; few of the Caribbean ones who w
make it into French. Fifth, a couple of the Eur
determine the structure and reception of the whol
only that Latin American literature that has alread
translated, distributed by the Anglo-American publish
English; some one else may have the same relations
or Spanish. In this sense, I have the same relationsh
texts in 'world literature' as I have with Tamil texts

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literature'; the mediating role of English is decisive. Two count

the Third World which do not speak the same languages rarely
any sort of direct relationship with one another's literature.
applies all the more to interpretation, commentary, teaching. Fina
a much more extended picture of 'world literature' exists in E
than in any other language, for the same reason that English
pre-eminent language of world finance and computers: it
national language of the great imperial powers of the 19th an
centuries, Britain and the United States. One could dissect al
points at far greater length. The basic argument is now in p
however.
VII
As regards the formulations pertaining to 'world literature' that I

quoted earlier, Marx was, I believe, right and wrong at the same
time. At a time when all kinds of romanticisms had attached
themselves to exclusively national culture and national literature,
Marx identified himself with the noblest traditions of Enlightenment
thought where culture and literature had to be radically separated
from national 'narrow-mindedness' and made into a common
patrimony for all humanity. And, he was absolutely right in postulating
that capitalist globalization in the sphere of political economy shall
inevitably produce a world civilization, for the first time in human
history, and that a 'world literature' will necessarily arise out of these
global exchanges that shall be both economic as well as civilizational.
This, for him, was neither an ideal enterprise nor a museum of great
texts nor a task for the literary intelligentsia alone, as it had been for
Goethe for instance. Rather, this eventual development was seen as
an inherent logic of history itself. It is indeed the case that the
production of precisely that kind of archive, bringing writers and
artists from many corners of the world face to face with each other,
and making at least a little part of that archive to the literate
populations of the world, has been a special feature of the present
century. By now, we do have the rudimentary beginnings of a 'world
literature' and this internationalization of art and culture will only
grow with time. Marx's prescience in this regard is of historic
significance.
But there are also two problems. The first is that what Marx
neglected to say in this context, as he was quick to say at so many
points in his work and about so many other analogous developments,
that capitalism does make such developments possible, even launches

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28 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
such projects in its own way, but is so riddle

contradictions that it cannot realize its own potenti
organisation and fragmentation are inherent in th
globalization that capitalism carries out. It privileges
literatures over others, concentrates resources in so
the expense of others, and organizes the produ
literature' in the image of the 'world market' with
inequalities and anarchies. What has produced th
itself become the greatest hindrance to its realizat
literature' to arise as a 'true interdependence of nat
the 'world market' needs to be transcended.
That much we have argued at length. But there's something else
as well. 'National and local literatures' are not inevitably expressions
of 'narrow-mindedness'. They can just as often be genuine expressions
of a democratic demand and a just cultural aspirations of a people, in
a particular place and time, especially in the context of cultural
imperialism. There are cultural nationalisms that have produced the
most retrograde, often murderous, political projects; in today's India,
that should be obvious enough. But there is a kind of cultural
nationalism that is a specific protest against cultural imperialism.
Whose nationalism, then, whose culture, whose literature? We need
to be deeply attuned to the contradictions of such phenomena.
Literatures are, moreover, so deeply embedded in particular languages
that a 'world literature' need not be conceived as the polar opposite
of 'national and local literatures'. The multiplicity of languages is
likely to remain, while the circulation of cultural goods can only get
more accelerated with newer technologies and rising rates of literacy
and education around the world. A world literature' can only arise
if material relations among the different language-literature complex
can be organised in a structure of exchanges that are non-hierarchical,
non-exploitative and non-dominative. This, however, imperialism
itself renders impossible, while imperialism also ensures that if a 'world
literature' were to be assembled in any one language it will necessarily
be the language of the dominant imperialist power.
Finally, we are faced with a very specific contradiction now, at
the end of the 20th century. The development of the productive forces,
not to speak of such phenomena as the ecological danger to the planet
as a whole, require increasing levels of planning and centralization
of resources, for the making of a rational, humane society in which
human beings can live in harmony with each other and with their
natural environment. This can only be achieved at a global level. On

