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The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature' Aijaz Ahmad Social Scientist, Vol. 28, No. 7/8. (Jul. - Aug., 2000), pp. 3-30. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0970-0293%28200007%2F08%2928%3A7%2F8%3C3%3ATCMA%27L%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T Social Scientist is currently published by Social Scientist. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/socialscien.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Tue Nov 6 15:53:10 2007

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Page 1: Aijaz Ahmad the Communist Manifesto and World Literature

The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature'

Aijaz Ahmad

Social Scientist, Vol. 28, No. 7/8. (Jul. - Aug., 2000), pp. 3-30.

Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0970-0293%28200007%2F08%2928%3A7%2F8%3C3%3ATCMA%27L%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

Social Scientist is currently published by Social Scientist.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/socialscien.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

http://www.jstor.orgTue Nov 6 15:53:10 2007

Page 2: Aijaz Ahmad the Communist Manifesto and World Literature

A1JAZ AHMAD *

The Communist Manifesto and 'World Literature'

Marx was twelve years old at the time of the revolutions of 1830 and thirty when he drafted the Manifesto, with some assistance from Engels, barely a few weeks before the revolutions of 1848 broke out first in Paris and then across much of Europe. The originality of the Manifesto is that Marx sought for the revolution a clearly proletarian orientation. For the rest, the idea of a revolution, of one kind or another, seemed, as he was growing up, as natural as the prospect that the sun would set in the evening and rise in the morning. Even 'socialism' was something of a password among many of those whom the Manifesto calls "would-be universal reformers". Part of the purpose in drafting the document in fact was to spell out the ways in which the Communist League, whose manifesto it was to be, thought itself different from those other tendencies in the democratic movements which also considered themselves socialist.

This is important to remember in a time such as ours, when a whole new generation is growing up in an environment where, perhaps for the first time in roughly two hundred years, the idea of revolution has been made to seem implausible, however much there might be aspirations for liberal democracy, social change and the like. That there would be revolution was clear to everyone in Marx's generation of students, intellectuals and activists who identified themselves with the spirit of 1789. In deed, a careful reading of the main documents of the French Revolution, notably the famous 'Declaration of Man and the Citizen', had been crucial in Marx's own philosophical and political evolution.' It was here, well before drafting the Manifesto that he had drawn two conclusions: that the abstract universal rights contained in the 'Declaration' were everywhere sacrosanct in theory

Till recently fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

Social Scientist, Vol. 29, Nos. 7- 8, July-August 2000

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but always denied in practice; and that it could not be otherwise because the 'Declaration' itself guaranteed inequality when it guaranteed the right to property. Paraphrasing Article 16 of the Constitution of 1793, the youthful Marx wrote: "The right of property is therefore the right to enjoy and dispose of one's resources as one wills, without regard for other men and independently of society: the right of self-interesteV2 This triumph of possessive individualism within the ideology of the revolution itself explained, in his view, the fact that although it was the militancy and the social weight of the proletariat that accounted for the success of revolutionary movements in France, it was always the possessing classes that led those movements and benefited from them.3 Immanent in that critique is the idea that the revolution that the young Marx envisages would transcend the logic of the French Revolution by incorporating it, radicalizing it and taking it to the very end of this logic by emancipating humanity in general, irrespective of class or nationality. Hence the emphatic stress on universality rather than on individual rights, which are seen as building blocs of universal rights; hence, also, the definition of socialist politics as 'the fullest form of democracy'. 4That, then, is the first point. Drafted some sixty years after the storming of the Bastille in France, some seventy years before the taking of the Winter Palace in Russia, the Manifesto assumes the reality, the necessity- indeed, something resembling permanence-of revolution in the long-term dynamic of modern history, even as it serves as something of a connecting link between the democratic revolution that it had inherited and the proletarian one that it was groping toward: the link that eventually came to connect 1789 with 1917, fleetingly as it were, considering that revolutionary visions were quickly reversed within the USSR as doggedly as revolutionary potentials had been sapped earlier in postrevolutionary France, first under the Napoleonic monarchy and then, more fully, with the Restoration of 1815.

Between the revolutions of 1830 and those of 1848, Marx had undergone an arduous apprenticeship. The last five of those years had yielded, even before his partnership with Engels got going in 1844, quite an array of formidable texts: Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: An Introduction, The Jewish Question, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and the famous Theses on Feuerbach.* The main collaborative work of Marx and Engels in the next few years was of course to be the German Ideology, which they considered unfit for publication, but Marx himself went on, soon after they had

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5 THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND WORLD LITERATURE

met, to expand Engels' brief draft of fifteen pages into a major book, The Holy Family, in 1845 and wrote-two years later, in French- Poverty of Philosophy which he regarded as the first scientific exposition of his theory.

With all this achievement behind him, the Communist Manifesto was not only the first relatively mature text of this very young man who had nevertheless written thousands of pages before turning thirty, but also a text that distilled, in prose of great brevity and beauty, a wide range of themes-from history, philosophy, political economy, philosophy of history, socialist theory, and much else besides-that had preoccupied him at much length previously. This greater maturity would be evident from even a cursory comparison of this text with, let us say, "Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith" and "Principles of Communism", which Engels had drafted in June and October 1947, respectively, as obvious prelude to the drafting of the Manifesto itself which began in December that year.6 Yet, it would be wrong to treat this as the text of some final illumination. For, i f we judge the Manifesto from the standpoint of his own more mature texts-Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire and Civil War in France, or Critique of the Gotha Program-it turns out to be more of a transitional text.

It is very well known, and we therefore need not offer any extended comment on the fact, that for all the originality and magisterial sweep of the materialist conception of history which Marx had worked out in his earlier texts and which is stated in the Manifesto with such brevity and brilliance, the essential categories of his economic analysis had not until then gone much beyond the familiar categories inherited from classical political economy. It was only during the next fifteen years that some of the distinctive categories of Marxist economic analyses, such as the distinction between 'labour' and 'labour power', or the shifting balance between absolute and relative surplus value in the history of capital ism, fully emerged.' It is equally worth emphasizing tha t until well into the 1850s M a r x understood colonialism in the most general terms, simply (though crucially) as a globalizing tendency in the capitalist mode of production but with virtually no understanding of what it was to eventually mean for the objects of this globalization in the colonized world. Prabhat Patnaik puts the matter succinctly:

The Manifesto, notwithstanding a reference to the United States, was addressed essentially to Europe. Moreover, it was addressed not even

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to the whole of Europe, but only to Western Europe where the four big countries were Germany, England, France and Italy. . . . let alone the vast expanse of colonies, semi-colonies, dependencies and other 'Third World' countries, it did not even stretch to Russia. . .Marx's analysis of capitalism had still not been carried to the point where its interaction with pre-capitalist modes, as in the colonies, or its appearance in the form of a backward capitalism, as in Russia, could be theoretically c~mprehended.~

