[DEBATE] : INTERVIEW WITH AIJAZ AHMAD

[Russell Grinker]

THE EYE OF THE STORM

A 40TH ANNIVERSARY INTERVIEW WITH AIJAZ AHMAD
By Seemin Qayum

This interview was conducted for the 40th anniversary issue of NACLA Report
on the Americas. 

Aijaz Ahmad is a leading Marxist intellectual and academic based in New
Delhi, India. He has written widely on political and cultural theory,
colonialism, and imperialism, and has taught in a number of universities in
India and the West. Among his many books are In Theory: Classes, Nations,
Literatures; Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary
South Asia; and Afghanistan, Iraq and the Imperialism of Our Time. He is a
frequent contributor to the Indian magazine Frontline, for which he has
written several articles on political developments in Latin America. NACLA
editorial committee member Seemin Qayum interviewed Ahmad on the occasion of
NACLA’s 40th anniversary.

What is the significance of Latin American political, cultural, and
theoretical developments for intellectuals and activists of your generation?
The Cuban revolution was one of the key events in the political formation of
my generation, just as the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973 was
in its negative impact a decisive moment in the history of the global
Marxist left. The more recent Latin American developments have been seen in
India as both a certain return to what one might call “the Cuban moment,”
but also the rise of a very different kind of left. My own writings on Latin
America have been designed strictly for an Indian readership and try to
grapple with just what this new left, in all its variations, is.
I have also written time and again that with the decisive defeat of the
Soviet experiment, whatever the causes of that defeat may have been, a
certain historical period has come to a close and the global left, on the
defensive and highly dispersed, has entered a more or less prolonged phase
of experimentation with various forms of struggle, combining some older
forms with newer ones. These innovations might eventually show us the way to
historically unprecedented forms that are appropriate for revolutions of the
21st century. The great achievement of the revolutions of the 20th
century—principally the socialist and anti-colonial revolutions—was that
they threw up an enormous number of revolutionary agents. Classes and
nations, yes, but not only those. The rise of women’s movements is of
historic importance, and considering that the vast majority of women perform
not only reproductive but also productive work, the whole issue of how class
politics is to be conducted—how gender is constitutive in concrete
formations of class itself—has been opened up in fundamentally new ways.
There is the question of caste in India, and the question of the indigenous
peoples in Latin America. We are now thinking of the demands of culture in a
new way, but also of the demands of nature; injuries done to human beings in
both these spheres, and injuries to the very material conditions within
which human beings live their lives. There was a time when we used to think
that industrialization of agriculture, in a transition to capitalism, shall
give us more advanced forces of production and would emancipate the
peasantry. The actual historical experience, which is now being addressed,
is that capitalist appropriation of land has ruined the peasantry everywhere
and turned great numbers of them into surplus populations, landless masses,
and slum dwellers.
Meanwhile, the industrial proletariat has been decimated in country after
country, and there is not a single great city of the world (the vast
majority of which are now in Latin America and Asia) that can be called
“industrial.” These issues relate directly to the kind of struggles that
have been central in recent Latin American developments. But the issues
themselves are by no means specific to Latin America alone, and the kinds of
struggles that have developed there have reverberated in a variety of Asian
struggles as well, and they are forcing an older generation of Marxists to
think their theory anew.
If Third Worldism was an important ideological formation, let us say from
the 1960s to the 1980s, what was Latin America’s place within it, and do you
see a comparable phenomenon in relation to imperialism today?
Che’s famous invocation, “Two, three, many Vietnams,” had a global
resonance—as did the Cuban example, as did what came to be called “the
Chilean road to socialism,” as did the economic nationalism of leaders like
Brazil’s João Goulart, as did the numerous guerrilla struggles in a variety
of Latin American countries, like the Nicaraguan revolution toward the end
of the period you indicate. In other words, Latin America, in all its
various developments, was part of a global revolutionary and
anti-imperialist process, and awareness of this fact was widespread among
activists and intellectuals of my generation. That earlier awareness and
sense of identification feeds into the interest that Latin American
developments today generate around the world, notably in India. More
generally, one could say that Latin America was the original laboratory for
U.S. imperialist policies, the region that first suffered all those
processes of U.S. imperialist exploitation, domination, and military
invasion which got globalized after the Second World War, when the United
States emerged as the uniquely hegemonic imperialist power in the whole
world. Since 1945, Latin America has been one of the three strategic areas
for the U.S. imperium, alongside West Asia (what is generally called the
Middle East) and East and Southeast Asia. Our two continents are equally in
the eye of the storm.
How do you see the relations between the left, social movements, and the
state in Latin America, and what resonance do you find with the Indian
situation?
It is difficult to compare a national situation within one country with very
different national situations in a continent. Venezuela and Bolivia have
undergone very dramatic changes in the very nature of state power. Nothing
remotely comparable has happened in India. The Communist left has certainly
formed governments at provincial levels, but that has only exposed how
little they can achieve within a republic of the bourgeoisie, especially in
a country like India, where the constitutional arrangements allot much more