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the other hand, however, this century has been, uniquely, a

of quantum increases in the levels of democratic demand
requires more and more devolution of power, including cultural
to the smaller units of human society. In this context, then,
literature' is indeed arising out of the very unification of t
through this immense increase in productive capacit
communicational technology, but for it to serve as an integral p
the socialist project it must be re-conceived not as an accum
of certain texts for profit but as a social relation among pr
scattered all over the globe, in their specific locales, but conn
each other in relations of radical equality. Like socialism itself,
literature' is a horizon: the measure of a time yet to come. O
it another way, 'world literature', like the working class, is a pr
of the capitalist market but stands in a relation antithetical
NOTES
1. See Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State and more particularly the fa
essay 'On the Jewish Question' in Quintin Hoare (ed), Karl Marx, Early
Writings (London, New Left Books, 1974). This edition includes an excell
introduction by Lucio Colletti.
2. Ibid., p. 229. McLellan in his translation prefers "right of selfishness"
stead of "the right of self-interest" as in Early Writings. See David McLell
(ed), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford, OUP, 1977), p 53.
3. The image we now have of modern capitalists and the industrial proleta
would be inappropriate when thinking of Marx's early writings, right u
the Manifesto. The famous "Paris proletariat" which was a key force in
revolutionary upheavals of that time was not even remotely "industr
and consisted of a variety of generally dispossessed masses. The "bourgeois
similarly included owners of urban property, the upper reaches of the lib
professions, merchants and the like. In the Manifesto itself the w
"proletariat" is sometimes- though not in every formulation- used in t
looser sense of a dispossessed mass of people whose only means of livelih
was their own labour.
4. See for a discussion of this point, my essay "The Communist Manifesto and
the problem of Universality," Monthly Review, June 1998.
5. The title "Theses on Feurbach" was given by Engels. Marx had used the
simple phrase "Concerning Feurbach" which makes them more tentative
and provisional, like rough notes.
6. All three texts are available, for convenient comparison Volume 6 of Collected
Works of Marx and Enigels (Moscow, 1984).
7. A distinction must be made here between Marx's distinctive and extensive
critique of what in The Poverty of Philosophy he had called "the metaphysics
of political economy," which was already fairly well advanced in the writings
leading up to the Manifesto, and a properly Marxist theory of capitalism,

154.59.124.141 on Sat, 22 May 2021 20:03:24 UTC
30 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
which only began taking shape during the 1950s, with t

Grundrisse.
8. Prabhat Patnaik, "The Communist Manifesto After 150 Y
Karat (ed), A World to Win: Essays on the Communist M
LeftWord, 1999).
9. Letter to F. Danielson (1881) in Marx & Engels, On Col
from the 'New York Herald Tribune' and other Writi
international Publishers, 1972), p 339. See, for more exten
Marx's detailed understanding of colonial plunder, Irfan
Perception of India," in Essays in Indian History: Tow
Perception (Delhi, Tulika, 1995) and my "Marx on Indi
Classes, Nations, Literatures (London 1992; Delhi 1995).
10. See On Colonialism.
11. Letter to Engels, 1858.
12. For a lengthier discussion of these points, see my "Imperialism and Progress
in Lineages of the Present (Delhi, Tulika, 1996).

154.59.124.141 on Sat, 22 May 2021 20:03:24 UTC

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The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature'

Author(s): Aijaz Ahmad

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3518232

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The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature'

Social Scientist, Vol. 29, Nos. 7- 8, July-August 2000

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but always denied in practice; and that it could n

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The Manifesto, notwithstanding a reference to the United States, was

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to the whole of Europe, but only to Western Europe w

Nor did that analysis yet anticipate that capita

The specific task of bourgeois society is the establ

That was in 1858, barely ten years after the

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Manifesto, and the terms of reference are virtually reversed: Europ

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Theses on Feurbach called 'social humanity'. What

I should want to answer that question in the shape of a close

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The bourgeoisie . . . compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to

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located in the colonizing centres but not in the colon

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and/or comparative advantage, for the mutual benefit of all. M

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Throughout his writings, Marx uses also the choice

The power and accuracy-and a feeling bordering

That ironic phrase 'what it calls civilization' alr

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'interdependence of nations'. It is in this other sense that the sent

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(Martinique), Vallejo (Peru), Neruda (Chile), Brecht (

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an anti-fascist popular front after 1935-not to speak of even a

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frequently celebrated as a 'spring of the peoples'

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is precisely the combination that the Bolsheviks had attempte

The problem lay elsewhere, in the assumption that the

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globalization of the capitalist mode of production would

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of this century should be called United Nations.

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based in rather a small literary community as

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the colonized were largely exterminated rather than simply sub

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anachronisms and cruelties inherited from the past.

Contrasted to the Indian experience, however, there have been a

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Arabic, to preserve their distinct cultural claim, or in Hebrew

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obtaining national integration among peoples

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Nor could it be otherwise. If it is indeed true, as Marx suggests

There is first of all the matter of investible resources. 'World

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immediate payment but for academic distinction a

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literature'; the mediating role of English is decisive. Two count

As regards the formulations pertaining to 'world literature' that I

Ahmad, The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature'

Ahmad, The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature'