Class Struggle and the Jute-Mill Workers of Bengal
November 18th, 2007
Dipesh Chakrabarty's Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890 to 1940 addresses an interesting subject – workers in a society (in this case Bengal) with a culture very different from Western culture – but fails to come up with a satisfactory analysis. The work is teleological, overemphasizes culture at the expense of worker agency, does not adequately analyze Bengali culture, and in some cases uses examples that do not support its claims. Chakrabarty's argument is fundamentally flawed.
Chakrabarty seeks to break out of old paradigms, particularly nationalist and Marxist interpretations of Indian history, by examining how capitalism functions in what he calls a “pre-bourgeois” or “pre-capitalist” culture. He uses the jute-mill workers in Bengal as a case study to explore this topic. He claims that Marx's analysis of capital presupposed a “bourgeois” culture with a Foucaltian disciplinary grid, both of which were allegedly absent in Bengal during this time period. According to Chakrabarty, jute-mill workers related to their employers in a manner closer to a master-slave or lord-serf relationship than one characterized by contract and bourgeois individualism. These cultural differences caused jute-mill workers to behave in significantly different ways and made the development of a labor movement more difficult. His sources include business records, interviews, newspapers, union records, government documents, and phrase books.
Chakrabarty's argument is teleological and, without intending to be, somewhat Eurocentric. The use of terms like “pre-capitalist” and “pre-bourgeois” imply that history is divided into a capitalist phase and the phase before capitalism, in other words a teleological line from “pre-capitalism” to the present. Chakrabarty’s image of “pre-capitalist”/”pre-bourgeois” societies tends to homogenize them together and imply that there was little or no change prior to the advent of capitalism. This image is also Eurocentric because it sets up Europe and the US as the norm (“bourgeois”) and everything else as being before the norm (“pre-bourgeois”).
Chakrabarty also overemphasizes the role of culture and, ironically given that emphasis, doesn’t even have a good analysis of culture. Chakrabarty’s emphasis on culture is so strong that it tends to depict workers almost like automatons. Workers have little agency in Chakrabarty’s analysis; their behavior is determined by culture – which is the only thing with real agency in his work. Chakrabarty also removes culture from time and treats it like something unchanging and intrinsic to a particular group of people. He gives us no sense of where this culture came from or the conflicts likely involved in its creation and evolution. Instead, we have a picture of a monolithic unchanging “pre-bourgeois” Bengali culture free of internal conflicts or debates.
Many of the examples Chakrabarty uses to support his argument that Bengali “pre-bourgeois” culture dramatically changed worker behavior and their interactions with employers are flawed. Chakrabarty attempts to argue that the inter-ethnic communal strife which workers participated in during this time period are somehow connected to their “pre-bourgeois” culture, yet the United States is thoroughly bourgeois and its history is littered with workers (and other classes) engaging in inter-ethnic violence against each other on an extensive scale, ranging from lynchings to race riots to race-based terrorism and guerrilla movements.
As part of Chakrabarty's argument that workers and employers related to each other in a “pre-bourgeois” manner he claims that authority in the Jute Mills “bore marks of terror.” (p. 174) Employers used extensive violence against workers, including forming militias and engaging in extralegal violence against workers. Yet, these are not signs of a “pre-bourgeois” culture because employers in the United States, clearly a bourgeois society, also used extensive violence and terror against workers. From the nineteenth century through the first several decades of the twentieth century, American employers used corporal punishment to discipline many of their workers, resorted to terror to crush working class political movements, used legal and extra-legal violence (including the formation of paramilitary militias) to suppress unions, and frequently massacred rebellious workers.
Ultimately, Chakrabarty's argument is deeply flawed. The topic Ckarabarty tries to explore – both in the narrow sense of of the jute-mill workers of Bengal and in the broader sense of how culture affects worker behavior – is one worth exploring. However, Chakrabarty's attempt to do so is not successful.