Social Scientist

Problems of Marxist Historiography

Author(s): Irfan Habib
Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 16, No. 12 (Dec., 1988), pp. 3-13
Published by: Social Scientist
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IRFAN HABIB*

Problems of Marxist Historiography

In one of his theses Marx said: 'Philosophers have so far interpreted

the world. The point is to change it.' Marxism sees an innate unity
between perception of the past and present practice. This unity implies
continuous interaction: as time passes and history (human experience)
lengthens, we draw greater lessons from it for the present; and as our
present experience tells us more about the possibilities and limitations
of social action, we turn to the past and obtain new comprehensions of
it. Consider Marc Bloc's understanding of the French Revolution as
representing continuity and not a break in French agrarian history,
reached after the Soviet Revolution of 1917; similarly our new
perception of the limitations of Soviet peasant mobilisation that
followed the success of the Chinese Revolution, a massive 'peasant
revolution' (1949). It is inherent in the unity of past and present that
Marxist historiography must continuously turn to fresh aspects to
explore and re-explore and fresh questions to answer. Nothing is more
illustrative of this need than the history of Socialist societies, since
1917. That history cannot be meaningfully studied only from what the
classics tell us Socialism should be. The lengthening, complex history
of Socialism is of great significance not only for the peoples of Socialist
countries, but also for all those who aspire for Socialism in their own
countries.
There are other factors too which must cause continuous
reconsiderations of positions previously taken. Research expands and
exposes facts we did not know of before: without undue modesty, we can
say we know more about India's past than Marx did. Can his statements
on India be accepted as the last word, even when we recognise that his
information was limited? Naturally, extended knowledge imposes on
us the task of testing our older interpretations against our information
as it now stands. It has to be an unceasing process.

More: Marxism, as the ideology of the working class, does not exist
alone and in isolation. There are rival interpretations arising all the
time. The authors of these interpretations might not accept the basic
premises of a class-approach; and, therefore, for us to dismiss them as

*Professorof History, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh

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4 Social Scientist

'bourgeois' and ignore them brings no conviction. They have to be

rationally analysed. In India every day we find ourselves face to face
with chauvinistic, communal and regional approaches to history,
which we must answer by detailed arguments. But there are other and
more fundamental challenges too. Gramsci, in criticising Bukharin's
ABC of Communism said that in the war of ideas, unlike ordinary war,
you have to attack the enemy's strongest, and not weakest points. This,
of course, demands constant preparation and self-examination: the
refining and extension of Marxist positions. This examination must
cover everything from general principles to specific facts, because both
are all the time being brought into question by others. We have to
answer not by denunciation-that is always a bad counsellor-but
careful scrutiny and investigation.
Finally, I believe that Scientific Socialism requires constant
debate within itself, without need for polemics from outside. Long
before the current recognition of the virtues of 'plurality', Mao Tse-tung
had urged that truth could belong to a minority, and all truths are at
first espoused only by a minority. This applies to a revolutionary party
as well as society at large.

'MIND AND MATTER' IN HISTORY

One of the common obscurities in popular understanding about Marxian
historiography has been caused, I believe, by the text-book view of
Marxism as 'determinism'. While Marxists have protested against this
characterization, their own description of 'Historical Materialism' (as
in Stalin's essay on Dialectical and Historical Materialism) is often in
fact couched in deterministic terms. We are told that the production
technology ('forces of production') determines the social relationships
('relations of production'). These together constitute the 'mode of
production', which determines the world of ideas and culture ('the
superstructure'). For has not Marx said, 'It is their social being that
determines their consciousness'? Clearly the relationship of
technique-class relations and mode of production-and culture, are
crucial, but in what way exactly does one part of the relationship
'determine' the configuration of the other part? It has been said that
'Marxism is a product of capitalism'. It could not have arisen before
capitalism created the working class. But that the different aspects of
Marx's thought were inevitably or automatically just what they were,
having been directly formed by the conditions created by capitalism,
would be a statement very difficult to substantiate.
One would rather propose that capitalism set the context, rather
than the structure, for Marxism-and this is very different from
determinism of any recognisable kind. (For the moment, I am not going
into Althusser's discussion of 'determination' and 'overdetermination').
Marxist text-books often suggest that the 'mode of production', but
especially the 'forces of production', represent the 'material' base,
whereas ideas form a separate superstructure seated upon it. But long

