Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism: Untimely Encounters 3031228944, 9783031228940

Table of contents :
Titles Published
Titles Forthcoming
Preface and Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Introduction: Decentering “Marxist” Political Theory After State Socialism
Border-Marxisms and the “Field”
Anti-capitalism and Historical Materialism’s Linear Time
An Autonomous Problematic of Power: Mao Zedong
After the Collapse of State Socialism
The “Democratic” State—Empty Place of Power
Critique of the Party-Form
The Conundrum
References
2 Capital’s Expressways and Life Beneath: Underground Economies, Illegal Populations
Introduction
The “Rise” of the “Underground”
Performing “Capitalism”
Labor
Consumption
Accumulation
Democracy as the “Outside”
References
3 Peasantry and the Marxist “Unconscious”
Farewell to the Working Class
Enter the Peasants and Indigenous Peoples
Indian Farmers’ Struggle, 2020
The Marxist Unconscious
Lenin and the Russian Revolution
Towards Reformulation
References
4 Climate Crisis, Productivism and Waste
Relocating Pollution and waste—The Global Story
Waste and Power
Expanded Reproduction of Waste
Marxist Productivism
Ecology and the So-Called ‘Logic of Capital’
The “New Copernican Revolution”
Ecological Debt
Bibliography
5 Exiting the Time of Historical Materialism
Introduction
Pathways of Exit: MN Roy
Pathways of Exit: Cedric Robinson
Pathways of Exit: Subaltern Studies
Pathways of Exit: Samir Amin
Towards Alternative Conceptions
References
6 Looking Ahead: Socialism is not the “After” of Capitalism
Socialism and the Global South
Socialism—From Scientific to Utopian
Socialism, Commoning and Solidary Economy
References
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism Untimely Encounters

Aditya Nigam

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

Aditya Nigam

Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism Untimely Encounters

Aditya Nigam Political Theorist Based in Delhi Delhi, India

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-031-22894-0 ISBN 978-3-031-22895-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22895-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: courtesy Samrat Som This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018.

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TITLES PUBLISHED

12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, 2020. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, 2020. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction, 2020. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2020. 30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, 2020.

TITLES PUBLISHED

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31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, 2020. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy, 2020. 33. Farhang Rajaee, Presence and the Political, 2021. 34. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism, 2021. 35. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century, 2021. 36. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World, 2021. 37. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, 2021. 38. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism, 2021. 39. Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics, 2021. 40. Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation: Critical Studies, 2021. 41. Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives, 2021. 42. Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism, 2021. 43. Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists, 2021. 44. James Steinhoff, Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry, 2021. 45. Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism, 2021. 46. Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism, 2021. 47. Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Notes,” 2021. 48. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism, 2021. 49. Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in MidCentury Italy, 2021.

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TITLES PUBLISHED

50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx, 2021. 51. V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, 2021. 52. Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values, 2022. 53. Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance, 2022. 54. Achim Szepanski, Financial Capital in the 21st Century, 2022. 55. Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power, 2022. 56. Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism, 2022. 57. Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics, 2022. 58. Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration, 2022. 59. Fabio Perocco (Ed.), Racism in and for the Welfare State, 2022. 60. Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity, 2022. 61. Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina, 2022. 62. Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism, 2022. 63. Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci, 2022. 64. Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism, 2022. 65. Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems, 2022. 66. Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism, 2022. 67. Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism, 2022. 68. Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx, 2022. 69. José Ricardo Villanueva Lira, Marxism and the Origins of International Relations, 2022. 70. Bertel Nygaard, Marxism, Labor Movements, and Historiography, 2022.

TITLES PUBLISHED

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71. Marcos Del Roio, Gramsci and the Emancipation of the Subaltern Classes, 2022. 72. Marcelo Badaró, The Working Class from Marx to Our Times, 2022. 73. Jean Vigreux, Roger Martelli, & Serge Wolikow, One Hundred Years of History of the French Communist Party, 2022. 74. Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis, 2023.

Titles Forthcoming Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

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TITLES PUBLISHED

Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Working Class Tomonaga Tairako, A New Perspective on Marx’s Philosophy and Political Economy Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, & Matthias Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society Mauricio Vieira Martins, Marx, Spinoza and Darwin: Materialism, Subjectivity and Critique of Religion Fred Moseley, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation Armando Boito, The State, Politics, and Social Classes: Theory and History Anjan Chakrabarti & Anup Dhar, World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud Hira Singh, Annihilation of Caste in India: Ambedkar, Ghandi, and Marx Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, An Introduction to Ecosocialism Mike Berry, A Theory of Housing Provision under Capitalism Maria Chehonadskih, Alexander Bogdanov and Soviet Epistemologies: The Transformation of Knowledge After the October Revolution Peter Lamb, Harold Laski, the Reluctant Marxist: Socialist Democracy for a World in Turmoil Raju Das, Marxism and Revisionism Today: Contours of Marxist Theory for the 21st Century Gary Teeple, The Democracy That Never Was: A Critique of Liberal Democracy

TITLES PUBLISHED

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Alfonso García Vela & Alberto Bonnet, The Political Thought of John Holloway: Struggle, Critique, Emancipation Erick Omena, Urban Planning as Class Domination: The Games of Land Dispossession

Preface and Acknowledgments

A book on Marxism and India had long been on my agenda but there were what seem to be insurmountable difficulties, given that it meant being able to access and engage with specific regional histories in the various regional languages—a skill I did not have, with the exception of Bangla and Hindi. However, I also knew that book could not be a historical account of the vast field that is Marxism in India, for that would require many volumes and a collaborative effort. A history of that kind would have to include not the political history of the communist movement alone but also of the mass struggles which, even when led by the communists, constituted another field altogether. But Marxism in India was not simply a political movement. Indeed, it can be argued that its most significant contributions lay in the domain of culture in the broadest sense—from literature and theater to cinema and popular culture. Consequently, that project was shelved. What I could never get rid of, however, were the unresolved theoretical questions that had to do with our practice as activists in the communist movement in a country that was not the “developed” capitalist society of Marxism’s birth. We had been aware of some of these theoretical difficulties and had debated them in a specific “Marxist” register, believing that Lenin and Mao had “resolved” them by adapting Marxist theory to the requirements of “backward” peasant societies. The collapse of Soviet bloc socialism suddenly reopened the question as many Marxists in India started arguing that the crisis of socialism was because Marxists had been

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forced to “make revolution” and “build socialism” in a world that wasn’t ready for it, for it wasn’t capitalist yet. By thus arguing that you could not skip historical stages, “stage-theory” was being resurrected and soon communists had partially adopted the neoliberal creed in the belief that would help them lay the foundations of a full-blown capitalism, at least in states where they were in power. That experience necessitated a fresh look at the whole question of Time and questions of “backwardness” and “forwardness”, “development” and “underdevelopment”—this time in a different register because the problem was no longer of Marxism alone but of the modern conception of Time itself. It also became clear that as long as this conception remains unresolved, the non-Western world will continue to live an illegitimate existence—always embodying a series of “lacks”. There have been many critiques of such a conception of time but what is needed is an alternative account, failing which, we are destined to fall back into the existing patterns of thinking. Many of those questions came together in my previous book, Decolonizing Theory, where the key theoretical questions concerned the conceptualization of the “outside” in relation to capitalism and modernity on the one hand, and of the presence of the “past”—what I called “synchronicity of the nonsynchronous”, borrowing from Ernst Bloch. The question of the ecological and climate crisis all along served as the backdrop for much of the rethinking for that book. It was more so while writing this book, as it was clear that it was not just the Marxist parties of the Old Left, which were mired in productivism; even the new Left-wing formations in other parts of the world were finding it difficult to break out of it. As I thought about these questions, the project of a book on Marxism started taking a different shape. Thus, when Marcello Musto proposed that I write for the “Marx Engels Marxism” series, I thought that was just the opportunity to get down to it. I thank him for the opportunity, which actually pushed me to write this book. Two of the chapters incorporate two essays that have published earlier though they appear here significantly transformed and expanded. These are: Chapter 2, “Molecular Economies: Is there an ‘Outside’ to Capital?” in Nivedita Menon, Aditya Nigam and Sanjay Palshikar (Eds. 2014), Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, pp. 482–514.

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Chapter 4, “Beyond Productivism: Socialism, Waste, Obsolescence”, in Gerber, Julien-Francois and Rajeswari S. Raina (Eds. 2018), Post-Growth Thinking in India, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, pp. 54–75. Critical Studies in Politics came out of a workshop that was graciously hosted by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and I am grateful to its then Director, Prof Peter de Souza and co-editors Nivedita Menon and Sanjay Palshikar for having made it possible. The earlier version of Chapter 4, “Beyond Productivism” was written for the first Post-Growth conference organized in India by Julien-Francois Gerber and Rajeswari Raina and the conference provided a stimulating occasion for thinking through many of the issues related to degrowth and capitalism. My thanks to both of them. Many of the issues discussed in this book have been debated over the years with many activist friends in different segments of the Left in India and while some have disagreed, some others have been more open to rethinking what were once common positions. Conversations with Vishwas Satgar over the years, have been very important in understanding the South African and African debates on colonialism and race. Attending one of their conferences, organized by Vishwas and Michelle Williams, from which has come out the “Democratic Marxism” series of volumes, led to an acquaintance with debates on racial capitalism. I also thank Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Morgan Ndlovu for inviting me to write the “Afterword” to their fascinating volume Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century that also allowed me to understand the current engagement with Marxism in the African continent. Nivedita Menon read the first draft of the entire manuscript closely and I have, as always, hugely benefited from her comments and suggestions. Comments from P.K. Datta and the anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan have also helped in tweaking the argument. Partha Chatterjee, Wang Hui, Urs Lindner, Kolja Lindner and Mohinder Singh read and commented on different chapters and Chapter 1, which have greatly enriched them. Everyone had to actually make time from their busy schedules, in order to read and comment on the draft. My deepest gratitude to all of them. For most of the time of writing this book, I was a member of the faculty at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi and hence a big thanks to the entire staff and faculty of CSDS. Their support was crucial—of course, in terms of access to the library but in many other ways that makes work easier. In particular, I want to thank Raghuveer and

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Raj Karan, Mr Natarajan, Jagadeesh Kumar and Ranjeet Negi, Ayodhya, Chandan, Vicky, Manoj, Harsh, Vikas and Sachin for their readiness to help in whatever way required. I also want to especially thank fellow faculty members Awadhendra Sharan (Director), Ravikant, Hilal Ahmad and Priyadarshini Vijaisri for helping me in accessing library and other research facilities even after my retirement from the institution. I am grateful to Samrat Som for allowing me to use his photograph for the cover image in this book. I thank Anirban and Monobina for being there. I want to thank Nivedita Menon, my dear friend of decades, intellectual collaborator and partner-in-crime whose support in so many ways I can always bank on. As usual, Aditi, Shankar, Aranya, Trina and Rajinder Nath have been a solid source of strength and support, more so, after my mother’s death. Arundhati Ghosh has not only been a source of great support but also a sounding board as many of the ideas were discussed with her at the time of writing. Her deep practical sense of the corporate world and of finance, as well as of organizations and institutions, has always helped me in thinking interstitially about abstract categories like “capital”. I dedicate this book to all those fighting oppressive regimes, across the globe, for a freer and more just world. Delhi, India

Aditya Nigam

Contents

1

Introduction: Decentering “Marxist” Political Theory After State Socialism

1

Capital’s Expressways and Life Beneath: Underground Economies, Illegal Populations

57

3

Peasantry and the Marxist “Unconscious”

97

4

Climate Crisis, Productivism and Waste

139

5

Exiting the Time of Historical Materialism

179

6

Looking Ahead: Socialism is not the “After” of Capitalism

223

2

Bibliography

239

Index

255

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Decentering “Marxist” Political Theory After State Socialism

The life of dialectics is the continuous movement toward opposites. Mankind will also finally meet its doom…We say the end of mankind … will produce something more advanced than mankind.—Mao Zedong1

In this introductory chapter, I have tried to look at “Marxism” from the outside, as it were—from the vast “underdeveloped” regions of the world, where it found its most enduring habitat. “Marxism”, thus decentered, was what we encountered as a generation of young radicals in India in the 1970s. Many of the questions raised by that experience are not written about anywhere. Hence the discussion that follows has had to draw a lot on how we perceived and debated them, connecting largely with the influence of the Chinese revolution. Many of the questions raised and debated in the global South, like that of the so-called “relative autonomy” of power or of the status of culture, may not seem new, given that a lot has been written on these questions in Western Marxism. Nonetheless, they acquire a very different resonance here, arising as they do, within the highly charged field of revolutionary practice in a world where capitalism as such hardly existed and economic determinism made little sense. However, the chapter is not simply about the past, of what 1 “Talks on Questions of Philosophy”, in Schram (1974: 228). The gendered expression “mankind” is of course how it was translated into English and is a mark of its times. The talk was given on 18 August 1964.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22895-7_1

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constituted a certain experience of “Marxism” at a particular moment of history but is equally about the present—the present of the ecological catastrophe, the present of the crisis of revolutionary imagination, the present of the rise of new Left formations and movements in the Global South and the questions posed by the problem of democratic transformation.

Border-Marxisms and the “Field” The point of beginning with the quote from Mao Zedong, in the epigraph, is not to highlight his prescience as we stand face to face with what looks like imminent doom in the face of the climate crisis; nor is it to point to his relentless optimism in the face of such a prospect. Rather, it is to bring out another question that will concern us throughout this book. Marxism in the East was a peculiar blend of Marxist ideas with concepts and notions drawn from extant traditions of thought in these societies. So for instance, in the lecture in which he made the remark cited above, Mao is at pains to restate, in different ways, this idea of the endless coming into being and passing away of things: “socialism too will be eliminated, it wouldn’t do if it were not eliminated, for then there would be no communism” (Schram 1974: 227). But communism too, is not a final state and even if it lasts for thousands of years, “I don’t believe that there will be no qualitative changes under communism…This is unthinkable in the light of dialectics” (ibid.: 227). I have always felt that this aspect of Mao’s thought, which often makes him look “wild” to his more “civilized” critics, comes from elsewhere, not from Marxism as such. In fact, Slavoj Žižek, the self-proclaimed defender of “Leftist Eurocentrism” and the Christian tradition, is quite astute in identifying this aspect of Mao as alien to his “dialectics”, though for me this is not a disqualification but rather what redeems Mao.2 For Žižek, while Mao was right in rejecting the notion of “dialectical synthesis”, he “was wrong in formulating this rejection, this insistence on the priority of struggle, of division over every synthesis or unity” (Žižek 2008: 185). According to Žižek, “this is why he got caught up in the simplistic, properly non-dialectical, notion of the ‘bad infinity’ of struggle”, for this to him is a sign of Mao’s

2 See Žižek (1998, 2000) for a clear exposition of his stance on this matter.

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“regression” “to primitive pagan ‘wisdoms’ on how every creature, every determinate form of life, sooner or later meets its end…” (Žižek 2008: 185, emphasis added).3 I will not comment on this putting of the wisdoms (of pagans) within quotation marks by Žižek for the moment but it is worth registering that the idea of “impermanence” that is expressed by Mao is quite central to many philosophies and cosmovisions in China and India, especially Daoism and Buddhism. I also want to underline here that the hubris of human “immortality” or the idea of return to an idyllic Eternity is not there in most cultures. Humans constitute but one small part of an infinite cosmos—and it is something that is supposed to make them more humble and modest. This “wildness” in Mao’s thought has often been commented upon derisively, especially by those Marxists who have always seen in him the expression of an eastern peasant ideology at work in the name of Marxism. So it might be interesting to pursue this strand in his thinking a bit more, though I will return to Mao’s political thought at greater length later in this chapter. Towards the end of the lecture, Mao asserts something he has said on other occasions as well: “Time and space are infinite” (Schram 1974: 229).4 Quite unlike the Christian tradition, of which Marxism is but a secularized version, where Time is counter-posed to Eternity as timelessness ; where the “fall” into historical time marks the beginning of this worldly life of strife and conflict, what we see in Mao is another conception altogether where Time itself is infinite. Marxism’s imagination of “communism” as a classless society sans strife, is a secular analogue of that Christian notion of redemption and a return to Eternity. As opposed to that kind of notion, in many Eastern traditions like the Daoist, Buddhist and Hindu for example, Time itself is without beginning and without end. But this is not the idyllic world of Eternity. For 3 In a slightly different kind of critique, Liu Kang (2011) observes that Žižek “portrays Mao as a crazy pagan lord” and cites him as saying that his apocalyptic view of the “protoNietzschean ‘overcoming of man’ is nothing less than a terrorist vision of doomsday…” (Kang 2011: 637). This is characteristic of his style of denunciation and one can actually say similar things with greater justification about Žižek himself. In this context, Kang rightly observes that “the biblical references that run through Žižek’s misreading of Mao and China betray a cultural bias, under the guise of Euro-continental philosophy and psychoanalysis” (Kang 2011: 643). This is not the place for delving into his oeuvre but I have discussed some of it at length elsewhere (Nigam 2020a, Chapter 3). 4 The reference here to the same lecture cited earlier, “Talks of Questions of Philosophy”.

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Time is the cause of change, of birth and death, of decay and sorrow—as in the case of Buddhism, which therefore emphasizes “detachment”. In some of the Indian traditions, Time is represented as “Mahakaal ”, the “Great Destroyer”. It is interesting, therefore, to listen to Mao say that “one thing destroys another, things emerge, develop, and are destroyed, everywhere is like this. Why should people die? …If there were no such thing as death, that would be unbearable…If we could still see Confucius alive today, the world wouldn’t be able to hold so many people” (Schram 1974: 227). Compare this with this quote from the Daoist text Zhuang Zi (Chuang Tzu): The years cannot be held off; time cannot be stopped. Decay, growth, fullness, and emptiness end and then begin again … The life of things is a gallop, a headlong dash—with every moment they alter, with every moment they shift. (Cited in Freiberg 1977: 8)

In a fascinating early article, J. W. Freiberg (1977) had tracked the Daoist antecedents of Mao’s dialectics and shown that while there were elements of the Marxist dialectic in him, many of Mao’s writings displayed a clear influence of Daoist philosophy, especially where it concerns epistemological questions. He cites another China scholar, Hellmut Wilhelm, to say that “(T)he world to the ancient Chinese was a world of motion, of constant flux; all things were constantly changing into their opposites, the yin into the yang, the small into the large” (cited in Freiberg 1977: 8, emphasis added). This idea of “things changing into their opposites” and nothing ever being only one or the other is central to Mao’s political thought too, I will argue later in this chapter. And let us note, in passing, that this is a far cry from Žižek’s claim that Mao got caught in the “bad infinity” of struggle. As we will see later on, crucial to the Daoist and Maoist conception is an understanding of what philosopher Francois Jullien (2004) has called the “propensity of things”, where even wars are not fought to finish off the enemy by “active intervention”. This a world very far from Žižek’s and calls for some humility as a precondition of understanding. Thus, for the Chinese sage, says Jullien, “the ‘world’ was not an object of speculation; it was not a matter of ‘knowledge’ on the one hand and ‘action’ on the other. That is why Chinese thought, logically enough, disregarded the theory–practice relationship: not through ignorance or because it was childish, but simply because it

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sidestepped the concept—just as it sidestepped the notion of Being and thought about God” (Jullien 2004: 15). Freiberg draws our attention to the fact that while Mao’s references often came from Daoist texts, he would equally frequently refer to literary texts as expressions of that dialectic: Mao makes several direct claims that he in part founded his dialectical method on the traditional Chinese dialectic: ‘There are numerous examples of materialist dialectics in Water Margin,’ he writes. In the philosophical essays On Practice and On Contradiction he refers to legends, short stories and novels, as well as historical and military treatises. (Freiberg 1977: 11)

Mao, of course, now configures these aspects of the “native” idea of Time and dialectics within a broader historical optimism that he derives from Marxism. And yet, as if to underline his antecedents, Mao says, quite explicitly, in the lecture we were discussing, “I am a native philosopher, you are foreign philosophers” (Schram 1974: 225). At the very end of the talk, Mao tells his listeners (and us): There is both Buddhism and Taoism, and it is wrong not to distinguish between them. How can it be proper not to pay attention to them? Han Yu didn’t talk sense. His slogan was ‘Learn from their ideas but not their mode of expression.’ His ideas were entirely copied from others, he changed the form, the mode of composition of the essays. He didn’t talk sense, and the little bit that he did was basically taken from the ancients …Liu Tzu-hou was different, he knew the ins and outs of Buddhist and Taoist materialism. And yet, his Heaven Answers is too short, just that little bit. His Heaven Answers is a product of Chu Yuan’s Heaven Asks. For several thousand years, only this one man has written a piece such as Heaven Answers …Heaven Asks is really fantastic, thousands of years ago it raised all kinds of questions, relating to the universe, to nature, and to history. (ibid.: 230, emphasis added)5

5 Stuart Schram’s explanatory note tells us: Han Yu (764–824) and Liu Tsung-yuan (773–819) (whom Mao refers to by his literary name Liu Tzu-hou here), were friends, distinguished poets and essayists who both experienced periods of banishment in the course of their official careers. Han Yu, especially is regarded as one of the greatest prose writers in the history of China; as a student Mao was taught to take him as a model in writing essays (Schram 1974: note 19, 327). In another note, Schram explains: Han Yu sought to recreate the simplicity of the classical period, while avoiding excessive archaism. The slogan about “learning from their ideas” quoted by Mao refers to this aim of seeking

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It is not my intention to go into a detailed reading of the different influences on Mao or on other communist thinkers and leaders in China or the colonial world at large. Nonetheless, it is telling how, despite volumes of writing on Mao and the Chinese communists, this aspect has rarely been commented upon, even by those who were clearly aware of such “influences”—if one might call them that. A striking instance of such a way of reading practices and intellection in the East, through the conceptual and philosophical frames developed in the West, is that of a relatively recent translation of Li Dazhao’s 1916 poem-essay “Spring” by Claudia Pozzana. Pozzana has also written a paper on this long poem/essay by Li Dazhao, who as we know, was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party.6 This is not the place to discuss the fascinating poem/essay but I do want to draw attention to one aspect of it. In the English translation by Pozzana, we come across these lines, for instance: The ego will thus change to a Spring ego, and ours to a family of Spring Ours to a Spring State, ours to a Spring Nation. Through its nidana, this Spring ego shall deserve In the immensity of countless kalpas To meet this loving Spring in one sole point Of space and time, to endless Spring belonging … Whether the universe is endless or not Depends on its having and end or a beginning Did the universe ever have a beginning? I say: The beginning was in nothingness In other words, there is no end and no beginning … India rose to give birth to Buddha But after the birth of Buddha, India died; Judea was created to give birth to Jesus But after the birth of Jesus, Judea faded away; China was established to give birth to Confucius But after the birth of Confucius, China declined. inspiration from ancient Confucian sages, while avoiding outmoded forms of expression. He adopted a critical attitude towards Buddhism, but nonetheless borrowed some ideas from it. Liu Tsung-yuan was a close friend of Han Yu. While he was deeply influenced by Buddhism, Mao characterizes him as a “materialist” (ibid.: note 45, 335). 6 Both the English translation and the essay (both by Pozzana) appear in Barlow (2002).

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… In this year’s Spring, let us consider today’s ksana As the starting point of this zhong of time; Let us deliver old history to the flames And develop only the zhong of this Springtime Zhonghua…

Claudia Pozzana actually retains the Sanskrit and Chinese words in various places and writes explanatory notes for the Sanskrit terms which say that “nidana (yinyuan) is a Buddhist term in Sanskrit: the twelve nidanas define the causal links of existence, as brought about by karman. Kalpa (jie) is a Sanskrit term for very long cosmic cycle of creation and dissolution of the universe”. I have cited just a few lines from this very long poem/essay but these lines are enough to show how similar, in a certain sense, is the landscape of thought inhabited by Li Dazhao on the eve of his becoming communist, and Mao in 1964, practically on the eve of the Cultural revolution. What I find perplexing, though certainly not inexplicable, is that the same Claudia Pozzana, in her accompanying essay on “Spring” and Li Dazhao, completely obliterates this thought-universe that is so constitutive of who Li Dazhao is and instead, struggles to “interpret” his notion of time through recourse to Bergson, Heidegger and even Alain Badiou, with absolutely no reference to this larger Buddhist and Daoist universe. In a sense, then, the purpose of this brief discussion indicating the landscape of thought inhabited by Mao Zedong and Li Dazhao leads me straight to the central concerns of this book. My interest here is not in Marx himself but in “Marxism”. Unlike many who live in the perennial hope of the “return of Marx” or seek to “return to Marx”, yearning for a recovery of the pristine source, uncontaminated by the “deviations” wrought by Leninist or Maoist practice in the underdeveloped regions of the world, my interest lies in the earthly journey of Marxism. This journey happened to occur largely in the “underdeveloped” world of the East, which I will henceforth refer to as the “global South” with one critical difference from its current usage. To borrow a formulation from Nivedita Menon, the term global South “does not refer to a geographical region, nor to a category within a developmental discourse, but is intended to indicate a space of thought, a possibility of revaluing and learning from speech from the margins, [and] of reworking the coordinates of intellectual work to free ourselves from the tyranny of Eurocentric universalizing narratives…” (Menon, forthcoming, emphasis added). In

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this sense, the global South is as much present in the United States, for instance, in the intellection and thought traditions of the indigenous peoples or African-Americans, as it is in the geographical South. I am interested in the specific “field” that was constituted by Marxism’s encounter with “underdevelopment”—what has often been referred to as “uneven development” or “combined and uneven development”, in Trotsky’s well-known formulation—where millions of people participated in making history, in transforming their societies and themselves. To be more precise, I am interested in Marxism as a field or a force-field in the sense in which we think of electromagnetic or gravitational fields, where objects and bodies impact on other bodies and objects and have effects, without necessarily coming into contact with each other. A further point needs to be underlined here: it is not just “Marxism” as an abstract and fully formed doctrine or ideology that one-sidedly constitutes this field but rather, “Marxism” as it is “summoned and mobilized” by anticolonial and radical elites within the colonized world/global South.7 It is a Marxism that is also therefore, repurposed to suit the needs of a different world—even though this dynamic turns out to be highly complicated, insofar as the “original” Marxism continues to have effects that are not so easily wished away. Often, what masqueraded as the “original” doctrine, further complicating the scenario, was the Stalinist theology embodied in the Communist International (Comintern), whose primary purpose seems to have been to append “Marxism-Leninism” to the requirements of the USSR’s view of the world. Many of the disasters of early Marxism in India and China can be traced to its obsession with rooting out “heresy”—as happened, for instance, with the destruction of the Workers and Peasants’ Parties (WPPs) in India towards the end of the 1920s. The destruction of the WPPs, it is necessary to underline, reduced the Communist Party

7 My use of the expression “summoned and mobilized” obviously recalls Louis Althusser’s reference to the Young Marx’s relation to Hegel: “the Hegel who was the opponent of the Young Marx from the time of his doctoral dissertation was not the library Hegel we can meditate on in the solitude of 1960; it was the Hegel of the neoHegelian movement, a Hegel already summoned to provide German intellectuals of the 1840s with the means to think their own history and their own hopes; a Hegel already made to contradict himself, invoked against himself, despite himself” (Althusser 1979: 65).

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of India (CPI) to complete inefficacy.8 The Chinese Communist Party, of course, managed to “make” their revolution largely by going against Comintern’s directives.9 Much of the poverty of Marxist thought in the global South can actually be directly attributed to the endless inquisitions conducted by the Comintern. In that sense, “Marxism” as a field, also encompasses, as far as the argument of this book is concerned, the metamorphosis that it is still undergoing after its liberation from the stifling role of being reduced to a state ideology, enabling a recovery and reassessment of many expunged and eliminated parts of its history. Its liberation has also made it more flexible and creative in its approach. As Taiwanese scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen puts it, “precisely because it was practised in different local formations over long periods of time and in a variety of concrete ways, Marxism has become the common property of all critical intellectuals, though in different locations and at different times, there are different emphases and concerns” (Chen 2010: 71). That Marxism, in this broad sense, no longer remains within old ideological straitjackets, can be seen from the rise of the new Left in Latin America, which is aligned more to the struggles of the indigenous people than to a fixed idea of the “working class”. Such a Marxism can also be seen in the ongoing attempts among some African scholars to find points of intersection between Marxism and the project of decolonization. As Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Morgan Ndlovu put it in their recent book, it “is beyond doubt” that “Marxism and decolonization have intersected across time and space to animate various contemporary anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist struggles as they have manifested in the Global South where the decolonization project has remained incomplete” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ndlovu 2022: 4). Indeed, it can also be seen in the work of another group of African

8 The formation and rapid growth of the WPPs from the mid-1920s onwards, had provided the communists, for the first time a direct connect with the mass of ordinary people but the experiment was to be short-lived because the Comintern, smarting under the impact of the debacle in China, effected its disastrous “Left turn” and instructed Indian communists to withdraw from the WPPs. See Seth (1995: 134–138) and Mukherjee (1983) for detailed discussions of the WPPs and the Comintern’s role. 9 Even though this fact is well-known, it is spelt out explicitly by Mao in the lecture discussed earlier: “Stalin felt that he had made mistakes in dealing with the Chinese problems, and they were no small mistakes. We are a great country of several hundred millions, and he opposed our revolution, and our seizure of power” (Schram 1974, 217, emphasis added).

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and Africa-based scholars that seeks to reimagine “Marxisms in the 21st Century” (Williams and Satgar 2013), which has led to the publication of a series of volumes under the rubric of “democratic Marxism”. Referring to the entire range of movements and initiatives from indigenous peoples’ movements and “twenty-first century socialism” in Latin America, to the World Social Forum, the Occupy Wall Street, the anti-austerity movements in Spain and Greece and the Arab Spring, these scholars attempt to imagine a “bottom-up” Marxism. “The Marxism of many of these movements is not dogmatic or prescriptive; rather, it is open, searching, dialectical, humanist, utopian and inspirational” (Williams 2013: 3). This “Marxism” is, therefore, not tied to the letter of Marxism; rather, it is invested in what we might call the spirit of Marxism, which is seen as radical striving for liberation from all forms of oppression. It thus also connects with Marxism’s early twentieth-century diffusion across the global South. After all, generations of those who called themselves “Marxists” in countries like India, perceived it as precisely that—a radical striving for liberation, rather than a set of formulae. “Capitalism” here stood more generally for the rule and power of wealth, against which “Marxism” and the idea of communism was seen as the clarion call to the poor, the dispossessed—the “wretched of the earth”, in short—to rise in revolt.10 Poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, a deeply Islamic thinker, even made God exhort his angels to imbue the poor of the world with the fire of rebellion to actualize the “kingdom of the people/democracy” (sultani-e-jamhoor)—in a poem suffused with the spirit of Marxism.11 It is this field produced by Marxism’s relation with the precapitalist world that, in turn, becomes the arena of a whole series of “untimely” encounters, ranging from slavery and racism to caste and nationalism; from the artisanry and peasantry to common property and indigenous populations. These encounters are “untimely” in the sense that they underline the non-contemporaneity of different life-forms with Capital, which has been Marxism’s primary reference point all along. 10 Marxist literature in Bengali, often uses even today, the early translation of “capitalism” as “dhanatantra” (system or rule of wealth), alongside the more specific “poonjibad” (capitalism). It is interesting to see how, despite Comintern’s and the official CPI leadership’s attempts to police such “Marxism”, it lived a different life in the Indian languages. 11 I have discussed this poem of Iqbal’s along with some other radical poems of the first half of the twentieth century elsewhere. See Nigam (2020b) in Partha Chatterjee (2020).

