Issues of class and culture: an interview with Aijaz Ahmad - Interview

Monthly Review, Oct, 1996 by Ellen Meiksins Wood

I don't mean that everyone in India lives like that. All sorts of abominable things happen. I meant to say something about my own experience and the experience I share with other progressive people like myself, and there are millions of us, I don't know how many but a great many - and about the very textures of daily life that people share without having actually theorized about it. And what I meant to say was that in this life, and in the lives of countless people, generation after generation, there have been so many ways, traditional ways and modern ways, of reconciling "universalism" and "particularism" that there have been for me many quite concrete ways of negotiating my own experience. These ways are quite different from the way this question gets posed in societies like those of North America which have very brief histories and which carry such burdens of racial genocide, slavery and migration - societies that have relatively little that is older than a capitalist ethic and not much of a communist tradition.

In more impersonal terms of history and theory, I would again bring up the issue of rights, about which I write and speak constantly because I think it is important to come at it from different angles. I think that there is a terrible distortion in the way the history of "universalism" gets recounted in the polemics against the Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment etc. In such accounts, the discourse of rights remains where it began, namely in the proposition that the locus of all rights is the individual, that this individual has no attributes other than that of citizenship, that the structure of universal rights must follow the logic of universal laissez-faire which itself emanates from the pre-Ricardian notions of the so-called free market. I don't think that the debate has been frozen at that point of origin for all these years. Rather, there have been constant struggles. In our own time, a whole range of theories - Marxist certainly but even liberal-feminist, secular, anti-colonial and anti-racist theories, not to speak of the extremely complicated discourses of minority rights - which have amply demonstrated that the supposedly attribute-less individual that laissez-faire liberalism proposes is, under the ideological surface, none other than the White bourgeois male. And that even liberal theory must face up to the fact that the individual who might be not-male, not-white, not-bourgeois cannot be called upon to surrender her attributes to an abstract universality.

The whole issue of the commensurability of universal rights with rights of various kinds of minorities is at least as old as Locke. Historically, the capitalist state has of course not granted to workers or women the fights that should be theirs but an idea is commonly held that there are rights that are specific to workers as workers and to women as women. There is an idea of the right of historical redress, in the form of affirmative actions, for sections of the population whose present disadvantage is rooted in the accumulated oppressions of the past. In the advanced capitalist countries, the state is in the process of being pushed to accommodate itself to the rights of the elderly, the physically handicapped. Everywhere in the world, the illiberal as well as the liberal are being called upon to accommodate themselves to the rights that are specific to what remains of those indigenous peoples whose lives are constantly shattered by capitalism's conquest of Nature. A recognition is beginning to dawn upon political theory that situations of individuals and communities are so various that the secondary structure of particular rights will cumulatively far surpass the underlying structure of universal rights. Neither the beginning of trade union rights in the nineteenth century nor the expanding structure of women's rights in the twentieth; neither the civil rights legislation in the United States nor the ideology of the welfare state in Western Europe, would be conceivable outside the extremely difficult problematic of reconciling, on the terrain of practical social covenants, the universal and the particular.