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 Problems of Marxist Historiography 5

ago the archaeologist Gordon Childe in the very title of his work, Man
Makes Himself, showed that production technology is after all
inseparable from ideas. Matter does not create technology; human
ideas, reflected in skill, dexterity, and science, create it. When
Maurice Dobb argues in his Studies in the Developmentof Capitalism
that the inventions which triggered the English Industrial Revolution
in the eighteenth century came not earlier, and only then, because the
surrounding economic circumstances were not favourable earlier, is he
not suggesting a reverse determination of 'forces of production'-the
supposedly material base-by social relationships?
Marx's view of historical development is clearly far more refined
and persuasive than a mere extension of materialist determination to
social evolution: 'Justas we cannot judge an individual by the opinion
he has of himself, so we cannot judge a period of social transformation
by its own consciousness.' This statement means that the intricacies of
the contemporary modes of production and social relationships could
not be seen in the earlier periods. Rather, they were always
misconceived. To Marx such misconceptionsor imperfect perceptions set
limits to the growth of further ideas, or of action during the process of
transformation.When he said that 'ideas become a material force once
they have gripped the masses', he surely meant that consciousness once
generalised delimits the range of ideas of individuals and social
action. Religion, and race or community prejudices could colour class
struggles and shape their results (we can illustrate this from our own
history). What happened in the epoch of capitalism and as a
consequence of the simultaneous or attendant scientific revolution was
the creation of a possibility, re-realised in Marxism, of an
approximately closer perception of the mode of production and social
relationships with a view to a far more resolute guidance of the
'transformation' or social revolution. It is in this sense that the
achievement of the perception by the working class of the real world
around it and the potentiality of its own revolutionary role-its 'class
consciousness'-has been given such signal importance in Marxist
practice. But this surely means that the role of ideas compared with
earlier periods has been substantially enlarged: blind struggles have
been replaced by sighted ones. Can we not go further and say that this
has been a feature of human development, and that the bourgeoisie,
which according to the Communist Manifesto had played such a
'revolutionary role', was responsible for the previous enlargement? I
feel convinced that Marx believed that ideas would be attaining
continuously greater importancein future. When he spoke of the future
as one where mankind marched 'from the realm of necessity to the
realm of freedom',I feel convinced (in spite of Engels's unfortunategloss
on freedom' as the 'recognitionof necessity') that Marx looked forward
to ideas at last gaining ascendancy over matter, not by any spiritualist
exercise, but by the abundance of material wealth which communism
would ultimately produce.

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6 Social Scientist

Far, therefore, from being a theory of materialist determinism,

Marxism sees the past of humanity in its true relationship to the
material world and aspires to achieve for it its ultimate sovereignty by
progress through socialism and communism, the twin states, present and
future, of social evolution that Marx confidently charted in the
Critique of the Gotha Programme.
It goes without saying that for us today liberation from the text-
book 'inevitability' theory, erroneously ascribed to Marxism, is a major
necessity. Capitalism and other exploitative systems are not going to
break down by their own weight or by the 'General Crisis of
Capitalism.' There is no alternative to entering the battle of ideas;
economic action, on behalf of toilers to teachers, is a help, but it is no
substitute for class-consciousness.