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For Marxism—and “historical materialism” in particular—these forms and phenomena were irrevocably matters of the past (“remnants” and “survivals”) and it cheerfully looked forward to that world where they, once dispossessed and eliminated by Capital, would have taken rebirth as the modern proletariat, unmarked by identity markers. That did not quite happen the way it was expected to and it is precisely in this field that Marxism’s multifarious encounters produce new challenges and at least some of them lead to interesting new transformations in Marxism itself. That being the case, there are no holy cows to be protected in the pages that follow. Before we proceed, a word is necessary here to clarify the meaning of the expression “Border-Marxisms” in the title of the book.12 Obviously, it recalls the concept of “border-thinking” proposed by Walter Mignolo which, as he argues, involves “dwelling in the border, not crossing borders”. This idea of border then, is to be understood not just in terms of territorial borders—or borders between the capitalist and non-capitalist world for that matter—but also as an inescapable condition of the formerly colonized subject, who must inevitably inhabit, at once, two epistemic worlds—one shaped by the modern West and the other that defines the world of her place or location. The expression “border-Marxisms” is also meant to underline the aspect of “dwelling in the border” that suggests we explore the field beyond simple, though certainly not unimportant, distinctions between the “West” and “East” or the “colonizing” and the “colonized” worlds. In the way I look at it, the expression “border-Marxisms” does not only refer to Eastern or Afro-Asian Marxisms but equally to the way in which the problem of time and temporal dislocation, of “uneven development”, “passive revolution”, “non-synchronous synchronicities” and “transition” appear even in the works of figures of Western Marxism like Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. This is not surprising if we bear in mind that “Europe” itself is a complex entity and the question of temporal dislocation is a matter that concerns some parts of it even today. Consider for instance, the fact that Aristides Baltas, the Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Syriza, once said in response to a question about Syriza’s strategic approach that the state created after the revolution of 1821 “was more or less based on what was happening in Europe and not really based on social forces and

12 I thank Nivedita Menon for suggesting this expression.

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existing social relations in Greece”, which “created all kinds of conflicts”. Explicating his point further, he observed: “For example, are we East or West? This has not been solved yet. I mean some people are still saying East, some others are saying West” (Baltas 2013: 129). In a sense then, some of the significant works of philosophers and thinkers in Europe mentioned above have, in different ways, confronted the question of non-synchronicity and difference. Although they work with very different and even opposed frameworks, what is important from the point of view of this book is that they fracture the linear narrative of historical materialism in significant ways. Important to bear in mind, for instance, is the fact that Gramsci was writing in the very time of the Bolshevik revolution and in the Leninist moment. It is not surprising therefore, that when he welcomed the Russian revolution as “the revolution against ‘Capital ’”, he was at pains to point out that “In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more a book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat”, for it was seen to underline the inevitability of capitalism. Althusser too, revisits the “Russian conjuncture”—the moment when revolution comes to be defined by “overdetermination” rather than emerge out of an evolutionary schema defined by contradictions at the economic level alone. Equally importantly, he writes in the conjuncture of the Cultural revolution in China and in engagement with Mao’s thought. Not surprisingly then, his work is shot through with concept of “dislocation” (décalage) and a deep meditation on the problem of historical time, with concerns of “unevenness” and “survivals” animating it. In that sense, neither Gramsci nor Althusser are purely episodes in Western Marxist thought but constitute a part of our field. However, as with Marx, I want to underline that the Gramsci and Althusser who will appear in this book will not necessarily be the Gramsci and Althusser of Western Marxism but “summoned” and repurposed to respond to address issues of the global South—just as one might argue, the “Cultural Revolution” of many Western Marxists and philosophers like Alain Badiou is not exactly the “event” that goes by that name in China’s history. I also want to claim in this context, that the entire oeuvre of a thinker like Ernesto Laclau actually remains incomprehensible without an understanding of the Argentinian, and more generally Latin American context and his active involvement in a segment of the “national” and “third worldist” Left, in contradistinction to the “abstract” and “internationalist” Left of the Communist Party and the Trotskyists. His early concern with populism—as distinct from the clearly demarcated “class politics”

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of the Left and the Right—animates his theoretical concerns right till the end and are very relevant for us in this book, even if I don’t cite him often enough.13 It is impossible to list out the names of all the thinkers who, in different ways, exemplify “border-Marxism” but one more name must be mentioned here—that of Stuart Hall—who, among others, founded the discipline of cultural studies in Britain. Though Hall is very clear that the impetus for the formation of cultural studies was political, he is also at pains to underline that the New Left of the 1950s “recognized the importance of cultural change in the period, but found little help in the existing Marxist bag of tricks” for “the concept simply didn’t appear” (Hall 2017: 8). Hall’s concern was primarily with British politics and the transformations in contemporary capitalist culture in Britain, but his Marxism bears a distinctive flavour of a “border-Marxism” in the way he is able to think questions of religion, race and resistance, as in the case of Rastafarianism (Hall 2017: 197–206). A silent dialogue with such thinkers will be evident in the pages that follow, even if they are not directly referred to.

Anti-capitalism and Historical Materialism’s Linear Time Where does one begin a discussion such as this, today? That is the important question. My point of departure in this book is the present that is defined by one simple fact: Capital today stands in opposition, not just to humanity, but to life as such, on this planet. If that be the case, the challenge for thought is not to traverse the familiar ground of capital-labor relations but to take the bull by the horns and recognize that all lifeforms, regardless of whether they fall within the core of the “capitalist mode of production” or not; regardless of whether they are human or not, they are all threatened by Capital. If our air and water are poisoned; if all life-forms on this planet become raw material for Capital’s superprofits; if the climate catastrophe threatens to destroy all forms of life on this planet, does it really matter whether we are “formally subsumed” under capital or have been incorporated into that much-awaited final destiny of “real subsumption”? Though many Marxists still believe, in line with a statement attributed to Joan Robinson that the one thing

13 For a discussion of this part of Laclau’s intellectual biography, see Laclau (1990: 197–200).

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worse than being exploited by capital is not being exploited by it, that question does not interest me in this book.14 As the world struggles to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of capital’s war on life-as-such has become the key to all other questions. Seen from this vantage point, the struggles of labor against capital to the extent that they might still make an occasional appearance, are not really theoretically relevant to my concerns in this book. This is not to say that they are politically unimportant. However, the point to be underlined really is that struggles of labor are always destined to remain trapped within the “logic of capital ” —that is to say, of the “capitalist relations of production”. Indeed, the situation is sometimes far worse. For capital, in its search for more and more profit, wants change—in technology, in the organization of production and in accordance with changes in market demand, and it might even find it more profitable to invest in non-fossil fuel industries but the “working class” is always resistant to such change. One could take the instance of polluting or fossil fuel industries, where under pressure, and in search of greater profits in non-polluting industries or those in the renewable energy sector, capital is quick to move investments into such newer industries. However, because the employment of workers is tied to the old industry, the “working class” is often reduced to fighting rear-guard battles for the survival of old industries. This has been demonstrated so often in the history of the “working class” movement across the world, including India that one seriously needs to consider why, despite facing prospects of decimation, “working-class” organizations and their

14 This statement is often attributed to Robinson without a proper citation. The closest I came to one, was this statement on the site www.marxmail.org on June 6, 2006. A poster said that Michael Meerpol, the economist, once wrote the following on PEN-L, a mailing list for left-of-center economists:

I don’t have a cite but it’s not apocryphal. Joan Robinson made that comment orally a number of times—both in conversation and in lectures. The first (and only specific) memory I have of that was in the context of discussing rural poverty in places like India, etc.—where she said many people on the scene told her that the only real solution for massive rural poverty in overpopulated regions was ‘capitalist agriculture’—and then she went on to state, ‘the only thing worse than being exploited, is not to be exploited!’ Given Robinson’s antipathy to capitalism as a “cruel” and “bloody” system, this was perhaps an ironic exclamation. http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/NicholasKristof2.htm.

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theorists have been so resistant to rethink their approach to the question, which sees ultimate virtue in being a “proletarian” employed by Capital.15 So the key argument in this book will take off from this recognition and argue that if we want to look beyond capital, we need to step outside the linear Time of historical materialism—a point that will keep reappearing in different ways through the book but to which we will return in the last chapter. Since the larger concerns of this book are framed by the climate crisis that is already upon us, my argument will be that the old nineteenthand twentieth-century imaginary of abundance and endless growth is a chimera best abandoned at the earliest. The concerns of this book are also framed by the increasing realization that the cancerous notion of “growth for growth’s sake” is constitutive of capital, which is now finding newer and newer adversaries, witnessed, for example, in the extreme precarity of life it continues to produce on a global scale. It should be stated however, that to say this notion of growth is constitutive of capital is not the same as claiming objective historical inevitability on its behalf. As I will argue in this book, I suggest capital remains capital only as long as it is able to reproduce on an expanded scale (“growth for growth’s sake”) and there may be other ways of transforming that condition. If one has to abandon the productivist and growth-fetishist imagination of modern capitalist life, how might one think of alternative, possible futures? The answer to that question hinges crucially on how we rethink the problem of historical time. One of the reasons why I put “working class” within quotation marks is that this is a somewhat problematic category in the context of most of the world, including India. Even though communists and Marxist intellectuals alike have regularly used this term, with all the baggage that accompanies it, ordinary communist organizers and activists at the ground level rarely see it as a class that is apart from other oppressed classes. In my experience as a trade union organizer in the 1980s, I realized that while planning strikes or other kinds of actions, trade union leaders would routinely take into account the harvesting and sowing seasons, for that is the time many of the industrial workers go back home, many of them still 15 This question is also tied to more short-term matters like the forms of organization and struggle, namely the trade union and the strike—as these too largely become irrelevant with the changes in the organization of production and disappearance of the old workplace. However, that is not an issue that we can go into here.

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having live connections with agricultural activities. In the regular dayto-day practice of trade unions, the “working class”, the “peasantry” or the “indigenous populations” were not understood to be modes of being inhabiting three different chronologically ordered “modes of production”, namely the capitalist, the precapitalist (feudal, Asiatic mode etc.) and the primitive communist. They were not seen as inhabiting three different times but rather, understood in very generic terms, as “the oppressed” or “the poor”. And it should, of course, be borne in mind that in actual material terms too, they were usually not very different from each other. Unlike the “modern proletariat” that came into being in the West following the complete liquidation of “precapitalist” agrarian communities, in many of the countries of the Global South, the workers continue to be drawn from the peasantry as well as from many indigenous communities.16 Thus, in India, even today workers in modern industry are still peasants with living relations with the village, just as large segments of workers in mining, tea gardens and such industries are recruited from the local indigenous populations. This fact itself ought to have posed serious theoretical issues, in the first place, for Marxist thinkers in the communist movement in India but as it happens, there is not even a recognition of what it might mean in terms of “stages” of “modes of production”. It is hardly surprising then, that while practice continued to recognize this “fact” in an ad hoc sort of way, deep down the idea of linear stages of history remained. Indeed, one of the most dramatic illustrations of this came in 2006–2007, when the state of West Bengal, under Marxist rule for almost three decades, gave a new push to its industrialization program, through forcible dispossession of the peasantry for setting up of industry

16 As a matter of fact, this too is a very stylized version of Western history. The fact is that perhaps England—and Britain at large—was the only place that this “classic” model was enacted. Small peasant property strengthened through the nineteenth century, in France, after what was supposedly the classic “bourgeois revolution”. The story of the development of capitalism in other parts of Europe too is quite different as we know. Suffice to note for the moment that in elaborating his idea of the passive revolution, Gramsci came to see the entire history of Europe after the French revolution as a passive revolution. I have already mentioned, citing Aristides Baltas, how Greece too does not partake of this stylized history—suggesting how unstable the boundaries between the West and East can actually turn out to be.

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by private corporations.17 This episode revealed, in a flash, the power that theory was still capable of wielding when it came to the crunch. It also revealed the common ground shared by Marxism, neoliberalism and other modernist philosophies.18 I discuss both, the question of the peasantry at large and the Singur-Nandigram episodes at length in Chapter 3. In that sense, this is not a failing of the Indian communists alone, for the effects of such a stagist understanding did not come to an end after Soviet industrialization during Stalin’s time, despite relentless critiques of Stalinism; they are writ large all across the post-Soviet world of “socialist” countries. Communists and Leftists everywhere are engaged in building capitalism, regardless of whether they came to power through a revolution as in China and Vietnam, or through elections. The matter is only slightly more complicated in the case of the new Left formations in Latin America but, at the end of the day, not very different from the predicament of the old communist Left on this issue, as we shall see later. This question therefore, has assumed critical importance today, not just for historical materialism and its conception of chronological succession of modes of production but indeed, for modernity’s understanding of Time itself. After all, if Marxism has long relegated these life-forms to the status of remnants of the past, it is precisely because it inhabits the same Time of modernity. The division between the “traditional” and “modern” sectors (later recast as the “informal” and “formal” sectors) of the economy has been central to the way the discipline of economics too, sees the indigenous or the peasant “economies”, where its own role is understood as one that has to usher in the unadulterated modern, by liquidating these “relics of the past”. Let us note that the question is not whether, as a historical form of life, the indigenous people or the peasants might, one day, cease to exist. The problem rather, is that it is the entire philosophical apparatus of modern knowledge that is out to uproot it through the force

17 The two areas of Singur and Nandigram became emblems of resistance whose voice resonated in anti-land acquisition struggles across India. In the event, these struggles in the state led to the rapid unraveling of the formidable machinery of the ruling CPI (M) and led to its defeat in the successive elections that followed. 18 In a slightly different context—that of the Kerala People’s Plan, J. Devika has described the CPI(M)’s moves as “meeting neoliberalism midway”.

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of the state, in the service of capital—as that is supposed to be historically the most “progressive” and modern form.19 The co-presence of more than one “mode of production” or what I call, after Ernst Bloch, the “synchronicity of the non-synchronous”, has been repeatedly noticed in the history of Marxism. However, its recurrent appearance in different contexts has not led to any serious rethinking of the stagist understanding of historical materialism. The question ought to have been taken very seriously, given that it had already surfaced as a critical issue in early Soviet history. The history of Soviet industrialization and the war on the peasantry, represented perhaps, the first instance of what was then repeated in early twenty-first century West Bengal. For the moment, let us recall that one of the earliest occasions when the linear time of historical materialism was put into question was when Otto Bauer (and the Austro-Marxists) raised it in the first decade of the twentieth century. Bauer had observed that In spite of regional differences, every great Western nation comprises people who think and act in similar ways. But our case is different. German Bohemia is at the level of Saxony; Upper Austria is at the level of old Bavaria; by contrast, East Galicia has agrarian relations like those in the land of the Wallachian boyars or in many areas of Russia, while the coastal region, with its tenant farmers…is reminiscent of Italy. In the AustroHungarian monarchy there are examples of all the economic forms to be found in Europe, including Turkey. (Bottomore and Goode 1978: 54, emphasis added)

Consequently, said Bauer “what exists in the International as a chronological development…takes place contemporaneously in Austria” (ibid.: 55, emphasis added). Actually, strictly speaking, it is incorrect to say that the idea of “linear time” was put into question here; the “synchronicity of the nonsynchronous” or “contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous” was simply registered; it was never taken up as a serious theoretical or philosophical question. By this I mean that while the co-presence of 19 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004) put it thus: “Just as in that phase all forms of labor and society itself had to industrialize, today labor and society have to informationalize” (emphasis added), as if it is some immanent law that forces “labor and society” on to this path. In fact, all of Hardt and Negri’s work is predicated on the supersession of older forms by newer, the new making the old redundant.

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different modes of production has been repeatedly recognized as an empirical fact, it has in the very next instance, been explained away as a problem of “transition”, where “past forms” can linger on as “survivals”. This has obviously prevented, as we now realize, any serious theoretical or philosophical coming-to-terms with its implications. The difficulty is that as long as this problem is not philosophically addressed and simply deferred by labeling it a “transition” issue, it reappears as a practical question, the moment a Left-wing political formation comes to power: building capitalism and uprooting, if not decimating, “precapitalist” forms, looks like the only way to go. This problem of non-synchronous synchronicities has repeatedly confronted historical materialism but the question that still remains to be asked is: what does this recognition of co-presence or synchronicity of the non-synchronous, do to our understanding of historical Time itself? What does it mean in terms of the larger project of social and political transformation? That is to say, if we refuse to see these premodern and precapitalist forms of life as remnants and survivals of the past, how does it affect our understanding of the modern project of emancipation?20 There is no doubt that there are forms of exploitation and oppression, and hierarchies of different sorts, which any serious project of emancipation must address but can this complex question be simply reduced to one of a temporal division? Put differently, can we say that simply because something has a longer history, it must necessarily be destroyed or liquidated by the new or the emergent? Likewise, can we argue that simply because something is modern, it must necessarily be emancipatory? In this book, I argue that if the socialist idea has to have any meaning, it has to be reinvented, in a way that it cannot any longer be seen as something that comes after capitalism. Rather, at the heart of a reconstructed socialist project must lie the struggle for autonomy, that is, the struggle for control by people and communities over their own lives and resources. To the extent that the story of Capital is a story of the dispossession of precapitalist agrarian and artisanal communities; to the extent that it is a story of the loss of the commons, it is also a story of the loss of autonomy. I argue that this is a conception that already marks many contemporary struggles and theory and philosophy need to urgently grapple with its 20 Throughout this book, I use the expressions “precapitalist” and “premodern” simply to underline that these modes of being have longer histories that antedate modernity and capitalism; I do not use them to say that they thereby belong to the past.

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implications.21 This book is primarily concerned with the different aspects of this question.

An Autonomous Problematic of Power: Mao Zedong22 The collapse of “actually existing socialism” posed a series of other questions afresh as well—questions that had till then been brushed under the carpet, though those too had come up repeatedly in the history of Marxism. One such critical question was that of power and therefore, of the status of politics: Was it possible to have a non-reductionist theory of power, within the framework of “Marxism” and historical materialism— one that does not simply reduce power and politics to an epiphenomenon of the economic?23 How does one think the question of revolution itself, if one continues to see the political domain, either as an epiphenomenon of the economic (as in the economist Marxism of the Second International), or even as determined “in the last instance” by the economic, despite recognition of its “relative autonomy” (as it came to be understood in post-Althusserian Marxism)? How does one understand the practice of a Lenin, a Gramsci or a Mao Zedong, where the focus really shifts to the political domain—to the strategic relationship of forces, the search for allies, questions of political and cultural hegemony and putting politics in command? How does one think the question of “culture”, within Marxism and historical materialism, given that culture exists in a different temporality whose rhythms of change and transformation are notoriously slow and long-term and do not respond, in any immediate sense, to the rapidity with which changes in the political and economic domain take place, especially in periods of revolutionary transformation? 21 For an early attempt to capture this trend among movements, see Esteva and Prakash (1998/2014). 22 I have taken the expression, “autonomous problematic of power”, from Paul Ricouer (1984). 23 One of the key issues that a theory of power needs to elaborate is that of the relationship between power and politics. This is not the place to elaborate on the distinction between the two, but I should state the sense in which I use the two terms: while all political relations are relations of power, not all relations of power are political. For the political dimension is linked, in my view, to claim-making, which carries within it the potentiality of producing an antagonism. In that sense, politics is not a necessary and enduring feature of power relations.

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Indeed, the problem becomes far more complex, the more we pursue it. Given that “culture” also encodes power relations, even more crucially, do existing cultural phenomena (religion, modes of being and thinking, practices) “structure” the very shape and form of the political and the economic? For instance, in Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson makes the very important point that capitalism became what it was because it was a product of British and European culture at large: The bourgeoisie that led the development of capitalism were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural groups; the European proletariats and the mercenaries of the leading states from others; its peasants from still other cultures; and its slaves from entirely different worlds. The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones. As the Slavs became natural slaves, the racially inferior stock for domination and exploitation during the early Middle Ages, as the Tartars came to occupy a similar position in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages, so at the systemic interlocking of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the peoples of the Third World began to fill this expanding category of a civilization reproduced by capitalism. (Robinson 2000: 26)24

Indeed, Robinson refuses to reduce everything to the workings of capitalism as such for he never sees capitalism act on its own as an economic instance but always interlocked with culture and power relations. It is this combination which eventually even produces that specifically nineteenth-century European invention, nationalism to which he links the phenomenon of fascism as well. Contrary to reductionist Marxist accounts, Robinson argues, In Germany and Italy, where national bourgeoisies were relatively late in their formation, the marshalling of national forces (peasants, farmers,

24 Apropos Robinson’s point regarding the interlocking of the economic and the cultural and the “expanding category of civilization”, I am grateful to Mohinder Singh for drawing my attention to the fact that the history of concepts like civilization, culture and, indeed, civil society shows that all these concepts were coeval with the Enlightenment and the birth of political economy and governmentality—including colonial governmentality in places like Bengal. This entire set of concepts emerged between 1750 and 1800. By the time of Macaulay and James Mill in the early nineteenth century, this of course takes the form of full-fledged “civilizing mission” with its differentiating apparatus.

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workers, clerics, professional classes, the aristocracy, and the state) was accomplished by the ideological phantasmagoria of race, Herrenvolk and nationalism. This compost of violence, in its time, became known under the name of fascism. (Robinson 2000: 26)

Unfortunately, all this was unavailable to us in India, where most Marxists were brought up on the staple diet of official Marxist texts and it was only around the 1970s and 1980s that some openness started developing towards Marxist thinkers like Gramsci, Althusser or Lucio Colletti and some of their works started becoming available in a few university bookstores. Thinkers like Robinson, C. L. R. James or W. E. B. Du Bois were hardly ever mentioned. Long before the collapse of state socialism, at the time when the youth of my generation were drawn towards active involvement in Left politics, through the 1970s and 1980s, the question of the status of culture and politics had started being discussed, at least in Marxist practice, primarily through Mao Zedong’s launching of the Cultural Revolution in China. Many of us believed that Maoist practice had actually “found the solution” to both the questions—that of the status of politics as well as of cultural transformation (of the “superstructure”), the former by insisting on putting “politics in command” and the latter by insisting that the cultural domain, because of its own temporality, requires a separate and continuous struggle. With its calls to “bombard the headquarters” and the notion of “continuous revolution”, Maoism opened many of us to a colorful new world of rebellion and anti-bureaucratic socialism, where neither the “Party” nor the “Socialist State” were above criticism. Wang Hui (2006) has linked the tendency against bureaucratism to an “antimodern theory of modernization” that emerged out of the larger search of the Chinese intelligentsia since the late Qing period. Mao inherits that aspect of modern Chinese thought and Wang sees it as the consequence of “the fact that the discourse of China’s search for modernity was shaped in the historical context of imperialist expansion…” (Wang 2006: 180). Wang characterizes the specific ideas and tendencies that this stance produced, especially embodied in Mao, as both antimodern and utopian, evident in the “fear of a bureaucratic state, contempt for the formalization of legal structures and the rejection of rationalization [in the Weberian sense]” (Wang 2006: 80). Whatever its specific Chinese historical antecedents, the fact remains that within the larger “third world” Marxist universe, it had a huge impact.

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Parenthetically, mention must also be made in this context, of Fadi Bardawil’s superb and complexly layered study of the Lebanese New Left party, Socialist Lebanon and one of its key theorists, Waddah Charara. Bardawil’s detailed “fieldwork in theory” shows how Charara’s critiques— and auto-critiques—of the Left’s practices, in the early 1970s, were enabled by Mao’s interventions (Bardawil 2020: 114). “The Maoist critique of the party, theory, and practice rearticulated the meanings of power and emancipation as it addressed the political and epistemic dimensions of the question of representation”, says Bardawil (ibid.: 114). Dealing with a completely different context, Charara’s questions related to sectarian and communal strife in Lebanon and called for a more complex understanding of the revolutionary subjectivity of the masses, so to speak. Thus says Bardawil, “this minor Marxist tradition, which sought to incorporate communal relations into class struggle, was not interested in restricting its intervention to criticizing Marxism for its Eurocentric discourses. It did that, but it was more invested in attempting to forge a theoretical idiom that enables the pursuit of militancy in the wake of realizing the saliency of communal contradictions internal to the masses that complicate revolutionary practice” (Bardawil 2020: 114–115).25 Indeed, in the history of Marxism, if there was one serious attempt to reconstruct the theory in keeping with the demands of the “underdeveloped”, largely colonial/semi-colonial world, it is not surprising that it could not but foreground questions of politics and culture, that became so crucial to Charara’s enterprise of understanding social conflicts in Lebanese society. Though Mao’s interventions could only provide some initial openings, the attempt, undertaken by him through some of his essays and pronouncements between 1937 and 1957, was to have farreaching impact in the way Marxists of our generation in Asia understood the complex layers of social reality.26 25 In the event, Charara could not make do with Marxism—even the amended Maoist and Gramscian versions—in order to understand the complexity of the imbrication of the political in the social, so to speak. As Bardawil says, “Rather…he examined how the political could not extricate itself from, and carve out, an autonomous sphere outside of communal relations of solidarity. It is not the collapse of communism that eclipsed the faith in History, but the fragmentation of the revolutionary subject along communal lines that foreclosed the possibility of autonomous political practice” (Bardawil 2020: 139). 26 The discussion that follows draws largely on a much earlier essay of mine (Nigam 1999). It should be underlined that many of the initial moves in this regard were made by what Sanjay Seth calls “Lenin’s reformulation of Marxism” in the face of the stupendous

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Three concepts seem to be of crucial importance to Mao Zedong’s attempt at dealing with the application of Marxism’s predominantly European theoretical paraphernalia and the rigid imposition of the Comintern’s code. First, the “law of uneven development”, posited as an absolute law. “Nothing in the world develops absolutely evenly”, he proclaims (Mao Tsetung 1977: 59). This assertion comes in the middle of his discussion on what he calls the “principal contradiction” and the “principal aspect of a contradiction” and Mao is at pains to underline here that “we must oppose the theory of even development or the theory of equilibrium” (Mao Tsetung 1977: 59). It bears reiterating here that this idea of the absolute unevenness of development in anything, anywhere and its corollary, the “principal contradiction” and “principal aspect of a contradiction” introduces an entirely new element in Marxism. It is certainly not derived from the Hegelian or Marxist dialectic and, in part, it certainly has to do with questions thrown up by Marxist practice as Althusser recognized. Althusser correctly saw a continuity here between Lenin’s recognition of a multiplicity of contradictions in any given situation and Mao’s elaborations in his essay “On Contradiction” (Althusser 1979: 177–183). However, the centrality of the idea of the contradiction in Mao is quite unique as is the very indeterminacy which marks it, for instance in the idea of a “principal contradiction” which in course of time, may not remain principal or things changing into their opposite. If we recall our earlier discussion of the Daoist claim that everything changes—or can change—into its opposite, for instance, yin into yang—it is quite possible to see that the roots of Mao’s idea might lie in traditional Chinese dialectics. It is through this assertion that Mao subverts the great metaphysical positivist desire, prominent in the theoretical apparatus of European Marxism and its subsequent Stalinist incarnation, of task of taking Marxism to the colonies (Seth 1995: Chapter 1). Lenin’s reformulations actually provide some of the openings that Mao then develops in his own distinctive style. This is an aspect of Lenin that has been elided in most Western Marxist accounts. Worth mentioning here as an instance is the volume, Lenin Reloaded, that came out of a conference held in 2001 (but with papers from other important Marxist intellectuals who hadn’t participated in the conference). This volume comprising as many as seventeen contributions that seek to retrieve and “reload” Lenin, does not feature a single contribution, by any one from the global South, nor is there a contribution that even deals with this aspect of Lenin. There is only one contribution, by Kevin Anderson, that talks of Lenin’s interventions in bringing the question of national liberation movements in the East and the colonial question to the center of discourse but even that essay sees it as a consequence of Lenin’s encounter with Hegel in 1914 (Budgen et al. 2007).

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finding laws and regularities governing human societies. We know that this baggage was quite central to the Marxism of the Second and the Third Internationals. Traditional Daoist Chinese dialectics rejects all that, for as Freiberg emphasizes, Daoist epistemology (like many other Eastern schools of thought), is largely relativistic. And relativism has another meaning as well: “This element of relativity is also a proscription against making absolute judgments; only by appreciating the relative nature of all knowledge does one remain open to respond to changing situations. In the Lie Zi (Lieh Tzu) it is written that ‘In any case, nowhere is there a principle which is right in all circumstances, or an action that is wrong in all circumstances’” (Freiberg 1977: 9). Second, Mao makes what is his central conceptual move through his enunciation of the “particularity and universality of contradiction”. The universality of the contradiction is simply the idea that “contradiction exists in the development of all things and that in the process of development of each thing, a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end”—an aspect that Mao says “has been widely recognized ever since the materialist-dialectical world outlook was discovered”. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin had all repeatedly “applied” and elaborated this aspect (Mao Tsetung 1977: 30). He therefore, focuses his analytical attention of the “particularity of contradiction”, because “it is still not clearly understood by many comrades, and especially by the dogmatists”. “They do not understand that it is precisely in the particularity of the contradiction that the universality resides” (Mao Tsetung 1977: 30). This too, it will be easily seen, is an expression of Mao’s untroubled resort to the particular and the specific as against the universal, once again drawing possibly from the relativism of the Daoist epistemological position. Notice here the second major subversion. If universality of contradiction was to a certain Marxism, the universal appearing, a la a certain Marxist Hegel, in each particular and each particular representing a mere moment of the universal, Mao in one stroke, completely reverses its meaning. The particular now becomes the only way in which the universal can appear. The contradiction “in each form of motion of matter has its particularity” and in considering each form of motion of matter, “we must observe the point which it has in common with other forms of motion”. But it is even more important “to observe what is particular to this form of motion of matter” and “to observe the qualitative difference between this form of motion and other forms” (Mao Tsetung 1977: 35). And why is this particularity important? Because “in every form of motion,

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each process of development which is real… is qualitatively different” and “qualitatively different contradictions can only be resolved by qualitatively different methods” (Mao Tsetung 1977: 38). In other words, you cannot apply the same abstract formulas in every situation, to vastly different kinds of contradictions. This is Mao’s famous law of contradiction. This notion is the second universal truth. The two statements together could be said to constitute what Mao calls “the universal truths” of Marxism. By thus positing unevenness as an absolute law and the particularity of the contradiction as the mode of appearance of the universal, Mao, even while holding on to the idea of “universal truths” in words, interprets it in a way that practically denies it. In his rendering then, this is universality—one which has no attribute of its own; it acquires everywhere the attributes of the particularity. In fact, if one looks closely, one can see that the universal in Mao is not logically and epistemically prior to the particular but rather abstracted from the different particulars. That is why Mao can ask why “the nomadic system of Mongolia and Central Asia has been directly linked with socialism?” and “Why is it that the Chinese revolution can avoid a capitalist future and be directly linked with socialism, without taking the old historical road of western countries..?” and answer: “The sole reason is the concrete conditions of the time” (Mao Tsetung 1977: 66). In treating the instances of Soviet Central Asia and Mongolia not just as exceptions or aberrations but as instantiations of his law of unevenness and reading their particularity as of a piece with that of the Chinese revolution, he is able to argue that the concrete conditions of the time make available the possibility of bypassing a “capitalist future” to them. In a later essay, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People”, Mao makes some additional moves in the direction of developing his idea of “antagonistic” and “non-antagonistic” contradictions. By making these moves, Mao is also able to complicate notions of subjectivity and agency handed down by official Marxism. Contradictions exist, according to him, not only between the exploiters and the exploited, but equally importantly, “among the people”. In the concrete conditions of China, he refers to “contradictions within the working class, contradictions within the peasantry, the contradictions within the intelligentsia, the contradictions between the working class and the peasantry”, etcetera (Mao Tsetung 1977: 81). It is true that Mao never theoretically follows through and works out the ideas of subjectivity and agency in the light

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of these formulations but all through his practice we can see that he is acutely aware of the implications of the above. It is easy to see that, put in this way, simplistic notions like a “class-in-itself” turning into a “class-for-itself”—another specifically nineteenth-century Europeanism— become impossible to conceive. As we know, the assumption behind this formulation was that of an a priori proletarian consciousness coming to fruition by overcoming its purely empirical state. Having already posited the contradiction within the class, it is neither possible to simply derive class consciousness from class position, nor think of a single unified will of a class—expressed through a single party. We also know that this single party and the idea of “the party of the working class” itself stood in a complicated relationship with the working class. Was there what Althusser had called an “expressive relationship” between the two, where the party was an expression of the historical mission of the class, as in Lukacs and Karl Korsch? Was it a vanguard, as in the Leninist conception, where its task was to “educate” the working class by taking socialist consciousness to it from outside? By positing contradictions within classes—and the working class in particular, Mao veers towards a more contingent relationship between the two but unlike Lenin, continued right through his revolutionary career, to insist on the need for the party to learn from the masses, indeed largely peasant masses. That complicated the notion of a vanguard as well. Needless to say, after making these moves, attributing a “telos ” of History to the working class or the communist party became well-nigh impossible. In case we had any doubts, Mao goes further. It is true that he put “contradictions among the people” in the category of “non-antagonistic contradictions” as opposed to “antagonistic” ones, which defined the contradictions between the exploiters and the exploited. Yet, these too are not fixed categories which can only be resolved in one particular way, consonant with the larger telos. So he argues, once again recalling our earlier discussion that one can easily turn into the other. “(T)his contradiction between the two classes (the national bourgeoisie and the working class), if properly handled can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods” (Mao Tsetung 1977: 82). On the other hand, “(I)n ordinary circumstances, contradictions among the people are not antagonistic…but if they are not handled properly…antagonism may arise” (ibid.: 89). The phrase “if handled properly” then leads us to the third concept of Mao’s: politics in command. Nothing but the limiting conditions are provided by the economy and the logic of

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production. The rest depends upon politics, upon how forces are rallied, how alliances are struck, how struggles are conducted and what organisational forms mediate each of these. This aspect of Mao’s thinking has often been criticized as “voluntaristic”, as ignoring the logic of production and the economy. However, as the argument in this book will try to consistently show, this supposed logic of the economy and productive forces remains an article of faith against all evidence and has never really worked in the way Marxists expected it to. We must however, be careful while understanding the use to which Mao puts these concepts. He wanted to puncture the rigidly structured and codified canon of the Comintern and create the space for his own activity. The political task of accomplishing the Chinese revolution demanded a partial rejection of that canon but in the balance of world forces then existing he could not afford to become another Tito— excommunicated by the communist world. It was to create this space that the idea of a particularity that not just expressed the essence of the universal but was an entity in its own right, became important. The theoretical/philosophical task that followed from Mao’s initiative, bolder and more far-reaching in its implications than Lenin’s, was never undertaken, either by him or by his successors. In many ways therefore, Mao remained a believer in “the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism” even though he often enough chose to define them in ways that subverted their meaning. In a sense, we could say that he often treated Marxism as a method that was open to innovation, rather than as a set of substantive truths. Today, we surely can read these conceptual moves made by him in a more radical way. This caution on Mao’s part is necessary in order to understand that because the theoretical/philosophical implications were never followed through into an alternative theorisation of the specificities of the colonial world/East, Marxism even its Maoist incarnation, remained within the larger framework of post-Enlightenment Marxism. It was therefore easy for it to slip back into the canon and in the case of China, into the high modernist paradigm that rules it in the post-Mao phase. It is important therefore to underline here that to create a space for a different practice and an alternative theorisation is no substitute for an alternative theory. In order to accomplish that latter task, a further step is required: It is not enough to say that “our history” is different from the West’s or of the USSR’s; we must be able to move towards an understanding of this history on its own terms. That is a problem we will take up in Chapter 5.

