The classes that construct a society
S.M. Shamsul Alam praises an addition to historical sociology
Western sociology, specifically American sociology is notoriously ahistorical. This ahistoricity can be located within the trajectories of the emergence of the discipline itself, when the discourse of modernity provides both epistemological and methodological foundations for sociology. Born during the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution, the discipline became "scientific sociology" that explicitly adopted positivism, that is, application of natural science methods to " discover" the "laws" that govern society. In it, situating historical dimensions while explaining social phenomena was systematically ignored. The emergence of Marxism in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with that of "scientific sociology," and fundamentally altered the very idea of sociology. Marxism, along with German sociologist Max Weber's contributions, laid down the contours of historical sociology that influenced countless sociologists worldwide. Class and Social Structure of Bangladesh is an important addition to the genre of historical sociology (keeping in mind Louis Althussar's Structural Marxism, that not all Marxists analysis is historical). Submitted as a PhD dissertation under the supervision of eminent sociologist Bryan S. Turner in 1982 at the University of Aberdeen, Chowdhury's text is theoretically nuanced and analytically rigorous. Written in a time of intense intellectual subversion, it follows, albeit implicitly, the well known critique of modernization theory, and addresses, historically, various issues related to Andre Gunder Frank's Dependency and Immanuel Wallerstein's world system perspective. At the same time, Chowdhury is aware that Dependency/ World System perspective is "insufficiently Marxists" as it fails to incorporate class analysis, otherwise know as "internalist" approach. Armed with these and other theoretical and conceptual tools, and without getting into sterile debate about "externalist" versus "internalist" approach, Chowdhury seeks to analyze the impact of double colonialism, first the British (1757-1947) and then the Pakistani (1947-1971) in EastBengal/East Pakistan /Bangladesh. Explicit to dependency approach, Chowdhury argues that the presence of double colonialism thwarted development in Bangladesh and firmly established its peripheral status within the world capitalist order. Thematically arranged, the text is divided into six chapters. The first two chapters describe the context of double colonialism and social transformation that it brought about, specifically in the context of the emergence of social classes and their link with underdevelopment in the region This, in turn, paved the way for siphoned off much needed surplus that was generated internally. In the last four chapters, Chowdhury focuses on post-colonial Bangladesh that firmly establishes the thesis that the question of underdevelopment must be located in double colonialism which the author describes in the first two chapters. In chapter one, Chowdhury successfully demolishes a long held view that pre-colonial Bengali society was stagnant and British colonialism introduced dynamism in a highly closed and stagnant society. This "stagnancy thesis", based on misreading Karl Marx's occasional journalistic and highly disjointed articles, tends to rationalize British rule in India. In the chapter, Chowdhury describes pre-colonial land ownership; how this unique land ownership pattern was linked with the Bengali peasantry and the role of a centralized state in its creation. Related to the "stagnancy thesis," this chapter deals with the question of self-sufficient village community. Scholars are divided into two camps on this issue. One view holds that pre-colonial villages were closed and self-sufficient, and the other that they were not quite closed and regular contact with the outside world was common. Chowdhury's argument on this issue is quite different. To him "(…) the pre-colonial Indian villages conditions of money economy and self-sufficiency existed side by side." In 1793, the British imposed the Permanent Settlement Act which paved the way for what Chowdhury calls the "beginning of the process of capitalist underdevelopment." Chapter two, titled "Second Colonial Era (1947-1971", chronicles Pakistani colonial rule in Bangladesh. Here the author discusses the transformation of both rural and urban class structures and how these transformations reinforce Bangladesh's underdevelopment. Theoretically, Chowdhury draws from the debate between Ralph Miliband (the current British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband's father) and Nicos Poulantzas on the capitalist state and from the theories of post-colonial state developed by Hamza Alavi and others. Following Poulantzas, Chowdhury argues that "…. along with economic power, political power is also a principle determination of class differentiation." The last two chapters explain both internal and external constraints of Bangladesh's development. In these two chapters, the author connects various class forces and role of the state with development or lack there of. The role of foreign aid and its negative effect on development is the topic of the last chapter. Chowdhury's English is crisp and lucid. He has that uncanny ability to present abstract ideas in a straightforward English without losing either its rigor or analytical capability. This highly erudite book will be of great importance to anyone, both scholar and layperson, interested in Bangladesh and its place in the world.
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