SOCIAL FORMATIONS AND CLASS STRUGGLES

'The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggles.' These ringing words of the Communist Manifesto seem quite
often lost in the long debates among Marxist historians over modes of
production, social formations, and especially feudalism. I cannot
protest too much over it, because I have also participated in these
debates. Nor do I think that they are irrelevant, although it does seem
to me that we should be careful not to lose sight of the wood for the
trees.
The relevance of defining social formations arises because you
cannot study class struggles without discerning classes; and classes must
belong to structures which we call social formations. Social formations
constitute successive organisations of society, so that the classic order of
succession has been primitive communism-slavery-feudalism-
capitalism. Whether the classic order is also universal is a question on
which there has been much controversy. Marx did not think that pre-
colonial India was 'feudal': it lacked serfdom, and there was identity
between tax and rent. The 'Asiatic Mode', which Marx speculated on in
the 1850s, has been resurrected as the Tributary Mode by Samir Amin;
and sub-classified into 'feudal' (based on rent) and 'despotic' (based on
tax) by Chris Wickham; Kosambi and R.S. Sharma have argued that
India did not see the stage of slavery, but had forms of feudalism from
the middle of the first millennium or thereabouts to the colonial
conquest.
While the controversy is not likely to cease, I do not wish to discuss
it here at length. My own views are against a universalization of
'feudalism' as an umbrella to cover all pre-capitalist systems
whatever their actual modes of surplus-extraction (class-exploitation).
I agree that failure to universalize feudalism would lead us to accept a
multiplicity of social formations over different territories; but I see no
scandal in this. I would reassert that this is also implicit in the
Communist Manifesto, when it treats capitalism as the first universal
mode of production, and speaks of complex class structures preceding it.

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 Problemsof Marxist Historiography 7

What I think needs correction is the view tacitly accepted by many

Marxist historians that every social order is created exclusively by the
internal contradictions of the previous one only at the apex of its
development. Thus slavery-feudalism-capitalism form a unilinear
succession, which if confined to Europe, would show that social
evolution in its highest stages belonged to Europe alone. I would contest
the premise. Marxand Engels were conscious, as shown by many of their
statements, of the backwardness of European feudal society when
compared with contemporary societies in other parts of the world.
European feudalism was not necessarily-in terms of commodity
production, productivity, etc-the most advanced social formation in
the world in its day. That it was ultimately transformed into
capitalism was by no means due to the development of its internal
contradictions alone. James Needham has rightly emphasized the
importance of Chinese technological discoveries, viz. paper, printing
press, pedals, belt-transmission with fly-wheel, mariner's compass,
gun-powder, etc., for the technological developments in late and post-
feudal Europe, without which the technological base for the Industrial
Revolution would have been inconceivable. Clearly, while human
advance has been on a universal scale, different regions in different
periods have been ahead of others: China was so clearly ahead of
Europe before 1200. And yet it could not for that reason generate
capitalism. Other factors too were required for the genesis of
capitalism, such as overseas plunder from the close of the 15th century
onwards and the ravaging of Africa for slaves, on the one hand, and the
Scientific Revolution, on the other. We may, by labelling India or
China as 'feudal', lay claims to having possessed the potentiality of
developing capitalism had colonialism not intervened. Despite the
seductiveness of this notion, I hope we will resist it, not only because
the factual base has been lacking (despite my colleague Iqtidar Alam
Khan's firm arguments), but also because a universal feudal system
would go so strikingly against the law of uneven development which is
so vital a part of Marxist dialectics.
All social formations contain contradictions; the most important
revolve around classes and express themselves in the form of class
struggles. For Marxist historians it is not only important to rescue from
oblivion the narrativesof rebellions of the subjugated classes but also to
analyse their nature and the extent to which their participants were
aware of their true class affiliations. For there can be class struggles
without the participants realising that they are such. Unfortunately,
since many of the uprisings are written about by their opponents, who
were partisans of the ruling classes, we have often no means of knowing
what the rebels really thought. Even so, one becomes aware that there
was more class-consciousness in the peasant rebellions of China or in
England in 1881 than in the agrarian uprisings in India of the 17th
century. The reasons for this backwardness, such as possibly the caste
system must be investigated; these may well have lessons for us today.