Nor did that analysis yet anticipate that capitalism's 'interaction with precapitalist modes' in the colonies would be fundamentally of a different, much more distorting and devastating order than had been the case within Western Europe, precisely because the nature of t h a t ' interaction' in the colonies was determined, even over-determined, by the fact of conquest and by the political, juridical and cultural apparatuses that arose on the prior basis of that conquest. Colonialism was not t o be the industrializing force that so much of early Marx had anticipated, and it therefore helped widen the gap in productivity rates, hence the gap in levels of economic and social development, between the colonizing countries and the colonized, quite aside from the transfer t o the colonizing countries of the wealth which otherwise could have been used for development of the productive forces indigenously. From the mid-1850s, however, Marx began studying and thinking about colonialism in a very different way, in greater detail and with much more theoretical rigour. Three aspects of this later, more mature thinking stand out. One is that Marx largely abandoned the hope that colonialism would be in any substantial degree a progressive force within the colonies; he came to think of it, increasingly, as "a bleeding process with a ~ e n g e a n c e . " ~ Second, there is in both Marx and Engels increasing appreciation of anti-colonial resistance and the right to national liberation.1° Third, there was also a growing sense that the expansion of capitalism over the vast expanses of the Americas, Asia and Africa was helping in containing the revolutionary movement within Europe itself, as follows:

The specific task of bourgeois society is the establishment of a world market. As the world is round, this seems to have been completed . . . The difficult question for us is this: on the Continent the revolution is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist character. Is it not bound to be crushed in this little corner, considering that in a far greater territory the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant."

That was in 1858, barely ten years after the publication of the

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Manifesto, and the terms of reference are virtually reversed: Europe is what is now described as "this little corner", while the colonies and semi-colonies where capitalism was then spreading were being recognized as "far greater territory".12 This idea-that the historic task of establishing the world market in its basic form was well nigh complete and capitalism was ripe for overthrow in its historic places of origin, and that the interaction' between capitalism and non- capitalist modes was giving the European bourgeoisie the means to crush the revolution at home-was to re-surface in Lenin and, with special force, in Luxemburg.

Thus, within the over-all architecture of Marx's thought, the Manifesto remains a transitional text in relation both t o the fundamental theoretical apparatus of Marxist political economy as well as the historical understanding of the role of colonialism in giving to actually existing global capitalism the core-periphery structure that it came to have. His thought on both counts was quite advanced already in 1847but key breakthroughs in both these areas came over the next decade or so. But, then, what about the philosophical method and use of the dialectic? Here, too, the transitional nature of the text in Marx's overall work, not to speak of an occasional mark of hasty formulation, is quite visible. Essentially, we find two rather different and mutually incompatible approaches to the processes a t work in trajectories of historical change, side by side as it were. In some passages-where Marx writes about the impact of capitalist globalisation for matters of culture, for example-the narrative takes a curiously teleological form, unfolding in terms of an expressive, unilinear causality which yields us something resembling a theory of reflection, plain and simple. Capitalism seems to spread across the world in unbroken motion, producing the same effects everywhere, so that everything appears to be really quite predictable and there emerges a perfect correspondence between a world market and a 'world literature', the latter produced by and in turn reflecting the former. This quite conventional understanding of the principle of causality appears, however, alongside-and therefore remains unreconcilable with- a most subtle dialectical operation whereby Marx requires us to take a leap of imagination so unsettling as to be virtually impossible.

For, in essence, what he requires us to do is to view capitalism as both-simultaneottsly- the best as well as the worst thing that ever happened to history, to the modes in which human beings have organised the production of wealth and, therefore, to what he had in

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Theses on Feurbach called 'social humanity'. What he requires from us, in other words, is that we grasp this ambiguity of a contradictory historical motion not in terms of a ledger of good and bad aspects, the progressive and the destructive, which could be mutually separated for dissection-at the end of which one could, in the manner of accountancy, then calculate whether or not capitalism itself has been good or bad in the long run-but as a single process in which an infinity of good and bad effects appear as so many links in a complex chain, with no isolable moments which could simply be subtracted from the whole. In deed, the good' and the 'bad' stand in a relation of mutuality and reciprocity so integral that one could not have the one without the other, so that the interlocking of the destructive and the progressive itself cannot even begin to be undone without a revolutionary rupture.

This operation of the dialectical method-which I have here, following Jameson, called a virtually impossible leap of the imagination-has little to d o with the dictum of Liebniz that 'the existing world is the best of all possible worlds' or even with Hegel's association of the Real and the Rational. In this side of his operation Marx appeals neither to the cunning of Reason nor to the hidden grace of God's Will, but to historicity, and to the essential multiplicity of contradictions that gives to the historicity of the modern its special, unique character of unequal and combined development. The Real of capitalism is not the Rational but a fierce embrace of the rational and the irrational which lends itself not to an improved balance through more doses of the rational but only to the rupture-which is what one would mean by the word 'revolution'-in the embrace itself; nor is the existing world the best of all possible ones, it is rather the best and the worst at the same time. Hence the mixture of exhilaration and terror in the way Marx encapsulates the fundamental motions of history in the capitalist epoch.

What difference does it make whether we adopt the one method rather than the other, i.e., whether we adopt the method of what I have here called expressive causality and straightforward reflection, or the method of the materialist dialectic which is the only possible answer to notions of immanent teleology?

111

I should want to answer that question in the shape of a close reading of, and then a rather extended commentary on, some very famous sentences of the Manifesto:

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The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe . . .

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. ..All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries. . . that no longer work up indigenous raw materials, but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. . . In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie . . . compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

We begin here, first of all, with the objective nature of the process of globalization itself. We begin, in other words, not with the intention of the bourgeoisie o r some plans it has conceived, but with 'the need of the constantly expanding market' which compels, even 'chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe'. In a curious reversal of the hunter and the hunted, it is not so much a confident bourgeoisie that goes ou t into the world in pursuit of profits but an anxious and restless class itself being hunted and 'chased' by a need that has taken hold of it and without the satisfaction of which the class itself would perish. Capitalism is seen here, already, a s the first mode of production in history that has an inner logic t o break the boundaries of exclusively national economies and cultures.