power to the central government than to the regional ones. Life in the
countryside has surely improved under left rule in those particular states,
and there has been appreciable improvement in health and education, but
little could be achieved for the urban working classes facing offensives
from national and transnational corporate capital. Communists control about
12% of the national parliament, but that is not enough to substantially
influence national policies or to break the ruling neoliberal consensus. By
supporting this or that coalition government at one time or another, the
main achievement of the left is that is has been able to stem the onslaught
from the far right at various points, but from a very defensive position.
This situation is much more comparable to the experience of the Communist
Refoundation Party in Italy than to anything in Latin America. Meanwhile,
the social movements tend to be far less militant, far more in the category
of decent local reformism, than those of Bolivia, for example, and far too
many of them depend on foreign and corporate funds. Again, the kind of
militancy one witnessed in Chiapas, even a sort of visionary idea of
wholesale transformation from below, is largely lacking in Indian social
movements, even in the very sizable movements of the oppressed castes
(dalits and adivasis). At the other end of the spectrum, India has perhaps
the most powerfully entrenched bourgeois state anywhere in the Tricontinent
(a term I sometimes prefer to Third World). In Latin America, only Brazil
comes even anywhere close to that secure solidity of the Indian state.
How does the emergence of a powerful critique of neoliberalism in Latin
America look from India, where the political establishment continues to
promote and celebrate liberalization as a dynamic motor for socioeconomic
development?
All the main Indian political parties, outside the left, are wedded to
neoliberalism, and support for it is strong in the corporate media and among
the richest 10% or so (100 million strong, concentrated in the largest six
cities). However, Indian Marxists have produced extensive, highly
influential critiques of neoliberalism, dazzling in their theoretical sweep.
This is not a minor matter in a country where tens of millions vote for
Communists. India’s social movements are largely guided by those critiques,
and resentment of neoliberalism runs deep, right into the villages.
Opposition to it is part of what Gramsci might have called the “common
sense” in India today. In this sense, Latin America is no different. Masses
in country after country have risen in revolt, and left intellectuals have
produced excellent work in this regard. But it is also a fact that ruling
circles in Latin America are still rife with apologists of neoliberalism,
from Chile (even under Michelle Bachelet) through Colombia and Mexico and
right into Brazil, Lula’s balancing acts notwithstanding.
Contrasts and convergences are of a different order. Neoliberalism came to
Latin America before its advent anywhere else, and that too through the
barrel of a gun after the 1973 coup in Chile. Thereafter it devastated
country after country (Argentina, Bolivia, and so on) well before it even
arrived in India, where it is barely a decade old and has never commanded
the sort of ferocity to which the Latin American peoples were subjected.
This is where the role of the Communist left and allied popular movements
has been crucial: not preventing neoliberalism altogether but softening and
slowing it down, through a variety of forms of struggle. Even the fact of a
stable bourgeois democracy has helped, since far too many interests—of very
many local and regional capitals, of various rural strata—have to be
reconciled in obtaining an electoral majority. Protectionist concessions,
contrary to neoliberal dogma, have to be granted in the process. The Indian
government dare not take away all the subsidies, all the price controls, all
the rationing systems for providing essential commodities to the poor, or
most of the provisions of what in the United States is quaintly called
“affirmative action.”
It has been unable so far even to lift currency controls and to make the
Indian currency fully convertible. This softening of neoliberalism has also
meant that the state has been able to contain the revolt against it within
electoral channels. A certain gradualism in building widespread consent, so
to speak, while preserving bourgeois hegemony!
Because neoliberalism came to Latin America much earlier, devastated its
economies much more radically, shifted wealth from there to the imperialist
centers much more dramatically, and was almost always backed by regimes that
had no popular legitimacy, revolts there have been incomparably sharper than
anything we have witnessed in India. This is combined with the fact—and this
is a crucial contrast—that politics in Latin America has always had a much
larger component of state violence and popular militancy. Agitations on the
question of water produce in Bolivia a first-rate crisis of the state, and
governments get overthrown in the streets even in Argentina, a country
historically much more bourgeois than India, which has no such political
culture.
What do you think of Hugo Chávez’s attempts to forge a transnational bloc
within the Americas as a means of countering the hemispheric power of the
United States? And what is your opinion of the impact of chavismo for the
Global South?
Simón Bolívar knew it at an extraordinarily early stage, José Martí
reiterated it many decades later, and every revolutionary in Latin America
has known it: Unless Latin America unites, it cannot be truly independent of
U.S. imperialism. The question is how you get it. I support Chávez’s project
profoundly, but I sometimes feel that he may believe too much in his own
revolutionary fervor, his command of petrodollars in a sphere that is
cash-strapped, his belief that the masses in other countries would push
their governments hard enough in that direction if he keeps up the pressure.
In short, the question is not the worth of the project, which is beyond
doubt, but how to go about doing it. His recent spat with Brazilian and
Argentine parliaments was not a good sign.
As for the rest, I don’t quite understand the term Global South even though
my friend Walden Bello loves it. My sense is that Chávez is loved and
admired by not just the left but even beyond the left by many around the
