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Marks of Capital: Colonialism and the Sweepers of Delhi1

Part of: Labour History and the Case against Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

Vijay Prashad
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Summary

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In a sub-field of Marxism, A.G. Frank and E. Laclau debated the intricate details of Frank's critique of the “dualist thesis”. That thesis argued that capitalism failed to overcome feudalism in its colonial adventure; Frank argued that to posit the duality between capital and feudal forms does violence to the structural integration of feudal forms into the logic of capital. Frank's critique, however, remained wedded to a level of abstraction which was unable to reveal the full implications of his suggestions. In this essay, I attempt to show that the logic of capital during colonial rule produced a municipal sanitation regime which relied upon the control over the labor of manual sweepers mediated through jobbers, overseers and contractors. Far from being the embodiment of “tradition”, the sweepers since colonial India bear on their bodies the marks of capital. This essay reveals those marks as well as demonstrating the integral relation between the logic of capital and barbaric colonial rule.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 1995 , pp. 1 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1995

References

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94 Cf. Sycd Hussain Alatas: “The ideology of colonial capitalism evaluated people according to their utility in their production system and profit level. If a community did not engage in activities directly connected with the colonial capitalist venture, the community was spoken of in negative terms.” The image of the lazy native was “a major justification for territorial conquest, since the degraded image of the native was basic to colonial ideology”. The Myth of the Lazy Native (London, 1977), pp. 212–213.

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