Yet, when M a r x speaks here of 'every country', he is so clearly- with the taken-for-grantedness of a historical reflex- speaking of a small number of European countries and, a t best, Northern United States, since 'production' had undoubtedly not taken a 'cosmopolitian character' in the colonies, nor even much of Europe itself. Similarly, 'old-established na t ional industries'-in the broades t sense of 'national' and 'industries7-had undoubtedly been 'destroyed' in the colonies but the 'new industries' that had 'dislodged' them were

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located in the colonizing centres but not in the colonized world, so that it was quite fanciful to speak of a 'universal dependence of nations', in the sense of mutuality and reciprocity, if we were to take into consideration the colonized countries as well. Most 'nations' were in fact coming to be highly dependent on a few core countries, and those core countries were connected with each other not only in relation of free-floating mutual 'intercourse' but also in a highly unstable and violent conflict over colonial possessions, which led to numerous local and regional wars throughout the 19th century and two world wars in the 20th.

The problem here is not simply that Marx could not accurately foresee the shape of things as they were to emerge later, in the age of imperialism in the proper sense, whose beginnings Lenin was t o date from about the 1880s. One can hardly be faulted for not having the clairvoyance to foresee structural and qualitative changes that have not yet come about. Rather, there were two quite different and inter- related problems. One is that the emphasis shifts so drastically in the different passages of the Manifesto that conclusions that could have been drawn from one far-reaching formulation are not properly carried into its subordinate clauses or into another, more or less adjoining passage. Thus, an earlier passages specifies 'the discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape . . . the East Indian and Chinese markets. . . [and] trade with the colonies' as crucuial elements in bringing about unprecedented 'increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally' but then focusses exclusively on 'an impulse' that these developments provided 'to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society'. Now, it was very uncommon among Europeans of the mid-19th century, when Marx wrote these words, to acknowledge and emphasize this role of the Americas, Africa and Asia in the stupendous growth of European mercantile capital, and in the European transition from feudalism to capitalism as such. The power and novelty of Marx' perception ought not be underrated, even though a whole new academic industry has developed in our own time, not only among bourgeois liberal writers but among influential sections of 'Western Marxism', to deny or greatly under-emphasize precisely this role.

However, within the formulation at hand, Marx seems unable to extend his thought to cover the other side of this coin: the impact of this growth upon 'the East Indian and Chinese' regions. Indeed, these regions appear here simply as 'markets' where, apparently, 'trade' takes place among equals, presumably on the basis of value equivalents

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THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND WORLD LITERATURE I1

and/or comparative advantage, for the mutual benefit of all. Marx does not actually say so, but there is nothing in the formulation which would suggest that the young author of these words is aware that the benefits entailed in the opening up of these 'markets' were very unevenly distributed. Even the phrase ' trade with colonies' is ambiguous, in two ways. The word 'colony' was those days used primarily for the temperate zones of white settlement outside Europe, and among those settler colonies M a r x was even then quite knowledgeable about the United States of America.. He was quite probably thinking here of the extensive and highly profitable trade between capitalist centres in Europe and the Northeastern United States. It is not at all clear, however, whether among the 'colonies' here are included the quite extensive territories that the European colonial powers had by then acquired in parts of coastal Africa and mainland Asia, notably India. Nor is it clear whether the word 'trade' here included the slave trade from the African west coast which was so important a component in the famous 'triangular trade' between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Had Marx at that time and in the same sweep also looked a t this other side of the 'trade with colonies', the Manifesto would have undoubtedly given us a fuller picture not only in terms of being more well-rounded but also, most crucially, one that could also convey the reality, more or less dialectically, that the same globalizing market forces which impose upon the world a historically unprecedented unity also divide and fragment the world so drastically that economic inequality, hence the maldistribution of cultural goods, between the core countries of capitalism and the rest is still very much on the increase.

This partial nature of the formulation then means that the 'world market' itself remains curiously disembodied, as an ever-expanding structure of production and exchange encompassing more and more parts of the world, more or less uniformly, as if the various regions and national units within this structure were either comprised of equals or, as the highly metaphorical language of the Manifesto repeatedly suggests, this 'market' was creating a uniform world civilization by bringing the 'barbarian nations' into its orbit. Now, one need not get inordinately exercised about the highly provocative use of words like 'civilized' and 'barbarian'. In one register, undoubtedly, these words embody the whole baggage of Eurocentricity that Marx had inherited from such illustrious figures as Montesquieu and Hegel. In context, though, these words connote the fundamental difference between capitalist and precapitalist modes of production and social formations.

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Throughout his writings, Marx uses also the choicest epithets and abuses against those traditional propertied classes within Europe- 'the tottering feudal society', as he puts it in the passage we have just quoted-that were ranged against 'the revolutionary element' of industrial capitalism. The primary contrast on his mind, in other words, is not between Europe and non-Europe but between modes of production. The real problem lies not a t this rhetorical level but much deeper: in the assumption that the perfection of the 'world market' leads, more or less logically and spontaneously, to the making of a unified global culture. Let us look at this assumption a bit more closely, in relation to our actual historical experience over the past one hundred and fifty years.

IV

The power and accuracy-and a feeling bordering on terror-of that prophetic formulation is undeniable:

The bourgeoisie ...compells all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst . . . In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

That ironic phrase 'what it calls civilization' already opens up toward that superbly contemptuous phrase-'civilization-mangers'-that Engels was to later use for the colonizing powers in his discussion of the Boxers' Rebellion in China. More than ever before, and infinitely more so than in Marx's own time, we now live, globally, in what Samir Amin was the first t o designate as a 'capitalist universality'. One could also fruitfully ponder another of Amin's formulations where he argues that we now actually have a global civilization, i.e. the capitalist civilization, within which the various national cultures are, for all their profound differences, so many units which are all equally- albiet differentially-constrained by the values, compulsions and illusions of that unitary and predominant civilization. So, Marx is by no means being spurious, nor has his prediction gone astray, when he insists in the Manifesto on the globally unifying power of capital. And, as the phrasing of the sentences cited above suggests, he was by no means an unconditional admirer of that 'civilization'; rather, he regarded the creation of such a civilization as a compuIsion exercised by one class against 'all nations'. The problem, again, is that he does not take the next step and see more accurately that a 'civilization' created under such a 'compulsion' could hardly be described as

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'interdependence of nations'. It is in this other sense that the sentence which precedes this prediction turns out to be so highly problematic:

National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

That phrase 'world literature', and the vision that the creation of such a thing was desirable, Marx had taken from his favourite poet, Goethe. And it was a common belief among German Romantics and Orientalists in the first half of the 19th century that some of the world's best literature was to be found not in Europe but in the classical languages of the East: Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and somewhat later, Japanese. Persian was a special favourite of Goethe, and in the Indian context William Jones was to remark that neither Greek nor Latin nor Hebrew could match Sanskrit for subtlety and beauty. Macaulay's later assertion that not all the books written in these languages could match a single shelf of European literature was thus not an Orientalist position, as Edward Said says, but an explicitly anti-Orientalist one. Marx had inherited that liberality of spirit. However, the materialist that he was, he associated the creation of 'world literature' not with the self-activity of a high-minded intelligentsia or as a mode of exchange among the principal classicisms, which is more or less what Goethe had in mind, but as an objective process inherent in other kinds of globalisation where modes of cultural exchange follow closely upon patterns of political economy. And it is undoubtedly true that with increasing development of the means of commerce and communication on the global scale, the circulation of literary texts across national frontiers has also become ever more brisk with each passing decade since Marx wrote those words.