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After the Collapse of State Socialism Mere “practical theorization” of these issues by Mao Zedong was by taken by us, in the movement, to be a theoretical solution.27 Clearly, there was no such thing as a solution here, though implicit in these slogans was a different understanding at work that called for more serious theoretical labor than was undertaken in the practical Marxism of our times. In some of the debates among Marxists in those days, the theme of “capitalist restoration” in the Soviet Union—and the possibility that it could also happen in China—was very intensely felt. This was certainly the case in India, where the rise of a powerful ideological challenge from the Maoist Naxalite movement to mainstream communist parties led to wholesale questioning of the model of a stolid bureaucratic socialism that the USSR represented.28 The fact that capitalist restoration could take place decades after Stalin had announced that socialism had been firmly established in the economic domain and classes no longer existed in the Soviet Union, pointed to the possibility that the struggle against “capitalist” tendencies in the domains of politics and culture had obviously been wanting. Not everyone on the Left in India was under the Maoist spell, however, and the majority of Marxists continued to believe that the USSR was, despite “revisionist deviations”, still a socialist country. For many such

27 Though we cannot go into it in any detail here, I believe it is necessary to recognize that there are levels of conceptualization and theorizing that are pretty much part of everyday practical activity which need not necessarily be theoretical. As we can see, such everyday practical theory is usually not concerned with either re-examining the structure of its theory itself in the light of its practical conceptual innovations, or aiming for consistency between the received theory and such innovations. 28 Though the Naxalite movement, in its first phase had pretty much died down by the early 1970s, its ideological impact was felt on the Left for a very long time to come. Here and elsewhere, I use the terms “ideology” and “ideological” in two senses—the first, in the sense it is used in the literature of communist parties. On other occasions, I also use the term “ideology” in its more philosophical sense, following Althusser and subsequent innovations by Stuart Hall. Hall (2017) develops Althusser’s idea that ideologies are “systems of representation”, insisting that ideologies “operate in discursive chains, in clusters, in semantic fields, in discursive formations” and that picking out any single nodal representation or idea, “you immediately trigger off a whole chain of connotative associations. Ideological representations connote—summon—one another”. That is why, says Hall, the idea of the dominant ideology and the subordinated ideology “is an inadequate way of representing the complex interplay of different ideological discourses and formations…” (Hall 2017: 137). I hope it will become clear from the context, which is the sense being used there.

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people, some questions that had perhaps not arisen earlier, came to the fore after the collapse. If the USSR was socialist and if production relations within it had been socialist, how was one to explain the collapse? I will steer clear here of the crude, conspiracy-theory arguments that were put forward at that time, which basically saw Mikhail Gorbachev, the key architect of perestroika and glasnost as having, either single-handedly, or “in league with imperialists” brought down the socialist system. To such people, perestroika and glasnost became the villains and in retrospect, even seemed to justify Stalin’s suppression of dissent and democracy. However, the question is hardly addressed by putting the blame on Stalin alone, as if the Soviet collapse were the consequence of a minor aberration— a “distortion” like the personality cult that could be easily corrected. This entire experience could not but pose the problem of power, especially before those who had believed that USSR was socialist, or at the very least, not-capitalist. The very initiation of the reforms that went by the name of perestroika and glasnost, some Marxist scholars in India had argued, suggested that a contingent form of the absolutist socialist state was made into the ideal form, leaving little scope for any serious thinking of the forms that socialist democracy could, and should, take (Kaviraj 1989). I had myself argued at length that if one assumed that some kind of non-exploitative, if not socialist, production relations had prevailed in the USSR, then the collapse which dramatically highlighted the absence of democracy, suggested a deeper theoretical problem—that of a disjunction between the domain of production and the domain of politics. Lenin’s claim that the Soviets were a “million times more democratic” than “bourgeois democracies”, simply because production relations were socialist, no longer made sense. Actually, to many of us it never made any sense but, in those days, it was one of the issues we had rather not thought about. Consequently, following the collapse, the absence of a non-reductionist account of power appeared to be the key theoretical issue before mainstream Marxist theory—even though at least some Marxist scholars in the West had been grappling with questions of an “autonomous problematic of power” and the “specificity of the political” for a very long time. The collapse of state-socialism had only highlighted to us the problem with the structure and “ideology” of communist parties, which saw themselves alone, as the bearers of the “monopoly of truth” and had therefore deprived themselves of the immense richness of thought that had been taking place outside their party-structures but within the larger Marxist universe itself (Nigam 1996).

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Today that idea of “disjunction” or “dislocation” seems utterly inadequate, considering that the political instance of the state is already deeply imbricated in the constitution of production relations, as Nicos Poulantzas, among others, had argued. Revisiting the experience of “capitalist development” in the global South with a fresh eye, it is no longer possible to argue that the political reorganization of social relations (including those of production), often to the extent of producing a bourgeoisie where there was none, is an exceptional feature of a post-revolution context. This role of the state and what we might call “the political”, is a more general condition. Today we need a more complex theorization that accounts for both, dislocation or non-correspondence between the political and the economic, as well as their mutual imbrication. Mainstream Marxist ideologues allied to the CPI(M), like Ashok Mitra and Irfan Habib, focused primarily on socialism’s economic failures, which they related to the existence of a “command economy” or, invoking Mao Zedong’s “On the Ten Major Relationships”, the lopsided emphasis on heavy industry to the detriment of agriculture and light industry. Naturally, in such writings, the question of socialist democracy was either totally elided or raised in passing (Habib 1993; Mitra 1994). Once again though, it is interesting that Habib’s reflections relied quite significantly on Mao Zedong’s writings, especially Critique of Soviet Economics , where the latter had not hesitated to criticize Lenin and his fascination with one-man management. He also cited other Chinese documents produced during the Sino-Soviet dispute, in order to support “the notion of ‘a privileged stratum’ fattening on socialism and controlling the socialist state” that had been put forward by the Chinese way back in 1964. “This ‘stratum’ was seen as essentially bourgeois (‘new bourgeois element’), whose interests could finally lead to a ‘capitalist restoration’ in the USSR”, argued Habib (Habib 1993: 15–16, emphasis original).29 This critique of Soviet socialism had to necessarily also implicate the Stalin era itself—for new bourgeois elements could not have emerged in the highest echelons of the Soviet state if socialism had actually been “fully established” as Stalin had claimed. While the importance of the economic questions cannot be underestimated, it seems to be undeniable that the question of power and the 29 The text in question here from which Habib cites, is a joint editorial of the People’s Daily and Red Flag, entitled “On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World”.

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absence of any form of socialist democracy was crucial to the crisis of twentieth-century socialism. In this chapter, my interest is in power in the political domain as such and not in all the ways in which power operates in all other spheres of society, even though it can be argued that in the context of statesocialism, the problem of over-centralization and the failure to put in place democratic institutions and institutional practices pervaded the economic domain as well. It led the state and its planning authorities to play the impossible role of substituting themselves for the market mechanism that actually mediates, literally, millions of individual decisions.30 Be that as it may, there is no getting away from the fact that the vanguardist idea of “the Party” as the bearer of the “Truth of History”, left no “outside” to the Party and its control in any domain. In different ways, the question of an autonomous problematic of power remains with us today, as new kinds of Left-wing formations continue to grapple with problems of revolution and democratic transformation, engaged as they are in a search for a way that can transcend the standard “revolution versus reform” binary. It is also present in the equally openended search of a whole series of new, horizontalist mass movements, which are premised on their rejection of authoritarian party structures and seek to steer clear of militant “vanguards” wanting to lead them. The latter, no doubt, encounter formidable problems in terms of finding an enduring basis for their movements and making their interventions more efficacious. They face an even more serious problem in that they have to deal with the electoral and party-political consequences of their decision to stay away from that domain, once the moment of struggle has passed. Nonetheless, they haven’t succumbed to the easy way out— of resurrecting the vanguardist fantasies in the way some Leftist theorists seem to be doing.31 30 This is of course, also linked to an ahistorical understanding that reduces everything from petty-commodity production and trade to entrepreneurship and market to “capitalism”—but that is another discussion altogether. 31 Here I am particularly thinking of a work like Jodi Dean (2016). Clearly, Dean is not alone in thinking along these lines, as is evident from her conversation with her interlocutors. Texts such as Dean’s are content to revisit old debates between Rosa Luxemburg, Eduard Bernstein, Lenin or critique texts like Roberto Michels’ Political Parties without any reference to the actual experience of the party-form in all kinds of contexts—which remains the real reference point for contemporary horizontalist movements. It is incorrect to read in them a mere reiteration of the old anarchist critique or restaging of old debates.

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To raise the question of an autonomous problematic of power is not to argue that economic and other forms of dominance play no role in the constitution of political power or that we can simply reverse the equation and assign “primacy” to the political, reducing the “economic” to its mere epiphenomenon. In fact, my argument rests on the claim that the economic, the social (or cultural) and the political are neither homogeneous, nor have the same “origin”—that is to say, different economic and cultural practices emerge from different histories and partake of their own specific temporalities. They cannot be understood in terms of an a priori category of a “totality”. Rather, more like an ecosystem, they develop contingent relations of symbiosis, one reinforcing the other but all tied up, at the apex, by the “state” which plays a unifying and organizing role, to borrow a phrase used by Nicos Poulantzas in a somewhat different context. Poulantzas, it might be recalled, speaks of the organizing and unifying role of the state vis-à-vis what he calls the “power bloc”, which to him, is itself the name of a historically contingent alliance between different “class fractions” of “the bourgeoisie” (Poulantzas 1978b: 127).32 If we were to just look at the “economic” for example, we can see that there exist contemporaneously, at any point of time, forms that have very long histories, which coexist with the relatively recent, modern sectors of the “capitalist economy”—and they continue to exist in complex relationships, sometimes of “adjustment”, sometimes of antagonism with each other. Thus the relationship in which they existed during the phase of import-substituting industrialization was very different from the one that obtains since the onset of neoliberalism. And this change or shift is never simply “objective” or “material” but ideological in equal measure. The shift to the neoliberal dispensation occurs with the ideological reconstitution of the state’s role itself. If we want to factor in the cultural element in our understanding of the social formation in question, we will once again notice equally complex layers of time and history that do not often cohere, as Cedric Robinson demonstrates in the passage quoted earlier. What gives the appearance of coherence to these different domains, is the level of “the political”—by which I mean not just the “machine” of the state but also the knowledges that constitute it—for example, the 32 In non-European contexts such as in India for instance, the power bloc need not comprise fractions of the bourgeoisie alone for occasionally, different kinds of landed rural elite are part of it as well.

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juridical, the philosophical (that underlies the juridical notions inscribed in the Law), and the economic, the techno-scientific and so on. In this context, it is also worth pondering briefly on the question of technology. When understood as “productive forces”, it is seen in the caricatured form in which, in Marxism, it is supposed to be developing objectively, on its own, leading to changes in other arenas—from “production relations” to “ideology”, “superstructure” and so on. The fact of the matter is that from the beginning to the end, the development of technology is made possible by new developments in knowledge, whose direction, in turn, is already determined by the huge investments made by state and capital. Marx’s own schematic rendering of this relationship in the oft-repeated 1859 “Preface” (to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) is certainly responsible for such an understanding of technology (read “forces of production”) following its own independent logic, independent of the world of ideas, science and knowledge. However, it is possible to read his claim in a different way today. Here is the relevant passage: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. (Marx 1859)

It was in passages like this that Marx accorded straightforward priority to the “material forces of production” and posited an alignment between them and the “production relations”, which together “constitute the

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economic structure of society”. He further argued that it was upon this structure, that “the legal and political superstructure” arose, to which corresponded “definite forms of social consciousness”. This passage has of course, been critiqued quite often but I reproduce it here to underline that there are two things that seem to me to be important in it, provided we bring a different reading to bear upon it. First, if Marx’s point was that social subjectivities are shaped by technology in some crucial sense (rather than about the ontological priority of the economic over “forms of consciousness”), then he was actually quite perceptive about it. Undoubtedly, the question of technology requires a different level of meditation today, when its presence has become ubiquitous—from the various media forms that saturate our lives to our everyday entanglements with “the machine”, even the “intelligent machine”. These range from the mobile phone and computer to household gadgets in ways that it makes no sense any longer, to talk of technology as “forces of production” alone. And if we add to this the way in which technologies of war, especially (but not only) nuclear power, have developed and changed, it calls for a different level of understanding—and critique that Marxism has generally shied away from. Second, Marx is also very insightful about the way technology not only shapes subjectivities but also, in a very fundamental sense, constitutes and reconstitutes social relations. Once again, it makes no sense today to see these merely as social relations of “production”, given that the very texture of everyday life is being rapidly transformed by technology as such, in our times. This is especially so, since with the advent of digital technologies and the internet, we increasingly encounter the figure of the “prosumer” who is simultaneously producer and consumer. The additional problem with Marx’s formulation was that he saw the “contradiction” between productive forces and social relations as resolving only in one way—through the social revolution that will put in place a new set of social relations. Our experience however, shows that the way this “contradiction” is resolved is always a function of power relations. Further, these transformations are not always ex post facto—that is to say, after the technology has been introduced. For the game is already decided long in advance, right from the moment investments in “research and development” are made, based on calculations of the profit- and power-enhancing capacities of the technology in question. The development of technology was never an “objective” process, constituted as it was always by power relations; it is even less so now, when capital has all but taken over life-assuch on the planet. It is another matter that once a technology is deployed

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and becomes part of our “habitus”, so to speak, ordinary people may use it in ways that end up subverting its intent as has been the case, especially, with the dispersed nature of information technology and the Internet. I am arguing, then, that the relationship between the economic, the political and the intellectual is extremely complex and not reducible to a relationship between discrete, homogeneous “domains” or “instances”.

The “Democratic” State---Empty Place of Power Even at the more mundane level, this understanding of the political and the economic as distinct and homogeneous domains turns out to be no less problematic for our understanding of both. Quite apart from the numerous scholarly ways in which this separation has been questioned by many Marxists themselves, there is another aspect of the relation between the two “levels” that we need to come to terms with. It is not just that “the political” (or the state) is constitutively present in the structuring of economic relations between capital and labour; equally importantly, it is a question of how we make sense of the conjunction of the economic and the political in the context of modern electoral politics, given that “the political” itself ceases to have any stable meaning. Marxists usually tend to talk of the “economic” and the “political” or “classes” and the “state”, without any reference to the electoraldemocratic process and the mediating institution of the political party— both central to the conduct of modern politics, which bring into the picture, the highly indeterminate figure of “the popular”. Apart from formulaic references to the “class struggle” (in relation to both the political and the economic) which really mean nothing beyond a point, the question of how class power is realized in the uncertain context of electoral-democratic politics is hardly ever addressed. I am using the term “class power” here and not “class rule” to indicate the gap that opens up between economic domination and political power, in a context where the ubiquitous presence of the popular always threatens to destabilize. It prevents the realization of “class rule” and must therefore always be demobilized and neutralized in a myriad different ways, if the power of the class has to be exercised. In fact, the equally ubiquitous presence of “corruption” and “cronyism” at the highest levels, in all democratic polities, must be seen as the sign of the fact that often enough, “class power” can only be exercised through the backdoor, as it were.

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I am arguing then, that the relationship between classes, parties and states in modern polities, cannot be understood in terms of the category of a “class state”, even with its supposed “relative autonomy”. This does not mean that the state is therefore, equally available to any class or social group to wield in its interests. Rather, as suggested above, drawing on Poulantzas, it needs to be seen as a complex formation that exists in symbiosis with the power bloc, vis-à-vis which it has a unifying and organizing role. “Class power” or “power of the power bloc”, then must negotiate its way through the permanent gap opened up by electoraldemocratic politics, bringing an element of constitutive uncertainty into the picture. In his last work, therefore, Poulantzas talks of the “the institutional materiality of the state”, which makes it impossible to reduce its role to one of political domination and insists that economic functions favouring the accumulation of capital are not enough “to give an exhaustive explanation of political institutions”. The key question still remains: “why are these functions fulfilled precisely by the quite peculiar apparatus that is the modern, national-popular, representative state? Why, for example, has this state not reproduced itself in the form of Absolutist monarchy?” (Poulantzas 1978b: 52, emphasis added). He also underlines throughout, the fact that the state in the context of the modern democratic republic, is “traversed by the popular”.33 To put it in the more radical sense that Claude Lefort gives to the phenomenon, the place of power becomes “empty” in modern democratic polities. The important point, says Lefort, “is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty”, for it “inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power” (Lefort 1988: 19, emphasis original). This question of the “empty place of power” (Lefort) or the “traversal” of the state “by the popular” (Poulantzas) becomes crucially important today if we want to seriously think through the possibilities—and limitations—of democratic transformation, as this has emerged as the key political question faced by all kinds of movements and formations on the ground, across the world. More than Lefort’s relatively more abstract formulations, it is Poulantzas’ argument that is of greater interest here, given that he had 33 “In reality, however, popular struggles traverse the State from top to bottom and in a mode quite other than penetration of an intrinsic entity from the outside” (Poulantzas 1979: 141).

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critically engaged with the theoretical issues posed by the “Eurocommunist” moment in the late 1970s in Europe. My interest here is not really in the actual direction that Eurocommunists took but in the twin questions of “democratic socialism” on the one hand, and the “democratic road to socialism” on the other that were opened up for examination and debate. These are the questions that animate and have animated the new Left formations across the world—from Brazil, Venezuela (under Chavez), Bolivia and Ecuador to Greece and Spain in more recent times, not to speak of other experiences like Nicaragua or India in very different ways. Indeed, Poulantzas concluded State, Power, Socialism with the exploration of the questions of socialist democracy and of the democratic road to socialism, which he argued, had become imperative if one wished to avoid the “the twin limits or dangers”—of the social-democratic tradition in Western Europe, on the one hand, and that of “Eastern example of… ‘real socialism’” on the other (Poulantzas 1978b: 251). Despite their huge differences, both social democracy and Stalinism, he argued, shared a common faith in statism and “profound distrust of mass initiatives”. The key point raised by Poulantzas, relevant for our discussion here, especially in relation to the long Indian experience of the communists’ involvement in the electoral-democratic system, should be presented in his own words: (T)he real alternative raised by the democratic road to socialism is indeed that of a struggle of the popular masses to modify the relationship of forces within the state, as opposed to a frontal, dual power type of strategy. The choice is not, as is often thought, between a struggle ‘within’ the state apparatuses…and a struggle located at a certain physical distance from these apparatuses. First, because any struggle at a distance always has effects within the state: it is always there, even if only in a refracted manner and through intermediaries. Secondly, and most importantly, because struggle at a distance from the state apparatuses…remains necessary at all times and in every case, since it reflects the autonomy of the struggles and organizations of the popular masses. It is not simply a matter of entering state institutions…in order to use their characteristic levers for a good purpose. (Poulantzas 1978b: 259–260)

The problem posed here constitutes the crux of the matter because every movement from the communist tradition has been caught in this schizophrenic dilemma of whether or not to “enter” (bourgeois) state institutions. The Indian communist movement that has had perhaps

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the longest involvement in the institutions of representative democracy, embodies this attitude in the starkest manner possible. The reason why the Indian case calls for specific discussion is because it provides a wealth of concrete raw material for theoretical reflection on the matter at hand. In the very first general elections, held four years after India became independent, in 1951–1952, with barely enough infrastructure for holding elections in a country as vast (therefore conducted over 68 phases), the Communist Party of India emerged as the largest opposition party, if with only 16 seats (Datta Gupta 2022). Though the Socialist Party polled more than 10 percent of the votes polled, it won only 12 seats, compared to a mere 3.3 percent of the votes polled by the CPI. The CPI had focused on contesting in its strongholds while the SP spread itself too thin, contesting 489 seats as against 49 of the CPI (Niclas-Tolle 2015: 123–124). Right from that time on, the Communist Party of India (CPI) and later the breakaway Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] have been contesting and winning elections, if only at the regional/state level. In the very next election, held in 1957, the CPI won handsomely and was able to form a government in the southern state of Kerala, with the support of a few independents. This was a time of intense internal churning in the CPI, when disputes about the nature of the Indian bourgeoisie, the “class character” of the Nehru regime, the possibilities of “peaceful transition” to socialism were being hotly debated, leading to a virtual split in the party in the run-up to its extraordinary Congress held in Amritsar (known as the Amritsar Congress) in 1958.34 Despite this, it is remarkable that the question of “democracy” never came up for debate or discussion. There were very significant internal differences between the two main groups within the party on each of the issues mentioned above, and it is undeniable that the open debate was made possible by the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the changes in “line” initiated after the sensational disclosures by Khrushchev, on the Stalin era. Nevertheless the debate was bound by the terms set by the CPSU. It is not possible to go into the details of the debates here but it is worth recalling that the idea of “peaceful transition” propagated by the CPSU after the Twentieth Congress, was predicated on the possibilities opened up, not by democratic politics but on the idea of a “new epoch”, where the strength of the socialist camp was said to have weakened imperialism and thrown up 34 The split would actually be formalized six years later, in 1964, when the CPI(M) and the CPI held their own separate Seventh Congresses.

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new possibilities of embarking on a “non-capitalist path of development”. Consequently, the terms of debate within the CPI do not seem to have exceeded those limits. In fact, as one of the important CPI(M)-affiliated critical intellectuals, Javeed Alam put it while discussing the question of “democratic centralism” in the wake of the first defeats of the party in West Bengal, following Nandigram: The CPs in India, including the CPI(M), have by default, accepted democracy as prevalent in India…and the framework of rights as given in the Constitution of India. But this has come about in a rather ad hoc manner, without a moment of theoretical reflection. This came about with the experience of the ‘Emergency’ with its disastrous consequences for the working class movement and popular struggles. It looks ad hoc because even in the early 1970s, the CPI(M) leader E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the foremost theoretician of communist practice in India, was talking of throwing the Indian Constitution, ‘lock, stock and barrel’, into the Indian Ocean. (Alam 2009: 40, emphasis original)

In the same essay, Alam went on to argue further that while the communists learnt an important lesson on the significance of rights, as a consequence of the Emergency and the abrogation of democratic processes, this new commitment to rights thereafter, still remained at the practical level. He goes on to add: Given this, the CPs have still not theorised the question of democracy, nor is there any hint towards this in any of the documents and debates. Unless a theoretical justification is systematically built up, practice will remain ad hoc. This has not happened so far, nor does it appear likely to happen any time soon…It is not likely to happen, if only party publications are authorised to do so, as these are not equipped intellectually, for such a theoretical undertaking. A protracted debate at all levels of Marxist thinking, in and outside the parties, is required. The CPs have to forgo many of the practices of democratic centralism for this kind of debate to come about. (Alam 2009: 40, emphasis added)

The question of democracy is posed by Alam, later on in this essay, also in terms of the possibilities it holds for socialist transformation. He makes two points that are worth registering here. First, the claim that parliamentary democracy is a “sham” needs to be understood historically,

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for already when Lenin was writing, the workers had, through protracted struggles, “won the rights to form trade unions, to exercise universal franchise, to go on strike” and to form their own political parties and contest elections. There isn’t even a hint of a recognition of the huge change that had occurred since Marx, in Lenin’s writings. “The Lockean discourse of rights—the historical foundation of rights in liberal democracy—was disordered from about the middle of the 19th century”, writes Alam, “with the working class winning right after right. A whole new schedule or rights came about and became engrained” (ibid.: 41, emphasis original). At this level, argued Alam, communists needed to recognize that the effects of the working class’s own struggles in expanding and transforming democracy, took it far beyond what its original design may have allowed. Second—and here Alam remained skeptical—was the level of the state’s role in the “reproduction of the existing relations of production” and therefore, of the possibilities of democratic transition to socialism. Alam is rightly suspicious that when it comes to the crunch, the state, howsoever democratic, will rise up in defence of private property. Short of that moment of revolutionary transformation, Alam insisted, democracy was real and communists needed to revisit their own theoretical understanding of it. In a sense, the point that Alam was at pains to make, with respect to the regime of rights, needed to be extended to a more serious examination of the practice of Indian democracy on the one hand, and of communist practice within it, on the other. For one thing, ever since the attainment of independence and the coming into force of the Indian Constitution, there had been an ongoing conflict between the parliament and the ruling party on one hand and the judiciary, on the other, on the question of the right to property. This was only to be expected, given that the program of land reforms was fundamental to the democratic revolution and the ushering in of the passive revolution of capital as has been argued by Nivedita Menon.35 Later in the 1960s, following the split in the ruling Congress party and Indira Gandhi’s swerve to the Left, fourteen banks were nationalized, leading once again to a legal battle. After a lot of to and fro, the details of which are not immediately relevant here, the right to property was removed from the group of fundamental rights. It still exists as a constitutional right but property can be acquired by the state 35 See Menon (2004) for a detailed discussion of the history of this conflict around the First Amendment.

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after providing some compensation. The problem of course, is that in the neoliberal era, instead of using the provision for redistributive purposes, the state’s “eminent domain” has been invoked for dispossessing the peasants. The point however, is that even with respect to property, specific interventions are possible, especially since many capitalist corporations derive benefits from the state because they are supposed to be fulfilling some public purpose. Nevertheless, like other aspects of democracy, this too remained understudied and untheorized. Throughout their long history, communists continued to participate in elections and form governments, all the while believing that they could actually do nothing within the framework of the “bourgeois state”—except that which was acceptable to the bourgeoisie. This became like a self-fulfilling prophesy: you do nothing because you believe that nothing can be done. Rather, they did what they thought was required to “complete the unfinished tasks” of the “bourgeois democratic revolution”, which included limited land reforms in the early years of independence but ultimately became only about “industrialization” and “development” in collaboration with private corporate capital. The last but perhaps the most dramatic episode of that history, in this respect, was the occasion when in 1996, the then chief minister of the state of West Bengal and politbureau member of the CPI(M), Jyoti Basu, was offered the prime ministership of the country by an alliance that had been formed, having just defeated the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the neoliberal Congress in the general elections. The first time the proposal was put to the party, its Central Committee refused the offer. The offer-cum-request was renewed once again. There was tension all across the country, especially as there were sections of the population, especially the minorities, who were looking expectantly at the party. It refused yet again. This was unprecedented anywhere in the history of the communist movement in the world. The basis on which the offer was refused was actually an argument from a very remote past, when the party still saw itself as wanting to radically transform Indian society in a socialist direction—something that had by 1996, long been given up, with the fall of Soviet socialism and the global victory of neoliberalism. By 1996, the party was so deep into parliamentary politics that had it undertaken the exercise of theorizing its own practice, it might have been able to intervene at a level, where at the very least, a democratic agenda could have been set for the coming decades.

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To understand this point better, it may be useful to remember that from the very first time when the united CPI had formed a government in Kerala in 1957, the CPI(M) had been in government twice in the 1960s in West Bengal (1967 and 1969) and once in Kerala (1967) in coalition before it was finally installed for a 34-year-long stint in West Bengal and in the state of Tripura in 1978. In Tripura, the CPI(M)-led Left Front had two stints from 1978 to 1988 and then from 1993 to 2018 of ten and twenty-five years, respectively. The first communist ministry in Kerala, formed in 1957 under the chief ministership of E. M. S. Namboodiripad had lasted just over two years but the party has been repeatedly returning to power since, through the 1960s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The state still has a CPI(M)-led government in power for the second time since 2016. With such a long record and experience, one would have thought the party would have figured out what to do with governmental power. Already by 1996, the party had been in power in many different states and Jyoti Basu had been chief minister for nineteen continuous years in West Bengal. The party’s central leadership however, declined the offer/request to Jyoti Basu, on the grounds that a communist prime minister in a “bourgeois-landlord state”, under a “bourgeois” constitution, would not be able to accomplish anything and that it would essentially amount to abandoning the party’s principles. This argument is interesting in itself, for it harks back to a distinction made in the 1960s, between participation in state governments and in the central government. After all, it had become clear as early as in 1957, that if the party was serious about its role in mass struggles, it had to contest elections. It was also clear that if the party were to contest elections and win, as had actually started happening (so it was not a purely abstract question), then there would be occasions when it would be called upon to form governments and lead them. The possibility of winning elections at the all-India level, to be able to form a government at the Central level was, in contrast, beyond the realm of possibility in the foreseeable future. Consequently, the party saw the business of running state governments in areas where it had a long tradition of political work, with a different eye. So when the CPI(M) was presented with the opportunity of forming governments in West Bengal and Kerala in 1967, within three years of its formation, it spelt out this distinction and allowed for the party’s active participation, forming and conduct of state governments, in a document titled New Situation and the Party’s Tasks. The document dealt with the question, as

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Alam has contended, at the purely practical and “tactical” level, with no thought given, either then or later, to the question of democracy itself. So it argued that these state governments are governments with no real power and the maximum that the government could do was to provide “immediate relief to the people”, or restrain the police and administrative machinery in dealing with mass movements and popular struggles. This understanding was reinforced by the fact that the Left-led governments of the 1960s were short-lived as they fell very soon due to a combination of the internal conflicts between the coalition partners and machinations of the central government. The situation changed after 1977, with the end of the Emergency and a greater awareness all around about anti-democratic practices of the powers that be. Very soon, as the party was faced with the prospect of running state governments for longer terms, it found itself in a quandary. This is evident from the way that as early as in 1985, “radical” sections in the party in West Bengal started raising the demand for the deletion of “para 112” from the Party’s Program. This para 112 was the one which had envisaged the possibility of entering and running state governments. The immediate trigger behind this demand was the fact that in the 1984 parliament elections, the Left Front had suffered massive losses, held as these were against the highly emotive background of the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi. But additionally, there was evidence that behind the electoral losses was also the anti-incumbency factor against the six years of Left rule in specific areas—or so the “radicals” seemed to argue. Clearly then, the question of democracy and power remained totally untheorized and as Alam argued, as long as that was the case, practice would remain ad hoc, which eventually meant that somewhere along the line the very idea of transformation was abandoned—as that was in any case, seen as being “not possible”. It is relevant, in this context, to note that Alvaro Garcia Linera, theorist of the Bolivian revolution and the republic’s vice-president in the Evo Morales government, talks of the revolution as comprising two moments—a Gramscian moment of hegemony and a Leninist moment of decisive intervention to defeat the dominant project. Thus Linera: Our experience in Bolivia teaches us that hegemony is the result of a combination of both these paths. At first, you have to radiate outwards

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and convince people of the principle of a mobilizing hope (as Gramsci sought)…. However, there is a moment, which we could call a ‘Robespierrian’ moment, where you must defeat the discursive and organizational structure of dominant classes. There Lenin is right. No power accepts its defeat by a simple evaluation of probabilities or by way of fatigue. (Linera 2019: 38–39)

Whether one wants to call it the Robespierrian moment or Leninist, the contrast between the new Left formations’ participation in electoral democracy and government and the stance of the CPI(M) in India emerges quite starkly here. At least as long as state power is the object of intervention, the Latin American experience has repeatedly shown that the moment of confrontation that Linera points to remains an alwayspresent possibility. It has arisen repeatedly in the course of the last two decades in Venezuela, Brazil and Bolivia, when democratic processes were sought to be subverted in different ways and it underlines the fact that the parliamentary dimension can only function effectively when extraparliamentary mass struggles occupy other arenas of power, including the streets. Indian socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia once put this in his own colourful style: “when the streets become deserted, parliament becomes wayward”.36

Critique of the Party-Form It is important to register here that the “pressure of the streets” that Lohia talks about, cannot be the “disciplined and mobilized” masses owing allegiance to the ruling party.37 Orchestrated mass rallies of such “masses” had actually become a regular feature of Left Front rule in West Bengal over the three and a half decades that it was in power. The challenge, rather, is to think in terms of a whole network of organizations, unions and movements which coordinate their actions but retain their own independence, even vis-à-vis a ruling party that they may be generally supportive of. Instances of such mobilization have been visible in the case of South Africa, where the Confederation of South African Trade Unions 36 In the original Hindi, it is: “jab sadken sooni ho jayen to sansad awara ho jati hai”. 37 The expression “disciplined and mobilized” recalls an essay, “Discipline and

Mobilize”, by Ranajit Guha, which in turn was a reference to Foucault.