world for the simple reason that he is today the only head of state anywhere
in the world who holds out a promise reminiscent of those of Ho Chi Minh and
Che. He reminds countless Indians, for example, of the promise that was
inherent in the anti-imperialist component of the Non-Aligned Movement, and
he reminds countless Arabs of how their rulers might have used oil wealth
for resisting imperialism, and did not. He is not the revolutionary that we,
the Marxists, had looked for, and I am not surprised that many of us feel
uneasy.
But revolutions are messy things and they don’t always succeed; they rarely
do, in fact, and the ones that do typically leave an imprint and then recede
into a much more complex history, leaving a legacy for revolutions to
follow. If I have learned anything from some 40 years of activity on the
left, it is that revolution is not an event that happens once and for all,
but a process, exhilarating and unbecoming at the same time, pushing the
history of human emancipation just so much! In that sense, chavismo is an
event of great importance. We, the intellectuals, can—and should—have all
sorts of skepticism about the way Chávez goes about doing things, but we
should also keep in view the fact that he has stirred the imaginations of
millions upon millions, far beyond his own country, in a way that few have
in these dark times.
Your own intellectual and political engagements are firmly within the
Marxist tradition, and you have written a stimulating essay, “The Communist
Manifesto: In Its Own Time, and in Ours.” Could you speak more broadly about
the relevance of Marxist analysis and Marxist politics for our own time?
Heavens! Should I simply recall Jean Paul Sartre’s dictum, formulated in the
early 1950s, that Marxism is the unsurpassable science of our age and that
anything that claims to be post-Marxist always turns out to be a throwback
to pre-Marxism? Let me offer just a couple of random ideas.Toward the end of
the essay that you refer to, I argue that the past 50 years have witnessed
greater proletarianization than in all previous epochs of human history. The
expansion of the proletariat in Europe through all the centuries was nothing
compared to the expansion of the proletariat in Asia since the Second World
War. I have also argued, at great length in many writings, that it is only
after the Second World War that we can speak of a united global capital and
a singular global empire, over and above nationally based capitals and
colonial empires like those of Britain and France. For the first time in
human history, Marx’s prediction comes true: capital and labor face each
other on a world scale.
I have also said, in numerous writings, that we must rethink the very
categories of Marxist thought, which have fundamental value at the
theoretical level but have to be rethought at the concrete historical level.
For example, if it is true, as we now know empirically, that women perform
some two thirds of the world’s productive labor (calculable according to the
prevailing accounting systems, let alone what these systems do not count),
and if it also true, as we now know empirically, that female labor is not
only paid generally less than male labor but is also slotted into the
sectors least protected by labor laws and is most prone to extra-economic
coercions like sexual exploitation, then would it not be obvious that women
are at the very heart of the proletarian class formation as such? With
appropriate modifications, the same could be said of the indigenous people
in Latin America or the oppressed castes in India, in terms of their
specificity as well as centrality in labor regimes. Let me also say that we
now know a lot more about the “extra-economic coercion” that goes on within
both waged and nonwaged labor within capitalism (e.g., sexual exploitation
of women, debt bondage of male labor in mines and plantations) that
classical Marxism always conceived of as “precapitalist.”
We thus have a very interesting situation. Marx’s prediction that the vast
majority of humanity shall be eventually divided between capital and labor,
regardless of nationality, comes true precisely at the time when we also
come to understand that the very fundamental categories of Marxist theory
need to be rethought. I would argue that Marxism itself provides the ground
on which its own categories can actually be rethought and would offer only
one simple example for this: Only if you do believe that work and labor is
what is fundamental to what the vast majority of human beings do, an
activity that defines the most fundamental truth about human existence as
such—only then can you think of women’s labor as the overwhelming part of
human labor and rethink the category of “the proletariat” as such. Hence, a
very different idea of what a “proletarian revolution” would actually look
like, in any real sense.
I referred earlier to Sartre’s famous book-length essay, The Problem of
Method. Let me invoke two more ideas from it: That Marxism contains within
itself principles that make it possible for it to rethink itself, and that
Marxism as a knowledge of the world that exists at any given historical
conjuncture is necessarily and always an incomplete knowledge, always in the
process of completing itself, since it has to constantly rethink itself as
the material world, whose knowledge it is, keeps changing. Always
incomplete! It is for you and me to contribute to further elaborating and
updating it, while also cherishing its inherent state of incompletion. You
could always say roughly the same thing more poetically, in the words of
Charles Olson, the U.S. poet, speaking in his finest poem, “The
Kingfishers”: “What does not change/is the will to change,” derived, I
think, from the closing lines of Marx’s famous Theses on Feuerbach. One
changes one’s thinking, within Marxism, to address the world as it actually
is, and thus to help change it, through an activity that is not just an
activity of thought. And we must be prepared for further changes in our
thought and action as the world itself shall keep changing.
Seemin Qayum is an independent researcher on Latin America and India. She is
co-editing The Bolivia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University
Press, forthcoming) with colleagues in the United States and Bolivia, and is
completing a book project with Raka Ray, Cultures of Servitude: Modernity,
Domesticity, and Class in India.