154 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the growth of an All-India organisation like the FICCI, it was difficult to translate into day to day practice. Rarely were the Indian capitalsts capable of acting in a united manner, except for a few months during the first phase of the Civil Disobedience Movement and at the time of the ladofBritish Trade Agreement."7 That, however, is how social classes behave as opposed to conspiratorial groups which the historians he criticiess often reduce them to. Marx and Engds explain very succincty, in their philosophical work on The Gefman Ideology, the dynamics of classes rather than just contradictory behwiotoal processes : "The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class, otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the cleiss in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it.'"'6 Moreover, studying the character of a vacillating class in the context of a national liberation moveaaent, it is not likely that one would find unadulterated examples of a& enduring, conscious ctoss perspective and practice, except at points where the struggle is unduly sharp. The moments of class solidarity that he does note, however, are significant, and show him to be oversressing the disorganization of the Indian capitalist class Just as the bourgeois historian he criticizes, Bipan Chandra, overestimates and glorifies its organisation. This approach makes him underestimate the capacity of the growing national liberation movement to mobilise businessmen, botti Indian and British, to toe its line, on the one hand, and the capacity of the capitalist ela&s to influence important decisions of the national movement through its leadership on the other. For example, he descrides how, during the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1931, the Congress had succeeded in reducing Use mills still under boycott to "only eight Indian mills, generally small, as having refused to sign the pledge and being therefore on the boycott list. That list also included twenty-five foreign-contfolfed mills," aad added that this was "an act of allegiance to the Congress and thus had a big morat impact'99 At the same time the bourgeoisie extracted the Gandhi-Irwin pact from the Congress, which, in the words ofSirPurshotam das Thakurdas, was "a return to political sanity".10 Then, by the "beginning. of November (1932) the EICA (East India Cotton Association) leadership seems to have persuaded most of the European firms t6 sign a statement supporting Indian national aspirations and by the end of December the boycott was limited to one European firm".11 This political isolation of the colonial government Markowitz describes as a state of affairs in whdeh "the Government of India was in a strong enough position, having broken the backbone of Civil Disobedience"12 How he comes to this conclusion wb^n even British business h^d capitulated to th^ Congress