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8 Social Scientist

We should also not forget that class struggles appear on two planes:
risings of the oppressed (e.g. peasant wars) and conflict between two
ruling classes (e.g. aristocracy versus the bourgeoisie in the French
Revolution). The latter may involve the other classes in the role of an
auxiliary. We should consider if this has not been true of certain
uprisings in India where, as in the case of Shivaji with his bargis, the
peasants were used to establish a zamindar-style state.
In this connection, Gramsci's judgement that peasants cannot create
an ideology of their own, is an interesting thesis to test. We may here
remark that Professor Ranajit Guha, and other scholars of the
'subaltern school', who use Gramsci's terminology (but in a peculiar
way and with additions like 'elite classes') lay particular stress on the
'autonomy' of the 'subaltern classes' in ideology and culture. Their
'subaltern classes', however, often appear to be not true classes, but
merely castes, tribes and communities, where zamindars and peasants
are seen and accepted as undifferentiated. The view that these
composite groups necessarily developed 'autonomous' ideologies (as the
working-class does, in Marxism) is an unproven premise. If religion is
the opium of the people, a religion that attaches itself only to the
ruling class and does not command the loyalty of the subject people,
would be of no use to the ruling class. The 'hegemony' of the ruling class,
in any stable social formation, is only partly based on armed power; it
must also be an ideological hegemony. To think that 'subaltern' classes
in India have possessed deep-rooted subterranean ideologies of their
own is belied by the universal prevalence of caste-ideology, which
these classes have shared with the ruling class. It is the prevalence of
such ideas within the 'autonomy' of the 'subaltern' groups that
necessarily limited their protest or resistance and brought about their
downfall. The subaltern scholars are happy narrators of tragedy; it is
not their task to look for salvation. That can come, of course, not with
the oppressed protecting their 'autonomy' in a system of class-
exploitation, but with rejecting their past parochialism, espousing the
ideology of the working class and joining with their peers in a common
struggle for liberation.
CAPITALISM AND COLONIALISM
Marx in his contributions to the New York Tribune, and in Capital and
other writings, gave special attention to the relationship between the
colonies and the emergence of capitalism in England. He framed the
theory of primary or primitive accumulation of capital to explain how
the industrial revolution in England was generated by colonial plunder.
Nationalist economists, since the time of Dadabhoy Naoroji rightly
made the Tribute or Drain of Wealth a major Indian grievance against
Britain. Unfortunately, British Marxist historians, like Dobb and
Hobsbawm, have either omitted a consideration of this aspect of
colonial relationships or only assigned it a marginal role in the origins
and sustenance of capitalist expansion in Britain. This lapse has surely

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 Problemsof Marxist Historiography 9
to be rectified if the real significance of colonialism in the formation of
a capitalist economy is to be properly assessed.
In still another matter, there has been a seeming lag in Marxist
appraisals of nineteenth century colonialism. Imperialism the Highest
Stage of Capitalism, which was taken to suggest that Imperialism, as
a vehicle of capitalists' striving for territory and wealth abroad, came
only with the development of finance-capital and monopoly. Indeed,
Lenin went so far as to say that
When free competition in Great Britain was at its height, i.e.
between 1840 and 1860, the leading British bourgeois
politicians were opposed to colonial policy and were of the
opinion that the liberation of the colonies and their complete
separation from Great Britain was inevitable and desirable.
I am sure Lenin would not have written these words had he known
that Marx had regarded the anti-colonial professions of the British
Free Traders of that very period with healthy scepticism. When India
had been in the process of annexation, everyone had kept quiet; once
the 'natural limits' had been reached, they had 'become loudest with
their hypocritical peace cant'. But, then, 'firstly, they had to get it
(India) in order to subject it to their sharp philanthropy'. This was
written in 1853. In 1859 Marx was writing that 'the 'glorious' reconquest
of India' after the Mutiny had been essentially carried out 'for securing
the monopoly of the Indian market to the Manchester Free Traders'. He
came perilously close to the conception of the Imperialism of Free
Trade, which John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson put forward a
hundred years later (1953), but without Marx's economic insights.
The importance of colonies for free-trade capitalism also poses for
Marxists a simple theoretical problem. All surplus-value is produced
by the worker. Thus surplus values of manufactured goods exported from
Britain to India represented the exploitation of the English worker, not
Indian. Yet, these very exports caused unemployment and vast artisan's
distress in India. Marx might have had this particular question in
mind when he put forward the notion of 'unequal exchange' (without
use of the particular term) and said that 'the richer country exploits
the poorer one.' The precise mechanism, given Marx's theoretical
framework, still remains only dimly illumined. Rosa Luxemburg came
near to answering the question by asserting that there could be no
'extended reproduction' in capitalism without exchanges with the non-
capitalist sectors (including colonies), through which the additional
surplus value would be 'realised'. Whatever the theoretical
weaknesses of Rosa Luxemburg's position (for which see the
sympathetic assessment by Joan Robinson and the harsher ones by
N.Bukharin and Paul Sweezy), the question she poses does not go
away. It is an area where Marx's own historical understanding of a
phenomenon has yet to be appropriately accommodated within his
theory of capitalist production and circulation.

