In the aftermath of the revolt, the government of India followed a policy of non-interference in Indian affairs relating to religion and caste. Nervous of a repeat of the widespread military and civil unrest experienced during 1857–8, the government was keen to dispel the apparently popular belief that its aim was the cultural defilement or even wholesale conversion of the entire population to Christianity. British administrators were also eager to untangle the seemingly tight knot that bound together the question of native ‘loyalty’ and ‘treachery’, and increasingly came to understand individual posturing with or against the state in relation to broader collective groups and relationships. In its drive for cultural understanding, if not empathy, the government created what is now commonly described as an ‘ethnographic state’, through which it differentiated, distinguished, and sharpened categories of religion and caste. These fed into colonial forms of governance generally, particularly new modes of recruitment into the Bengal army, as also the specifics of colonial alignment with particular sections of the Indian population. Indian communities were themselves central to the formation of such social discourses and practices. As during the pre-colonial period they continued their attempts to reposition themselves socially, economically, and culturally according to their own needs and desires.

Yet, as we have seen, colonial concerns about the relationships between the individual, society, religion, caste, and tribe were not solely a post-1858 development.

Introduction

The green challenge to Marx's socialist vision for its purported commitment to industrial giganticism and the fact that a green politics has emerged as a focal point for oppositions to the current world order has spurred Marxists to reconsider the theory and practice of socialism in a green light. The present chapter follows in the spirit of that work intent upon defending the potency of Marxist theory – particularly Marxian economics – to expose the roots and modalities of the eco-destructive tendencies of capitalism. And, this work shares in the belief that it is only through the building of a genuine socialism that an eco-sustainable global future for humanity can be realized. However, the chapter maintains the case Marxism makes regarding such paramount questions needs to be strengthened and that there exists a latent power of Marxian analysis waiting to be tapped for precisely this purpose.

Marx's Capital has been successfully mined for its elucidation of the class-exploitative, crises-ridden, lop-sided wealth-concentrative nature of capitalism. But only marginally has it been explicitly drawn upon for its exploration of how it is possible for such a society – what Marx referred to variously as an ‘upside-down’, ‘alien’, ‘fetishistic’ social order reducing human socio-economic relations to ‘relations among things’ – to reproduce human economic life over an extended period in the first place.

The transition from the Keynesian ‘golden age’ to the current ‘age of neo-liberalism’ was one of the defining events of the international political economy in the post-war era. This chapter examines this transition in terms of changes in the theory and practice of monetary policy across these two periods, and their socio-economic implications. It is argued that monetary policy regimes are irreducibly political. They do not simply offer alternative approaches to macroeconomic management; policy regimes also discipline nation states and social actors in different ways. For example, they constrain the choice of economic policy priorities and the use of the available policy tools, influence inter-capitalist relations within and between countries, and limit the demands of the working class. The macroeconomic policy regime is one of the basic features of the system of accumulation. By the same token, crises of the policy regime can bring to light limitations of the hegemonic processes of economic production and social reproduction.

This chapter shows, first, that the demise of Keynesianism was the outcome of intractable social, economic and political problems in the late 1960s and 1970s, including monetary and exchange rate disturbances, social discord and the weakening US hegemony. The neo-liberal transition was the historically specific (contingent) outcome of the search for solutions to these mounting problems in the accumulation process. The development of a new monetary and exchange rate policy regime was one of the decisive aspects of this transition.

Introduction

Contemporary observers claimed frequently that religion was an important cause of the Indian mutiny-rebellion of 1857–8. They viewed missionary activities, inappropriate legislative interventions into religious affairs, and the alleged introduction of cartridges greased with animal fat into the Bengal army as significant reasons for revolt. A number of nineteenth-century writers and historians have taken up this perspective to argue that the uprising was at least partly a cultural arena in which north Indian communities responded to perceived colonial assaults on religious practices. As we have seen, other military, social, and economic concerns fuelled and sustained widespread unrest. However, this chapter will focus on a further dimension to the cultural background to revolt: the colonial jail in north India. Accounts detailing the run-up to the mutiny-rebellion sometimes mentioned local hostility to prisons, for jails were newly constituted colonial spaces in which Indian bodies were confined, controlled, and disciplined in unprecedented ways. Penal practices often transgressed Indian social norms, particularly with regard to religion and caste. In this reading, jails both embodied and symbolized broader social fears about colonial interference in religious affairs and forced conversion to Christianity.

