A Marxist Mosaic. Selected Writings 1968–2022 by Jairus Banaji. Brill. 2024. xii + 857 pp. €229.00 (hbk). ISBN: 978-90-04-70330-8

Abstract

This massive volume is the third major collection of essays by Jairus Banaji, following Theory as History (Banaji 2010) and Exploring the Economy of Late Antiquity (Banaji 2016), which was a follow-up to his monograph on Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (Banaji 2007). It consists of 34 chapters, several of them extensive review essays, divided into nine, sometimes chronological, parts: Part 1: Early interventions (1968–1973), Chapters 2–6; Part 2: The Platform Group writings (1977–1979), Chapters 7–10; Part 3: The peasantry, rural labour, modes of production, Chapters 11–13; Part 4: Antiquity, Islam, and the Arab world, Chapters 14–17; Part 5: Issues in Marxist theory (2009–2019), Chapters 18–20; Part 6: Merchant Capitalism (2016–2021), Chapters 21–24; Part 7: Fascism, Chapters 25–28; Part 8: India: the left and the national movement, Chapter 29; and Part 9: India: class struggles in the countryside and cities, Chapters 30–34.

Three chapters first appeared in this journal and another three in the Journal of Peasant Studies when it was edited by Terence J. Byres. There are four previously unpublished papers: Chapter 14, ‘The social background of some African martyrs’ (of the Mediterranean of late antiquity), written in 1989, Chapter 18 on ‘Reconstructing historical materialism: some key issues’ (from 2009); Chapter 20 on ‘State and capital in the era of primitive accumulation’ (from 2019); and Chapter 33, ‘A short history of the Employees’ Unions of Bombay, 1947–1991′, written with Rohini Hensman in 1990. The source of Chapter 24, ‘The labyrinth of capital: reading the history of capitalism through jute and rubber’, is not given but is the text of a presentation given by Banaji to the Global History of Capitalism Seminar at Harvard University in February 2021 (https://wigh.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/history-global-capitalism-seminar-jairus-banaji-labyrinth-capital-reading).

Among its other values, the book makes available texts that otherwise might remain inaccessible for most readers, notably the philosophical essays (Chapters 7 and 8) from the Bulletin of the Communist Platform. The first chapter, titled ‘Introduction: a left-wing life’, presents the trajectory of Banaji's intellectual and political work over the five plus decades of the writings collected here.

This collection presents a combination of wide-ranging, painstaking and sophisticated readings of Marx and Marxist theoretical literature with the practices of a historian, notably in the specialist sense of using primary sources on Late Antiquity (especially Chapter 14) as well as Banaji's extraordinary knowledge of literatures in many languages on agrarian economies and the emergence and development of capitalism, from the beginning bound up with the formation of world economy in his view.

It is best perhaps to start with a sequence of key interventions from the 1970s that informed so much of Banaji's subsequent work. The two longest chapters are from the Bulletin of the Communist Platform (see 9–12). Chapter 8 (1978), titled ‘Dialectic and history: work, alienation, classes and the state in Sartre's Critique of dialectical reason’ marks his longstanding regard for Sartre (see also Chapter 3), not least Sartre's concept of ‘seriality’, which informs key aspects of Banaji's political reflections. Sartre is also relevant to the debate that ‘haunted’ Banaji ‘about free will and determinism and how we could write histories that allowed for that’ (15). Chapter 7, ‘A philosophy of revolutionary practice: the first two theses on Feuerbach’ is a kind of exegetical exploration of part of that iconic text by Marx. The same applies to Chapter 9, ‘From the commodity to capital: Hegel's dialectic in Marx's Capital’, reprinted from the book edited by Elson (1979). This takes issue with the anti-Hegelian stance of so much contemporary ‘Western Marxism’ to provide an alternative close reading of the first chapter of Capital. The main point here, and for so much of Banaji's subsequent work, is the absolute centrality of labour to any adequate investigation of capitalism, including how diverse forms of (value creating) labour are subsumed by capital. Of other foundational essays by Banaji in the 1970s, one should mention ‘Modes of production in a materialist conception of history’ (Banaji 1977) reprinted in his Theory as history (2010) for which it provided a framing statement.

Finally, and reprinted here for the first time, is the essay on ‘Chayanov, Kautsky, Lenin: considerations towards a synthesis’, first published in Economic and Political Weekly in 1976. This is of special interest not least given the longstanding antipathy to Chayanov in the political economy of agrarian change, of which Utsa Patnaik's critique of Chayanov and ‘neo-populism’ was a near contemporary landmark (Patnaik 1979).

