INDIAN BUSINESS AND NATIONALIST POLITICS 153 movement.992 Nowhere is there an unequivocal presentation of a progressive anti-imperialist national capitalist class, but rather of one incapable of and unwilling to overthrow the reactionary precapitalist vested interests or to put up an uncompromising resistance to imperialism. This position is made even clearer in an article written by Ajoy Ghosh, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India from 1951 to 1962, till his death. His view is relevant to our discussion even in narrow academic terms, as it was in 1936 that he became a member of the Politbureau of the CPI which is almost in the middle of the period of Markowitz* study. He quotes from the Thesis on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and the Semi-Colonies, adopted by the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928, where it is clearly stated that the "native bourgeoisie, especially the portion reflecting the interests of native industry, supports the national movement and represents a special vacillating compromising tendency wnich may be designated as national reformism ...an opportunist movement subject to great vacillations, balancing between imperialism and revolution...The native bourgeoisie, as the weaker side, again and again capitulates to imperialism. Its capitulation, however, is not final as long as the danger of class revolution on the part of the masses has not become immediate, acute and menacing.993 With regard to India, the position is very clear. At no point in this period did the Indian Marxists hold any other view than that "it is the dual role of the bourgeoisie as a class that alone can satisfactorily explain recent developments as well as past events."4 Moreover, they stressed the fact that "the whole bourgeoisie is national in the sense that its interests as a class are not identical with imperialism but on the contrary come into conflict with it. The class as a whole wants independent capitalist development"5 and that "compromise and struggle are not two different polices of two different sections but two aspects of the basic policy of the class a whole.556 This position, which dominated the thinking of Marxists most definitely in the period under study, leaves no doubt that Markowitz, like Don Quixote, has taken to tilting at windmills of his own creation. Starting from this weakness, Markotwiz then lands himself in another problem because of his empiricist-positivist approach. Basically his method is one that describes a series of states which can at best be superimposed one onto another with a vast stock of facts, some relevant and some irrelevant, as a descriptive aid to buttress the various "snapshots" of history. As such, transformations are either a priori or contradictory jumps from one state of affairs t® another. For example, in his critique of Indian bourgeois historians, at the conclusion of the book, he says: "A detailed study of the politics of Indian business in the 1930s does not confirm the image of a very articulate capitalist class capable of acting as a united lobby, an image which is currently being projected in the writings of some historians. Although an awarea^ of oornnaou interests w^s increasing, as shown by