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(COSATU) has been an independent part of the Tripartite Alliance that rules; they have also been seen in the mobilizations against unpopular decisions of the earlier Lula government in Brazil by sections linked to the Workers’ Party itself. These are instances where independent mass organizations or trade unions enter into alliances and even share power with political parties of the Left but retain their autonomy and the right to oppose specific decisions. More recently, however, in India, we have seen the emergence of two recent mass movements—the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act movement in 2019–2020 and the year-long farmers’ struggle from November 2021 to November 2022, which had clearly announced that they would have nothing to do with political parties as such, no matter what their political hue. In a way, these movements exhibited the same antipathy to political parties that had earlier been seen in the massive anti-corruption movement in 2011. And it is undeniable that these movements were able to sustain themselves and did not sell out midway, precisely because they had kept the parties resolutely out of the picture. This has been a big gain in political learning from the experiences of the past decades. In this context, the question of the party-form and its relation to the electoral-representative system is worth pondering on. Socialists, regardless of their hue, must squarely face the issue of “representation” that arises in the course of political practice at every step and is critically tied to the question of vanguardism. At another level, parties have their own interests and goals and are only interested in mass movements to the extent that they enable them to grab power—and it is this that has defined the conduct of recent mass movements in relation to them. In this context, we need to ask some very pertinent questions about the party-form as such. Do parties have an autonomous logic that ties them to the affairs of the state? Are parties governed by some autonomous logic of power that is fundamentally at odds with the logic of mass movements and the demands of the popular? What is the meaning of the Gramscian insight that at certain points in their history, parties become detached from the social classes that they represent, because these classes or fractions thereof, no longer consider those parties as their representatives? How do we understand the Gramscian answer that often this happens because, either the specific group of leaders or the specific organizational form of the party no longer allows for the expression of the collective will of the class? What is it that accounts for the repeated co-option of revolutionary parties into the system they set out to change?

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Today, some of these questions are being asked globally, of all kinds of political parties and not just of the “revolutionary” party. The party-form as such is seen as the villain of the piece as it is increasingly seen as the instrument, not of the expression but of the hijacking, of “popular will”, if at all we can assume it to be unproblematically “already there”, in the first place. It is this question of the party-form as such, that preoccupied the early Indian communist, M. N. Roy in the last phase of his life. Roy had spent a substantial amount of time in Berlin and had also developed relations with scholars attached to the Frankfurt School. During those years, he had also had the opportunity to observe the rise of Nazism in Germany but in a deeper sense, the experience of fascism forced Roy to confront the question of modern politics itself. It was this question that preoccupied him in the last phase. In this phase of his life, in December 1948, Roy dissolved the Radical Democratic Party (RDP) that he had founded eight years ago, in December 1940. The RDP had functioned more or less as a Marxist party, in its philosophical orientation, though it was not built on the rigid Bolshevized structure that was characteristic of the communist parties brought up under Comintern tutelage. Roy’s break with the Comintern in 1930 and his subsequent six-year incarceration in prison, had given him a lot of opportunity to read, think and write. The eight years of RDP’s existence also gave him the practical experience of party-building and building of mass organizations like trade unions. Already, by the time India gained Independence in 1947 and the country was overcome by the violence and madness of sectarian violence in the run-up to, and following, the Partition of the country, Roy had become convinced that “democratic politics” could not actually stand on its own feet without far-reaching changes in society at large. He seems to have become convinced that a philosophical and cultural revolution had to precede a political revolution (Roy 1960: 197–198). At the root of the problem, in his reckoning, was the institution of the political party, which occluded the “individual man and his judgement”. “On the one hand, we have the mass of people, and on the other, we have parties” and “appeals are not made to individual voters and their power of reasoning but to the sentiment of the masses” (Roy 1960: 53). In making this distinction, Roy was underlining the fact that there was no such thing as the “popular will” that existed prior to the constitution of the “people”, whose shape and form was itself contingent upon the specific appeal that carried the day and that depended on how and to whom the appeal was addressed.

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There are many problems with the way Roy frames his new stance, not the least being his return to the “individual” as the foundation of his ontological and epistemological viewpoint. Nonetheless, at the political level, his critique of the political party whose existence he saw as being intrinsically tied to representative democracy, was prescient and much ahead of his time. His studies in prison had already convinced him that no revolution ever took place till the ground for it had been prepared by a new philosophical orientation and societies like India’s could not afford to believe that merely by winning political independence, they will achieve the goal of a better, radical democratic society. In a sense, the point made by Roy about the “mass of people” who are susceptible to the propaganda of political parties appealing to their sentiments, connects with the understanding of “the mass/es” and “crowds”, dealt with in early twentieth century attempts to understand the fascist phenomena. Critiques of the party—or indeed any form of organized politics—of course go back a long way and in that sense there is nothing new or novel about Roy’s position, even though he is at pains to underline that his is not the anarchist critique of all forms of organization as such.38 What is interesting in his critique and his explicit—and repeated— claim that the relatively recent emergence of political parties and “party systems” not only leads to the eclipse of the democratic ideal of popular sovereignty, it also reduces all politics to mere power struggles: “With the rise of the party system, the idea of popular sovereignty became a constitutional fiction. The party system resulted from the difficulty of practising direct democracy in large modern states with numerous populations. And with the rise of the party system, politics became a scramble for power”(Roy 1960: 67). Roy goes further to argue that with the crisis of democracies, consequent upon the rise of the party system, the need for a new social and political philosophy had become urgent. From this point of view, Roy argued that the decision to dissolve his RDP was not an abdication of politics but an attempt to convert the party into a movement that would dedicate itself to the cause of a new philosophical and cultural revolution, an Indian renaissance. The new direction spelt out by Roy must certainly have sounded utopian and indeed, a sure recipe for the further marginalization of the Royists, given that the newly independent Indian nation was embarking

38 This is a recurrent theme in Roy (1960).

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with great enthusiasm on the path of building a democratic polity based on the party system. Little would it have occurred to skeptics and critics that sixty odd years later the sounds of rejection of political parties as such, would reverberate in movements across the world—from the Arab Spring to the anti-corruption movement in India in 2011, to the 15M movement of the Spanish indignados ’ and the Indignant Citizens Movement in Greece that same year, not to mention the Occupy Wall Street movement and its offshoots. These recent experiences from different parts of the world, it seems to me, signal the last days of the particular form—the partyform—that structured all of modern politics in the last two centuries or so. At the very least, there is an exhaustion and weariness with the form of politics practiced by parties. As Manar Shorbagy put it, “Right from the very beginning, Kefaya [the Egyptian movement for change] has identified the established political parties as part of the problem not the solution” (Shorbagy 2007: 51). The political parties are seen as either complicit with the regime or inefficacious: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Egypt’s political system has reached a dead end. The opposition political parties are locked in their headquarters, unable to communicate with the public. Virtually acquiescing to the siege of an arsenal of restrictive laws, those political parties have for years suffered from an increasingly diminishing membership, lack of operational funds, and internecine internal feuds. (Shorbagy 2007: 39)

Other analysts and scholars too underlined this aspect of the more pervasive movements across the Arab world, namely their weariness of traditional party politics. Manuel Castells writes for instance, of the Tunisian protesters that they were not satisfied even after the abdication of the dictator Ben Ali, and kept up their protests: “They kept shouting ‘Degage! Degage! (Get out of here)’ vis-à-vis all powers that be: corrupt politicians, financial speculators, brutal police and subservient media” (Castells 2012: 23).

The Conundrum Clearly, we are living in an interregnum when the old forms of politics have become moribund and obsolete but new ones have not yet

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emerged. And so, as the tide of mass struggles recedes older animosities and sectarian conflicts, unthinkable outside the form of party-politics, make their appearance again. In this interregnum, once the moment of struggle is over, once the old regimes have been dismantled, we are left with the same old framework of elections. Once again parties step into the breach. Once again things seem to flow irreversibly back into familiar, recognizable patterns. But it would be a mistake to imagine that this is yet another manifestation of the old pattern in which parties and vanguards will have their final moment of glory, riding in on the back of popular unrest. Something, clearly, is waiting to be articulated in this relentless refusal of the political as we have so far known it. It is not that politics as such has come to an end. Rather, the more “the political” gets evacuated of politics, the more politics appears everywhere else. Rethinking the idea of the political and of politics as such, I suggest, entails a re-examination of the entire conceptual paraphernalia of Marxism—as well as of political theory, premised as the latter is on what can only be called the “dramaturgy of the will”.39 It is as though “people” by definition are creatures of “the will to power”, and that it is they who constitute the foundation of all politics. Thus when they participate in elections and cast their vote, they are understood to be exercising their will in electing their representatives. The reality that all the contemporary movements point towards, on the other hand, is precisely the opposite: the domain of politics and the arena of democracy are the field of vanguards—the Jacobin elements who are creatures of the will par excellence, who usurp the sole right to speak and decide in the name of the people. What happens if these vanguards are deprived of the right to speak in the name of any such fictional collectivity? What if we see the act of participation in elections as a complex game that ordinary folk are forced to enter into and play with the political class in order to open channels to power that would otherwise be outside their reach? The point I am making here is not that ordinary people are unconcerned with politics; rather their engagement with politics is mediated by a number of quotidian concerns. It is when things become unbearable in some sense that mass movements of the type that we have been witnessing lately, take place. That is when concerns are perhaps articulated in their sharpest

39 I borrow this expression from Pierre Rosanvallon (2006).

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form. But in no case do we have “the masses” themselves making a claim for power, only vanguards who speak in their name. It is a Weariness with this experience, through the twentieth century, has made it imperative that we consider all such creatures of the will as part of the problem rather than the solution. In this introductory chapter, I have tried to lay out some of the issues of theory that have confronted the practitioners of Marxism in the Global South. The collapse of “actually existing socialism” is the window that affords us an opportunity to re-read Marxist theory in a decentered way. This means that I have had to foreground the experience of the Global South and the attempts by Marxist thinkers and practitioners to grapple with that experience. The presence of and engagement with Western Marxism continues—as does the pull exercised by the original Marxism. This field of Border-Marxisms is therefore tension-filled. That tension will be evident in the rest of the book as well. This exercise is very much located in our present and as such, the questions that we face today provide the second window into the long march of Marxism in the Global South. In Chapter 2, I explore capitalism from the “outside”, just as this chapter has tried to look at Marxism from the outside. I have argued in that chapter that capitalism is not the totality it is understood to be, where the Global South must exist in an always subordinate position. The relation between the Global South and capitalism is one where the latter is an intruding, external aggressor which relentlessly attempts to capture, subdue and discipline the former but, as the argument in the rest of the book will try to show, never successfully manages to do the same. Chapters 3 and 4 take up two specific instances or cases where the linear time of historical materialism is problematized through an exploration of the question of the peasantry and the obsession with productivism and progress that refuses to see the problem posed by waste theoretically. Both these questions are important in that they touch key questions of historical materialism and allow us an opportunity to bring in the global South centrally into our concerns. Chapter 3 takes the argument forward by arguing that the peasantry that Marxists expected to have long died has actually refused to do so. Thus while we see the “working class” being thoroughly unmade and remade as the precariat in the era of flexible accumulation and globalization, this is precisely the period of the emergence of a powerful organized voice of the peasantry, broadly defined, at the global level. Alongside the

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decline of the working class’ political clout, we see the emergence of the indigenous people and the peasantry as the main force confronting global capital everywhere. Chapter 4 interrogates the productivist obsession of Marxism by bringing up the problem of “waste”—an area of a strange silence in Marxism. Against the overall background of the climate crisis, the question of “waste” as the necessary product of productivism cries out for theorization. In the end, all questions of air and water pollution are about what is left behind after production and consumption, namely waste. This chapter discusses it in the context of recent “trash trade wars” between countries of the Global South and the developed capitalist countries. Chapter 5, looks at the different ways in which the linear time of historical materialism stands problematized from within Marxism itself. It discusses the different pathways of exit from this linear time, present themselves before us in the work of thinkers like MN Roy, Cedric Robinson, Subaltern Studies and Samir Amin. It also discusses the work of Kojin Karatani and Jairus Banaji to explore how certain possibilities of an alternative theorization emerge, explicitly in Karatani and implicitly in Banaji. The last chapter, the Conclusion, takes up the implication of the arguments of the previous chapters to argue that “Socialism is not the ‘After’ of Capitalism”, and that if we are interested in rekindling the socialist imagination, it must be displaced from its so-called “scientific” pedestal and made to speak to the “real movements” that are already going on to find alternatives to the capitalist mode of being.

References Alam, Javeed. 2009. Can Democratic Centralism Be Conducive to Democracy? Economic and Political Weekly 44 (8) (19–25 September): 37–42. Althusser, Louis. 1979. For Marx. London: Verso. Baltas, Aristides. 2013. The Rise of Syriza: An Interview with Aristides Baltas (Interview by Leo Panitch). In The Question of Strategy, Socialist Register, ed. Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, 120–136. New York: Monthly Review Press. Bardawil, Fadi A. 2020. Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Barlow, Tani E., ed. 2002. New Asian Marxisms. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Bottomore, Tom, and Patrick Goode, eds. 1978. Austro-Marxism, Texts trans. and ed. Bottomore and Goode. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Budgen, Sebastian, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek. 2007. Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Castells, Manuel. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity. Chatterjee, Partha, ed. 2020. After the Revolution. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Datta Gupta, Sobhanlal. 2022. How Communist Party of India Emerged as the Largest Opposition to Congress in 1951–52. The Wire, 19 February. https://thewire.in/history/how-communist-party-of-india-eme rged-as-largest-opposition-to-congress-in-1951-52, last accessed on 24 March 2022. Dean, Jodi. 2016. Crowds and Party. London and New York: Verso. Esteva, Gustavo, and Madhu Suri Prakash. 1998/2014. Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures. London: Zed Books. Freiberg, J.W. 1977. The Dialectic in China: Maoist and Daoist. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 9 (1): 2–19. Habib, I. 1993. ‘The Marxian Theory of Socialism and the Experience of Socialist Societies.’ Social Scientist, 21 (5/6), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/351 7812 Hall, Stuart. 2017. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, ed. and intro. Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books. Jullien, Francois. 2004. A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kang, Liu. 2011. Poeticizing Revolution: Žižek’s Misreading of Mao and China. Positions 19 (3) (Winter): 627–651. Kaviraj, S. 1989. ‘Perestroika: Reflections on the Theory of Power.’ Social Scientist, 17 (7/8), 50–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/3517285 Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time. London and New York: Verso. Lefort, Claude. 1988. Democracy and Political Theory. Oxford: Polity Press. Linera, Alvaro Garcia. 2019. The State and the Democratic Road to Socialism. In Ducange and Keucheyan (ed.) (2019), 20–44. Mao Tsetung. 1977. Five Essays on Philosophy. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Marx, Karl. 1859. Preface. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/cri tique-pol-economy/preface.htm, last accessed on 23 March 2022.

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Menon, Nivedita. 2004. Citizenship and the Passive Revolution: Interpreting the First Amendment. Economic and Political Weekly 39 (18) (1 May): 1812– 1819. Menon, Nivedita. Forthcoming. Secularism as Misdirection: Conversations from the Global South. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Mitra, A. 1994. ‘Socialism: The Day after or the Day Yet to Be.’ Social Scientist, 22 (7/8), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/3520149 Mukherjee, Aditya. 1983. The Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties, 1926–30: An Aspect of Communism in India. In Chandra (ed.), 1–44 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo, and Morgan Ndlovu, eds. 2022. Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century: Living Theories and True Ideas. London and New York: Routledge. Niclas-Tolle, Boris. 2015. The Socialist Opposition in Nehruvian India 1947– 1964. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Nigam, Aditya. 1996. ‘Marxism and Power.’ Social Scientist, 24 (4/6), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/3517788 Nigam, Aditya. 1999. Marxism and the Postcolonial World: Footnotes to a Long March. Economic and Political Weekly 34 (1) (2–15 January): 33–43. Nigam, Aditya. 2020a. Decolonizing Theory: Thinking Across Traditions. New Delhi: Bloomsbury. Nigam, Aditya. 2020b. Early ‘Marxism’ and the Parapolitics of Revolution: Thinking the Question of Thought. In Chatterjee (ed.) (2020), 73–111. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978b. State, Power, Socialism. New Left Books: London Ricouer, Paul. 1984. The Political Paradox. In Legitimacy and the State, ed. William Connolly, 250–272. New York: New York University Press. Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2006. Democracy Past and Future, ed. with intro. Samuel Moyn. New York: Columbia University Press. Roy, M.N. 1960. Politics, Power and Parties. Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers. Schram, Stuart, ed. 1974. Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed, Talks and Letters 1956–71. England: Penguin Books. Seth, Sanjay. 1995. Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Shorbagy, Manar. 2007. Understanding Kefaya: The New Politics in Egypt. Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) (Winter): 39–60 Wang, Hui. 2006. China’s New Order: Society, Politics and Economy in Transition. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Williams, Michelle. 2013. Introduction. In Williams and Satgar (2013). Williams, Michelle, and Vishwas Satgar. 2013. Marxisms in the 21st Century: Crisis, Critique and Struggle. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

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Žižek, Slavoj. 1998. A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’. Critical Inquiry 24 (4) (Summer): 988–1009. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. The Fragile Absolute—Or Why the Christian Legacy Is Worth Fighting For? London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 2

Capital’s Expressways and Life Beneath: Underground Economies, Illegal Populations

Let us note that if these epochs [ancient, modern, postmodern]succeed upon one another, or engender one another, they do not supplant one another like scenes in a play: for us and consequently in relation to the political question, they are all still present in a disunified totality, in a noncontemporaneity that is the very structure of the ‘current moment’ …. (Balibar 1994: 59)

Introduction If in the previous chapter, I have tried to give a glimpse of what a decentred field of “Marxism” might look like, in this chapter I want to look at “capitalism” from the “outside” as it were. The reason I put both “capitalism” and “outside” within quotation marks has to do with the fact that I do not use the term “capitalism” in the conventional sense of a “mode of production” that is usually seen as an enclosed totality with its own “inner logic”. Rather, I see it as a mode of being, a comportment—or an ideology if you please—that is coterminous with a larger configuration of “power/knowledge” that I will call the “capital/knowledge complex”— with due apologies to Michel Foucault (Foucault 1980). For Foucault the configurations of power /knowledge referred to the emergence of disciplinary configurations and practices that can only be understood in terms of their micropolitics and studied through “an ascending analysis” from the bottom up, whereas the capital/knowledge complex is something that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22895-7_2

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has to be understood at a global level.1 Embodied in apparatuses and institutions, first of powerful colonizing nation-states and later, in the twentieth century, of global financial institutions, this capital/knowledge complex is what puts in place the system or mode of production and power that we know as “capitalism”. As an ideological configuration, capitalism enlists and recruits individuals and produces them as capitalist subjects wherever it establishes its rule, especially among the state and political elites in the global South. As I will argue in this chapter, this capital/knowledge complex is assembled, right from the dawn of what we call modernity, by political theory, moral philosophy, law and political economy (later economics), all contributing to making it what it became. In that sense, we could also call it the “modern European episteme”—for every knowledge discipline of (European) modernity rests on the philosophical premises laid out by these disciplines. It is not without reason, therefore, as I will discuss in Chapter 4 and the Conclusion that the search for life beyond capitalism no longer seems possible within the confines of this European episteme, provoking a search for “epistemologies of the South” and relational ontologies based on a rejection of the philosophy of “possessive individualism” (Macpherson 2010; Santos 2014). It is this new capital/knowledge complex that provides the justifications for the colonial powers, as they set out to conquer the world and implant capitalism worldwide by uprooting peasant, artisanal and indigenous communities and creating the bourgeois property form, under-written by the new juridical apparatus of the law. One can only see that entire history as one of a continuing, centuries-long encounter between capitalism (in my sense of the term) and pre-capitalist communities. Capital as a mode of power was successfully installed only at the political level of the state and only in a very limited sense, as a mode of production. The war to capture such communities and modes of being that already populated these lands and thus colonize them, carried on for 1 Indeed, Foucault’s analysis of power too does not simply concern itself with the local and the micropolitical. He in fact, suggests that starting, “from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics”, we can “then see how these mechanisms of power have been—and continue to be—invested, colonised, utilised, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended etc., by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination” (Foucault 1980: 99). Mechanisms and forms of global domination, one might argue, partake of entirely different histories.

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centuries. It continues to this day. For that reason, I do not see these modes of being as “subsumed” by capital in any way—formally or really. Much of the discussion in this chapter will make sense only if we keep this in mind. “Capitalism”, as seen from the global South, presents a dystopic picture of massive expressways moving through nowhere, with fastmoving traffic—and little else. Occasionally though, those speeding through these highways must take a break, slow down and halt to eat, recharge themselves and their vehicles. That’s when they fleetingly connect with life. For life, really, is lived beneath or away from these expressways, in villages, small towns and cities and in very different rhythms. But this life alone provides for the needs of those who are hurtling down these eight-lane roads at breakneck speed, enjoying their newfound liberation from the constraints of what goes on in the villages and cities below. But in fact, the latter can live without these expressways in a way that those on the expressways cannot, even for a day. Indeed, these highways would not exist today, were it not for the fact that they continuously encroach on life below and on the land and livelihoods of the peasants and farmers, often violently, so that the “smooth flow” of goods—raw material and commodities—and people may continue. That is necessary, we are told, for the sake of lifting those who live beneath, out of poverty and “backwardness”. It is another matter that “they” actually could not care less. But postcolonial political elites, even radical ones who had led national liberation struggles, were produced as subjects of capitalist desire for the modern—the route to which had already been laid out for them by Europe and the United States. In whatever incarnation (import-substituting, “socialist” and now neoliberal), their sole desire has been to recreate European modernity in Asia, Africa and Latin America. However, given the pervasiveness of what Anibal Quijano has called the “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000), postcolonial elites only ever participate in the reproduction of exploitative relations between the North and the South that continue despite political decolonization, notwithstanding an occasional conflict here and there. Thus, for instance, a recent study published in the international journal Global Environmental Change says, Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million

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person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. (Hickel et al. 2022)

The expressways of Capital run across the cities and countrysides of the global South connecting them, most importantly, to the global North, transporting all this value and more, to keep life in the North/ West running at high consumption levels. Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen call it the “imperial mode of living”, through which term they intend to point towards “the norms of production, distribution and consumption built into the political, economic and cultural structures of everyday life for populations in the global North” (Brand and Wissen 2021: 41). And yet, the strange belief continues that it is the economies of the South that are “dependent”, though like life beneath and away from the expressways, these economies will certainly be better off without the North—if the above calculation by Hickel et al. is any guide. The relationship between the capitalist mode of power/production (the expressways) and the noncapitalist modes of being (life beneath) does not really add up to a “totality” or a “system” with a supposed “internal logic” of its own, as it were. Balibar’s quote in the epigraph refers to a “disunified totality” where the idea of the totality already stands negated in some sense. We can say paraphrasing him that the precapitalist, capitalist and other modes coexist in a noncontemporaneity that is the very structure of the present, regardless of how we conceptualize the relation between the different modes. Saying that the global South—the colonies in earlier centuries—are a part of the “totality” of a single “mode of production”, tied in an intrinsic relationship, makes it sound as if there is some “objective necessity” that directs this “process”. The question is by calling capitalism a “totality” and suggesting that it constitutes an objective historical “process”, are not social scientists (and even Marxists) giving pillage and conquest a benign and misleading name? Would we say, for instance that the expeditions of Alexander of Macedonia in the fourth century BCE or the sack

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of Baghdad by the Mongols in the 13th CE were parts of an “objective historical process”? The history of the world is littered with episodes of war and conquest but never do we say that these were parts of an objective process of “world-history”, even when the conquest had salutary effects on the society conquered. By giving modern colonialism the exalted designation of a “world-historical” process, philosophy and social science made it sound inevitable—and Marxism also posited it as the outcome of the inner logic of capitalism, to the extent that it recognized it. By positing “capitalism” as a global/universal “mode of production”, the colonized world of the global South was reduced to the status of a past whose destiny it was to be superseded by the more “advanced mode of production”, part of which they had, willy-nilly become. I will argue that not only is the relation between capital and the precapitalist social forms an external one, of capture and domination, this externality also implies that the dominant experience of capital in this world remains largely outside the narrow domain of capital-labor relations. In this world, populations are en masse turned illegal if they refuse to be disciplined into obedient capitalist subjects, just as their modes of being come to be identified as “underground economies”, as we will see below. In these modes of being, economic activity is not a separate activity but something intrinsically tied to aspects of their being itself. However, with the advent of the rule of the capital/knowledge complex, they get defined in terms that are unrecognizable to themselves. We can also see the traffic on these expressways as akin to the global financial flows that have been running amok in recent decades, disconnecting real economic activity on the ground from what goes on in the world of high finance. If we look at this scenario, one thing becomes clear with each passing day: “Capital” is not a mode of “production” in another sense—it is no longer concerned with production as such but speculative activity that has been called its “cancer stage” (McMurtry 2013). The fact is that there is no essential capitalism—just as second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna would say that there is no “ultimate truth” and the “self” does not exist (anatma)—because everything is dependently arisen (pratitya samutpada): everything is what it is only in its relation to everything else. The working class and the capital-labor relation was once central to what we knew as capitalism in the capitalist metropolises; however, in the “peripheries”, it was an entirely different entity. With the hegemony of finance capital, especially in the last few decades, labor

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became increasingly incidental. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, it might become quite redundant. On the other hand, what defines contemporary capitalism is that it constitutes a threat to life itself on the planet. The points of resistance to it too proliferate as new arenas of conflict emerge. In that sense, in saying that there is no essential capitalism, what I am suggesting resonates with what Isabelle Stengers claims when she says that “capitalism must be understood instead as a mode of functioning, a machine, which fabricates its own necessity, its own actors, in every conjuncture, and destroys those who haven’t been able to saddle up for the new opportunities” (Stengers 2015: 52, emphasis added). In the rest of this chapter, I will make an argument for recognizing this “difference” that becomes visible only from what can be called the “outside” of capital—though, strictly speaking, in calling it the “outside”, capital still remains the reference point.

The “Rise” of the “Underground” At the height of the Great Recession, in March 2009, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) carried a report on the so-called informal economy in the “third world”. Entitled “The Rise of the Underground”, the report outlined some interesting features of this economy—what it called “the vast, unregulated market encompassing everything from street vendors to unlicensed cab drivers”. Economists, the report rightly observed, were given to thinking of this underground as generally bad news for the world economy. However, it also noted that “now it’s taking on a new role as one of the last safe havens in a darkening financial climate, forcing analysts to rethink their views” (Barta 2009). Take for instance, the following extract from the report: “At the Manek Chowk market [in Ahmedabad], in this Indian city’s congested center, vendors peddle everything from beans to brass pots from a row of derelict stalls as monkeys scramble overhead. One man sharpens nails using a spinning blade attached to a moving bicycle wheel… Their wages are pitiful by Western standards. But there are no layoffs at the Manek market. All anyone has to do to work there is show up and start hawking -- something more and more people are doing these days.

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Without this job, “we’d have nothing,” says Surajben Babubhai Patni, a 58-year-old vendor selling tomatoes, corn and nuts from under a makeshift cloth tarp. “She makes as much as 250 rupees a day, or about $5, but it’s enough to feed her household of nine, including her son, who recently lost his job as a diamond polisher” (Barta 2009). Or, take the case of 33-year-old Pilaporn Jaksurat who worked on a cotton spinning machine in a garment factory in Bangkok. She was laid off as a direct consequence of the recession, when her mill, which used to sell fabric to manufacturers in Europe, found the going tough with the sudden fall in demand. “She decided to start her own business, selling shots of medicinal wine to truck drivers and motorcyclists on the highway by her home – an adult version of the neighborhood lemonade stand. With help from friends, she fashioned a makeshift bamboo stand on vacant grass by the roadside. The start-up cost was about $275, she says, paid for with money from her severance package.” A few weeks later, she was making a profit of about $10 a day after expenditures for ingredients, including herbs and wine. Compared to the $7 or so she made at the garment factory, this was much better—for it not only gave her more earnings, she was also her own boss. This income allowed her to “keep sending money home every month to help support her parents and 2-year-old child, who live together in a rural area in northern Thailand.” These are just two random stories of people who lost their jobs in the 2008 global economic crisis but nonetheless found ways of earning alternative livelihoods or simply surviving because others in the family were linked to this “underground” economy. The “frightening scale of the crisis”, said the report, was now forcing economists to reconsider their opinion about the underground economy. It cited W.F. Maloney of the World Bank and Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to underline this. According to the report, Johnson even went on to say that these jobs are “one reason that the situation in desperately poor countries isn’t as bad as you’d think” (ibid.). This same point was underlined by the municipal commissioner of Ahmedabad who insisted that though the existence of this economy means that almost one-third of the local population does not pay taxes, the city government planned to expand this sector—because that is why people manage to survive, to get their bread and butter when big companies ditch them. Economists, we know, have had their own reasons for seeing such informal economies negatively: Informal businesses don’t pay taxes; they

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lack capital and the expertise to be as productive as big enterprises, leading to less innovation and lower standards of living. Thus as Nancy Birdsall, an economist at the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank, tells the WSJ correspondent, having a big underground economy “is not something to be cheerful about,” says. “When everybody is selling apples to each other, you’re not creating new wealth – it’s not a sign that things are OK (emphasis added).” We shall have the occasion to return occasionally to this reified form that that idea of “the economy” acquires in the words of Nancy Birdsall, where well-being of the producers is not the purpose of production but apparently the wellbeing of “the economy”—for which “creation of wealth” is critical—never mind who that extra wealth goes to. It is, of course, another matter that such economies are anything but a story of “everyone selling apples to each other”, as was discovered many decades ago by some scholars. As is well-known, till around the 1960s, it was assumed that most societies of the “developing” world were comprised of “dual economies”—that is, characterized by the coexistence of a modern, capitalist sector alongside a “traditional” sector that was peopled by petty producers and small traders and was often characterized by low sub-optimal earnings for its workforce. The idea behind calling it the “traditional sector” was to identify it as some sort of remnant of the past that would, in time, slowly get incorporated into the modern sector based on formal rules of contract, especially with respect to the workforce. This would lead to high growth and correspondingly greater employment and higher wages. By the 1960s, this optimism had started wearing thin, especially with regard to these so-called developing countries. As scholars working on the “informal sector” point out, it was in this context of rampant unemployment that the International Labour Organization (ILO) “mounted a series of multi-disciplinary ‘employment missions’ in various developing countries”. The first of these was to Kenya in 1972 (Chen 2003). The findings of the Kenya employment mission were revealing: it found that not only had the “traditional sector” persisted, it had indeed expanded “to include profitable and efficient enterprises as well” (Chen 2003). It was, in fact, the Kenya mission that for this reason abandoned the use of the term “traditional sector” and referred to it as the “informal sector” so as to rid it of descriptions of a teleological nature. The term “informal” had, in fact, been used by economist Keith Hart in 1971, in the context of his studies in urban Ghana and had noted precisely the efficiency and creativity of this sector.