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10 Social Scientist

It is also time that we may reconsider the question of export of

capital as an important element of the colonial relationship. Outside
the railways, much of British capital in India was not imported, but
generated in India from official salaries and mercantile activities of
Englishmen. Its later transfer from India to Britain was not true
repatriation, but another element of the Drain.
THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT
Since R.P. Dutt's India Today (1940/1946) there has been considerable
writing on the Indian National Movement by Marxists. There has been
a recent detailed survey by E.M.S.Namboodiripad, A History of
India's Freedom Struggle. It seems to me that there is now a general
understanding that the National Movement was a united front of all
classes of the Indian people, the peasantry, other petty bourgeoisie,
the bourgeoisie and the working class, to the exclusion of the big
landowners and princes. The major nationalist organisation, the Indian
National Congress, did not always reflect the united front, although,
as in the late 1930s it came very close to such a position.
It is, of course, important in the light of this understanding to
review many harsh criticisms of the leaders of the National
Movement, which can be found in the documents of the Communist
Movement till before the Dutt-Bradley thesis of 1936 and occasionally
later. The correction of this attitude need not, however, mean that the
Communists or the other Left groups were incorrect in all the basic
positions they took, for example in 1942. An overwhelming
preoccupation with the 'errors' of the Left, as in the volume edited by
Professor Bipan Chandra, is unfortunate, since by this very
preoccupation, it belittles the achievements of the Left during the
National Movement and its contributions to it. After all, the creation of
the organised Kisan Movement and the trade unions was mainly the
handiwork of the Communists and their allies; and that cannot be
forgotten.
I would urge that we should treat the National Movement (which
was always larger than the Congress) as a common heritage. All
assessment of individuals playing roles in it must be tempered by the
realisation that they stood up in opposition to British rule. Dadabhoy
Naoroji spoke for the silent millions when he brought the poverty of
the Indian people and its removal as a major issue between Imperialism
and the Indian people. Gandhi succeeded in mobilising those
millions-though the forms of that mobilisation may have remained
limited. These were undying services to the cause of the Indian people.
Marxists should be on guard against efforts to treat these as illusory, or
insignificant, as in the writings of the Cambridge and Subaltern
schools, which, by the way, in effect, treat the Left also as part of the
elite leadership.
Today, the positive aspects of the National Movement, its
bourgeois-democratic values such as secularism, women's rights,

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 Problemsof Marxist Historiography 11

national unity, freedom of the press, and parliamentary democracy,

need particular emphasis. These can form the initial points for a
people's front, in which all classes may be united as can carry forward
the cause of democracy and socialism. Such a front could be a worthy
successor to our National Movement.

HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOCIALISM
One of the admitted weaknesses of Marxist historiography lies in the
limitations of its analysis of the history of socialist societies, whose
existence began with the Russian Revolution of 1917. While in Marx's
Capital, we have a theoretical framework for understanding 'the laws
of motion' of capitalist society, no such framework is available for
socialism. It was for long thought sufficient that the state should own
industry and agriculture should be collectivized so as to produce
Socialism. Not until 1952 did the Soviet Union possess in Stalin's
pamphlet, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR an
authoritative exposition of some of the most elementary questions
relating to socialist economy. But Stalin left many important problems
unresolved or omitted them from view altogether. The only objective
that he set for socialism was the enlargement of production on the basis
of higher techniques. A more important breakthrough was made by
Mao Tse-tung. Althusser commends Mao for making, in his essay On
Contradiction, a basic addition to the Marxian theory of dialectics.
And Oscar Lange commented as early as 1957 that 'it has been the merit
of Mao Tse-tung to have re-called with emphasis that socialist society
too develops through contradictions.' What Stalin's essay had indeed
lacked primarily was the spelling out of the contradictions that beset
socialist society in the USSR in the particular stage he was dealing
with. In his speeches Correctly Handling Contradictions among the
People and Ten Great Relationships in the late 1950s, Mao had clearly
begun to evolve a theoretical basis for analysis of progress towards
socialism. But unluckily, by the mid-1960s he seems to have altered his
views so as to hold that the contradictions of socialism were being
transformed in China into contradictions between socialism and
capitalism; and he thereupon initiated and led the Cultural
Revolution, which our Chinese friends now hold to have been an error.
It is, therefore, important to consider what specific contradictions
need resolution in a socialist society. These are obviously to be
considered in two major stages within socialism: (1) transition to
socialism and (2) socialism, or what Marx called the lower stage of
communism. In the first stage there are obvious class contradictions
between the proletariat and the former capitalists and landlords, and
between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie (rich peasantry,
etc). There is little dispute involved here, although the time is past
when we should accept all the measures actually taken in the USSR
and other socialist countries as the only ones possible. A comparison
between the Soviet methods of collectivization and Chinese