Today, it is impossible to be a serious student of French literature without having to come to terms with literature composed in the language by Caribbean and North African writers. In English alone, the most influential novelists of the past quarter century have come from the former colonies of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Any roster of the most widely read novelists of this same period, all languages considered, would have to include Marquez (Colombia), Gunter Grass (Germany), Achebe (Nigeria), Mishima (Japan), Rushdie (India/Pakistan/Britain), Gordimer (South Africa), Morrison (United States) and so on. Similarly, no roster of the pre-eminent modern poets is conceivable without Mayakovsky (RussiaIUSSR), Cesaire

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(Martinique), Vallejo (Peru), Neruda (Chile), Brecht (German), Yeats (Ireland) and scores of others, from diverse regions and languages. Translation has become in the second half of the 20th century as important and widespread an activity as original composition, which has transformed reading habits across the globe. Within the English- speaking world Marquez and Rushdie are probably more widely read than any novelist born in the English Isles-and Marquez of course writes originally in Spanish, but then his work gets immediately translated in a dozen languages across the world, notably in English and French which then accounts for his roughly equal popularity across continents. Libraries and bookshops all over the world stock works of dozens of writers from diverse parts of the world, in the language which has the widest readership in the country or region where the library or bookshop is located, regardless of the language of original composition. It is possible that more people have read Marquez in a language other than Spanish than in Spanish itself, and Spanish is of course spoken across much of Latin America in addition to Spain, so that one tends to either forget his Colombian national origin or to attach no particular significance to it: he becomes simply a Latin American writer or a truly 'universal' writer.

Nor is it a matter of mere quanities and circulations. There is the more sizeable matter of what one can only call cross-fertilization within the internationalised literary field itself. As Artaud, the seminal figure in French surrealism, once remarked, his encounter with the poetry of Cesaire, the Black Martinican communist, was decisive in his own evolution. In fiction, Rushdie, the Indo-British writer, is inconceivable without the prior, magistereal presence of Marquez, the Colombian friend of Castro; one may justifiably say that Rushdie is just a 'poor man's Marquez'. The language of poetry now originally composed in the English language has been deeply marked by the translations of the great masters in other languages, such as Neruda or Cesaire. Closer to home, there is no major literary language in India whose modern l i tera ture has no t been fundamental ly transformed by external, principally West European and Soviet influences. The literary movement of the 1930s and 40s which we associate with the history of the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA), and which was arguably the first self-consciously trans-Indic literary movement since Bhakti (only wider), would be inconceivable without a complex set of influences that included not only the direct Soviet influence but also a much wider influence of a global cultural front that came into being in consequence of the Comintern's turn to

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an anti-fascist popular front after 1935-not t o speak of even a wider web of influences that ranged from Balzac t o Chekov. We could go on multiplying the examples. The main point, in any case, is that something resembling a 'world literature' 1s now part of the cultural experience of the literate classes across the globe, in a way that was unthinkable in Marx's own time but which Marx deduced from the logic of capitalist universalisation itself.

Before proceeding any further, it is useful also to put in perspective Marx's unease with-perhaps even denigration of-'numerous national and local literatures'. The attitude seems dreadfully harsh, and in some degree it is. The moment of 1848 was, however, for an internationalist such as Marx, a difficult moment. Unlike India, where modern nationalism, which initially arose in the crucible of the anti- colonial struggle, had been from the beginning polyglot and multi-cultural, the consolidation of the nation-state form in Europe during the 19th century-and that was the century of nationalisms in Europe!- went together with the idea of a single national language, a unique national culture, and a consolidated national literature which was said t o signify a unique national character; literature, culture and character were often associated, in fact, with 'race'. The worst consequences of that kind of nationalism we are currently witnessing in the savage regimes that have arisen o n the ashes of former Yugoslavia, from Croatia to Kosovo. It is difficult for us, in India, to even comprehend the potential for genocides inherent in this exclusionary notion of 'national' literature because every variant of the definition of 'Indian literature' that we have a t our disposal presumes multi-linguality. However, purification of the 'national languagelliterature in tandem with the purification of the population itself, through eviction orland eviction of those considered outside the charmed circle of the nation', was an ever-present danger in the nationalisms of Marx's time, as they have remained in many a nationalism up to-and into-our own time. Marx's association of 'national and local literatures' with 'national . . narrowmindedness' needs to be viewed in this perspective.

He was groping toward a universalist antidote against the narrow- minded nationalist bigotry that was so evident all around him as he raced through the writing of the Manifesto so as to have it printed and distributed before the actual outbreak of the revolution that everyone knew was coming and which was likely to be split up in so many nat ional is t revolutions, as indeed happened. In later historiography, the nationalist revolutions of 1848 have been

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frequently celebrated as a 'spring of the peoples' in which nations rose up t o gain their rights. Marx's fear, as he drafted those words, was that a common revolution of working masses against the ruling classes of all the European nations was likely to be de-railed by the mobilization of the masses in a variety of cultural nationalisms that would end up by strengthening the ruling elements in all the nations. W h a t appears in the Manifes to a s predic t ion a n d h o p e of internationalist solidarity was, in a curious and palpable way, actually an inverse expression of a fear that "narrow-minded" nationalisms might actually prevail. The formulation is directly related to those other formulations where the working class is urged to take hold of the nationalism of its own people ('become the nation') in order to create solidarities beyond the nation, since 'the working men have no country', for the good reason that 'we cannot take from them what they have not got' (i.e., the bourgeoisie wants to be trans-national itself but uses its own nation-state to impose a national labour regime for the working class; hence, socialist internationalism against capitalist globalisation). One needs to keep in view this whole range of concrete pressures of the time, and the ideas inevitably arising out of those pressures, in judging the value of individual formulations.