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Orthodoxies, however, have a strangely persistent quality that can remain unshaken even in the face of contrary evidence. And so the economic orthodoxy of the new discipline of “development economics” continued, unfazed, in its belief that with more and more economic development, one day these economies would disappear into the formal capitalist, modern sector. However, not only did they not disappear, with the shift from old Fordist capitalist organization to what David Harvey called “flexible accumulation”, the informal sector actually reappeared even in the very heart of the so-called developed economies. Old formal employment contracts gave way to greater informalization as formal employment shrank and different kinds of new, more informal arrangements came to the fore. The story as it has unfolded since the onset of flexible accumulation or postfordism, has seen the appearance of sweatshops in the heart of the “developed” world and of a workforce more vulnerable than in the earlier days.2 In this context, the recent recession naturally became a cause of major concern. And it was precisely in that context that some economists began to recognize that the so-called underground economies are actually a great buffer that could absorb the shocks of the crisis. Solomon Benjamin calls the sites of such economies “productive slums”, and his work (Benjamin 2005) on the Vishwas Nagar colony of East Delhi shows findings similar to what was discovered by the Kenyan mission. Benjamin underlines that Vishwas Nagar exemplifies a particular kind of network of businesses that constitute “a highly efficient system producing innovative products, generating skills, and extensive employment.” He shows how Vishwas Nagar has transformed within the last fifty years, “from raw land to a bustling industrial neighbourhood”. In 1995, for example, not only did its 2000 firms control 30% of the country’s cable and conductor market in the Light Tension category, it was also a highly productive training ground that attracted skilled workers and entrepreneurs from other cities (Benjamin 2005: 7). Only three of the 2000 odd entrepreneurs had gone to technical colleges—all the others,

2 The question of expansion of the informal sector within the western capitalist

economies represent of course a very different kind of development and much of what we have to say about the so-called informal economies in the ‘third world’ does not apply to them. However, the point they too illustrate is that there is really no inexorable logic of erasure of the informal by the formal and that capital’s own crises continue to produce informalities of different kinds.

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clearly learned their skills on the job. And Vishwas Nagar’s growth has not been dependent on the availability of institutional credit. The entire industry is driven, in a sense, by the capitalization of land (ibid.: 8). However, that is not the point that immediately interests me here. What the Wall Street Journal story highlights is the fact that there are, even today, when capital has apparently all but colonized the whole world, large sectors in most parts of the “third world”, economies that are insulated enough from the vagaries of demand and supply in the global market not to be affected by its caprices. In other words, in some sense, they lie “outside” the global capitalist market. At the very least, we can say that they have tenuous links, if any, to the global capitalist market and that, by and large, their businesses cater to markets that are relatively local/ domestic and have their own structure of demand and supply. I have earlier referred to these as “molecular economies”, including within this rubric, large swathes of the rural/ agricultural economy that are also similarly differentially integrated into the capitalist order.3 I used the term “molecular” in the Gramscian sense to mean that they exist and operate in a “diffused” or scattered state, that they are not necessarily tied into some overall larger logic or overall plan that determines them (Gramsci 1971: 60).4 In this sense, it also ties up with a particular inflection provided by Deleuze and Guattari, whereby the “molecular” is seen as that which escapes the codes of “macropolitics” or macroeconomics. In their rendering, “the molecular, or microeconomics or micropolitics, is defined not by the smallness of its elements but by the nature of its ‘mass’ – the quantum flow…” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 217). “From the point of view of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations…and the overcoding machine” (ibid.: 216). This specific Deleuzian twist to Gramsci’s idea is important from my point of view, for it draws attention to something more than the “diffused” and “scattered” state of these economies—to the dynamism 3 Clearly not all of agriculture (or of the urban informal sector) is relatively autonomous of the global market. Many components of both are deeply integrated and felt the shock of the crisis directly. Here I am referring only to those that are relatively autonomous. This constitutes a huge part of the economy. 4 The context of Gramsci’s use of this term is the establishing of the apparatus of moral and political hegemony, where “the Moderates” acted, often in individual ways, as “private enterprise”, as opposed to operating through a party programme or constituted through a plan worked out in advance (Gramsci 1971: 60).

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that underlies their constant escaping or fleeing from the “overcoding machine” that seeks to arrest them and assign them a specific place in the “structure” that is “capitalism”. The idea of molecular economies runs against well-entrenched orthodoxies—both in mainstream bourgeois economics and in Marxist theorizations. Mainstream economics understands capitalism—which it disingenuously calls a “market economy”—to be the most “rational” system to which all economies—and governments—must aspire. Molecular economies are anathema to economists as we have seen, because they are supposed to be some mythic “remnants” of an undeveloped past, always ever “selling apples to each other” i.e. not creating any wealth, and not paying taxes and violating the law. Typically, such molecular economies emerge in the interstitial spaces of the planned modernist city, violating the segregated “zoning” of Master Plans, often even accessing a range of civic amenities “illegally”. In smaller towns of India these kinds of businesses are in fact, the dominant form. Even though things are slightly different in the agricultural sector, in that they are not illegal, and small peasant production is still molecular. Even the bigger farmers in the more capitalized Green Revolution areas sell in domestic markets (mandis ) to wholesalers (arhatis ), and there is a large degree of informality that marks their market related practices.5 In the vision propagated by mainstream economics, these economies also constitute a serious loss of revenue to the government and are not accountable to it in any form. With the onset of globalization, so the practitioners of this profession argue, the whole world is now one and subject to the same laws of the global market— hence the need for all economies to “grow” rapidly. The vision presented by economists then is one of a simple replication of the economies of Europe and the United States, where agriculture must be replaced by industry, villages by cities and, finally, everything must become a part

5 One of the biggest issues of contention in the epic, year-long struggle of farmers from the Green Revolution belt (November 2020–November 2021), was the issue of retaining these mandis and the question of minimum support price (MSP). Even though the demand of guaranteeing MSP to farmers is directed at the government—and hence within the legal framework—the issue has repeatedly come up because farmers suffer both when there is crop failure as well as when there is a bumper crop (with prices falling). Their commercial integration into the market, notwithstanding, they have longterm relationships with the arhatis or wholesalers who offer them loans or credit to tide over seasonal crises.

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of the formal economy: Every transaction must be recorded, taxed and brought within the state’s legibility. But it is not simply bourgeois economics that thinks in this fashion. Virtually all shades of Marxism have also long argued in the same vein. In fact, as indicated earlier, it is commonplace in Marxism to talk of the “world capitalist economy” and of the “historical inevitability” of capitalism. Marxism has long seen the “capitalist mode of production” as an enclosed totality that is governed by its own “internal logic”, often referred to as the logic of capital. The problem of the so-called traditional sector takes a somewhat different tack in Marxist theorizations. At one level, it was argued that once the world capitalist market is in place, it starts conditioning, if not actually determining, production even at local levels. Every bit of production carried out anywhere in the world becomes subject to the “laws” of the capitalist market. There was a small bit of a problem though, right from Marx’s time: Not all “economies” thus “integrated” into the capitalist market however, changed over to the capitalist mode in their actual organization of production. Often, production carried on in pretty much the same way as it had—without wage labor, and without, therefore, the extraction of surplus value.6 Marx “resolved” this question by positing a distinction between the “formal” and “real” subsumption of labor under capital. Formal subsumption or subordination meant that being incorporated into the capitalist market, labor was in some sense already under capital’s sway. Nonetheless, this could not carry on for long and soon it would have to give way to a capitalist organization of the production process itself, through the universalization of the wage relation as contract between two free parties. That would mean real subsumption or subordination. Another symptom of this same difficulty within Marxism, emerged into view when discussing concrete societies in the “mode of production” framework, for it became clear that most societies exhibited the simultaneous coexistence of different “modes”. Capitalism was often seen to be existing alongside other precapitalist forms and for periods, long enough to suggest that they were not mere “transitional” forms. Thus

6 Some Marxists have, however, argued that the wage-form is not a defining feature of the capitalist mode of production. I will discuss this separately in Chapter 5 but as I will suggest, arguments like those lead “historical materialism” to yet another conundrum—of not being able to say clearly what precisely is it that defines either the feudal or the capitalist mode.

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was produced the concept of “social formation” which would allow for analyzing this impurity, this deviation from the real entity. A social formation was supposed to be an articulation of different modes of production which, in capitalist times, was seen to be necessarily dominated by capitalism. Generations of Marxists have tenaciously held on to this view in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary, while the twin concepts of “formal/ real subsumption” and “social formation” allowed nominal recognition to be bestowed upon the actual heterogeneity of the socialeconomic. This becomes especially evident as the debate breaks out, outside the bounds of the English and Western European experience, most prominently during 1960s and 1970s. From the 1990s onwards, with the collapse of the USSR and the worldwide victory of neoliberalism, there has been a return of the old discourse in a transformed and somewhat symptomatic sense. The conjunction of this neoliberal conjuncture with the new telecommunications revolution revived the sense of capitalism’s continuing vitality in a context where socialism had clearly failed to stand as an alternative. Passages from the Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels had spoken of the bourgeoisie as striving to build a world in its own image and of how it cannot live “without constantly revolutionizing the means of production”, were cited in order to buttress the claim. And for some time at least it really seemed as if the “lack” of capitalist development in the “peripheries” had simply been a consequence of wrongheaded policies of postcolonial states that had relied too much on state bureaucracies and withheld accumulation. Such indeed was the widespread criticism that emerged of the strategy of import-substituting industrialization in contrast to the export-led model that provided countries like South Korea the opportunity to rapidly industrialize.7 It wasn’t only the Marxists of the Old Left who made such claims; even the more recent and contemporary theorizations of philosophers like Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Antonio Negri resonated with them. So, for instance, at a conference held in 2009, on the “Idea of Communism” the entire galaxy of philosophers present reiterated this in different ways. Negri declared with his characteristic flourish that “there is no room for narodniki any more, there is no longer any outside”. There is no longer,

7 See Chibber (2004) for a Marxist version of this argument.

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he claimed, any outside to capitalism and exchange value.8 In Zizek’s rendering, not only is there no outside in economic terms, ultimately all political acts of protest too, only go to strengthen the rule of capital. This same point emerges in his repartee to Evo Morales’ lament that “Mother Earth no longer exists”, when he claims that “the only good thing about capitalism is that Mother Earth no longer exists” (Žižek 2009: 96–97). In other words, not only is the dominion of capital now all pervasive, it is also desirable insofar as it eliminates all other economies that are not based on the “dictatorship of exchange value” and which have in some form resisted being incorporated to the logic of accumulation. The most striking rebuttals to such theorizations by Western Marxists however, come from struggles in what were once called the peripheries of world capitalism. Hardly had the neoliberal celebrations begun, when the Zapatista rebellion of indigenous people in the Chiapas mountains of Mexico took place, in 1994. This was followed by the formation in 1998 of the Movement Towards Socialism in Bolivia as a largely indigenous people-based movement. The year 2000 saw the violent “water wars” in Cochabamba (Bolivia) and had very recently been preceded by the violent explosion in the heart of the first world itself, at the time of the World Trade Organization ministerial conference in Seattle, towards the end of 1999. None of these struggles occurred in places where the “dictatorship of exchange value” had been established; rather these movements precisely opposed the imposition of the capital/knowledge logic on their lives. The frenetic pursuit of the neoliberal dream of a 10% growth rate acquired unsettling proportions in India as well, as the last century came to a close. Rapid growth required rapid industrialization and the opening out of the country’s resources for maximal exploitation by private corporations. And this, characteristically, called for the dispossession of large sections of the rural population. Land and forests had to be cleared of its inhabitants. And this was where the most militant struggles of recent times came to the fore virtually forcing the government to retreat. The turning point, in this respect, was the twin struggles of the peasants of Singur and Nandigram in the Marxist ruled state of West Bengal in 2006– 2007. Not only did the struggles eventually bring the curtain down on

8 The papers of this conference have since appeared in a volume. See Žižek and Douzinas (2010).

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the 34 year long rule of the Left Front government in the state, they also forced the Central government to step back and enact a fresh law in place of the old colonial law that had till then governed land acquisition.9 No sooner had the now emblematic struggles of Singur and Nandigram forced a public debate on the matter, than the familiar story of the “standard experience” of industrialization was narrated by media commentators and even reputed non-neoliberal economists like Amartya Sen (Sen 2007a, b). It turned out that this “standard experience” always referred to the English case of the “enclosures” of the commons.10 If mainstream economists and media commentators called it the “standard experience” of industrialization, Leftist critics—both economists and political theorists—cast their story in terms of the fable of “primitive accumulation” (Sanyal 2007; Chatterjee 2008; Samaddar 2009). For, everyone agreed upon one thing: though capitalism entails mass dispossession, it is a historical process that is at some level unavoidable. Some of them like Sanyal and Chatterjee offered a way of thinking about the problem somewhat differently but neither questioned the teleological story of capital’s inevitability. On the ground, however, what was undeniable was the fact that major resistances were jeopardizing the very neoliberal project of “building a world in its own image” and of “constantly revolutionizing the means of production”. Given this, in this chapter, I look afresh at the entity called “capitalism” and examine the claim made on its behalf, that it has established its sway over the entire world. In the following section, drawing on some recent scholarship, I claim that what we know as “capitalism” was produced through a series of bodies of knowledge and practices, mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—though some practices go back a couple of centuries earlier (Gibson-Graham 2006; Perelman 2000; Mitchell 2005; Arblaster 1984; Foucault 1994; Poovey 1998; Tigar and Levy 2005; Duchrow and Hinkelammert 2004). Once produced, this knowledge has determined the ways in which social agents—from policymakers in government to opponents in radical political movements—act

9 The new law, known as the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013 eventually replaced the Land Acquisition Act 1894 insofar as provisions of consent, relief, rehabilitation and transparency of process were concerned. 10 I have dealt with this argument at length in one of my books (Nigam 2011).

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in relation to it. “Capitalism” becomes a sign of being modern thanks to the hegemony established by the capital/knowledge complex. In the section that follows the next, I engage with some recent theoretical interventions by Indian scholars on the question of capitalism and its “outside”. I should also underline a methodological point here. Rather than read this debate as a discussion of a specific, Indian case, in the manner of earlier debates, I read it as another moment in the history of capital where the problem of “transition” has dogged it. In other words, as will become clear, it is not that capitalism was formed fully and given to us in the postcolonial world in that form, though a certain norm was already in place that postcolonial societies were to pursue. I read this Indian debate as a part of a longer history where the norm itself (Marx’s “classic form”) becomes open to question. Finally, I conclude with a brief reflection on alternative ways of looking at capitalism today.

Performing “Capitalism” I saw men on television (trade union stars, Cabinet Ministers, left-wing think tank advisers) visibly hystericized by talking economics: eyes would glaze, shoulders hunch, lips tremble in a sensual paroxysm of ‘letting the market decide’, ‘making the hard decisions’, ‘levelling the playing field’, ‘reforming management practices’, improving productivity’…those who queried the wisdom of floating exchange rates, deregulating the banks, or phasing industry protection were less ignored than washed away in the intoxicating rush of ‘living in a competitive world’ and ‘joining the global economy’. (Meaghan Morris cited in Gibson-Graham 2006: 92)

The state of affairs described by Meaghan Morris above with respect to the way people [men, in particular] behaved when discussing the economy (at least in the heyday of neoliberalism), could well be located in any part of the world—though she herself is talking about Australia. Such is the global sweep and power of “the economy” [read “capital”] today. But this was not always so. Capital/ism never seemed so natural till very, very recently and as I will try to show, it still does not—for behind the veneer of the bravado of “taking hard decisions” lie unresolved anxieties. But before I proceed, let us also note that in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the discipline of political economy was still incubating and “capital” as such was still awaiting its theorist in the person

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of Karl Marx, all that existed were certain practices, dispositions and institutions. Some had a name and some still did not: Taxation, buying and spending, selling and making profit, saving, investing and institutions like markets, even banks and stock exchanges, practices of accounting and book-keeping, practices of entrepreneurship and trade. Many of these have existed for centuries—if not millennia. Some are relatively more recent but not quite. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “capital” too existed but when and how it became capitalism is another question. The term “capital”—designating money, stocks of funds and stocks of merchandise—was first used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. According to Braudel, by 1283 it was used in the sense of capital assets of a trading firm and was used interchangeably with wealth, property, money, funds, goods and property. The term “capitalist” began to be used sometime in the seventeenth century and right up to the nineteenth century, it referred simply to the owner of capital—not to an economic system. In its specific sense of a system, a mode of production, the term can be said to have been first deployed by Marx. But did Marx really simply name the beast? Did political economy also merely discover the virtues of the market and accumulation? In pronouncing “market economy” as the most “rational system” based on the inherent rationality of “economic agents” (consumers, investors, entrepreneurs—never laborers), it had to also produce these creatures. It was not enough for people who also invested, accumulated or consumed to be there; these practices had to be instituted as the norm, as so many recent studies show. This was done by appealing to the state and intervening through the mechanisms of power as we shall see below. Similarly, for Marx to identify the capitalist mode of production, it was not enough to simply give it a name. He had to define and describe it, outline its characteristics and single out what distinguished it from other modes. In so doing, Marx produced a historical account of the capitalist mode that reduced all other forms of exchange, trade, entrepreneurship and market to the prehistory of capitalism. Even while providing a blistering critique of political economy, he was constrained to partly incorporate its self-presentation of Progress and rationality, inhabiting as he did the larger epistemic world of modernity. It needs to be underlined that for the discourse of political economy to emerge and establish itself, there had to be a prior discourse of Reason. There had to be this prior separation of “Reason” from the “irrational”—which was always seen as an attribute of the backward and the

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savage/barbarian. As has been pointed out, these were precisely the terms in which early classical political economists equated the working class with “savages” and faulted both “for an inadequate effective desire for accumulation” (Perelman 2000: 124–125)—and we can see how Nancy Birdsall’s statement about “selling apples to each other” is lodged within this notion. For political economy to institute something like “the economy”, two institutions—bourgeois private property and the legal instrument of the contract—had to be already in place (Duchrow and Hinkelammert 2004: 33). And we know that the first articulations of the bourgeois property form and its strident defense go back to Locke—where possession of property had already become the mark of civilization (Duchrow and Hinkelammert: 46; Arblaster 1984: 173; Perelman 2000: 124). In other words, the self-understanding of political economy (and capital) was predicated upon the larger shift in the understanding of historical Time and concomitant ideas of Progress (Koselleck 1985). Situated as Marxism was in this larger shift, for Marx (and Marxism) to name the capitalist mode of production was, therefore, also to pronounce it as the common destiny of humanity before its final supersession. It is hardly surprising then, that it bestowed upon capitalism the agency for ushering “barbaric” societies into the orbit of modernity and “civilization”. Marxism’s own understanding took the idea of progress to unprecedented levels, where the idea of “World-History”, seen as a Totality governed by its own internal rationality, meant that “capitalism” itself had to be seen as a moment in its unfolding in Hegelian fashion. How else could communism and socialism be pronounced as immanent in History’s logic? An interesting counterfactual therefore might be to ask, what would our understanding of the economy or of capital have been, had these different bodies of knowledge not existed? Possibly we would have seen “capital” merely as one of the new entrants in the open field where people bought and sold and where they produced. That field could not have been anything like a closed “structure” or a “totality”, imbued with its own internal dynamic. Hegel had to have already arrived for Marx to infer that it was through the play of contradictions within the totality that Progress took place, that nothing could ever remain outside the everexpanding realm of capitalism, just as the Geist always unfolded in History by incorporating the anti-thesis into a new synthesis. I will, therefore, turn the question of the burden of proof on those who claim that such a thing as “capitalism” exists as an enclosed totality with its own internal

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logic. This means that henceforth, I shall only refer to capital operating within an open field of “the economy” which itself, as we proceed, will be problematized. We know today from the work of a number of scholars that “capitalism” was produced over a period of a couple of centuries through entire new bodies of knowledge and practices, among which the discipline of political economy (subsequently “economics”) is undoubtedly the foremost. We can also put this a little differently, drawing on Timothy Mitchell’s fascinating work: We can say, for instance, that the moment of production of the knowledge of capital and economy is not a separate moment for this act is itself performative in insofar as it performs— that is, reorganizes and reconstitutes —the domain that we now know as “economy” and the entity that we now call “capital” (Mitchell 2002, 2005). The discussion that follows will be organized around three key practices that are supposed to be critical to Capital’s being, namely, labor, consumption and accumulation. As a result of what the disciplinary discourse of economics does namely, the reorganization of society with “the economy” at its center, these activities have begun to seem almost natural. The claims that the most primal instincts of human beings are consumption and acquisition, possession and accumulation—have all acquired the status of natural “facts”. With respect to labor the question is somewhat different. No economist will argue that like consumption or accumulation, laboring too is a natural instinct and that all human beings should therefore find their fulfillment in laboring. This is a claim made by many Marxists though. What economists do is assume labor to be a disembodied “factor of production” like land and capital that merely has to be released from agriculture and put to more productive uses. I will argue that all these activities are organized with the active intervention of the state and a range of other institutions and that there is considerable anxiety around each of them, as large sections of people seem not to want to behave in ways expected of them by economists and modernizing state elites. Labor At one level, this is the simplest point to demonstrate. After all, struggles of labor against mechanisms of labor discipline and control dot the entire history of capital. From the early studies by British historians, especially

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EP Thompson’s landmark work in “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” (Thompson 1993) we know how, right from the beginning of the eighteenth century, vigorous attempts were made to inculcate a new work discipline among the workers. Marx’s own discussion of the way agricultural populations were “suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life” and were hurled into urban labor markets tells the story of the violence integral to the production of new industrial workforce. Talking of how they were transformed “en masse into beggars, robbers and vagabonds” mostly under the stress of circumstances, Marx details how legislation after legislation, from the end of the fifteenth century onwards, provided for the harshest punishment of such “vagabonds” and “work shirkers”. Laws that provided that “sturdy vagabonds” be whipped and imprisoned, that “they be tied to the cart-tail and whipped till blood streamed from their bodies” were enacted as early as in 1530 (Marx, n.d.: 686). Or, a legislation that allowed anyone [clearly a property owner] to take a worker who “shirks work” as his slave and treat him thus, forcing him to work with whip and chains and feed him bread, water and refuse meat or whatever the “owner” deems fit, was enacted in 1547 (ibid.: 687). “Confinement”, says Michel Foucault, “that massive phenomenon, the signs of which are found all across eighteenth century Europe, is a ‘police’ matter. Police, in the precise sense that the classical epoch gave to it – that is, the totality of measures which make work possible and necessary for those who could not live without it…” (Foucault 1973: 46). Speaking of the first moments of the “Great Confinement” and the edict that led to the establishment of the Hôpital Général, Foucault underlines that from its very inception, “the institution set itself the task of preventing ‘mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders’.” He goes on to tell us: “In 1532, the Parlement of Paris decided to arrest beggars and force them to work in the sewers of the city, chained in pairs” (ibid.: 47). All this is quite well known. What is probably not that well known is how deeply political economy (and its precursor moral philosophy) was implicated in this violence. Michael Perelman documents the deep imbrication of political economy in this process. He cites Francis Hutcheson’s musings from his System of Moral Philosophy, to the effect that “If a people have not acquired an habit of industry, the cheapness of all the necessities of life increases sloth…Sloth should be punished by temporary servitude at least ” (Perelman 2000: 16). This preoccupation with inculcating work discipline among the poor seems to actually have been obsessive,

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so much so that we see Jeremy Bentham in his tract, significantly entitled Pauper Management Improved, advocate an entire new apparatus that would have absolute authority over the “whole body of burdensome poor”. Modeled on the East India Company, this outfit called the National Charity Company, was to be a joint stock company with 250 industry houses accommodating half a million people to start with, and to double its size in due course. His plan for its inmates—including subsequent generations who would be born there—was of “improvement”, through provision of cheap labor for industry: “So many industry-houses, so many crucibles, in which dross of this kind [the poor] is converted into sterling” (cited in Perelman 2000: 21). Perelman cites Bentham bragging about this new institution, to the effect that no other manufacturer can have the kind of hold over his workmen that “his manufacturer”, can have; after all, his manufacturer could reduce his workmen to a situation “next to starving” if they were idle, and they would have nowhere to go, no option but to fall in line. He cites from Gertrude Himmelfarb’s important study The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, to the effect that Bentham also recommended that children be put to work at four instead of fourteen, so that they could more usefully spend those “ten precious years”. Else, those would simply be “ten precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual” (ibid.: 22). From Perelman’s account it is also evident that not only was this the general attitude of most early economists to labor, they were all also equally vehemently opposed to all traditional forms of livelihood or any practice of self-provisioning. Thus William Petty, one of the founding fathers of political economy, was deeply invested in what he identified as the new division of labor. An advocate of greater efficiency, he even dreamt of the day when “even hogs and more indocile beasts shall be taught to labor; when all vile material shall be put to noble use”. As is the case in many other parts of the world, as we shall see in our discussion below, ordinary people were largely involved in household production which they did not want to leave easily. But for Petty, it was not a matter of individual choice—he expected the government to create the new division of labor by transferring workers out of agriculture and household production. His advice to the Law was that it “should allow the Labourer just the wherewithal to live; for if you allow double, he works but half so much as he could have done…” And to that end grain should be kept in short supply, stacked away in granaries rather than allow it to be

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“abused by the vile and brutish part of mankind” (Perelman 2000: 127– 28). Francois Quesnay, the leading figure of the Physiocrats, echoed the very same sentiments when he said: “It is very harmful to allow people to get used to buying Corn at too low a price. As a result they become less hardworking…” (cited in ibid.: 134). It is necessary, at this point, to bring in a part of the story of the formation of the modern proletariat that feminist scholars have been at pains to point out and that Silvia Federici’s now classic Caliban and the Witch (2014) elaborates with a wealth of material. This is the close connection that the infamous genocide, known as the witch hunts in Europe, bears to the formation of “labor” for capitalist enterprises. Federici, herself a feminist Marxist, returns to the debate as well as the history of the “transition to capitalism” and points out that Marxist historians “with very few exceptions, have consigned the witch-hunt to oblivion, as if it were irrelevant to the history of class struggle” (Federici 2014: 164). At least to them, she argues, it should have seemed significant “that the witchhunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization of the New World, the English enclosures, the beginning of slave trade, the enactment of ‘bloody laws’ against vagabonds and beggars, and it climaxed in that interregnum between the end of feudalism and the capitalist ‘take off’ when the peasantry in Europe reached the peak of its power but, in time, also consummated its historic defeat” (Federici 2014: 164–165) Federici goes on to argue that The witch-hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline, thus redefining the main elements of social reproduction. In this sense, like the contemporary attack on ‘popular culture’, and the ‘Great Confinement’ of paupers and vagabonds in work-houses and correction houses, the witch-hunt was an essential aspect of primitive accumulation and the ‘transition’ to capitalism. (Federici 2014: 165)

What is more, Federici is also at pains “to stress, contrary to the view propagated by the Enlightenment”, that “the witch-hunt was not the last spark of a dying feudal world”. “It is well established”, she argues, “that the ‘superstitious’ Middle Ages did not persecute any witches” and that the very concept of “witchcraft” did not take shape till the late Middle Ages; that never in the “Dark Ages” were there mass trials and executions,

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“despite the fact that magic permeated daily life and, since the late Roman Empire, it had been feared by the ruling class as a tool of insubordination among the slaves” (ibid.: 165). Regardless of whether one subscribes to Federici’s idea that the witch hunt was “an essential aspect of primitive accumulation”, it is clear from her account that it was closely tied to that process, just as “primitive accumulation” itself was no essential historical process but a plain instance of dispossession of agrarian and artisanal communities. What is important in her account is that there is a historical conjunction that is evident here, between the new knowledge formations (in this case, Reason) that identify “superstition”, “magic” and “witch-craft” as evils to be uprooted. That it ties up neatly with the requirements of an emergent mode of power that seeks to discipline labor for the sake of “industry”, and “moral and intellectual improvement” as Bentham put it in the quote cited earlier, is quite clear. Notice that all these arguments about moral and intellectual improvement emerge from the Enlightenment, not from the requirements of an emergent bourgeoisie. In a sense, philosophy and political theory did the groundwork for the transformation of the peasant/artisan to industrial worker and of common property to private property, and the capital/knowledge complex was already in the process of emerging. The Lockean tradition that was crucial for the institution of bourgeois private property, was in many ways, entirely of a piece with the basic assumptions of the early political economists. Thus, as Anthony Arblaster points out, Locke equated common property with neglect through an ingenuous argument: “God gave the World to Men in Common; but…it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and the Rational ” (cited in Arblaster 1984: 163). It is interesting and well known that though Locke relates the right of property to labor (the Industrious) his notion of labor is, from our present perspective, utterly convoluted: “Thus the Grass that my horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digg’d in any place where I have a right to them in common with others, become my Property, without the assignation or consent of anybody.” In another world, this would count as robbery—that I simply seized what was common property by having my horse graze on that land, but in Locke’s hands it is exalted political philosophy! Arblaster rightly points out that Locke simply assumes “naturally and without feeling any need to argue the point, that a servant does not own the fruits of his or her labor” (ibid.: 164).

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Arblaster also suggests “that the speed with which the process of enclosures went ahead after about 1760 reflects not only the power of property, but also the growing ascendancy of a new kind of economic rationality. It was economic in a very pure sense, in that it was only economic gains and losses that were taken into account…” (ibid.: 171–72, emphasis added). Already by the closing decades of the seventeenth century then, the economic was emerging as the fundamental ground of the social but put in place through the capital/knowledge complex. This was the basis of the self-presentation of capital and bourgeois private property and it was precisely this that Marxism accepted in toto. It was this that sanctioned the disciplining of labor for the noble purpose of industry and through it, of society at large. It is true that things changed—subsequent political economists were not as ruthless and violent in their denunciation of and unconcern for the “vile and brutish part of mankind”, but their concern with labor discipline and productivity remained. The moral proscription and tirade against “idleness” and “sloth” continued and was often, even accelerated—as was the case after the revolutions of 1848 (Rabinach 1990: 32). This moral proscription of idleness was also part of a long Christian tradition and so pervasive was its influence that even many early socialists like Fourier, St. Simon and Proudhon sang paeans to work (Rabinach: 35). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, things began to change. Newer concerns like “fatigue” and the limits of the body, its refusal to bend to the demands of industrial society, came to the fore. Newer scientific disciplines like physics, physiology, psychology, ergonomics, hygiene and the “science of work” emerged that would take hold of the human body.11 However, that is another story. Consumption If this was the history of the early years, later capital was to be seized with the very opposite anxiety—that of consumption. How to make workers consumers of the industrial commodities they produced? More recent scholarship has demonstrated that not only was “labor” produced through elaborate mechanisms of power, the consumer too was not simply waiting to buy washing machines and cars. Elaborate mechanisms 11 For a detailed discussion see Rabinach (1990) which traces the fascinating development of this new complex of disciplines in the changed context.

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had to be put in place to bring forth the consumer—and much anxiety still surrounds the precariousness of this mode of being. The exponential expansion of the advertising industry, alongside the rise of what Guy Debord called the “society of the Spectacle” and what Baudrillard called the simulacrum and the hyperreal (the media, advertising, simulated shopping centers practically dissolving the distinction of the real and representation), the lure of credit, the constant beckoning to the individual to become consumer—all point to the same anxieties. An interesting expression of such anxieties came in the context of a debate sparked off by the austerity measures introduced by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in India in 2009, in the wake of the recession in the global economy. These measures, quite mild in themselves, and quite farcical at one level, entailed some shortlived curtailment of expenditure by officials and elected representatives. Sections of the corporate media, that saw themselves as active campaigners for probity in public life, however, went into a tizzy this time. So for instance, the newspaper The Indian Express, said in an agitated editorial comment: “the concern is that now a nominally reformist party and government are trapped into a spiral of moral ‘correctness’ that is rapidly taking on anti-aspiration, anti- ‘rich’ overtones” ’12 The fear was not about certain party leaders wanting to live simply; it was that in some indirect way, “austerity” and “simplicity” were being exalted. In other words, this step was sending out a message that could potentially discourage consumption. We could ask, if some people want to live in luxury, it is their prerogative, but why all this anxiety about others who want to live in simplicity? The answer is that were this to happen and more and more people were to start enjoying a simple life, the “economy” would be in crisis. For some people to live their consumptionist lives, the myth of the naturally consuming and self-maximizing individual must be maintained and actualized. In fact, the entire history of modern capitalism is shot through with this anxiety—of producing the consumer. All through the twentieth century, attempts have gone on to ensure that people, especially workers, consume in a “rational” way. In the early years of the last century, Henry Ford even had to send groups of social workers to “educate” his workers

12 “Holy Cows”, editorial comment, Indian Express, September 16, 2009.

