Description

There cannot be any capitalist production without a working class. But there can be, as Marxists have often pointed out in the recent past,capitalism that subsumes precapitalist relationships. Under certain
conditions, the most feudal system of authority can survive at the heart of the most modern of factories. There is nothing in the logic of the market or profit that guarantees an automatic transformation of individuals into citizens. This poses interesting problems of narrative strategy for historical accounts of working classes in countries where the struggle to achieve a certain degree of “liberal” practice in everyday
life comes long after the beginning of industrialization. In these contexts, the master-slave dialectic reproduces itself far more often than does the phenomenon of the rule of the citizen.
The problem of choosing an appropriate narrative strategy, in these cases, is even more complicated for the Marxist historian, since Marx’s own ideas on the capital-labor relationship often take a hegemonic bourgeois culture for granted. This is the problem that this book addresses by examining in detail the history of a specific labor force the jute-mill workers of Bengal under British rule. These workers constituted an important section of the Indian working class. The choice of this particular history is admittedly somewhat arbitrary, being contingent on the accidents of my intellectual evolution.