Although this shift might appear minor, its consequences are significant. In Marx’s rendering, the expansion of capital’s sphere does not carry any direct implication for the form of political rule. The spread of its characteristic economic relations is consistent with, and might even require, coercive state structures. For Guha, however, since the universalizing drive is identified with acquisition of the consent of subaltern groups, his framework generates a distinct cultural criterion for testing the extent of capital’s universalization: insofar as capital fails to promote a liberal polity, it fails in its universalizing mission. With admirable clarity, Guha brings together the three phenomena—capital’s universalization, bourgeois hegemony, and hegemony as the ability to represent the general will—in a passage denouncing liberal apologetics:
[T]here is no acknowledgement in [liberal] discourse that in reality the universalist project we have been discussing hurtled itself against an insuperable barrier in colonialism. Hence the attempt, in colonialist writings, to make the rule of British capital appear as a rule based on the consent of the subject population—that is, as hegemonic—and correspondingly to construct, in nationalist writings, the dominance of the Indian bourgeoisie as the political effect of a consensus representing the will of the people—that is, as hegemonic again.56
The evidence for the failure of capital’s universalization is that the bourgeoisie failed to garner the consent of those it was exploiting or, even more, that it was unable to represent “the will of the people.” This strongly suggests that for the universalistic project to have successfully unfolded, capital needed to have emerged as spokesman for the general will. Where liberals err is not in their acceptance of this as a criterion for universalization, but in their claim that the Indian story embodies just such a project.
Two issues are involved here. The first is the suggestion of a very tight fit between the economic dimension of capitalist expansion and the generation of a new cultural and political environment. Such a claim may not appear controversial, since it would seem natural to assume that a drastic change in economic institutions should call forth at least some changes in culture and politics. But it is one thing to argue that economic changes are likely to generate pressures for corresponding shifts in culture and politics; it is quite another to use particular institutional and cultural changes as a test for whether the economic transformation is in fact taking place. Guha not only argues that the universalization of capital induces the rise of new cultural forms, but he takes the dissemination of particular instances of these as a litmus for whether or not capital has been universalized. Hence his insistence that, in failing to transform subaltern culture, to break down its obduracy and integrate it into a national culture, capital abandoned its universalizing mission. He never considers the possibility that the expansion of capital’s economic logic simply may not require the kind of deep cultural transformations that he thinks it does. He does not consider that capital might be able to meet its basic needs by relying on the very cultural forms he thinks are inimical to it—those typical of traditional political economies, suffused with outdated forms of social hierarchy and subordination. So, while there could certainly be some shifts in politics and culture, they may not be of the kind that Guha assumes are necessary.
And just what are the institutions Guha points to as evidence for capital’s universalization? Not only does he insist that capital must revolutionize the political culture; he seems also to have a very clear idea of just what the content of the new culture must be. Again and again, he links capital’s universalization with the rise of liberal political and cultural institutions. If the colonial bourgeoisie failed in its mission, it is because of having turned its back on the liberalism it professed in the West; if the Indian business houses were found wanting in their mettle, it is because of their “mediocre liberalism,” which was a “caricature” of the liberalism of their Western counterparts. If capital in India failed in its transformative mission, it is because it did not replace the political idioms of the traditional order with those of modern bourgeois society—the rule of law, formal equality, self-determination, and so on. Capital’s aborted universalization is inferred from the fact that these notions did not become institutionalized in the broader political culture. Guha does not consider that the shift to capitalist social structures might actually fit quite well with the idiom of traditional politics. If this is indeed the case, then the perpetuation of what he calls precapitalist institutions might not constitute evidence for an aborted universalization after all.
Guha’s argument about capital’s universalization rests on his understanding of the bourgeoisie as historic actor. He takes the notions of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois liberalism quite literally—these political forms do not simply arise in the capitalist era but are, for him, desired and fought for by the bourgeoisie. Capitalists are, at least in the classic cases, the vectors of these ideals, and it is bourgeois agency that implants them in the political culture. As in the case for capital’s universalization, Guha shifts the focus from the economic—such as the imperative of profit maximization—as the sine qua non of bourgeois goals, to the pursuit of certain political and cultural ends. The bourgeois revolutions are significant for him because they crystallize what he takes to be the real achievements of the bourgeoisie as a historical actor—not merely the establishment of capitalist economic relations, but the universalization of the class’s political and ideological commitments.
It is surprising that Guha does not entertain the possibility that the spread of the cultural and political forms he associates with the British and French bourgeoisie might have issued from other sources; hence, while they might have become established in the capitalist era, they would not have been brought about by capitalist design. This is surprising only because, by the time Guha published Dominance without Hegemony, there was a veritable mountain of historical literature pointing precisely in this direction.
We now turn to the historical evidence on the course of the so-called bourgeois revolutions.
1 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15.
2 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
3 Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–8.
4 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), henceforth cited as DH. The volume also contained Guha’s 1988 S. G. Deuskar Lecture. The two essays in question are “Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography,” which was included in Subaltern Studies VI (1989), and “Discipline and Mobilize: Hegemony and Elite Control in Nationalist Campaigns,” originally published in Subaltern Studies VII (1992).
5 For a history and analysis of the strike, see Stephen Sherlock, The Indian Railways Strike of 1974: A Study of Power and Organised Labour (Delhi: Rupa, 2001).
6 Ranajit Guha, “Introduction,” The Subaltern Studies Reader (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xix. Emphasis added.
7 Ibid., xiii.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., xi.
10 Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography.”
11 Ibid., 5. Emphasis in the original.
12 Ibid., 5–6.
13 Ibid., 6.
14 DH 23.
15 Guha clearly derives his argument from a certain reading of Gramsci, one that was very much in vogue among Marxists during the 1980s. As I indicated in Chapter 1, I will not comment on the merits of his interpretation of Gramsci’s work, though I do believe that it is questionable.
16 DH 63–4.
17 DH