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on how to spend “rationally” and not squander their wages on useless expenditure (Harvey 1990: 126). But perhaps the most significant of all is the constant fear of “recession” or “depression” that modern capitalist economies live under. As is evident from Paul Krugman’s argument (Krugman 2009), the fear of depression has haunted the economists even when they thought they had exorcized its ghost. All through the 1990s and early 2000s, economists and policy-makers lived under the belief that depression or even a milder recession is now a thing of the past. Krugman mentions the Nobel Laureate Chicago economist Robert Lucas in particular, whose 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association he cites. In this speech, Lucas, after explaining that macroeconomics was born out of the response to the Great Depression, confidently claimed that “the central problem of depression-prevention has been solved for all practical purposes” (Krugman 2009: 9). Lucas was not alone in believing this, even as the worst-ever recession since the Great Depression was preparing to burst upon the US economy. He and other leading economists, confident as always, believed that the “business cycle had been tamed”, at the very least. And what else is a depression or recession but a crisis of consumption, of demand? There is abundance of supply and no demand. And one of the great insights of Krugman’s book is that none of the standard macroeconomic prescriptions of cutting interest rates or increasing budget deficits were resorted to when the Asian financial crisis hit the scene. The policy measures dictated by the IMF and the US Treasury did just the opposite of what macroeconomic wisdom suggested. And the reason for this was “fear of speculation”, of increasing panic which could intensify the crisis further. This of course has to do with demand and supply in capital and currency markets and do not concern us directly, though we should note that ultimately it is not “economic laws” but simply insecurities generated out of an extremely volatile system that leads to speculation and panic. The point really is that “economies” (that is, economists and policy-makers) must always keep working overtime to ensure that there is no “effective demand” collapse, and that consumers keep spending. As Krugman remarks, the Great Depression ultimately only ended because “World War II gave the jump start Keynes had been urging for” (ibid.: 102) through that massive government spending exercise that boosted effective demand.

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A very significant recent analysis in this respect has come from Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor in the US government. Writing in the New York Times, he underlined that the most significant reason preventing recovery of the American economy is the decline in consumption.13 The problem, says Reich, has to do with the “structure of the economy, not the business cycle.” Further: “No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.” People managed to spend nevertheless, says Reich, because of two reasons, as far as the US economy is concerned. First, more and more women had entered the workforce and many families had two incomes at their disposal. Second, especially in the last couple of decades, people put in more hours of work. And then of course, they had their savings to dip into. Finally, when they were through with their savings, people resorted to credit. Sinking ever deeper into debt, they managed to keep spending but this bubble had to burst—and it did. And now, with the experience of the crash, US citizens (whose personal savings rate had reached zero levels in the pre-crisis years) were already saving to the tune of 6.4% despite stagnant income growth.14 This return to savings cannot but be at the cost of cutting current consumption. A lot of governmental and private corporate effort always has to go in to making people spend, and the signs now are that these may not be working half as effectively as they had in the past. Accumulation In The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto opens his discussion with a poser from Fernand Braudel’s magisterial three-volume study of capitalism. Braudel contends in his study that “capitalism has been potentially visible since the dawn of history, and that it has developed and perpetuated itself down the ages…” Even though he concedes that the 13 Robert Reich, “An Equal Recovery – Ending the Recession Requires Spreading the Wealth”, reprinted in the Indian Express, 4 September 2010. 14 This figure has only increased since, going up to 7 and 8 percent, not counting the abnormal COVID-19 years.

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“Industrial Revolution” wrought a “formidable transformation” in the West, he nevertheless claims that “capitalism remained essentially true to itself ”. This incidentally is one of the ways in which marxists and other scholars have been led to see capital/ism as immanent in human societies. Braudel’s problem clearly arises from his inability to distinguish between entrepreneurship, commerce and trade on the one hand and “capitalism”, on the other. Hence his puzzle that de Soto cites at the beginning of his study: The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist, should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut-off from the rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society?

Hernando de Soto comes very close to answering Braudel’s question, when he suggests, rightly, that entrepreneurship and commerce do not by themselves constitute capitalism. So for example, he starts by underlining that, The cities of the Third world and the former communist countries are teeming with entrepreneurs. You cannot walk through a Middle Eastern market, hike up to a Latin American village or climb into a taxi in Moscow without someone trying to strike a deal with you. The inhabitants of these countries possess talent, enthusiasm and an astonishing ability to wring a profit out of practically nothing. They can grasp and use modern technology. Otherwise, American businesses would not be struggling to control the unauthorized use of their patents abroad…Markets are an ancient and universal tradition… (de Soto 2001: 4)

This incidentally is the direction in which many of the studies of the “informal sector” referred to earlier point. They reveal a huge amount of creativity and talent, entrepreneurship and drive that is evident in these economies. It is also worth reiterating at this point that markets, exchange and entrepreneurship—and therefore profit in some form—have long been tied to creativity of various kinds and to reduce all such transactions to “capitalism” is to completely misrecognize the beast. In that sense, de Soto actually puts his finger on something crucial: contrary to what Nancy Birdsall of the Centre for Global Development believes, people in most of the world are not simply selling apples to each other, they are creating huge amounts of wealth. Yet, this is not, cannot be called accumulation of

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capital. You can actually create wealth, even huge amounts of it, without accumulation. There are two senses in which we need to distinguish accumulation here from other kinds of wealth creation and profit-making: (1) the sense in which Marx spoke of it as expanded reproduction where the surplus generated is plowed back into production on an ever increasing scale. Clearly, it is possible to make profit and yet put back only a bare minimum into production (expansion, technological upgradation, diversification or depreciation)—using the rest for other purposes. (2) the sense in which de Soto talks of it (though he does not use this term), as something that can only accrue to a particular form of property—the juridical bourgeois property form. To pursue the point further, we should follow de Soto’s argument a little more. He argues on the basis of data collected by him and his research team (“block by block, farm by farm in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America” as he tells us): …(t)hat most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. Even in the poorest countries, the poor save. The value of the savings of the poor is, in fact, immense: forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that the poor have accumulated is worth fiftyfive times as much as the sum total of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. (de Soto 2001: 6)

But all this is, in de Soto’s view dead capital. For, it never enters the capital market, strictly speaking. “Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, and cannot be used as collateral for a loan and cannot be used as a share against an investment”, he says (ibid.: 6). Imagine, de Soto says, if all this wealth, which the poor have saved for tougher times, were to enter the capital markets, how much more capital and wealth it could generate! Very disingenuously though, he suggests, that if this were to enter the markets, it will be to the benefit of the poor who have amassed this wealth. Anybody familiar with how middle class savings have been played in capital markets and entire life-savings of ordinary people wiped out overnight during the repeated crises in the history of capital, would know that this is hardly the case. And yet,

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there is a point here. Much property in these parts of the world is still not bourgeois property in the juridical sense, since it has no legal existence. However, it is not simply a matter of “documenting” property and representing it in titles and deeds, as de Soto seems to suggest. The transformation to bourgeois private property involves—and has always involved—a violent decimation of all forms of common property and even non-capitalist private property. This is evident if we look at the story of land acquisition in contemporary India. It is not only tribal-inhabited land where no clear “rights” exist except for the fact that these communities have lived there for centuries that are under threat but also land of the landholding peasantry which has clear-cut titles (pattas ) that is sought to be decimated. Things are a bit different when it comes to urban property, where the sphere of the so-called illegal is widespread. The effort of the state is to bring all of this into the domain of its legibility. The poor who come to cities in search of livelihoods come most often without any assets and have to initially make do by squatting on government land in some unauthorized settlement. From that initial “illegality” to various aspects of daily life—hawking, vending and pulling a cycle-rickshaw—everything involves being caught up more and more in a web of illegal existence. Whether the De Sotovian attempts at titling and documenting property here are likely to be less violent is not clear. On the contrary, it is almost certain that it will lead to mass expulsion of the poor from cities—as has been evident in Indian cities over the past years. As contests over urban space become acute, there is increasingly less and less land left for settlements of the poor who have been thrown to the outskirts of cities like Delhi. What titling and documenting will do in this situation is not beyond the realm of imagination, in a context where many people have access to and use the same patches of urban public land. However, that is not within the purview of our discussion here. What I do want to underline however, is that what people do in routinely engaging in entrepreneurial activities, in production and commerce, is not accumulation and that accumulation is not a “natural” activity. Accumulation comes into being with the rise of capital and can only continue as long as only a few partake of it and when certain conditions are met. These conditions include, first and foremost, as Marx pointed out, a component of unpaid labor through which economic surplus is produced. Secondly, it also includes, as we are increasingly becoming aware, of the availability of cheap raw materials—that is to say, once

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the range of disciplinary knowledges discussed above, have instituted the economic as the ground of the social—in a world that is already defined anthropomorphically. Humans are the center of the universe and their economic activities determine everything else. “Ecology” becomes, in this understanding, merely a sub-set of the economy where it simply exists to provide “natural resources” as raw material for accumulation. Accumulation arises, thus, at the point at which “the economy” acquires a reified existence, when people no longer produce for themselves but to keep the economy going.

Democracy as the “Outside” In a series of articles published over two decades ago, Sudipta Kaviraj (1995, 1996) began an important argument theorizing the “dilemmas of democratic development” in postcolonial societies. Spelt out later as a “revisionist theory of modernity”, Kaviraj underlined once again the idea of “sequentiality” that is central to his argument. Put briefly, Kaviraj argued that modernity should be seen as a constellation of a number of different processes—individuation, industrialization, capitalism (and the disciplining of the new, uprooted communities to provide for industrial labor) and democracy. He argued that the precise sequence in which these processes took shape would vary in different societies and historical contexts and would lead, in the event, not to one single thing called “modernity”—invariable across time and space—but to a range of different constellations of modernity. The very fact that there are different historical sequences would inevitably affect the ways in which “modernity” would take shape in these different contexts and different societies. So, for example, he suggested that unlike in the West, democracy in postcolonial societies preceded rather than followed the processes of both individuation and industrial capitalism, producing thus, an entirely different constellation of modernity.15 It could not but affect the character of both democracy and capitalism in these societies. If we wish to undertake the task of mapping the genealogy of postcolonial modernities, then, we could say, extending Kaviraj’s argument, we need to take a closer look at the specificities of these different constellations. This argument 15 To be sure, the processes of both individuation and industrialization had begun but they still constituted an almost insignificant part of the experience of modernity in colonial times.

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then gives a more concrete meaning to the idea of “alternative modernities” that would seem to embody different ways in which democracy and capitalism, for instance, would be related to each other. Crucial to Kaviraj’s argument outlined above is the fact that precisely because Western modernity followed the sequence it did, it could produce both a “disciplined” labor force as well as a body of autonomous, selfdetermining individuals so crucial to the production of the “citizen”, before the onset of democracy. In an important sense, the shape that Western democracies eventually took could be attributed at least partially to this fact. In fact, Kaviraj goes on to suggest that it is possible to argue that it was the demand for democracy, created by the struggles of the working classes and women—for universal suffrage—that went a long way in shaping the contours of Western democracies in the twentieth century. The fact that both democracy and a liberal discourse of rights appear in the postcolony, prior to capitalist industrialization and “individuation” but alongside an emergent anticolonial nationalism, has far-reaching consequences for both, the nature of its democracy and its capitalist development. In India, at least, it is a matter of some significance that electoral-democratic institutions and the democratic ideal, if not democracy as such, became available during colonial rule itself. As such, we have the existence of trade unions and a labor movement from the very early years of capitalism in India. The capacity of Indian capitalism to produce a disciplined working class was therefore extremely limited from the start. Equally importantly, as the instances of recent struggles show, its capacity to ruthlessly tear apart the traditional agricultural communities from their land and throw them into an urban labor market are, likewise, very limited. Despite two centuries of colonial rule and over a century of laws like the Land Acquisition Act (1894), India in the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century remains largely an agricultural country. In other words, if we were to follow Kaviraj, this different sequence also had an impact on the very nature of India’s (and much of the postcolonial world’s) capitalism. The nature of capitalist development in the postcolony (or postcolonial capitalism) has been recently explored by Kalyan Sanyal (2007). Sanyal deploys the idea of “governmentality” as his key term and develops his argument in a critical conversation with Partha Chatterjee’s work. A whole range of writings of the 1970s and 1980s including the early Marxist writings of Kaviraj and Chatterjee, had argued, taking the cue

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from Antonio Gramsci, that the “passive revolution is…the general framework of capitalist transition in societies where bourgeois hegemony has not been established in the classical way” (Chatterjee 1994: 212). They had acknowledged that the trajectory of postcolonial capitalist development would be vastly different from that of capitalism in the “advanced” industrial societies but this would be largely because capitalism was relatively weak in these parts of the world. The historicist narrative of transition undergirded the understanding of these theorists who nevertheless understood capitalism to be the eventual destiny of the whole world. One day capitalism would finally supersede pre-capitalist forms and proper development would begin. Sanyal challenges this understanding by insisting on a framework that “rules out the possibility of capital superseding pre-capital” (Sanyal 2007: 39). He accepts Marx’s understanding of “primitive accumulation” as the inevitable precondition for capitalist development but suggests that the specificity of postcolonial capitalism lies in the role played by governmental interventions in “reversing the effects of primitive accumulation” (ibid.: 60). At one level, Sanyal’s argument is in fact more radical. He claims that the very logic of postcolonial capitalism is such that it continuously reproduces “non-capital”, a reverse process (to primitive accumulation) that he calls ‘de-capitalization’. His argument is that while primitive accumulation necessarily leads to the dispossession of the vast mass of the population from their means of labor, the context of postcolonial capitalism is such that this uprooted population cannot be absorbed within the domain of capitalist production. Their lives as producers have been destroyed by the expansion of capitalism but “the doors of the world of capital remain forever closed” for them (ibid.: 53). It is this section of the population—the wasteland of capitalism’s rejects as he puts it—that for sheer survival must be “reunited with the means of production to engage in non-capitalist production” (ibid.: 59). It is here, Sanyal argues, that the “discourse of development ” steps in: “The result is a need-based economy in which the dispossessed are rehabilitated in non-capitalist production activities…made possible by interventions brought about by the discourse of development” (ibid.: 59). This discourse, combined with the logic of governmentality, continuously reverses the effects of primitive accumulation. Despite its fascinating conceptual innovations, there is one problem with Sanyal’s understanding of “postcolonial capitalism”: In his rendering both, the logic of governmentality and the discourse of development, are in some sense internal

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to capitalism itself. Even if they are not seen as an essential, constitutive part of it, they certainly appear as functionally internal to it. Such an understanding would reduce all the different kinds of micro-political interventions by social movements as well, to simply so many manifestations of “governmentality” which might itself seem like an extension of the logic of postcolonial capital.16 In an important essay, Partha Chatterjee (Chatterjee 2008) drew on Sanyal’s work in order to move away from the pervasive “transition narrative” that sees peasant societies under capitalism as always in the process of moving from feudalism to capitalism and paraphrases him approvingly on this point: The transition narrative does not work because of certain “transformations in the last two decades in the globally dispersed understanding about the minimum functions as well as available technologies of government” (Chatterjee 2008: 55). Further: “There is a growing sense now that certain basic conditions of life must be provided to people everywhere and that if national or local governments do not provide them, someone else must, whether it is other states or international agencies or non-governmental organizations” (ibid.: 55). Thus, even though Chatterjee steers clear of any attempt to establish any structural or necessary connection between primitive accumulation and the reversal of its effects, he too finds the “globally dispersed understandings” about the “functions and technologies of government” as the key factors in the reversal. As with Chatterjee’s more recent elaborations of “political society”, his resort to “governmentality” too appears almost too benign (being concerned primarily with welfare, well-being etcetera). More importantly, there is no possibility, in this rendering, of understanding any kind of political, movement-intervention as anything but an 16 At some points in the text, Sanyal actually suggests a much stronger, constitutive connection: “In short pre-capital’s [i.e. de-capitalized forms] conditions of existence flow from the internal logic of the expanded reproduction of capital” (Sanyal 2007: 39). Or: “I attempt to rethink the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation of capital by explicitly considering exclusion and marginalization of surplus labour power as an inescapable moment of capital’s arising, and then conceptualize the post-colonial economic formation as a structural unity of capital and a sub-economy of the marginalized” (ibid.: 47). Laudable though the attempt to think non-capital as structurally tied to capital may be, this rendering certainly creates more theoretical difficulties than it resolves. For, it also raises the question of the place of “development discourse” and “governmental rationality” in this “structural unity”. Chatterjee’s position, it seems to me, avoids this pitfall by seeing these as separate and discrete processes. At the very least, one might say, Chatterjee is not interested in establishing “structural unities”.

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effect of governmentality (defined in this broad sense). Thus, efforts by the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha to combine “struggle” and “constructive activity” or attempts by a range of groups to form cooperatives, or for that matter, struggles to ensure “rehabilitation” for those dispossessed of their land would all appear here under one rubric: NGO activity, themselves part of the “globally circulating technologies of poverty management” (ibid.: 55). In fact, one might wager that to Chatterjee and Sanyal, no politics is possible that does not concern itself directly with state and state power. Every other initiative then can only be seen as an instance of such “globally circulating technologies of poverty management.” Here the sequentiality argument in the essays by Kaviraj (1995, 1996, 2005) can provide another view. Capitalism appears hamstrung on this view, neither by its own essential logic nor by the global development discourse but by virtue of the fact that it appears when democracy and democratic practices are simultaneously becoming pervasive. Capitalism in the “peripheries” is confronted by democracy and the avenues of protest and struggle that it has made available. It no longer has the means available to “discipline” and “normalize” the working class into the new work ethic through brutal laws on “vagrancy” and “vagabondage”, as it did in England. It has had to face an organized working class movement almost from the very early stages of capitalist development in India, for instance. Equally importantly, in the last decades of the twentieth century, capitalism—metropolitan as well as postcolonial—has also had to face growing opposition from ecological movements that make the wholesale uprooting of agricultural populations far more difficult than was possible in say seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Thus there is something more that the Sanyal-Chatterjee view does not account for: the widespread continuation of supposedly pre-capitalist forms of production both in agriculture and in non-agricultural sectors. It is their struggle that gets inscribed on the banner of the democracy that confronts capital’s onward march. To be more accurate, these are actually “non-capitalist” rather than “pre-capitalist” forms as both Sanyal and Chatterjee recognize but they are not a consequence of the reversal of a process of dispossession that has ostensibly already taken place. They, in fact, represent the recalcitrant other of capital and capitalism—that which capitalism must attempt to seize, discipline, control and subsume within its own domain but which constantly escape its logic.

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I will not labor the point any further here but note that the reason why both Sanyal and Chatterjee are forced to take recourse to the “governmentality” and “development-discourse” route, it seems to me, is that they have already conferred the status of historical necessity to so-called primitive accumulation and a totalizing power to capitalism. Once that is done, it is difficult to find an adequate explanation for the continued large-scale existence of both agricultural and non-agricultural (artisanal, small commodity) production in most of the world. It is true that agriculture and artisanal production do not exist in the old form anymore, that they are thoroughly reconstituted by market relations. This, however, does not warrant the fairy tale of primitive accumulation. These forms continue to exist and the fiction of the “separation of the laborer from the means of labor” seems to have worked only when it was executed with the armed power of the state. It was nothing but a state-sponsored theft of common and peasant property, long before any bourgeoisie was anywhere in the picture; it remains so if and when it occurs today, as in contemporary India. The story of two or three centuries of capitalism and colonialism itself shows the utter failure in establishing the industrial-capitalist form or mode of production in most parts of the world. One only has to look at the continued widespread agrarian and small commodity character of the economy in most of the world to be able to recognize that the story of the historical necessity of primitive accumulation (separation of the producer and means of production) and the inevitability of capitalism is little more than a fairy tale. Of course, Sanyal’s point about the reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation and re-capitalization is well taken but I am not sure how much of the informal economy owes its existence to poverty alleviation programs of governments and international development agencies. More likely, the truth is closer to Hernando de Soto’s claim that the poor have themselves created this enormous amount of wealth. I am, of course, not arguing that such dispossession does not take place; it certainly does and has increased manifold in its violence in the neoliberal era. However, mass dispossession and violent decimation of non-capitalist modes of being is just that— and to exalt it with the status of an objective historical process is to be complicit in that violence in some sense. To conclude then, I want to respond to a question that is often asked. If one holds, as I do, that “economies” across large parts of the global South still remain largely unconquered, how does one explain the fact that many of them are already involved in commodity production and often,

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with reasonably high degrees of sophistication? This is clearly evident, for instance, from Solomon Benjamin’s account of the informal sector production in East Delhi’s Vishwas Nagar and it is not difficult to find numerous other such instances. This question needs to be answered at two levels. At the first level, it has to be emphasized that the mere presence of commodity production and of the fact that many small enterprises have to deal with the market, access credit and such other things, is not an index of its “subsumption” under capital. As Sanyal’s discussion underlines, the “need economy”, while having to engage in such activities, differs fundamentally from the “accumulation economy” in that enterprises comprising it do not display any interest in either reinvesting for expanded reproduction or the relentless upgradation of technology to save labor. This is because their very raison d’etre is different—to provide for the needs of those involved in them. Over and above the dimension underlined by Sanyal, the need economy also remains an “underground economy”, in the senses discussed in this chapter. To that extent, we can certainly say that those populating the need economy are not quite capitalist subjects. At another level, it is important to reiterate that when two armies confront each other, for instance, each side anticipates the moves of the other and makes changes in one’s conduct, strategy etcetera but we do not thereby say that one has “subsumed” the other. We can say that only if we invoke the idea of the totality in which capital is a dominant presence and all other modes of being are subordinated to it.

References Arblaster, Anthony. 1984. The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Balibar, Etienne. 1994. Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies in Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx. New York and London: Routledge. Barta, Patrick. 2009. The Rise of the Underground. The Wall Street Journal, 14 March. Benjamin, Solomon. 2005. ‘ Productive Slums’: The Centrality of Urban Land in Shaping Employment and City Politics. A Report for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA. Brand, Ulrich, and Markus Wissen. 2021. The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism. London and New York: Verso. Chatterjee, Partha. 2008. Democracy and Economic Transformation in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 19 April.

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Chatterjee, Partha. 1994. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. New Delhi: Oxford University Press Chen, Martha Alter. 2003. Rethinking the Informal Economy. Seminar, No. 531, November. Chibber, Vivek. 2004. Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. De Soto, Hernando. 2001. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. London: Black Swan. Duchrow, Ulrich, and Franz J. Hinkelammert. 2004. Property for the People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital. London: Zed Books in association with Catholic Institute for International Relations. Federici, Silvia. 2014. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Foucault, Michel. 1973. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1994. Power. Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 3. ed. James Faubion. New York: The New Press Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge MA and Oxford UK: Basil Blackwell. Hickel, Jason, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, and Intan Suwandi. 2022. Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1990–2015. Global Environmental Change 73. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S09 5937802200005X, last accessed on 26 April 2022. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1995. Democracy and Development in India. In Democracy and Development, ed. Amiya Bagchi. London: St Martin Press. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1996. Dilemmas of Democratic Development in India. In Democracy and Development: Theory and Practice, ed. Adrian Leftwich. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2005. Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity. European Journal of Sociology XLVI (3): 497–526. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.

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Krugman, Paul. 2009. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Macpherson, C.B. 2010. A Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke. Toronto: OUP Canada. Marx, Karl. n.d. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, vol. I. Moscow: Progress Publishers. McMurtry, John. 2013. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. London and Winnipeg: Pluto Press and Fernwood Publishing. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press. Mitchell, T. (2005). The work of economics: how a discipline makes its world. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Europäisches Archiv Für Soziologie, 46(2), 297–320. http://www.jstor.org/stable/239 99581 Nigam, Aditya. 2011. Desire Named Development. New Delhi: Penguin Perelman, Michael. 2000. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: The Problem of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Quijano, Anibal. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from the South 1 (3): 530–580. Rabinach, Anson. 1990. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity. USA: Basic Books Samaddar, Ranabir. 2009. Primitive Accumulation and Some Aspects of Work and Life in India. Economic and Political Weekly 44 (18) (8 May): 33–42. Santos, Boaventura de souse. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London and New York: Routledge. Sanyal, Kalyan. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-colonial Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge. Sen, Amartya. 2007a. Prohibiting the Use of Agricultural Land for Industries Is Ultimately Self-Defeating. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen Sambit Saha of The Telegraph, 23 July. Sen, Amartya. 2007b. The Industrial Strategy—Developments in West Bengal. The Telegraph, 29 December. Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Luneburg: Open Humanities Press and Meson Press. Thompson, E.P. 1993. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: The New Press.

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CHAPTER 3

Peasantry and the Marxist “Unconscious”

Farewell to the Working Class In a peculiar reversal of “history”, at the end of the twentieth century, we not only saw the collapse of “actually existing socialism” and its replacement by capitalism, we have also seen (and are continuing to see) the virtual decimation of the “working class” in the sense of a class tied to modern large-scale production. Alongside the political decimation of the working class, we also witness the peasantry and indigenous populations come center-stage in the new battles against capital that are being waged worldwide. The working class, in the sense of an uncontaminated modern entity with no links to premodern communities and tied solely to modern capitalist/ industrial production, to the extent that it actually existed, has not only lost political efficacy but is being rapidly decimated due to two circumstances. The first is the consequence of a longer term trend, hugely aggravated by the new round of technological revolution that started with the advent of the computer and the internet—often referred to as the Third Industrial Revolution (Rifkin 1995). “The information and communications technologies and global market forces”, said Rifkin over two and a half decades ago, “are fast polarizing the world’s population into two irreconcilable and potentially warring forces—a new cosmopolitan elite of ‘symbolic analysts’ who control the technologies and the forces of production, and the growing numbers of permanently © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22895-7_3

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displaced workers who have little hope and even fewer prospects for meaningful employment in the new high-tech global economy”(Rifkin 1995: xvii). When Rifkin published his book, AI (artificial intelligence) was just being discussed as a technology of the future. By now we are already seeing its impact unfolding massively, as more and more corporations move to adopt AI-based technologies that are already displacing millions more jobs across the world. Despite more optimistic prognostications in business circles that there will be no job losses in the longer term due to AI technology, it is widely coming to be acknowledged that there is no way employment for large masses of humanity can be provided for—hence the move towards “direct cash transfers” and “universal basic income” (Ferguson 2015). The shift to a politics of distribution (from a politics of production) that this shows, is an indication really of the passing of the “modern working class” in the sense that Marxists used to talk of it. Andre Gorz in his Farewell to the Working Class (1982) was already talking of the massive impact that the labor-displacing technologies were going to have in the industrialized countries of Western Europe. He had talked of “a society of mass unemployment coming into being before our very eyes” (Gorz 1982: 3), which he saw as a long-term tendency. For that reason, he had sub-titled his book as “an essay on post-industrial socialism”. Eric Hobsbawm had also observed, way back, in his wellknown lecture “The Forward March of Labour Halted”, that for over a hundred years, since the 1870s, there had been a steady decline in the “working class”—though his was a different point: “So we have, over this century, growing proletarianization, with the relative decline within the wage-earning population of the manual workers…” (Hobsbawm 1978). Of course, Hobsbawm was talking of the increased and increasing internal stratifications within the working class that were affecting its political capacity to act, despite occasional militant actions. But in a way, he too was underlining, at a very early stage, the way technological changes were inducing industrial changes that were, in turn, remaking the working class in quite unexpected ways. Gorz, however, was more scathing and forthright: This crisis, however, is much more a crisis of a myth and an ideology than of a really existing working class. For over a century the idea of the proletariat has succeeded in masking its own unreality. This idea is now as obsolete as the proletariat itself, since in place of the productive collective

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worker of old, a non-class of non-workers is coming into being… (Gorz 1982: 67, emphasis added)

Gorz saw this non-class not as a product of capitalism but as a product of its crisis and the “dissolution of the social relations of capitalist production” (Gorz 1982: 68). In a sense, Gorz’s description of this non-class prefigures Kalyan Sanyal’s account of the “wasteland” of postcolonial capitalism. This non-class, says Gorz, encompasses all those who have been expelled from production by the abolition of work (Gorz 1982: 68). There is one crucial difference of this non-class however, with Sanyal’s, for the inhabitants of his wasteland were never constituted properly into a class in Gorz’s sense: this wasteland is “a space of the excluded, a space constituted by people who do not perform, in fact are not given the option to perform labor for capital” (Sanyal 2007: 63). They always remain on the “ship of fools” (the metaphor Sanyal borrows from Michel Foucault). The massive rise of the gig economy in recent years, alongside the non-class of its workers, can be seen as an instantiation of the kind of scenario that Gorz was imagining. The second circumstance is the relocation of major industries of the global North, over the past three or four decades, to the low-wage and lax-environmental-standards areas of the global South. We need to only recall the great debate on the “social clause” that emerged, as negotiations to the final round of General Agreement of Trade and Tariffs (GATT) were being concluded and the World Trade Organization (WTO) was being put in place in 1994–1995. The idea of the “social clause” or the linking of “social standards”—especially labor and environmental standards—to trade, was pushed by the Northern governments, essentially as a way of preventing their own capital from moving to Asian and African countries. The move failed and major Northern industries moved to the global South nonetheless, leaving the provincial white working class in the lurch. These as much as the new undocumented immigrant laborers in the West constitute what Guy Standing (2011) calls the precariat. These suddenly unmoored working classes eventually trooped towards the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson as we now know.1 1 Standing discusses the classic instance of the Italian city of Prato, near Florence. In 1989, its population was almost entirely Italian. 180,000 of its residents had been linked with the local textile industry for generations. “Reflecting the old values”, say he, “this Tuscan town was solidly left in its politics. It seemed the embodiment of social solidarity

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The workers who come to work for these relocated industries, in the sweatshops of say China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and such other countries, were precisely the ones I have referred to in the Introduction, very much tied to their agricultural, generally precapitalist communities. In the context of the exploding Chinese construction industry, Ngai Pun and Huilin Lu refer to them as “peasant workers” but their character remains pretty much the same across many industries. For instance, they cite All China Federation of Trade Unions sources in late 2004, as saying that “one-third of all ‘peasant workers’, i.e. migrant workers from rural areas were working in the construction sector”, implying thereby that the remaining two-thirds are obviously spread across other industries (Pun and Lu 2010: 129). Against the backdrop of the widening gulf between the villages and the cities, as a consequence of China’s neoliberal reforms, increasing numbers of rural workers had no option but to move to the cities for work, but the state continued to maintain its administrative control on them through the household registration system (huji), say Pun and Lu. This, they argue, is what ties the peasant to the village and thus “makes it difficult for the ‘peasant workers’ to complete the transformation from peasants into workers” (Pun and Lu: 131). While this is an aspect specific to the Chinese context, the fact remains that virtually all over Asia and Africa, we see the pervasive presence of these “peasant workers”—often referred to by scholars of agrarian studies as the “semi-proletariat” (and the phenomenon as “semi-proletarianization”). As Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros argue, there is perhaps another dynamic here at work, which leads to “semiproletarianization whereby petty commodity production and wage-labour together sustain(ed) the household” (Moyo and Yeros 2005: 26). They also cite studies from India by John Harris and Jan Breman which suggest that “full proletarianization has generally been forestalled, not the least by state action, and that rural households, by and large, have held on to a and moderation” (Standing 2011: 4). By 2008, it had 42,00 Chinese firms and 45,000 workers, making up almost a fifth of the city’s population. “Then came the financial shock, which hit Prato in much the same way as it hit so many other old industrial areas of Europe and North America. Bankruptcies multiplied, unemployment rose, resentments turned nasty. Within months, the political left had been swept from power by the xenophobic Northern League. It promptly instituted a crackdown on the Chinese, launching night-time raids on their factories and ‘sweatshops’, rounding up workers and demonising them…” (Ibid: 4, emphasis added).

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plot of land and maintained the dual income strategy of petty commodity production and wage labour” (Moyo and Yeros 2005: 29). As a matter of fact, the tendency identified here was noticed way back in the 1960s, when Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul put forward the concept of a “semiproletarianized peasantry” in their study of the political economy of Africa (Waterman 1983). Arrighi and Saul saw the “semi-proletarianized peasantry” as comprising those wage earners “only marginally or partially proletarianized as, over their life-cycle, they derive the bulk of means of subsistence for their families from outside the wage economy” (cited in Waterman 1983: 172).2 What is really striking, however, is the relatively neglected fact, theoretically speaking, that this was pretty much the way in which Lenin understood the development of capitalism in Russia in his eponymous book, as early as in 1899. He did not see the development of capitalism in Russia as conforming to the “classical” British pattern of dispossession of precapitalist communities—the famous “primitive accumulation”—but rather, as another way in which capitalism was developing in Russia. He could therefore say, The intermediary link between these post-Reform types of ‘peasantry’ is the middle peasantry. It is characterised by the least development of commodity production. The independent agricultural labour of this category of peasant covers his maintenance in perhaps only the best years and under particularly favourable conditions, and that is why his existence is an extremely precarious one. In the majority of cases the middle peasant cannot make ends meet without resorting to loans, to be repaid by labourservice etc., without seeking ‘subsidiary’ employment on the side, which also consists partly in the sale of labour-power etc. (Lenin cited in Hussain and Tribe: 195)

What used to appear in earlier Marxist scholarship and debates as the inability of capitalism to develop—variously referred to as “retarded capitalism” or “arrested capitalist development”—is now increasingly seen as the consequence of living strategies and practices of the poor, who often defy the logic of being either peasants or workers. Untroubled as they are 2 Peter Waterman finds the empirical identification of this “semiproletarianized peasantry” quite important because it is ubiquitous in different segments of the African economy (Waterman 1983: 173). However, the details of their elaboration of the concept and the debate that followed do not concern us here.