Banaji has two principal foci in this essay, of which the more prominent is his embrace of Chayanov's ‘logic’ of peasant economy as a household mode of calculation, or ‘organisational process’, centred on simple reproduction, and at a (necessary) level of abstraction neglected in classic works by Marx, Lenin, Kautsky and others (framed by Banaji's observations on methods of theoretical and historical analysis). Unusually in Banaji's writing, this essay deploys mathematical graphs and explores the validity of Chayanov's basic model with data from Indian farm surveys. These are held to demonstrate the mechanisms and indicators of labour intensification of peasant households and ‘deviations from labour intensification theory’, in turn contrasted with Lenin's Development of capitalism in Russia, which ‘transgressed the boundaries between scientific method and crude empiricism’ (347).

The other advance of Chayanov was his suggestions of agrarian economy under capitalism, its various linkages and functions, through which exploitation of peasant labour - as of other forms of non-wage labour - can be identified and explained, including the strong tendencies towards peasant overwork and underconsumption. Subsequently Banaji was to return to this aspect of vertical integration in Chayanov's thought in his work on ‘commercial capitalism’ (Banaji 2020, 12–13, 99).

Banaji's interpretation of Chaynaov does not deny the centrality of class differentiation among peasantries in the course of their integration in capitalism nor, in Banaji's view, does Chayanov necessarily support ‘neo-populism’ as many of his followers and critics maintain. Banaji explicitly disavows that his reading of Chayanov leads to agrarian populism (347–348), a position also maintained in his later essay on Kautsky and ‘illusions about the peasantry’ in 1990 (Chapter 31). Nonetheless, there remains an ambiguity concerning whether Banaji believes that there is a ‘peasant mode of production’ (Bernstein 2013) as Chayanov clearly did (Bernstein 2009). If that is the case, then a ‘peasant mode of production’ should be ‘articulated’ with that of capitalism as many agrarian populists today believe. Alternatively, it can be argued that ‘peasants’ have been replaced by (agrarian) petty commodity production constituted within the relations and circuits of capital (Harriss-White 2023). It is interesting to learn that Banaji's proposed first book in 1972 was on peasantry (6). He is now completing it, and it is certain to be of paramount interest to readers of this Journal.

The following chapters develop and apply the theoretical positions briefly outlined to topics that have preoccupied Banaji since then: the economic history of Late Antiquity; histories of agrarian change before and during capitalism including novel adaptations of notions of global ‘commodity chains’ in Part 6; his forceful arguments for the concept of ‘commercial capitalism’ and its importance; politics in India, both historical and contemporary, with its critical explorations of the formation of the Communist Party of India (Chapter 29) and of Indian Maoism (Chapter 32); and, an important connection, Banaji's interest in fascism, both in Germany (informed by his knowledge of the sources in German) and in the India of Modi's BJP.

The sheer range and erudition of these essays challenge any reviewer who lacks the expertise to assess them all adequately (including the presenter viewer). Nonetheless, one reads (or rereads) them in a continuous state of illumination. For example, in his review of Andreas Peglau's study of Wilhem Reich (Chapter 26), Banaji suggests that Reich ‘was probably the only major figure on the Left in the interwar years to argue strongly for the integration of a cultural politics into revolutionary political work, anticipating a strand of politics that only feminism would foreground in a major way, and this decades later.’ (574, emphases in original).

It is thus more a question for the reviewer of selecting personal ‘highlights’ from the riches collected here.

Among my ‘highlights’ are the review of Peglau on Reich just cited, as indicated earlier, the republication (at last) of the crucial essay on Chayanov (Chapter 12); the republication and (re)statement of some key essays on agrarian change (e.g., Chapter 13 on ‘Modernising the historiography of rural labour’) and on Marxist method, combining theoretical and historical investigation of capitalism (e.g., Chapter 20 on primitive accumulation and Chapters 21 and 22 on merchant capitalism).

It is unlikely that those who turn to this volume will be interested in all it offers. For students of agrarian political economy, and its applications to the histories of capitalism, there is a great deal to benefit from, as has been suggested. Jairus Banaji is one of the most committed, sophisticated and learned Marxists of his generation, and I look forward to his forthcoming book on peasantry with the keenest interest.