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12 Social Scientist

mobilization for cooperatives and communes suggests important

differences in outlook towards the peasantry, which could have
important lessons for other countries building socialism.
For the second stage in which the USSR and China now are, two
basic contradictions may be defined by looking at the goals which Marx
in his Critique of the Gotha Programme set for 'the higher stage of
Communism', towards which socialist society would evolve.
(1) Contradiction between 'mental and physical labour':
essentially the contradiction generated by higher incomes and
authority for bureaucrats, managers, intellectuals, etc., which
has to be maintained in socialism for quite a long time in the
interest of higher production.
(2) Contradiction between town and country: this often arises in
the socialist countries in the form of pressure of industry upon
agriculture. It was the source of the theory of socialist
primitive accumulation, abandoned in words, but often pursued
in practice to promote industrialisation.
There are other contradictions, which need also to be examined.
Socialism has come about in a system of nation-states, and when one
large economically powerful socialist nation deals with others,
national contradictions are bound to arise.
How such contradictions are to be resolved, raises the problem of
the political system of socialism. In an old controversy (where Stalin
was on the side of the angels), the question was raised whether the
dictatorship of the proletariat means the dictatorship of the Party
and whether they were the same. Clearly, there must always exist
contradictions between the ruling Party apparatus or leadership and
the Working Class, which cannot be glossed over by a mere designation
of the party as a Working-Class Party.
There is no doubt that until the abundance of material wealth
ushers in the period of communism, these contradictions would continue
to exist. This has been proved amply by the Chinese measures after the
Cultural Revolution, under which even individual farming has been
restored: this is relevant to our Contradiction No. 2, since both
communes and collective farms could be made to surrender surpluses for
industry more easily than individual farmers, who, apparently,
produce more. In the Soviet Union there has recently been more concern
with the contradictions between the party and the population, and
measures similar to those of the Chinese are on agenda, relating to
both our Contradictions (1) and (2). And yet if what Marx called
'bourgeois rights' continue in socialism, it is also important that as
production advances they should be contained. Distribution is as
important as production (a point not touched upon by Stalin in his
essay); and 'Equality, Liberty and Fraternity' should surely be more
than mere slogans in a socialist society-far more than in
Revolutionary France which gave birth to them.

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 Problems of Marxist Historiography 13

A Marxist historiography of socialism can be reconstructed on the

basis of our comprehension of the various contradictions within
socialism. The task can be eminently performed by historians of the
socialist countries with direct access to archives and experience. But it
is as crucial a task for Marxists outside the socialist countries. One
would differ from Charles Bettelheim in the stand he takes, but the
task of analysing the Soviet experience from a Marxist point of view,
which he aims at in his Class Struggles in the USSR, is in principle an
unexceptionable one. The gauntlet has been thrown to those who could
do it with a different perception of the evolution of socialism. With
socialism a reality for the last seventy years, the people's choice for it
cannot be invoked on the basis of the inequities of capitalism alone. It
is surely obligatory on us to frame our own independent analysis of the
history of socialist societies in order to define the contours of the
socialism that we aspire to build in India.

(Text of the Second V.P. Chintan Memorial Lecture, Indian School of

Social Sciences, Madras, September 1988)

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