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by the intricacies of Marxist theory which has long attempted to define “peasants” as petty bourgeois and wage laborers as “proletariat”, real-life practices have not cared to oblige such theory or theorists. Such practices forced even Lenin to recognize the persistence of the peasantry as long back as in the late nineteenth century, at least as an empirical fact. The editors of a recent special number of the Journal of Peasant Studies on what they call “Agrarian Marxism”, through their wide-ranging survey of the field and introducing the papers of the special issue, point in the same direction when they say, Whether heterogeneous agrarian classes should be seen as classes of labor, semiproletarians, or ‘workers with peasant characteristics,’ remains open. What these contributions do show, to return to Kautsky’s two souls, is that agrarian struggles over land and labor are neither a binary nor in contradiction. These papers [in the special issue] all go beyond the traditional binary of peasant and proletariat and insist that contemporary political struggles will be shaped by movements across the urban and rural divide, and by both production and reproduction. (Levien et al 2018: 871)

The difficulty really is that neither Lenin nor the editors of the special number above, actually do anything more than make an assertion about an empirical fact and their labors do not enable us to rethink the philosophy of history that underlies the more orthodox claims. If in Lenin’s time, it was still possible to believe that these “peasant workers” were simply transitional entities, it is no longer so today, over a century after Lenin. I will return to the theoretical challenge that still needs to be confronted, in the last section of this chapter, but for the moment, it is necessary to register here that the decline of the working class in the Euro-American world has wider significance than mere replacement of the Northern working class by the Southern working class. For the point remains that the shift of industries from the global North to the global South has also meant the replacement of the “proletarianized” working class of large-scale industry by the “semi-proletarianized peasant-worker”, often with no organization and no rights. To put it in Pun and Lu’s words, “the overwhelming majority of workers have no labor contract and so must depend on labor subcontractors of one sort or another, enduring abominable work and living conditions with no insurance, no safety regulations, long and hard work hours, wretched food and

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housing, susceptible to pay deductions at any time, or even receiving no pay at all after a year of backbreaking labor” (Pun and Lu 2010: 129). It may not be out of place to recall that an earlier dimension of this process of “substantial relocation of industries on a worldwide scale” was already being accomplished through what came to be referred to as the “internationalization of production”, “orchestrated and led by transnational companies,” during the 1970s (Cohen et al. ed. 1979: 12). Even at that time, one of the questions that concerned Marxist scholars was about the precise nature of the “working class” in these societies of the “third world” where production was being relocated. Cohen, Gutkind and Brazier observed that “the collapse of subsistence economies in the face of capitalist penetration has led to the growth of a large group of workers who are ambiguously and simultaneously ‘semiproletarians’ and ‘semipeasants’” (Cohen et al. ed. 1979: 12, emphasis added).3 Lately, the sweatshop scenario has started changing further, increasing precarity even more. For instance, a recent report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) “found that more than two-thirds of SouthEast Asia’s 9.2 million textile and footwear jobs are threatened by automation—including 88% in Cambodia, 86% in Vietnam and 64% in Indonesia” (Minter 2016). These are all long-term trends and have nothing to do with the extraordinary situation created by the pandemic globally. This circumstance can only strengthen the “dual income strategies” that Moyo and Yeros talk about, which continuously thwart the process of “proletarianization”—and that is further likely to add to the “repeasantization” process that some scholars talk of.

Enter the Peasants and Indigenous Peoples It is hardly surprising then that in contrast, even today, over 60 percent of the global population still survives and earns its livelihood from agriculture and that this population has been increasing —at least in absolute numbers—despite massive, accelerated dispossession and takeover of agricultural land worldwide. Indeed, a large part of the impact of urban unemployment is taken care of precisely because the workers still have 3 The editors of this volume, therefore, clarify that more precisely, the question for at least some Marxists was “to understand how surplus value was expropriated in ThirdWorld societies”, rather than to go by a “restrictive definition of ‘a working class’” (Cohen et al. ed. 1979: 12).

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connections with the villages and when the going gets bad, they return to their villages. Agriculture has, in a sense, provided that safety net that sustains people in African and Asian countries, despite its now chronic crises. With the frenetic pace of neoliberal development over the last three decades, we have seen the sharpening of conflicts worldwide, where the peasantry and indigenous populations have emerged as the key foci of anti-capitalist resistance (Moyo and Yeros eds. 2005; Desmarais 2007).4 As Desmarias argues, paraphrasing Cliff Welch’s much earlier survey, “in the teeth of globalization an active process of ‘re-peasantization’ is going on as the absolute number of peasants grows, as peasants movements engage in new forms of resistance, and as they build on-the-ground alternatives” (Desmarias 2007: 20). Some other scholars have not only registered this process but have seen in it programmatic possibilities for agriculture in the twenty-first century. Functioning within an explicitly Marxist universe but striking some unconventional paths, Moyo, Jha and Yeros (2015) thus assert that an alternative society based on a reconceptualization of the agrarian question, recognizing the convergence of rural movements with indigenous rights, feminist and environmental movements has become imperative (Moyo et al 2015: 40). Indeed, they emphasize that such an alternative society “will most certainly be forced to take seriously ‘repeasantisation’ (or re-agrarianisation) as a modern project, along with new collective forms of production, labour absorption and sustainable industrialisation” (Ibid: 40, emphasis added). It is evident then that—strange though it may sound—despite the unchallenged dominance of capital and neoliberal policy-makers, backed by states and powerful international institutions, despite their efforts to liquidate these “backward” life-forms, the peasants and indigenous people have “returned” with a vengeance. Despite the all-powerful forces of capital, backed by economists and philosophers alike, the peasant has refused to die or vacate the “stage of history”, as it were.5 Precisely at the

4 To quote Moyo and Yeros: “Indeed, we claim that the countryside of the periphery today has become the most significant location of anti-imperialist politics worldwide” (Moyo and Yeros 2005: 35). 5 Though I occasionally discuss the indigenous people and peasants separately, I generally use the terms “peasant” and “peasantry” in a broad sense, in keeping with the definition of “peasants” used by La Via Campesina: “people who till the land to produce food, the fishers, the pastoralists, the farmworkers, the landless, the migrant workers,

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time when agricultural policies and agribusinesses were becoming globalized, it was felt that “small farmers needed to develop a common vision and struggle to defend it”. That was when an international organization of peasants was formed in 1993. La Via Campesina (LVC) as it is called, now comprises “182 organizations in 81 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas”, representing some 200 million farmers, according to the official LVC website. As a LVC report states, La Via Campesina is an international movement bringing together millions of peasants, small and medium size farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world…it defends peasant agriculture for food sovereignty as a way to promote social justice and dignity and strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture that destroys social relations and nature. Women produce 70% of the food on earth but are marginalised and oppressed by neo-liberalism and patriarchy. They play a crucial role in La Via Campesina. (LVC, n.d.)

Another indication of the fact that the peasants are here to stay and not in any mood to oblige economic theologians, social scientists and philosophers, is that after over two decades of hard work, they managed for the first time to get the United Nations to adopt its Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. It is telling that this document was only finally adopted by the UN in December 2018. Long before the Declaration was adopted by the UN though, it was a “Peasants’ Declaration”. “It was the peasants of La Via Campesina who decided that the states should recognize their rights” and not the states that started the process. It was actually in the 1990s that the Federation of Indonesian Peasants’ Unions first initiated a discussion on peasants’ rights. This timing is important for it is also the time of the formation of La Via Campesina, and as the document cited above states, it was occasioned by the coming into being of the World Trade Organization.6

the indigenous people rural workers—of diverse identities, genders and age groups” (See LVC, n.d.; Desmarais 2007). 6 “More than anything else, those present [at the formation of LVC] were deeply aware that they had a common enemy: The World Trade Organization (WTO), the establishment of which was then being negotiated. One of the main objectives of the States negotiating the WTO charter was to bring agriculture under its purview, which would have been a first for a multilateral trade agreement…The creation of the LVC made it possible

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The critical difference this time round, compared to earlier rounds of peasants’ dispossession by capital and industry, was that the myth that it was the peasants’ destiny to disappear into the pages of history was no longer convincing to an increasingly large number of people. The idea of the historical inevitability of the supersession of precapitalist forms by corporate capitalism was already under question. The peasants were now organizing internationally to fight—without the mediation of political parties or states who are still caught up in the old imagination. This battle begins with the recognition that even today millions and millions of people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and that 37 of the 54 African countries are almost entirely agricultural (Jean Ziegler 2019: 6). It was almost around the same time that the dramatic New Year uprising of the indigenous people of the Chiapas mountains took place in Mexico, on 1 January 1994. The uprising was timed to coincide with the very day that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was to come into force. NAFTA’s implementation was to align Mexico’s agricultural policies and laws to those of United States and Canada. Mexican elites too were interested in promoting privatization, alongside big transnational companies. The Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) saw NAFTA as the death warrant for the Indian population of Mexico (Godelmann 2014). The uprising, which occupied seven towns and led to violence that left around 300 people dead, was perhaps the first big assertion of indigenous people in this phase and the EZLN was “one of the first popular movements to recognize neoliberalism as a dangerous new stage of global capitalism” (Klein 2019; Godelmann 2014). Though it is important that years after the uprising, the EZLN and the Mexican government entered into an agreement guaranteeing self-determination to the indigenous people, an analysis of the successes or failures of the movement are not relevant to our discussion here, at the moment. Within a few years of the Chiapas uprising, the world was witness to what are known as the Water Wars in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba. During prolonged protests that went on for months, “peasants from the nearby countryside manned barricades, sealing off all roads to the city” (Finnegan 2002). The main demand of the “water warriors” was the reversal of the privatization of Cochabamba’s water system that had to coordinate and reinforce peasants’ efforts to combat the establishment of the WTO” (LVC n.d.).

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been handed over to a consortium led by the US-based Bechtel Corporation (Finnegan 2002; de la Fuente 2003; Alurralde 2006). The struggle was successful in reversing the privatization and became, in the event, a turning point in Bolivia’s politics. Indian Farmers’ Struggle, 20207 A particularly interesting moment in this resurgence of the peasantry (in the broad sense of the term mentioned above) is the instance of the recent one-year long struggle of Indian farmers, wherein they laid siege to Delhi, setting up temporary settlements on all sides.8 Hundreds of thousands of farmers, mainly from the neighboring, largely Green Revolution areas, surrounded the capital from 26 November 2020 to the end of November 2021, braving the extreme weather of Delhi’s summer and winter alike. Over 700 farmers died in the course of this struggle, into which they had been pushed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by a government that had hoped to accomplish the corporate agribusiness takeover of farming under cover of the lockdown. Not only did the Narendra Modi government not pay any heed to the demands that had earlier been raised by the massive Kisan Mukti March (Peasants’ Freedom March) held in November 2018, it went on to surreptitiously promulgate three ordinances, in June 2020, that went directly against everything that the farmers wanted. These ordinances sought to hand over agriculture to the corporate sector—which would effectively mean destruction for a large mass of farmers. Naturally they were resisted powerfully—in what is perhaps the most determined struggle of the last four decades in India. The protests had been going on in some states since September 2020 and reached the capital at the end of November, when the farmers’ organizations decided to move the focus of struggle to the central government.

7 I followed the movement very closely on a daily basis, during this period. I was in touch with some activists and chroniclers of the movement regularly and have written about it on different occasions on the blog kafila.online. Most of this sub-section draws on my own writings and my sense of the movement as it developed through intense conversations during that phase. 8 For our purposes in this book, I use the terms “peasant” and “farmer” more or less interchangeably, though in the Indian context, the latter term has come to be associated with the relatively affluent peasants of the Green Revolution areas.

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The three ordinances, which were later made into laws that pushed the farmers into a do or die struggle in different parts of the country, were the (i) Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Ordinance, 2020, (ii) The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Ordinance, 2020, and (iii) The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020. Farmers’ organizations opposing the ordinances claimed that they had been misleadingly named so as to give the impression that they empower the farmers and that they could be more accurately renamed the “APMC [Agricultural Produce Market Committee] Bypass Bill”, “Contract Farming Promotion Bill” and the “Food Hoarding by Corporates Bill”, respectively (Pandey 2020). The long and short of these ordinances is quite nicely summed up in these suggested names—for what the three together aimed to achieve was the dismantling of state procurement (though on paper it may continue to remain), and thereby open agriculture to contract farming for big corporations, allowing them to corner essential food commodities in as large quantities as they want to be sold via their retail chains. The entire attempt, it was widely perceived, was to open out the agriculture sector to giant players in the field who were known to be close to the party in power, though the impact of WTO’s insistence on doing away with agricultural subsidies and such matters was clearly what motivated the new laws. The farmers’ organizations, organized under the banner of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM, United Peasant Front), feared that contract farming, once it is made the norm, would seriously compromise food security for all. For if agribusiness firms eyeing quick and massive profits can get farmers to change from essential food production to some other crops, these firms will start deciding what will be produced and that could change the entire cropping pattern. It is not difficult to see that what gets you quick profits aren’t crops that are sold as essential food items in the domestic or local market but could be anything from potatoes for chips to maize for “alternative fuel” for US consumers. In effect, such a change endangers the “food sovereignty” of the people. In a word, the farmers’ struggle raised issues that went beyond questions of their own immediate survival. If the design visualized in the three laws came to pass, it could also have led to the destruction of lakhs of livelihoods of people who survive by selling fruit and vegetables—for those too would have been produced by farmers under contract

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farming with corporations, which would sell them at their retail stores. Prices for millions of consumers too would then be determined by these giant retail chains as is already clear from the difference in prices in such stores. This was the reason why the struggle actually managed, despite government and corporate media attempts to vilify and demonize it, to strike a sympathetic chord among a fairly large section of the population. These issues, of course, came up only in 2020, once the new laws were passed. The question, therefore, can be asked as to why the farmers/ peasants had been agitating for the preceding few years. “Farmers are not just a residue from our past; farmers, agriculture and village India are integral to the future of India and the world”, declared the Kisan Charter (Farmers’ Charter) released by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC) that had called for the massive Kisan Mukti March (Peasants’ Freedom March) in New Delhi, two years before this struggle, on 29–30 November 2018.9 It may be worth underlining here that many of the organizations that were part of the AIKSCC—and later the SKM—have been members/ partners of La Via Campesina and reject therefore the old understanding that sees the peasant/ farmer as a “residue from the past”.10 It is also interesting to note that some of the big peasant organizations that were part of the AIKSCC and are linked to the mainstream communist parties too signed on to this declaration. As over 100,000 farmers marched into Delhi on 29 November 2018 and then to parliament, the streets of Delhi had resounded with this sense, this determination that “we are here and not going anywhere”. The main slogans of the farmers’ march were remunerative support prices for their produce, writing off of their debts and the passing of two legislations piloted by the AIKSCC. The very names of the proposed bills, the Farmers’ Freedom from Indebtedness Bill 2018 and the Farmers’ Right to Guaranteed Remunerative Minimum Support Prices 2018, together referred to as the Kisan Mukti (Peasants’ Freedom) Bills, underline the key demands of the march to parliament. The indebtedness question was and continues to be a key issue in recent mobilizations, given that there have been hundreds and thousands of peasants’ suicides 9 The AIKSCC, which called for the rally, is a platform of over 250 peasants’ organizations. The Charter can be read in Nigam (2018). 10 For a list of Indian organizations that were part of LVC as of 2007, see Desmarais (2007: 15).

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over the past two and a half decades—though this round of the farmers’ struggle was more focused on the new laws and the related, more immediate question of “minimum support price” (MSP). The question of remunerative support prices for farm produce has been on the table for a very long time now. It was in the late 1970s and early 1980s that this demand became a major issue, with big farmers’ agitations taking place around it. Organizations like the Shetkari Sanghatana formed in 1979 in Maharashtra, were characteristic of that phase of the movement. In the mid-1980s, farmers in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh rose under the banner of the newly formed Bharatiya Kisan Union, demanding, among other things, higher prices for sugar cane (the main produce in that belt), cancelation of loans and cheaper electricity. Basically, the entire phase of the “new peasant upsurge”, of the 1970s and 1980s, heralded the emergence of a different kind of peasant/farmers’ movement from the kind that the Marxist Left had long worked with. Marxist parties had long thought of the peasant movement and the “agrarian revolution” in terms of the alliance of the poor peasant and landless labor, where issues of land redistribution and, at a more immediate level, of higher wages and security of tenure for sharecroppers were more important. In fact, most of the radical left parties/groups believed that the aim of the peasant movement was to build “all-in peasant unity” against landlordism—till well into the 1970s when that kind of landlordism had ceased to exist in large parts of the country, thanks to the post-independence land reforms. Though those land reforms did not aim at radical land redistribution (“land to the tiller”), they did abolish tenancy and effect a transformation of land relations—and this was in no small measure because the communist-led Telangana peasants’ struggle, which I discuss below, had put the question of land reforms on the agenda of the Indian government. The “new peasant upsurge” of the late 1970s and 1980s was essentially a consequence of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which involved cultivation of new high-yielding varieties of wheat, alongside mechanization of production—use of tractors, electrically driven pumps for irrigation, widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. While the long-term ecologically destructive effects of the Green Revolution only became evident much later, the more immediate effect was felt by the farmers in two ways. Productivity increased and led to a general improvement of earnings initially, but gradually increasing input costs— of electricity, of machinery, of chemicals and of fertilizers—all began to

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impact upon the earnings. This combined with the general difficulties of agricultural pricing led to a situation where remunerative prices and the question of MSP moved center-stage. This is not to suggest that the older questions around land and wages have become irrelevant, but the situation is far more diverse and varies greatly across regions. There is no single “agrarian question” exhibiting the same character across the length and breadth of India. In all the states where the new upsurge was taking place, issues had changed in a very fundamental way. Post-independence land reforms by giving ownership rights to tenant cultivators in many areas had altered class-caste relations in the countryside very significantly. In most of these areas—and they constituted a very large part of the landmass called India—it was the middle to rich peasant, more directly integrated into the capitalist market, who was now in revolt. The demands of this middle caste, middle or rich peasantry were no longer internal to the agrarian economy in the way questions of wages or land reforms were. Rather, they were now in direct conflict with corporate/industrial capitalists and the state. Their demands were often directed, as in the case of sugarcane cultivators, against the sugar factory owners. At the same time, there was another set of struggles that had been going on that involved, in sharp contrast, the adivasi (indigenous peoples) populations at the point of dispossession through state-led mega development projects like the series of dams along the river Narmada. They had come together under the banner of the iconic Narmada Bachao Andolan in the Narmada valley but there were many others too, in different parts of the country who were resisting moves to displace them. For instance, one can mention the epic struggle of the adivasis of Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha state, against the bauxite mining project involving the mining giant Vedanta. The movements against displacement and land acquisition have a much longer history, but with the onset of neoliberalism, they acquired a whole new dimension and urgency. These struggles too are not internal to the agrarian countryside but most often in direct confrontation with state and capital. Gradually, over time, a relationship has developed between the different kinds of broadly agrarian movements and, in the face of many offensives of the neoliberal state and corporate capital, these different movements have found some common ground. This phase (2020–2021) actually came after a lull of sorts. The years from the early to mid-1990s till about 2006–2007, were years of resignation and despondency, of mass destitution and suicides—and the

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overall atmosphere was not at all conducive to the voice of peasants or workers being heard. Demands of writing off of debts or of minimum support prices through state intervention would be brushed aside as “populist” demands. Thus, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, 310,000 farmers committed suicide between 1995 and 2015, though unofficial estimates put the number much higher. In 2019 alone, 42,280 farmers and agricultural daily wagers committed suicide (Tripathi 2020). Though peasant indebtedness and struggles against debt on the one hand, and for remunerative prices, reduction of energy and other input costs on the other, have separate and much longer histories, matters reached crisis proportions since the latter half of the 1990s, as neoliberal policies combined with the effects of the ecological crisis began to wreak havoc on farmers’ lives. In an early report based on investigation in different states, Vandana Shiva and Kunwar Jalees noted that “1997 witnessed the first emergence of farm suicides in India”, and that “rapid increases in indebtedness was at the root of farmers taking their lives” (Shiva and Jalees n.d: 1). Shiva and Jalees underlined the fact that the farmers’ debt situation worsened because of the dramatic fall in the prices of farm produce as a result of free trade policies dictated by the World Trade Organization (WTO), which were essentially rules for dumping (Shiva and Jalees n.d: 2; Shiva and Jalees 2006). In another early Jan Sunwai [People’s Hearing] report on the agrarian crisis, Gene Campaign noted that between 1998 and 2005 alone, 6000 indebted farmers, mainly cotton farmers, committed suicide in the then Andhra Pradesh. What was telling was that following the state-level Structural Adjustment Programme which the government initiated at the behest of the World Bank, the government “raised power tariff five times even as cotton price fell by half” (Biru and Barpujari n.d.: 3). Sharp increases in input costs, from diesel to fertilizers and pesticides, were a direct consequence of cuts in input subsidies which did not just increase costs of agricultural production but made agriculture itself look like an unprofitable activity. Added to this is the increasing promotion of expensive, patented and genetically modified seeds that could only be purchased from multinationals like Monsanto and Cargill at four times the price of traditional seeds. Changes in the public sector banks’ lending policies also affected the availability of cheaper institutional credit, especially to smaller farmers.

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And to cap it all, neoliberalism sounded agriculture’s death knell by making it clear that it was the lowest priority, that highly fertile agricultural lands could now easily be diverted, not only to the construction of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), but also to other things that had to simply do with the luxury living of the new consuming middle classes—from malls and expressways to huge gated residential complexes. Huge and frequent crop losses due to endemic droughts on the one hand, combined with frequent untimely rain and hailstorm episodes on the other, have led to large-scale destitution among farmers, according to M.S. Swaminathan, the father of the Green Revolution (Ramakrishnan 2017). Whatever the government might like to pretend, the fact of the matter is that increased incidence of droughts is not unrelated to the phenomenon of rapidly increasing desertification (Sehgal 2018). Very recently, even the Minister for Environment of the present government accepted that almost a quarter of the country is turning into a desert (Borgen Magazine 2014). And desertification has to do, quite directly, with fast depleting water tables, deforestation, erosion of soil quality due to overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and unsuitable cropping patterns. Increasingly, it is also becoming clear that the wild fluctuations in weather conditions, leading to destruction of an entire season’s crop, are quite directly related to the effects of climate change. It is in a context like this that the demand has been raised for the writing off of the debts of farmers for they simply do not have the capacity to pay, not only when crops fail but equally when there are bumper crops and prices crash—though writing off debts can only be stop gap measures aimed at providing immediate relief. While all these issues have been there for some time, there were only very localized and isolated protests till very recently. The logjam was broken by the massive struggles against the acquisition of land by various state governments for SEZs and for corporations to set up industries. The big change came, ironically, with the movements in the Marxist-ruled state of West Bengal, which I discuss at length in the next section. The massive public outcry and vigorous debate on land acquisition under a nineteenth-century colonial law that followed, made the central government of the day initiate the process of making a new law that would govern land acquisition. This law was enacted by the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2013 which had stricter provisions regarding the obtaining of peasants’ consent and regarding their resettlement and rehabilitation, once land was acquired. However, soon

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after the present right-wing government of Narendra Modi took over power, it promulgated an ordinance that would nullify the gains made in the 2013 law, making acquisition once again easier for corporations. What should be clear from the above narrative is that over the last few decades, the character of peasants’ struggles has changed from one that was directed against local landlordism—for land and better wages—to a struggle against capital and against the state, which comes as capital’s ally. In fact, both questions—that of land and of rampant indebtedness—are tied together today, not just because of attempts to institute “the neoliberal order” in general but also because of connections to the WTO interventions in agriculture.11 It is also perhaps important to recognize that while the new struggles are against capital, and some of them because the peasants/farmers have to deal with market related issues, this by no means “proves” that these peasant farmers therefore constitute a “rural bourgeoisie” or “capitalist landlords” who are thereby primarily capitalists. Their relationship to capital and state still remains largely antagonistic. To conclude this part of our discussion, it is important to reiterate that the new struggles of the peasants and indigenous peoples worldwide are emerging within a larger recognition that they are not a “residue from the past” but rather “integral to the future of India and the world” as the Indian Kisan Charter put it. Even if it is not yet a very widely accepted idea, one only has to read the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas and remember that it was finally passed only in 2018, to understand that it is an idea whose time has come. This pretty much inverts our sense of historical time.

The Marxist Unconscious It is also increasingly evident that neither the phenomenon of “repeasantization” nor the instances of the new movements and struggles are isolated episodes. In fact, the new Latin American Left took rebirth in this period with its primary social base in the indigenous populations rather than the working class. And that too was not a sudden development, for the indigenous question had existed all along, in an unresolved tension with official communist ideology as is evident from the detailed 11 For a detailed account of WTO interventions in agriculture, see Shiva and Jalees (2006).

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country by country mapping of the Latin American Left in an early account by Jorge Castañeda (Castañeda 1993). Marta Harnecker identifies the malaise clearly in her reflections on the problems that face project of “rebuilding the Left” in Latin America. Looking at the past experience, she points out that “the acritical emphasis placed on the working class, thus led to the Latin American parties ignoring the specific characteristics of that continent’s revolutionary social subject and failing to understand the role that the indigenous people and Christians can play in revolutions in Latin America” (Harnecker 2007: 47).12 Thus she underlines: Today, the Latin American revolutionary movement has come to understand two things: one, that it must respect the language, customs, religious beliefs and cultural norms of indigenous peoples if it does not want to be identified as an ally of the oppressor; and two, that there is immense revolutionary potential – stemming from their ancestral traditions of resistance to oppression – pent up in these economically exploited and culturally oppressed peoples. (Harnecker 2007: 49)

As an aside, we may note that though these new Left formations are not invested in the stagist imagination of historical materialism in the same way in which the old Left used to be, one does find in them an unthought through emulation of the extractivist models of development that are undergirded by the same modernist assumptions. It has been pointed out by indigenous scholars, for instance, that there remains a serious lack of fit between this new avatar of the Latin American Left and its continuing investment in a Marxism-derived progressivism (Dunbar-Oritz 2007). It should be underlined that this happens to be so because the change has occurred only at the practical-empirical level and has not been theoretically grasped in a radically different way. It therefore remains caught within the modern understanding of Time and, therefore, in the idea of the inescapability of capitalism-as-progress and all that comes along with

12 Harnecker recalls the ways in which the Communist International’s insistence on modelling all parties along Bolshevik lines “proved extremely damaging” for the Latin American section of the Comintern, for “its leaders devotedly copied formulas invented for an undifferentiated Third World and ignored the specificities of the Latin American countries”, referring in particular to the experience of Jose Carlos Mariategui who insisted on calling the party he founded the Socialist and not the Communist party (Harnecker 2007: 47, emphasis added).

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it. In the next part of this section, I take a very telling Indian story in order to explicate how this operates in practice, so to speak. A particularly dramatic instance of this difficult Marxist relationship with the peasantry was seen in recent Indian history in the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-ruled state of West Bengal. I have referred to this episode briefly in Chapter 1, but it is important to state here that the denouement, the “event’ that brought the curtain down on the 34 year long rule of the Left Front (1978–2011), was not just dramatic; it revealed in a flash what many Marxists themselves had not perhaps recognized. We could call that “something” the “Marxist unconscious”, where the “peasantry” had lived a strange and unresolved existence for decades, till the government’s acquisition of their land for private corporations— and industrialization—led to a moment of illumination, especially for the peasantry. I suspect, though, that it was no less of a revealing moment for many Marxists as well. The reason is not very difficult to seek though it does call for a little explanation. The “event” was constituted by a combination of two episodes, in quick succession. The government acquired land for an automobile factory in a highly fertile area not far from Kolkata, called Singur, in May 2006, and was on the verge of acquiring huge tracts of land in another area known as Nandigram, where it had planned to set up a chemical hub with the Indonesian Salim group of industries. This latter episode, in November 2007, was sparked off with the information of the impending land acquisition leaking and becoming public. Coming in the wake of the brutal acquisition of land in Singur, the footage of which many people had seen on television, the struggle in Nandigram reached an insurrectionary level from the outset. Peasants dug up the roads leading to the village to prevent government forces from entering and blocked them further with trees felled for the purpose. The local CPI(M) offices inside the area became the target of popular anger and violent confrontations ensued. Many party cadre had to flee the area in the face of the anger of the very people they had “represented” and ruled over, for more than three decades. The struggle continued for months together, leading in the end to the CPI(M) cadre and police finally “liberating” Nandigram, with many lives being lost. Things would never be the same again for the CPI(M)—the party that had once lorded over the state with a virtually invincible machine whose electoral and political power came largely from the villages, was now reduced to a pathetic caricature of its own self. The irony is that there was a time when CPI(M) activists would laugh at

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urbanites who often tended to be far more critical of their government, never failing to remind them that the Left Front’s (LF’s) staying power was because of the peasantry in the rural areas. The implication was that they did not care about the urban voters, who in any case constituted a very small fraction of the state’s population. The peasantry had long been part of the poetry of the Left in India—of Bengal Marxism in particular—and it has featured as the prime protagonist in some of the best literary creations of the twentieth century. Some of the greatest and most heroic struggles conducted by the Left had been peasant struggles—Tebhaga, the militant sharecroppers’ struggle in united Bengal in 1946–1947, the Telangana peasants’ armed struggle in the then Hyderabad state (and parts of Madras Presidency) from 1946– 1951 and the Warli adivasi (indigenous people) revolt in Maharashtra 1945–1952—apart from many other smaller but no less determined struggles. Stories of these movements had become part of communist folklore across India and were recalled with pride, more than any working class struggle under communist leadership. The struggle of the Telangana peasantry under the leadership of the Andhra communists had led to the first serious attempt by them to engage with the experience of the Chinese revolution and the writings of Mao Zedong. These ideas had been articulated as a full-fledged thesis in opposition to the official thesis adopted by the party at its second Congress in 1948 and came to be known as the “Andhra Thesis”.13 The idea of a “protracted peasant war of liberation” along the lines of the Chinese experience came to occupy an important position in the imagination of the more radical sections of the party, against the more urbane and urban-oriented (and by implication, more privileged) leaders of the party, especially B. T. Ranadive, the general secretary-to-be of the CPI at its second Congress.14 Needless to say, somewhere behind this fascination for the peasantry and the Chinese path also lay the suspicion of the idea that only the “advanced working class”, linked to modern industry (and later the public sector), could play the vanguard role in the revolution. For, in organizational terms, it also implied neglect of the more difficult task of organizing the peasantry,

13 For a generally sympathetic account, see Mohan Ram (1973). 14 Ranadive was not only an advocate of the Russian-style working class insurrection in

the cities, he was also one of the earliest critics of Mao Zedong (Ram 1973).