Nor is all this a matter of the past only. Let's take only one example, traversing across and connecting Marx's time with our own. It was in his time- and very much in the time of the Manifesto, in the middle of the 19th century-that a whole range of movements for cultural consolidation arose in those provinces of the Habsburg Empire which were later to be integrated into Yugoslavia, i.e. Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia in particular. The movement was led by the literati in each case and took the consolidation of distinct languages and literatures as the core issue in national consolidations. Movements for the creation of sovereign states on the basis of these prior consolidations of language and literature arose later, in the twilight years of the Empire. We might add that the theoretical work of Austro- Marxism on the cultural aspect of the national question, most well-developed in the work of Otto Bauer, then conceived of the replacement of the Empire by a multi-national and multi-cultural socialist state with maximum degree of regional cultural autonomy for each language/literature cluster. In the annals of Marxist theory, this was until that time possibly the mo, t far-reaching attempt to reconcile cultural particularity with multi-linguality in the framework of an overarching socialist civilization. And, of course, in those early years when the revolutionary legacy was still virile in the USSR, that

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is precisely the combination that the Bolsheviks had attempted in practice. The distance between Lenin and Bauer on the question of cultural self-determination was not as great as it is commonly supposed.

Be that as it may. When socialist Yugoslavia came into being after the victory of the Partisans under Tito's leadership, Serbo-Croatian, a mixed bi-national language spoken by vast majority of the people in the federation, was of course recognized as the national language but autonomous development of regional languages and literatures was guaranteed and liberally financed by the federal state, with each regional language having extensive role in the administrative and professional life in their respective regions as well as a t the federal level. In the process, not only did the ruling party itself get organised on the federal basis but the literary intelligentsias associated with the various languages also received enormous resources and privileges. In context, then, it is a great historical irony that by the 1980s, the opposition not only to socialism but also to the very territorial integrity of Yugoslavia came to be centred in precisely those various Academies of Arts and Letters to which the Yugoslav state had given such power, prestige and prominence. All the nationalist mythologies which eventually led to mass murder-the idea that the Bosnian Muslims were the descendants of foreign invaders who had always suppressed the Serbs; the idea that Serbo-Croatian was an 'artificial' language and that both Serbia and Croatia needed to gain their own respectively 'purified' languages; that the whole map not only of Yugoslavia but also of the federating units had to be re-organised, with violence and mass evictions if necessary, to obtain the consolidation of these competing culturally defined nations; and so on-were forged in and propagated by these very Academies, with the literary intelligentsia playing the leading role and groups of historians in each region bringing up the rear. This experience shows that the idea of a 'national literature' can quite easily cease to represent the legitimate cultural rights of a people and become a retrograde-even murderous-force as soon as it gets sundered from the more progressive moorings in ideas of cultural diversity and universalist civilization. Marx's hope that a 'world literature' would arise as an antidote against 'national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness' was not, if we remember this whole history, nearly as naive as it might seem.

v The problem lay elsewhere, in the assumpt ion t h a t the

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globalization of the capitalist mode of production would itself perform this historic task of ensuring that a universalist culture of common aspiration would prevail over national or local 'narrow-mindedness'; the assumption, in other words, that there was some direct, one-to- one relationship between a 'world market' and 'world literature' which could somehow be accommodated within the socialist project as a progressive force. The methodological problem of course is that both the 'world market' and 'world literature' are viewed here as unified wholes, without internal tensions and contradictions, and as polar opposites of 'national economy' and 'local and national literatures', so that the rise of one pole presumes the demise of the other. Subsequent experience, thanks to colonization and imperialism, but thanks also to the nation-state form which has been a punctual feature of capitalism in all its locales, has been rather different.

The fact of the matter is that the 'world market' has always been an interlocking system of national and regional markets. For all the globalizing tendency inherent in capitalism, the bourgeoisie has always had a profound connection with its national origin and the nation- state; thus, the American bourgeoisie is no less American than the French aristocracy was French. The British bourgeoisie set out to win for itself a world empire not as a universal class but as a doggedly British one, in mortal competition with other national bourgeoisies, such as the French or the German. And when the colonial empires collapsed they gave rise, in the former colonies, not to a transnational association of freed peoples but to whole array of nation-states. The same goes for the self-organization of capital itself. Even today, a cursory look at the board of directors of not only small companies and corporations but even of major transnational corporations would demonstrate this relationship between origins that remain mostly national and operations that tend to become transnational. The case of Microsoft, the paradigmatic transnational corporation of our time, is an obvious illustration of this fact, as are those of Warner Brothers or America-On-Line, the other information/communication giants; in deed, the very name 'America-On-Line', speaks volumes. Similarly, for all the brisk internationalisation of finance capital, the most important bank in any country is always its national bank, be it the American Federal Reserve or the German Bundesbank. In the political field, the 20th century has witnessed not the decline of the nation- state form but the emergence of more nation-states across the globe, including Europe itself, than ever before in history. Nor is it for nothing that the main international organization of the second half

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of this century should be called United Nations. If such is the structure of the capitalist political economy itself,

could the case of literature be otherwise? All literatures are above all local and national. Only in the colonies did a foreign literature come to command more prestige than the national one, and even here the foreign literature could not obliterate the local and national ones. Colonial India is a case in point. It is certainly true that the educational apparatuses of the colonial state greatly privileged English literature, that a degree in English got one a more prestigeous and lucrative job than a degree in any of the indigenous languages, and that something resembling a class distinction arose between those who knew English literature and those who did not. Even so, that same colonial period witnessed the rise of printing presses in all the languages that came to be the dominant regional languages, and with this print technology came great consolidation of those languages as well as very great expansion of literary production and dissemination of literary texts in those languages. For every one person who composed a poem in English there were hundreds, probably thousands, who composed in Urdu or Bengali or Tamil. Furthermore, these indigenous print languages had connections with traditions and practices of orality and folk performance that the dominant colonial language could not have. In that sense too, the reach and depth of this dominant language was very restricted.

So, we had a complex structure. What we received through colonial globalization was not a 'world literature' but an 'English literature' which was itself a national literature. English of course offered some translations from other, mainly European, languages as well, but very much in a subsidiary register; a truly large-scale literary industry in English itself is much more a phenomenon of the post- colonial period. Related to this dominance was the matter of scope and spread; although it was available to a small minority, English literature was nevertheless the only literature that was available across the country. This predominance has had many far-reaching consequences. For example, with the expansion of the educational apparatuses of the postcolonial state in Independent India, and with increasing levels of embourgeoisment, English has for the first time emerged as one of the genuinely Indian languages for literary composition; the past decade alone has witnessed great acceleration in the composition and sale of literary texts in English. To the extent that there is now a trans-Indic bourgeoisie with its own very distinct cultural forms and literary tastes, Indian English writing, though still

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based in rather a small literary community as compared t o the potential readerships in several of the other major languages, is nevertheless emerging as culturally dominant. What interests me here, however, is the idea of an 'Indian literature' and the relationship of English with it.

