Kerem Nisancioglu - Theory as History: Jairus Banaji’s contribution to Marxism
Essays on Modes of
Production and Exploitation:
by
Reviewed by Kerem Nisancioglu
Spanning thirty-odd years of academic endeavour, Jairus
Banaji’s Theory as History is a collection of essays exploring
the role of labour and exploitation within the wider research programme of
historical materialism. Having become the latest recipient of the prestigious
Isaac Deustcher Prize, this ambitious and rich monograph has already made a
splash in the seemingly never ending debates surrounding the historical
transition to capitalism, as well as crucial Marxist concepts such as ‘mode of
production’ and ‘relations of production’….
…The breadth and depth of Banaji’s historical research is
nothing short of staggering, making extensive use of primary archive material
while also avoiding an overreliance on solely English-speaking secondary
sources. In this regard, Banaji’s work is an example to many in the Marxist
tradition (and beyond) that have been content with lazily applying pre-given
abstract concepts to concrete reality as a substitute for proper historical study.
But it is further to Banaji’s credit that such historical detail at no point
eschews theoretical issues.
Through his analysis of Islamic traders and the
Deccan peasantry, Banaji rises to the long avoided post-colonial challenge of
integrating the history of non-Western societies into the historiography of
capitalism. At a time when authors across all political spectrums are returning
to historical questions surrounding the ‘Rise of the West’ in order to explain
its so-called 21st century ‘decline’, Banaji’s intervention reminds us of the
inherently international character of capitalist development. And in the midst
of an historical epoch in which imperialism is being legitimated through
Islamaphobia and the supposed ‘Clash’ of Western and Eastern civilizations, Theory
as History is a timely corrective to the view that ‘the East’ is an
eternally intractable and inherently incompatible foe of the West...
Such observations are crucial to challenging the notion,
widely prevalent in Stalinist orthodoxy and capitalist ideology, that the
supposed backwardness of the ‘Global South’ is due to a lack of capitalist
development. In contrast Banaji contends that Caribbean plantations, Latin
American latifundia and Egyptian ezbas were not aberrations or hangovers from precapitalist
societies, but were fundamental to the inner working and reproduction of
capitalism in the 19th century and beyond. And through a stimulating reading of
Sartre’s critique of the ‘free contract’ Banaji deconstructs the related notion
that coerced labour is something external to capitalism. In an age where
Workfare, sweatshops and unwaged domestic labour are still prevalent, an
analytical sensitivity to the variability of capitalist exploitation is of
paramount importance. This also warns us against the pitfalls of reformist
illusions and points us in the direction of revolutionary practice that resists
capitalist exploitation in all its forms.
Indeed, Banaji’s principle theoretical breakthrough also has
crucial political consequences. As numerous Smithian and Marginalist economists
(and to a lesser degree Weberian sociologists) have argued, there is extensive
historical evidence for the existence of wage-labour and capital prior to the
modern, capitalist epoch. For such authors this proves the transhistoricity of
capitalism, and consequently acts as a rebuke to the most basic of Marxist
claims – that capitalism is transient. Banaji skilfully negotiates this
historiographical blind spot, not by denying the historical evidence, but by
critically reworking it in a Marxist framework.
In this sense the greatest
insight of the book is a reaffirmation of the historical changeability of
society, and why the rigorous, critical and theoretically informed study of
that changeability, in all of its complexity, is of fundamental importance to
understanding – and transforming – the present. In short, it provides an
important theoretical foundation to an overtly anticapitalist politics seeking
to move beyond this epoch of exploitation.
See also