In the pages that follow we will examine the penal practices that invoked these concerns, discussing north Indian responses to and negotiations with colonial innovations in imprisonment during the first half of the nineteenth century. Now it is historiographically well established that prisons were sites in which essential colonial social categories were reflected, institutionalized, and embedded.

Introduction

The revolt in the North-West Provinces, Bengal, and the Panjab left the government with a serious problem: where to put recaptured and surrendered prisoners, and the increasing number of new offenders convicted by the special commissioners for crimes associated with the revolt. As we have seen, rebels damaged or destroyed many jails. In addition, government often converted those that remained intact into military barracks, necessitating structural changes such as the pulling down of outbuildings and walls. As well as the difficulties caused by the lack of accommodation for prisoners, the mass desertion of prison guards in some areas meant that their security could not be guaranteed. There were few if any European soldiers to spare to ease the shortage. Further, hundreds of prisoners had been sentenced to transportation overseas, but there was no means of forwarding them from the districts to the holding jail at Alipur. The river steamers usually employed for the purpose were busy carrying European officers, civilians, and wounded soldiers.

This chapter will explore the development of a penal crisis in the aftermath of the revolt. District magistrates made a series of pleas for a solution to the many problems they faced, but in the short term there were only limited options. Especially in the North-West Provinces, jails needed major repairs, complete rebuilding or new sets of prison guards. An uneasy attempt to deal with the lack of jail accommodation came with the transfer of large numbers of prisoners to more secure jails, notably Alipur in the Bengal Presidency.

Introduction

This chapter seeks explanations for the last period (roughly three decades) of volatile global capitalism in order to advance strategic resistance. The merits of ‘classical political economic theory’ include the identification of crisis tendencies at the core of capital's laws of motion, tendencies which are met by countervailing management techniques. Crisis displacement techniques became much more sophisticated since the 1930s freeze of financial markets, crash of trade, Great Depression and inter-imperial turn to armed aggression. The chapter documents the global economy's vast credit expansion and the use of geographical power to move devaluation to Third World and emerging market sites, as well as vulnerable markets in the North that have suffered substantial ‘corrections’ in past years. Extra-market coercion including gendered and environmental super-exploitation has intensified in the process. The result is an ‘uneven and combined’ capitalism that concentrates wealth and poverty in more intense ways, geographically, and brings capitalist markets and the non-market spheres of society and nature together in ways adverse to the latter.

As for resistance, popular movements across the world are divided on strategies and tactics. While there are some crucial sites of national state control by anti-capitalist forces in Latin America, we can consider the options faced by the popular movements in terms of three alternative orientations: (i) ‘autonomism’, (ii) ‘global governance’; and (iii) ‘decommodification’ of life/nature alongside the ‘deglobalization’ of capital.

It is certainly possible to overestimate the practical importance of arguments for the normative legitimacy of global capitalism. But normative arguments continue to circulate in the social world, and it would be foolish to think that they do so without significant social effects. As long as ideological defences of capitalism continue to be produced, there will be a need for ideology critiques.

Arguments – for the normative legitimacy of global capitalism – unfold in three main stages. A normative principle (or set of principles) must be proposed and defended. Then, it must be established that a global capitalist order is compatible with, or even necessary for, the adequate institutionalization of that principle. If the global economy is at present flawed from the standpoint of the given principle, this must be shown to be a contingent matter, capable of being reversed through appropriate reforms.

In the first section I shall present what I take to be the strongest contemporary version of this argument, combining the normative principle articulated by the leading contemporary theorists of global justice with the most significant recent development in mainstream economics – ‘new growth theory’. In the second section, I shall present a critical assessment of this position from a Marxian standpoint. In the third section it will be shown that the position is internally incoherent. The paper concludes with a speculation regarding the future course of global capitalism.