At a certain level, anything composed or written by an Indian citizen is part of something called Indian literature. But this assertion is essentially abstract, related as it is to the territorial imagination of the Indian nation-state-a claim a t once geographical a n d civilizational, but a mere claim nevertheless, observed more in the piety than in any degree of participation. I may deeply believe that Tamil literature is a part of an 'Indian literature' but my entire knowledge of that literature is comprised of what becomes available in English, as translation and commentary. English has thus emerged not only as a major, perhaps culturally dominant literary language in its own right but also as the crucial language of literary mediation among all the other languages. A Dogri writer may justifiably think that what she is writing is part of an 'Indian literature' but to those Indians who know no Dogri that writing remains utterly outside their palpable experience and active imagination. Nor does it become so if it gets translated into Kannada or Hindi, except for those who speak these other languages. The only way it could get circulated across the country, even though within a restricted class of readers, is if it appears in English. Thus it is that an enormous archive of 'Indian Literature' is being created in English, from such diverse sources as, say, the Sahitya Akademi, Kali for Women, the Katha collections and prizes, Penguin, academic conferences and seminars, and so on. It is through these translations that a conviction that 'Indian literature' actually exists gets transformed, concretely, into a material knowledge, however limited and second-hand.

This brief excursus on the ambiguities of the Indian literary experience is meant t o convey three things. O n e is tha t with colonialism, the 1anguageIliterature of the colonizing power indeed became dominant in a variety of colonies, but this dominance took the form not of a 'world literature' arising to transcend 'national and local literatures' but that of the dominance of the colonizing nation's national literature over those of the colonized ones; local and national literatures continue, and may even be more voluminous, but they occupy subordinate positions in the literary field as a whole. Only in the extreme case of such settler colonies as the United States, where the precolonial literary archive was oral rather than written, and where

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the colonized were largely exterminated rather than simply subjugated, d o local literatures expire and national literatures of the colonized fail to arise in any substantial degree. Second, 'national' literatures tend to arise in the language of the dominant class; to the extent that English is the medium of communication, administration and market transaction on the all-Indic level, an archive of 'Indian literature' is more likely to arise in this language, through original composition as well as translation (especially translation), rather than in any other language, a host of other noble endeavours notwithstanding. Third, that in multi-lingual societies such as ours, 'national' literatures tend to subsume rather than actually destroy 'local' (in our case, regional) literatures. Of this process, there are two variants, the benign and the obviously cruel, which one could schematically associate with the names of the Sahitya Akademi and Salman Rushdie. Thus, the benign version thinks of constituting an 'Indian' literature through the industry of translation and commentary, at the core of which is English translation and commentary, some of which is done with great verve and distinction but most is accomplished with much enthusiasm but little talent. The classic example of this largely sterile enthusiasm is the English-language journal, Indian Literature, that the Sahitya Akademi has been publishing for far too many years, with no notable consequence. The more cruel, metropolitanizing version is evident in the anthology of Indian writing that Salman Rushdie has edited, in which a story of Saadat Hasan Manto stands for all the Indian writing done outside English and all the rest is comprised of original English compositions, most of them mediocre. In words almost lifted out of Macaulay's Minute, Rushdie remarks that he does not read these other languages but scholars he knows inform him that what gets published in them does not compare with what gets composed in English.

Few enough Englishmen settled in India, and the pre-eminence of English literature here was owed to the cultural underpinings of the colonial state- in highly contradictory ways. Intimacy with English language and literature was surely a class privilege and a means of augmenting that privilege; the more this intimacy, the more cultural capital one had a t one's disposal. This knowledge also served as a window on the world, however. Developments in arts and sciences around the world could be brought home for indigenous developments as well, so that the some of the worst but also the best ideas from across the globe entered Indian national life through this medium which served as a great modernizing influence against great many

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anachronisms and cruelties inherited from the past. It was, after all, through English that Indian writers and intellectuals first encountered 'world literature', and this has been a very great gain. In the colonial period, and even more so since Independence, this contradictory role of English language and literature as a structure-in-dominance but also as a modernising, internationalising force has been owed, in any case, not to any considerable degree of European settlement but to the peculiar forms that our modernity has taken, including the crucial role that colonialism played in it.

VI

Contrasted to the Indian experience, however, there have been a variety of other experiences in relation to colonialism itself, especially in the settler colonies. Five variants here are notable. Where settler colonialism eventually failed, the fundamental structure has not been altogether different. In Algeria, for example, indigenous population survived under the dominance of colon population itself, and French policy of selective assimilation produced a three-tiered structure of a French-speaking professional class alongside, and above, the much larger numbers who were located in Arabic and Berber cultures. This too has had contradictory effects. On the one hand, French plays a major role in the intellectual life of the modern Algerian literati, with some of them having a considerable presence in French literature as a whole, not only among North African and ot'her Francophone countries but in the French metropolis as well. O n the other hand, however, the current Islamicist uprising in Algeria, which has taken roughly 100,000 lives, can also be seen, in cultural terms, as the assertion of the Arabic-speaking middle classes against the French- speaking bureaucratic elite on the one hand and, on the other, against Berber-speaking groups which have made major inroads into middle class life and are asserting their cultural rights against their Arabic- speaking compatriots.

Second, there's the peculiar case of Israel where the zionist settlers revived a dormant classical language, Hebrew, which had been no one's living language for great many centuries and re-invented it as a modern state language uniting the whole of the settler population and eventually producing quite a remarkable national literature which, judging from English translations, is as vibrant as any. The Palestinian population was either evicted or subjected to this dominance of Hebrew, and different fractions of Palestinian writers who remained inside Israel have responded to this situation by writing either in

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Arabic, t o preserve their distinct cultural claim, or in Hebrew, in order to communicate with and participate in the life of Israel as a whole. We thus have a peculiar case of a settler colonial population, drawn from across the world, inventing a national language, which had been n o one's spoken language in recent centuries, a n d subordinating t o this 'national literature' another people's 'local literature' which refuses to die out and which connects itself, rather, with the larger cultural life of the Arab region in general.

In all other cases, the language that came with the colonizer has had a pre-eminent position, becoming a 'national' language, in three ways. In Canada, which is constitutionally a bi-lingual state, both the literary languages, English and French, have t o do with the final settlement that was reached, through warfare, between British and French colonialisms. The literati of each, then, trace their cultural heritage from their respective 'mother' countries; France especially, in one case, but also overwhelmingly Britain in the case of English- speaking Canada though the U.S. has actually displaced Britain in recent decades. Indicative, however, is the fact that migrants who come from all over the world must then adjust themselves to one of the two national languages, depending on the region where they settle, if they are t o participate in the life of the 'nation'. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the largest of the Latin American settler colonies, the language continues t o be Portuguese, but the historic centre-peripheries relationship has been reversed; precisely because Brazil was a colony of Portugal which itself was the least industrialized of the colonizing countries, hence possessing very little exportable cultural capital, Brazil dominates Portugal in arts and letters while looking toward the rest of Western Europe for intellectual capital.

Most significant, however, is the case of the United States. So powerful has been its imperialism that one forgets that it was a key settler-colony before it became an imperialist power. The most advanced capitalist country in the world, with no 'national' past of its own, the U.S. drew settlers, slaves and immigrants from every country in the world and could have been, in its cultural life, a great laboratory for the growth of a 'world literature'. Indeed, much of what is today seen as 'world literature' is in fact produced, through translation and gloss, by the U.S. universities and publishing industry. To this significant fact, we shall return presently. Let us first observe that the maintenance of the United States as a uni-lingual nation, which has a distinct literary-cultural heritage and public education which is available only in English, has been the principal means of

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obtaining national integration among peoples of such diverse backgrounds; the children of these immigrants may, and do, happily inherit their parents' religion but not their language. In the literary field, then, there's an interesting tension: enormous energy is invested in creating a distinctly American literature and disseminating it as the 'national' literature, but a very great energy is also spent in colleges and universities to keep alive a connection with British literature as well, as background and patrimony. That the majority of Americans are not of British origin matters little; American literature, because it is in the 'national' language of the U.S., must acknowledge that British connection as the true origin. Interestingly, sibling literatures, such as the Australian or Canadian ones, who also grew in settler-colonial settings but have the same English background, get very little attention as such.

What about the core countries of capitalism? Without exception, in all of them, it is the national literature that commands pre-eminence, in education, in the formation of reading publics, in print runs, and so on. Virtually all of them, with a few exceptions which only prove the rule, are uni-lingual states; that has been the European norm. Until quite recently, the study of non-national literatures was a marginal activity: departments of comparative literature, for the study of European literatures other than one's own, and obscure area studies programs for the study of non-European ones. Orientalist scholars themselves were interested much more in religious texts, social and cultural studies, anthropological research, or in the classical literatures but hardly ever in the modern ones. In the second half of the century, all this changed very considerably. Postwar years witnessed enormcus increases in the colonial migration into the core European countries, mostly working-class but with substantial- and rapidly increasing- numbers of the petty bourgeois professional strata itself, who brought their own cultural capital with them and demanded recognition and reward for it. That kind of migration then began flooding the United States after the 1960s; soon enough, and for the first time in its history, more migrants arriving there coming from the Third World than from Europe. The formation of a 'world literature' through translation and commentary, which I have summarized in Section IV of the present essay, is a phenomenon of this particular phase, and the process of this formation has been located primarily in the core capitalist countries, even when much of the materials come from elsewhere and, selectively, from the earlier half of the century.

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VII

Nor could it be otherwise. If it is indeed true, as Marx suggests that the making of a 'world literature' is intrinsically connected with the making of a 'world market', it then necessarily follows that the forces and countries that have played the leading role in the making of that market will also play a leading role in the making of that literature. By 'making' here I do not mean 'production'; commodities that circulate in the world market are not always produced in the capitalist centres. By 'making' here I mean evaluation, accumulation, dissemination, and profit: both money-profit and cultural profit. Virtually all literary texts are produced in local, national, regional contexts, but a text thus produced becomes a text of world literature when it arrives in the metropolitan centre, gets recognised as meriting inclusion in the archive of 'world' literature, gets translated and evaluated (by publishers, reviewers, critics, professors), and gets shipped into the transnational book market. That Salman Rushdie lives in Britain and Arundhati Roy in India makes no difference to that fundamental process, even though living in one place rather than another may position one differentially in relation to the market; the main point, as regards our argument, is that Roy's novel, regardless of its merit, could not become a document of 'wortd literature' if it had not been taken up in the metropolitan centres. This is a structural fact, and has nothing to do with the facts of her residence, intentions, etc.

There is first of all the matter of investible resources. 'World literature' is produced in the capitalist centres at two tiers of the publishing industry-what Bourdieu has called the two circuits of 'mass production' and 'restricted production'. Simply put: the big publishing houses, and the university presses: editions that come out in hundreds of thousands, and editions that come out in a couple of thousands; mass market, and academic market; the writer as celebrity, and the writer as an object of obscure academic desire. The two may in some cases converge-Rushdie and Roy traverse both markets- but at the point of production the two circuits remain separate. The key fact is that in the metropolitan countries--and above all, in the United States-more in the U.S. than in perhaps all of Europe put together-enough capital is available for both circuits to participate in the process of accumulation. The sphere of restricted production, e.g., the network of university presses, requires what are by U.S. standards very small levels of capital-authors are paid virtually nothing, and translators tend to be professors who do it not for much

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immediate payment but for academic distinction and promotion- which is realized slowly but surely from inside the academic, textbook market. The sphere of mass production requires a much larger concentration of capital-author's royalties, agents' commissions, outlays for huge editions, publicity on a war footing, and so on- which then must be realized more quickly. Regardless of the great prominence of a handful of Third World writers in this mass market, and regardless of the great excitement this phenomenon produces in some Third World countries (India is notable for producing such writers and excitements), the real market for both these circuits is within the metropolitan countries; no Indian writer could command such large royalties if India itself was the target market. Third World markets absorb surplus production and contribute to margins of profit; most of those products, especially from spheres of restricted production, actually never make it into the Third World markets.

Some other features of this market are notable. First, as is true of literary production in general, in the making of 'world literature' too restricted production matters more than mass production. For every translated work of fiction that a big publishing house picks up, there are ten that are published by smaller publishing houses, in much smaller numbers; this is all the more true of poetry. Second, this restricted but reliable market exists for specific reasons: the expansion of immigrant communities which want some sampling of literatures from their mother countries, academic markets where metropolitan universities have an expanded infrastructure of teaching such texts, and a small general reading public what has cultivated a cosmopolitan taste. Third, most literary texts that circulate in these markets are actually produced and exchanged within the metropolitan centres. For every Indian novel that gets translated into English, there are a hundred French novels that too get translated; for smaller countries, or countries less in the eyes of the metropolitan reader, the ratio would be even more unfavourable. Fourth, a certain degree of the colonial connection persists. Few of the African writers who write in French make it into English; few of the Caribbean ones who write in English make it into French. Fifth, a couple of the European languages determine the structure and reception of the whole archive. I know only that Latin American literature that has already been selected, translated, distributed by the Anglo-American publishing industry in English; some one else may have the same relationship with French or Spanish. In this sense, I have the same relationship with Turkish texts in 'world literature' as I have with Tamil texts in my 'national

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literature'; the mediating role of English is decisive. Two countries of the Third World which do not speak the same languages rarely have any sort of direct relationship with one another's literature. This applies all the more to interpretation, commentary, teaching. Finally, a much more extended picture of 'world literature' exists in English than in any other language, for the same reason that English is the pre-eminent language of world finance and computers: it is the national language of the great imperial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, Britain and the United States. One could dissect all these points at far greater length. The basic argument is now in place, however.

VII

As regards the formulations pertaining to 'world literature' that I quoted earlier, Marx was, I believe, right and wrong at the same time. At a time when all kinds of romanticisms had attached themselves to exclusively national culture and national literature, Marx identified himself with the noblest traditions of Enlightenment thought where culture and literature had to be radically separated from national 'narrow-mindedness' and made into a common patrimony for all humanity. And, he was absolutely right in postulating that capitalist globalization in the sphere of political economy shall inevitably produce a world civilization, for the first time in human history, and that a 'world literature' will necessarily arise out of these global exchanges that shall be both economic as well as civilizational. This, for him, was neither an ideal enterprise nor a museum of great texts nor a task for the literary intelligentsia alone, as it had been for Goethe for instance. Rather, this eventual development was seen as an inherent logic of history itself. It is indeed the case that the production of precisely that kind of archive, bringing writers and artists from many corners of the world face to face with each other, and making at least a little part of that archive to the literate populations of the world, has been a special feature of the present century. By now, we do have the rudimentary beginnings of a 'world literature' and this internationalization of art and culture will only grow with time. Marx's prescience in this regard is of historic significance.

But there are also two problems. The first is that what Marx neglected to say in this context, as he was quick to say at so many points in his work and about so many other analogous developments, that capitalism does make such developments possible, even launches

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such projects in its own way, but is so riddled with its o w n contradictions that it cannot realize its own potentials. Hierarchical organisation and fragmentation are inherent in the very form of globalization that capitalism carries out. It privileges certain national literatures over others, concentrates resources in some countries a t the expense of others, and organizes the production of 'world literature' in the image of the 'world market' with all its inherent inequalities and anarchies. What has produced the possibility has itself become the greatest hindrance t o its realization. For a 'world literature' to arise as a 'true interdependence of nations' the logic of the 'world market' needs to be transcended.

That much we have argued at length. But there's something else as well. 'National and local literatures' are not inevitably expressions of 'narrow-mindedness'. They can just as often be genuine expressions of a democratic demand and a just cultural aspirations of a people, in a particular place and time, especially in the context of cultural imperialism. There are cultural nationalisms that have produced the most retrograde, often murderous, political projects; in today's India, that should be obvious enough. But there is a kind of cultural nationalism that is a specific protest against cultural imperialism. Whose nationalism, then, whose culture, whose literature? We need t o be deeply attuned t o the contradictions of such phenomena. Literatures are, moreover, so deeply embedded in particular languages that a 'world literature' need not be conceived as the polar opposite of 'national and local literatures'. The multiplicity of languages is likely to remain, while the circulation of cultural goods can only get more accelerated with newer technologies and rising rates of literacy and education around the world. A world literature' can only arise if material relations among the different language-literature complex can be organised in a structure of exchanges that are non-hierarchical, non-exploitative and non-dominative. This, however, imperialism itself renders impossible, while imperialism also ensures that if a 'world literature' were to be assembled in any one language it will necessarily be the language of the dominant imperialist power.

Finally, we are faced with a very specific contradiction now, a t the end of the 20th century. The development of the productive forces, not to speak of such phenomena as the ecological danger to the planet as a whole, require increasing levels of planning and centralization of resources, for the making of a rational, humane society in which human beings can live in harmony with each other and with their natural environment. This can only be achieved at a global level. O n

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the other hand, however, this century has been, uniquely, a century of quantum increases in the levels of democratic demand, which requires more and more devolution of power, including cultural power, to the smaller units of human society. In this context, then, a 'world literature' is indeed arising out of the very unification of the globe t h r o u g h th is immense increase in p roduc t ive capaci ty a n d communicational technology, but for it to serve as an integral part of the socialist project it must be re-conceived not as an accumulation of certain texts for profit but as a social relation among producers scattered all over the globe, in their specific locales, but connected t o each other in relations of radical equality. Like socialism itself, 'world literature' is a horizon: the measure of a time yet to come. Or, to put it another way, 'world literature', like the working class, is a product of the capitalist market but stands in a relation antithetical to it.

NOTES 1. See Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State and more particularly the famous

essay 'On the Jewish Question' in Quintin Hoare (ed), Karl Marx, Early Writiizgs (London, New Left Books, 1974). This edition includes an excellent introduction by Lucio Colletti.

2. Ibid., p. 229. McLellan in his translation prefers "right of selfishness" in stead of "the right of self-interest" as in Early Writiizgs. See David McLellan (ed), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford, OUP, 1977), p 53.

3 . The image we now have of modern capitalists and the industrial proletariat would be inappropriate when thinking of Marx's early writings, right up to the Manifesto. The famous "Paris proletariat" which was a key force in the revolutionary uphe&als of that time was not even remotely "industrial" and consisted of a variety of generally dispossessed masses. The "bourgeoisie" similarly included owners of urban property, the upper reaches of the liberal professions, merchants and the like. In the Manifesto itself the word "proletariat" is sometimes- though not in every formulation- used in that looser sense of a dispossessed mass of people whose only means of livelihood was their own labour.

4. See for a discussion of this point, my essay "The Comrnuizist Manifesto and the problem of Universality," Monthly Review, June 1998.

5. The title "Theses on Feurbach" was given by Engels. Marx had used the simple phrase "Concerning Feurbach" which makes them more tentative and provisional, like rough notes.

6. All three texts are available, for convenient comparison Volume 6 of Collected Works of Marx aizd Engels (Moscow, 1984).

7. A distinction must be made here between Marx's distinctive and extensive critique of what in The Poverty of Philosophy he had called "the metaphysics of political economy," which was already fairly well advanced in the writings leading up to the Marzifesto, and a properly Marxist theory of capitalism,

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which only began taking shape during the 1950s, with the drafting o f Grutzdrrsse.

8. Prabhat Patnaik, "The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years," in Prakash Karat (ed), A World to Win: Essays on the Comrnu~zrst Manifesto (Delhi, Leftword, 1999).

9. Letter t o E Danielson (1881) in Marx & Engels, Otr Colo~zralism: Articles from the 'New York Herald Tribune' and other Writings (New York, international Publishers, 1972), p 339. See, for more extended comment on Marx's detailed understanding of colonlal plunder, Irfan Habib, "Marx's Perception of India," in Essays 112 I~zdiatz History: Towards a Marxist Perceptio)~ (Delhi, Tulika, 1995) and my "Marx on India" in 111 Theory: Classes, Natro~zs, L~teratures (London 1992; Delhi 1995).

10. See Otz Colorrialism. 11. Letter to Engels, 1858. 12. For a lengthier discussion of these points, see my "Imperialism and Progress,"

in Lineages of the Presetzt (Delhi, Tulika, 1996).