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since it entailed living in extremely difficult, backward conditions—as opposed to the relatively easy life in cities. In later years, as the debate within the united CPI became intense and eventually led to two consecutive splits—first with the breaking away of the CPI(M), and then with the Naxalite revolt in 1967 and the emergence of a series of Maoist groups—one of the key questions that lay at the center of disputes was that of the “agrarian revolution”. Unlike the parent party, the CPI which expressed faith in peaceful transition through the “parliamentary path”, the rebels of both the CPI(M) and subsequent CPI(ML) groups, had argued for the centrality of the “agrarian revolution”. The “agrarian revolution” based on the poor peasantry and agricultural laborers, they claimed, would have to be the “axis of the democratic revolution”, which alone could open the way for a “people’s democratic state”—yet another Maoist formulation that drew on Mao’s essay “On New Democracy”. While in practice, the CPI(M) and the various Maoist groups went very different ways where organizing the peasantry was concerned, the common rhetoric of the “agrarian revolution” as the key to the “democratic revolution” remained—as did the poetry of the peasantry. In fact, the emergence of the Naxalite movement, with its avowed commitment to the “Chinese path” and the “Thought of Mao Zedong”, in a way ensured that the romantic investments of the younger revolutionaries in the peasantry acquired a new life. Thus even during the two United Front (UF) governments in West Bengal in 1967 (which lasted just eight months) and 1969–1971, land occupation struggles of the poorer and landless peasantry were unleashed on a big scale. Though by the time the LF government came to power in 1978, the CPI(M) had realized that the days of land struggle were over. Moreover, once the UF government fell, all the land occupied by the peasants was reverted to the owners, despite the fact that the occupied land was usually land that been held by landowners in excess of the legal ceiling. The party was now keen to bring about only “legally initiated changes”. Land was therefore no longer on its agenda but its “Operation Barga” programme, that involved the formal registration of all sharecroppers in the state, thus providing them security of tenure, gave the CPI(M) its invincible base in the countryside. With the new chief minister, Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, taking over from the veteran Jyoti Basu in 2000 and announcing his plans for a neoliberal transformation of the state, he very quickly became a favorite of the media and the upwardly mobile globalizing elite. Bhattacharjee

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thus came to embody, if only very briefly, the fragile but potent electoral combination of the old rural base reinforced by a new powerful constituency in the urban areas. Little wonder then, that he led his party and the LF to an unprecedented victory in the 2006 state assembly elections, winning 230 of the 294 seats. And yet, unsurprisingly, that was precisely the moment of his and his party’s undoing. The neoliberal plans for West Bengal’s industrialization could only be put in place by forcibly dispossessing the peasantry. The Singur land acquisition began within days of the government taking oath of office after that massive electoral victory. Almost overnight, the long Marxist love affair with the peasantry turned sour; no more would the peasants of the state ever trust them after the Singur-Nandigram event. The Singur-Nandigram event revealed one thing without a shadow of doubt: the peasant issue was never really resolved in Marxist thought— at least not in the thought of the Stalinist Marxism that the CPI(M) espoused. The ultimate Stalinist fantasy was that of heavy industrialization, and as long as Marxists were not in power, this imagination could happily coexist alongside a Maoist emphasis on the peasantry. In the first two decades, from 1978 to about the end of the 1990s, the Left Front wasn’t quite able to push through its fascination for industrialization for two reasons. First, it was not as though the Jyoti Basu led LF did not try—it had proposed its flagship industrial projects like the Bakreshwar Thermal Power Project and the Haldia Petrochemical Complex but in those days of the pre-liberalization dirigiste regime, state governments were seriously constrained because of the permissions required from the central government. LF’s industrialization projects were thus held up for years together. Second, as long as it was only a slogan, “industrialization” was something the entire party could sign on to, but as its contours in the neoliberal phase started becoming clear, opposition within the party had to be reckoned with as well. On matters like industrialization in the “joint sector” (state government and private capital), Jyoti Basu actually had to do a lot of convincing inside the party, in the mid-1980s when he first embarked on this path.15 By the beginning of the 1990s, with the neoliberal regime in place, state governments got the power to directly woo capitalists to come and invest in the state. The collapse of Soviet bloc socialist states also took the wind out of the sails of the opponents of the 15 This was one the hotly debated issues in the CPI(M)’s Twelfth Party Congress, held in Kolkata in 1985.

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new industrialization path that the West Bengal CPI(M) was staking out. Thus, in 1994, Basu simply bypassed the party and the LF and tabled his new industrial policy—and got it passed—in the state assembly directly. There was one difference, however, in that land acquisitions during Basu’s time, though equally unjust to the peasants, were not done as recklessly as during Bhattacharjee’s time. There was some semblance of “consultations” with and “persuasion” of the peasants to part with their land. The peasants, though unhappy with the way they were deprived of their land for building luxury apartments and the New Town in Eastern Kolkata, nevertheless reconciled themselves to their fate for there was no way they could have challenged the CPI(M)’s formidable machinery at that time. In that sense, it is perhaps not incorrect to say that Mao’s was the only attempt that was made within mainstream Marxism to conceptualize the place and role of the peasantry in socialist reconstruction—beyond the moment of struggle and capture of power. In China, that experiment was given up after Mao’s death as China embarked on its neoliberal path, glimpses of which we saw above in Pun and Lu’s descriptions of millions of “peasant workers” in contemporary China. It is another matter, as Lin Chun argues, that in China this reversal has not quite succeeded in reversing the profounder transformation that the “peasant revolution” had brought about. Things in the case of contemporary China bring out another dimension that was perhaps a far more long-term effect of the Maoist intervention: As the agrarian question had been central to the communist program almost from the outset, a major upshot was the formation of a new rural historical subject. Collectively, in a recent historical and current constitutional alliance with the working class in the PRC, the peasantry cannot be regarded as ‘pre-capitalist’ but rather is postcapitalist in its subjective identification and objective positioning. Unique to China’s twentieth-century trajectory, then, is the paradox of the victory of a peasant revolution signaling also political transformation of traditional agrarian categories. This transformation, along with the rise of a new rural agency, was so profound that even a sweeping decollectivization begun in the late 1970s could not overturn everything. (Chun 2013: 118, emphasis added)

This aspect of actual “Marxist” history—the Maoist moment—too is something that remains a part of the “Marxist unconscious”: Marxists continue to believe, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, that “the figure of the peasant has throughout the world faded into the background

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of the economic landscape of agriculture”—and simply push it out of their “thought” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 120).16 Any attempt to trace the genealogy of this particular attitude vis-à-vis the peasantry must eventually reckon with the fact that Marxist theory never came to a reappraisal of the linear logic of historical materialist time. No amount of references to the Grundrisse that apparently indicate Marx’s recognition of multiple trajectories and multiple routes to capitalism (Hobsbawm 1965), no amount of mere empirical recognition that capitalism too might traverse multiple paths like the British, the Prussian and the American (Moyo et al 2015) and no amount of invocation of worker-peasant unity as a strategic slogan changes the fact that the idea of the inevitability of capitalism and its ultimate elimination of small-scale production, especially agriculture, remained unchallenged and unaffected. As Teodor Shanin (1986) put it, explicating the early debate within the Second International, the German Social Democrats in 1896 “rejected the very idea of a Marxist Agrarian Programme” (Shanin 1986: 146). It was Kautsky supported by Engels – to the Russian RSDWP [Russian Social Democratic Workers Party], the highest theoretical authorities – who defended this position and explained it… Agriculture was unable to progress and transform at the all-societal speed, but industry would take agriculture in tow. The forces of production must rise, the proletariat must increase in size and strength, and peasantry must eventually disappear…On the road to [socialism], the party of the most advanced class …must not engage in back-sliding compromises with other social and political forces. That was particularly true of peasants who both represented the past within the present and held property and thereby could not be a socialist force. Strategically, the only possible attitude to their demands was neutrality – a party of socialist progress had nothing more to offer to the peasants than the realism of accepting the facts of life, that is, their demise under capitalism and hope for a better future under the proletarian leadership... (Shanin 1986: 146, emphasis added)

It is, of course, interesting that when Kautsky wrote The Agrarian Question, his data actually showed him that the peasantry was far from disappearing. Thus he ended up explaining why the peasantry might not 16 Chun herself cites this statement from Hardt and Negri (Chun 2013: 117). Her argument about the persistence of the peasant as a new historical subject in the Chinese context is also made as a refutation of the position articulated by them.

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easily be destroyed by large-scale capitalist production. To put it in the words of Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin, For Kautsky, economies of scale and more advanced technology made large-scale agriculture necessarily more effective than peasant farming. But peasants survived all the same and even outbid capitalists for the purchase of land, while tenants often produced more profit for the landlord than direct capitalist farming. In Kautsky’s view this happens because peasants are ready to accept ‘underconsumption’ and ‘excessive labour’, underselling permanent wage workers, caught in what Lenin was later to refer to as the ‘plunder of labour of the peasants and which formed a part of Chayanov’s concept of ‘self-exploitation’. (Alavi and Shanin 1988: xvi)

Athar Hussain and Keith Tribe (1983) document and discuss, in fascinating detail, the ups and downs that the debate on the agrarian program went through in the German Social Democratic Party. It is not possible to go into that entire story here but it is nonetheless, worth registering that it was under the pressure of electoral-parliamentary politics and some autonomous parties like the Bavarian Social Democratic Party, that the SDP was forced to take cognizance of the peasantry. It was as a consequence of this that the Frankfurt Congress of the Party in 1894 appointed an agrarian commission to suggest an agrarian program—the very idea of which was opposed by Kautsky (Hussain and Tribe 1983: 86). Earlier, in the Marxist Erfurt Program of the SDP, “protection was extended to rural inhabitants” but it was made very clear that it was “only in their capacity as sellers of labor and not as peasants or owners of land, no matter how small a piece of land they owned” (Ibid: 86). The agrarian commission published its report, along with a set of specific demands to be incorporated in the Erfurt program, in June 1895 (four months before the Breslau congress). Some of the demands were as follows: (1) the conservation and an increase in the public property in land (state property, communal property, etc.), in particular forests and water. (2) Handing over the state lands (which occupied a substantial area) to agricultural cooperatives or to small peasants for cultivation. (3) The state provision of credit. (4) The nationalization of mortgage banks and mortgage debt and a reduction in mortgage rate of interest. (5) The state provision of insurance against various risks (6) The maintenance and extension in the communal rights of pasture, collection of forest wood. (Hussain and Tribe

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1983: 97–98) The recommendations came under massive attack and with Engels’ blessings were laid to rest. There is an interesting but scary aside to this whole controversy—especially if we remember what came to pass later in Germany. August Bebel had, in expectation of “a spectacular victory” in the elections, written to Engels about “the difficulty of conducting agitation among peasants by merely outlining to them their bleak and hopeless future”—that is to say, telling them that they were destined to be destroyed by capitalism. He then went on to say, “I heard farmhands saying: you have made clear to us bluntly that you are not able to help us, but we do not want to go under, and that is why we vote for the Anti-Semites. The Antis promise to help us” (quoted in Hussian and Tribe 1983: 93). On another occasion, Engels’ response to this question, which was obviously there in everybody’s mind, was that “(N)either now nor at any time in the future can we promise the small holding peasants to preserve their individual property and individual enterprise against the overwhelming power of capitalist production.” Thus, Referring to big and middle peasants, Engels said ‘If these peasants want to be guaranteed the continued existence of their enterprises we are in no position whatever to assure them of that. They must then take their place among the Anti-Semites, peasant leaguers [the reference is to the Bund der Landwirte] and similar parties who derive pleasure from promising everything and keeping nothing.’ (Hussain and Tribe 1983: 98)

The first moment of a real breakthrough came from the Leninist intervention in the context of the Russian revolution, though that too had its limitations. Lenin and the Russian Revolution In 1883, Georgi Plekhanov wrote a critique of his own former Narodnik position and of the journal Narodnaya Volya, entitled “Socialism and the Political Struggle”. In order to achieve the goal of a constitutional democracy, he argued, the task of the Russian revolutionaries was to build a workers’ party. However, he claimed that this “did not involve a rejection of the peasantry as a political force, but rather concerned an assessment of the likelihood of the rural population taking a political initiative compared

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with the possibilities presented by the industrial workers” (Hussain and Tribe 1983: 181). Hussain and Tribe go on to quote Plekhanov as saying: We do not hold the view, which as we have seen was ascribed to Marx’s school, rather than it existed in reality, and which alleges that the socialist movement cannot obtain the support from our peasantry until the latter has been turned into a landless proletarian and the village community has disintegrated under the impact of capitalism. We think that on the whole, the Russian peasantry would show great sympathy for any measure aiming at the so-called ‘nationalization of the land’. Given the possibility of any at all free agitation among the peasants…they would also sympathize with the socialists, who naturally would not be slow in introducing into their programme the demand for a measure of that kind. (Plekhanov cited by Hussain and Tribe: 181–182)

According to Hussain and Tribe, “Lenin took over and elaborated this conception, although this has been obscured by the later assumption among Marxist writers that it was necessarily revisionist to suggest that dispossession was not a necessary condition of capitalist development” (Ibid: 182). This is interesting given the fact that the towering figures of Engels and Kautsky held precisely the view that socialists could have nothing to do with the peasantry till it had been turned into the landless proletariat and the village community disintegrated under the impact of capitalism. It seems likely that Plekhanov’s position on the peasantry was a remainder from his Narodnik past rather than something he inherited from orthodox Marxism—a position that he rapidly abandoned as his Marxism became more orthodox. Later, while preparing “different drafts of a programme for Russian Social Democracy…Plekhanov increasingly inclined to a view of the peasantry as a bulwark of absolutism”, and by 1892 he espoused the position “that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were the sole revolutionary forces, describing the ‘muzhik’ as the basis for thousands of years of Eastern despotism” (Hussain and Tribe 1983: 185–186). This is the position that Plekhanov, and via him, Lenin too held when he wrote his Development of Capitalism in Russia, published in 1899. Shanin writes that “despite Lenin’s initial readiness to be somewhat more open to peasant demands than his Iskra partners, the first agrarian programme presented by him and accepted by the RSDWP congress of 1903 was the tactical expression of this Social Democratic view of the 1890s” (Shanin 1986: 147). This is a position that Lenin radically

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changed following the 1905 revolution and the massive peasant revolts that were part of it. Teodor Shanin, in his illuminating study of the 1905 revolution as a “moment of truth”, has mapped the different positions adopted by different sections with the Russian Social Democrats. Increasing demands for a new rural strategy came to the fore, he says, especially with respect to the initial Agrarian Programme of 1903, which had united them all, until 1906. Thus: Few of them considered a new theoretical approach. To others, the issue was mainly tactical: a trade-off between the wish to gain peasant support in the struggle against tsardom and the fear that a peasant victory and an egalitarian land redivision would retard capitalism and delay proletarisation, that is, act regressively within post-revolutionary Russia. Finally, there were those who did not see any reason to change anything at all - attempts to court the peasant petty proprietors were contrary to the true proletarian interest. (Shanin 1986: 148)

It is remarkable to read through those debates and the historical accounts of those times today, for they are utterly candid about the fact that the socialists must not do anything that would either “delay proletarianization” or “retard capitalism”. For them the best situation would have been one where the peasantry had been destroyed and dispossessed, transformed into a landless proletariat by capital so that they could then step in as Marxists and Social Democrats to organize it. Though the author of the 1903 Agrarian Programme, Lenin was practically alone in now calling for its revision, emphasizing that a new strategy had to assume that “the economy of the squires in Russia is based on repressive-enserfing and not on capitalist system of economy.” He went on to assert that those who “refuse to see it cannot explain the contemporary broad and deep peasant revolutionary movement in Russia’ (Shanin 1986: 148). Thus, according to Shanin’s account, At the fourth congress in 1906, Lenin’s and P. Rumyantsev’s suggestion of ‘nationalisation of all land’ (which stood as close to the positions of the AllRussian Peasant Union and to the PSR’s [Party of Socialist Revolutionaries –AN] ‘socialisation’ idea as one could venture in those days) was not only defeated by the Menshevik majority of the delegates but also refused by the majority of Bolsheviks … Lenin’s views in that matter were at that time being questioned in the Proletarii - his own faction’s newspaper…In November

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1905 the conference of the RSDWP’s northern committees decided ‘under no circumstances to admit into the party programme’ peasant demands for the confiscation and redivision of all land. (Shanin 1986: 149, emphasis added)

The fact that Lenin’s position in the fourth congress was close to the understanding of what was understood to be the neo-Narodnik party, the Socialist Revolutionaries led his former mentor Plekhanov to remark that “Lenin looks at nationalisation [of land] with the eye of an SR. He even begins to adopt their terminology, for example, talks of popular creativity [of political forms T.S.]” (Quoted in Shanin 1986: 149). Lenin, of course, did not remain in the minority for very long as soon his stance formed the basis of the Bolsheviks’ new strategy. “This new strategy of nearly unconditional support of the peasant demands was conceptualised as promoting the ‘American road’ to capitalism under a victorious revolutionary regime—the democratic dictatorship of the workers and the peasants. In that view the egalitarian land redivision for which the Russian peasants fought was to be treated not only as politically advisable in challenging the tsardom but also as economically progressive in clearing the way for the fullest flourishing of capitalism” (Shanin 1986: 150–151). Shanin tells us, contra official Soviet versions, that there are two clearly discernable periods in Lenin’s biography and his writings on this issue. The first includes the entire corpus of writings including What the Friends of the People Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats (1894) and up to Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), which are largely concerned with “explicating Plekhanov’s line of ‘capitalism now’ and of merciless war against the populists’ blindness.” The second, says Shanin, are the more “action-bound writings of 1905–1907 in which strategy was reconsidered and transformed” (Ibid: 152), but where, according to him, Lenin for reasons of expediency (“party politics”) leaves the theoretical issues unresolved (Ibid: 152). So while he and the Social Democrats decided to drop the 1903 Program and adopt a new one, he did not make any changes to the text of Development of Capitalism in Russia, which was the text on which the Program was based in the first place. One might argue that in retrospect, the results of this omission were to be quite disastrous. For what happened after the 1917 revolution, especially after the mid-1920s (Lenin died in 1924), was that “it was not Lenin’s new strategy established in 1905–1907 which was predominantly reflected in the orthodox (and increasingly streamlined) historical studies

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within the USSR. To be sure, Lenin was constantly quoted, but it was mostly the ‘young man’ Lenin” (Shanin 1986: 152). It is impossible to reproduce the intricate historical account reconstructed so carefully by Shanin here, but it is not very difficult to imagine that this entire enterprise was meant to retrospectively demonstrate that the Bolsheviks always had the correct understanding of Russian capitalism and its agrarian scene and that they were the only political force active in the countryside. Eliminating entirely, the positive appreciation that Lenin had started making of the PSR’s understanding of the agrarian situation (for which he was chided by Plekhanov at the fourth congress), this official account also ultimately canonized Development of Capitalism in Russia as the authentic representation of Lenin’s views.17 The story of the fate of the peasantry after the revolution is telling. As Lynn Viola’s fascinating study (Viola 1996) puts it, “‘(D)epeasantization’, a Communist corollary of industrialization, socialism and the advent of the classless society, would be accelerated as the self-proclaimed forces of ‘modernity’ battled the ‘darkness’ and ‘backwardness’ of the village. Although the Communist Party publicly proclaimed collectivization to be ‘socialist transformation’ of the countryside, it was in reality a war of cultures, a virtual civil war between state and peasantry, town and countryside” (Viola 1996: 3). Viola’s study focuses primarily on the collectivization program and, in particular on the year 1930, it reveals the gulf that separated the peasants’ world and the Bolsheviks’ understanding of the place of agriculture and the peasantry in “socialist industrialization”. Much of the deep distrust had already begun, early on during the course of the civil war and the consequent food crisis, when Bolsheviks had resorted to highly strongarm methods to get the peasants to surrender their surplus grain. Ostensibly the battle, during the civil war, was against kulaks, says Viola, but in reality it was against the entire peasantry—“and it would be waged in order to hurry history along its predetermined course, which would lead to the disappearance of this supposedly primitive, premodern social form” (Viola 1996: 15). There is no doubt that there was a severe shortage of food during the civil war and it was urgently necessary to 17 It should be pointed out here that it is only this particular aspect of Development of Capitalism in Russia that is at issue here. On the whole, even in this text, Lenin’s approach was actually quite unorthodox. For a reading of the more unorthodox positions of the text, see Hussain and Tribe (1983).

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acquire grain to feed the towns, but the way Lenin and the party went about it was hugely problematic. Lenin was candid, and as early as in May 1918, “he declared that any ‘owners of grain who possess surplus grain’ and do not turn it in, regardless of social status, ‘will be declared enemies of the people’” (Viola 1996: 16, emphasis original). However, Lenin being Lenin, he was also quick to understand that this was the road to disaster. He thus beat a retreat and while making major concessions to the peasantry, via the New Economic Policy, underlined at the Tenth Congress of the party that “so long as there is no revolution in other countries, only agreement with the peasantry can save the revolution in Russia” (Viola 1996: 18). The NEP allowed the party a few years to recover the relationship with the peasantry, but things were to start coming to a head once again in the late 1920s and reached a crescendo during the collectivization campaign. Worker-peasant unity, tenuous as it was, now broke irretrievably. The campaign against the “evil figure” of “the kulak” or the rich peasant, from the late 1920s on and through the collectivization drive, expanded to include practically any peasant, says Viola. “Every peasant could be a kulak; every peasant could be the enemy; and all peasants could be the ‘most brutal, callous and savage exploiters, ‘leeches’ and ‘vampires’” (Viola 1996: 36).18 “The forced deportations and expropriations of the hundreds of thousands of defenceless peasant families were chalked up as revolutionary necessity”, adds Viola, and refers to the “terrible sufferings experienced by the people packed like cattle in box cars on their way to exile or sick and dying with disease that ran rampant in special settlements…” (Ibid: 37). Thus it was that the peasantry entered into a full-scale war with the Soviet state under Stalin, during the collectivization drive and through resistance, it “revealed itself to be separate and distinct, and antithetical to Soviet power” (Viola 1996: 5). In a sense, the larger unity of the peasantry emerged through this sense of common struggle. Most peasants were neither convinced nor deceived by the state’s public transcript. For them, collectivization was apocalypse, a war between the forces of evil and the forces of good. Soviet power, incarnate in the state, the town, and the urban cadres of collectivization, was Antichrist, with the collective farm as his lair…They understood it [collectivization] as a battle 18 The quotes within the quote are from Lenin.

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over their culture and way of life, as pillage, injustice and wrong. (Viola 1996: 14)

There is another side of this war on the peasantry that came to a head in 1929–1930—and that is the “campaign against religion and the church”, as party cadres went about closing churches and arresting priests. The reasons for this were not simply related to religion but rather to the fact that “the church also frequently served as the physical locus of revolt”—it was an attempt to “deprive the peasants of key cultural institutions” (Viola 1996: 37). These institutions also included markets— agricultural markets—that were more than places of buying and selling as they also constituted “a major cultural thoroughfare for contacts with other peasants and urban society and the reproduction of peasant culture” and functioned as sites of celebration and popular entertainment (Ibid: 40). If one looks at this entire history, it becomes abundantly clear that the Marxist relationship with the peasantry remained a tense and unresolved one all through. Lenin’s interventions right from the time of the early peasant struggles from 1902–1903, did attempt to carve out a new understanding that would become the basis after, 1905 for his understanding of the significance of the worker-peasant alliance. However, the role of the peasantry was conceived by Lenin mainly in relation to the antagonism of the peasants with the “privileged landowners” of a “serfowning society”—and of course the political struggle against Tsardom. In the words of E. Kingston-Mann, “these ‘specific historical circumstances’ made Social Democrats into temporary defenders of small-scale property in the struggle against feudalism. When this revolution was won, nationalization (the transfer of land rent to the state) might follow, and at that time, no sentimental preference would be given to the ‘working peasant’ over the agrarian capitalist” (Kingston-Mann 1974: 533). This position of Lenin’s did not fundamentally change though there is perhaps a way in which his rendering of the role and place of the peasantry was, in practice, more flexible. With his passing away, the relationship with the peasantry once again became fraught. The irony of the situation is that what was canonized as “MarxismLeninism” was the view of the young Lenin of 1899. In the context of my earlier discussion of the CPI(M) in West Bengal, it is difficult not to recall that when we were growing up as young student radicals associated with that party, the standard references of the party-affiliated intellectuals like

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Utsa Patnaik, when discussing the “agrarian question”, were to Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia, which was routinely invoked against the supposedly romantic neo-populist Chayanovian view of the peasant economy.19 It is not as if scholars like Patnaik were unaware of the kind of argument made by Shanin above, which not only shows discontinuities in Lenin’s thinking, but indeed his ever-readiness to change his position when faced with contrary evidence. Rather, Patnaik and other Marxist scholars had an investment in upholding the Stalinist version of events leading up to the forced collectivization drive, where the split between the Bolsheviks and the peasantry came to a head and it became anathema to say anything in defense of the peasants. Consequently they do not deign to engage with such arguments directly. Indeed, in an early article Jairus Banaji (1976) had shown that in the first place, Chayanov’s theory of the peasant economy was not only not “anti-Marxist” and “populist” as was often made out to be but could actually be synthesized with Kautsky’s and Lenin’s understanding of the relative viability of small-scale production, especially the middle peasant farm, by providing the theoretical basis for their claims (Banaji 1976: 1601). Interestingly, Banaji took the argument further by claiming that it was not at all impermissible, within Marxism, to talk of a “peasant mode of production” or “peasant economy”. As he put it, “In Marx, we come across incidental references to the ‘rural-patriarchal system of production’, or to the ‘old fashioned peasant economy’, which he calls a mode of production. Luxembourg espouses this notion even more emphatically, as do Preobrazhensky and Kautsky himself and several others” (Banaji 1976: 1601). Coming from a different part of the Marxist tradition, Banaji had no problem with this other way of looking at the peasant economy—unconstrained by the orthodoxies of Stalinism and the Comintern. He does, of course, still share with most Marxists the belief that ultimately, sooner or later, capitalism must win and the peasant economy cannot hold out forever. Thus while he defends Chayanov against charges of populism from Marxists, he interprets Chayanov’s claim regarding the “exceeding viability and stability of the peasant economy” as not implying an “indefinite capacity to resist the disintegrating pressures of competition”—almost as if to say that if that

19 See for instance, Utsa Patnaik (1999), especially the first essay in the book, “NeoPopulism and Marxism: The Chayanovian View of the Agrarian Question”, initially published in the Journal of Peasant Studies in 1979.

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were to be true, it would be an indefensible proposition (Banaji 1976: 1602). It seems that for Marxism’s “civilized self” to continue to appear in public, unperturbed, it was necessary to repress the post-1905 Lenin along with the late Marx of the 1870s who was urgently studying the Russian peasant communes, and reopening the entire question of communal ownership of land in precapitalist societies. It was as if, that Marx and this Lenin, almost too ready to concede too much to the “Narodniks” and Socialist Revolutionaries, too ready to recognize the radical potential of the “backward” peasantry and the peasant commune, had to be expunged from the text called Marxism, for the happy story of the universal march of History via capitalism to emerge.

Towards Reformulation The ghost of Narodnik “populism” accompanies Marxism like a shadow in what we have discussed above but the really interesting thing is that by the time Marxism arrives in India and China or Africa, the question of the peasantry’s role is no longer even a matter of debate. In the mid-1920s, for instance, when the poet Nazrul Islam and founder of the communist movement in Bengal, Muzaffar Ahmad started their paper (on behalf of the Labour Swaraj Party of the Indian National Congress), it was initially called Langal (the Plough). It was shut down by the British in April 1926 and when it reappeared some months later, it was called Ganabani (People’s Voice). This idea of the majority of the poor and oppressed being the peasants or simply, “the people”, and hence an important force, not just for national liberation but in the struggle against poverty and for justice seemed just so self-evident at that time. In North India, poetphilosopher Muhammad Iqbal’s poem “sultani-e-jamhoor”, which I have referred to in Chapter 1, also spoke of the coming time as the time of the “rule of the people”. At around this time, from 1926–1927 onwards, Peasants and Workers’ Parties were set up in a number of Indian states which concerned themselves very seriously with issues relating to the peasantry. In this context, it is difficult not to refer here to Frantz Fanon’s (2001) invocation of the “wretched of the earth”—not the proletariat, not any social group or class linked to the colonized modern sectors but to that raw humanity that has been reduced to what Aime Cesaire calls “thingification” (Cesaire 2010). For Fanon, “for centuries the capitalists

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have behaved in the under-developed world like nothing more than warcriminals”, with “deportations, massacres, forced labour, slavery” having been “the main methods used by capitalism to increase its wealth…and to establish its power” (Fanon 2001: 80). That was how Africa experienced capitalism, which also created its own settler enclaves in the continent. By and by, “the workers, primary school teachers, artisans and small shopkeepers” too begin to profit, if at a discount, from the colonial set-up.” The peasantry alone remains outside this setup, says Fanon, and therefore, “the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays” (Fanon 2001: 47). Whether one agrees with Fanon’s claim about the peasant’s relationship to violence or not, the point that I want to emphasize here is that in these passages of the text, he presents us with a understanding of the peasant and the worker and their respective revolutionary potentialities, in terms that are radically different from, indeed diametrically opposed to the one that we encountered in the European and Europeinspired debates among social democrats and Marxists in our preceding discussion. The peasantry is the most revolutionary because it is the class that has nothing to lose, whereas the working class has already developed stakes in the colonial setup. That the peasantry exists outside the class system is what becomes most significant for Fanon, not the “fact” that they are “small property owners”. That is why, despite all the talk “about progress, about ‘achievements’, diseases cured, improved standards of living”, Cesaire insists that “colonization = ‘thingification’”, where the indigenous man has been turned “into an instrument of production” (Cesaire 2010: 42). If this is the predominant experience of capitalism-colonialism in the colonies, we hear both Fanon and Cesaire say, then we need to understand revolutionary agency in very different terms from the way Marx articulated it. Indeed, perhaps the most popular couplet in Iqbal’s poem referred to earlier, is the one where he makes God tell his angels to “Burn down every sheaf of wheat in the field that fails to give livelihood to the peasant (Jis khet se dehqan ko mayassar nahin rozi/us khet ke har khosha-egandum ko jala do).20 20 For a discussion of this poem see Nigam (2020: 82).

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For Iqbal too, the peasant on the brink of starvation and without livelihood is the reference point for the coming rule of the people. One can indeed produce chapter and verse from the writings, both literary and political, from these parts of the world which see the peasantry not as property owners to be distrusted but as the representative of all the oppressed as such and, more importantly, in India, for instance, as annadata—those who feed us. For the most part, Marx himself—and Engels too—was theorizing capitalism on the basis of the European experience where a certain triumphalism of capital may have seemed quite inevitable in the nineteenth century. The experiences of the colonies—in different ways, to be sure—not only illuminate its other, darker, side; they also invite us to suspend our theoretical prejudices when attempting to conceptualize what revolution in the colonies could possibly mean. In our preceding discussion, we have seen that that triumphalism was not even possible to sustain in all parts of Europe and the Russian scene, with its debate on the peasant communes (mir), raises enough questions that call for a reformulation of Marxism in some crucial ways. When the Late Marx, wrote his troubled, undelivered responses to Vera Zasulich, he was pretty much indicating possibilities in that direction. Thus, he says, in the second draft (February/March 1881) that What threatens the life of the Russian commune is neither a historical inevitability nor a theory; it is state oppression, and exploitation by the capitalist intruders whom the state has made powerful at the peasants’ expense. (Letter reproduced in Shanin 1983/2009: 104–105, emphasis added)

Strikingly, Marx was already considering the possibility that it was not the operation of historical laws but state oppression that was destroying the peasant commune. That in itself is not really the surprising part but what follows: that state oppression was destroying the peasant communes by standing by the capitalist intruders —which, to my mind, suggests an external aggressor force and not the operation of a global “structure” or a “totality” of which the Russian economy too is a part. It is not surprising then that when Marx and Engels wrote their famous “Preface” to the second Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1882, they could conclude thus,

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Can the Russian obshchina, a form albeit heavily eroded, of primitive communal ownership of land, pass directly into the higher communist form of communal ownership? Or must it first go through the same process of dissolution which marks the West’s historical development? Today there is only one possible answer. If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for the proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then Russia’s peasant communal land-ownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development. (From Shanin 1983/2009: 139)

That the peasant commune can become the “point of departure” for a communist development is a very significant point to concede and one can only surmise that this could not have been possible without having re-thought the question of the historical inevitability of the destruction of the peasant economy. As Marcello Musto observes, in 1881, “after three decades of profound theoretical research” as well as his “massive synopses in The Ethnological Notebooks ”, Marx had quite a different view of the past communal forms to capitalism. (Musto 2020: 66). Based on his research into the published and unpublished works of the Late Marx, Musto underlines that the new element in Marx’s thinking in this period “was an ever greater theoretical openness, which enabled him to consider other possible roads to socialism that he had never before taken seriously.” (Ibid: 69) All this suggests that perhaps there had been the possibility of another Marxism emerging in the course of Marx’s own encounter with the trajectories and histories of the non-Western world.

References Alavi, Hamza, and Teodor Shanin. 1988. Introduction. In Kautsky (1988). Alurralde, J.C. 2006. Crisis in Cochabamba. Alternatives Journal 32 (4/5): 37– 39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45033547. Banaji, Jairus. 1976. Chayanov, Kautsky, Lenin: Considerations Towards a Synthesis. Economic and Political Weekly 11 (40): 1594–1607. http://www. jstor.org/stable/4364979, last accessed on 18 June 2022. Borgen Magazine. 2014. The Desertification of India. Borgen Magazine, 26 June. https://www.borgenmagazine.com/desertification-india/, last accessed on 15 June 2022. Castañeda, Jorge G. 1993. Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War. New York: Vintage Books.

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Cesaire, Aime. 2010. Discourse on Colonialism. New Delhi: Aakar Books. Chun, Lin. 2013. China and Global Capitalism: Reflections on Marxism, History, and Contemporary Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, Robin, Peter CW. Gutkind, and Phyllis Brazier, eds. 1979. Peasants and Proletarians: The Struggles of Third World Workers. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. de la Fuente, M. 2003. A Personal View: The Water War in Cochabamba, Bolivia: Privatization Triggers an Uprising. Mountain Research and Development 23 (1): 98–100. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3674547. Desmarais, Annette Aurelie. 2007. La Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants. New Delhi: Daanish Books. Dunbar-Oritz, Roxanne. 2007. Indigenous Peoples and the Left in Latin America. Monthly Review, 1 July. https://monthlyreview.org/2007/07/ 01/indigenous-peoples-and-the-left-in-latin-america/, last accessed on 19 December 2021. Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin Books. Ferguson, James. 2015. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Finnegan, William. 2002. Leasing the Rain. The New Yorker, 8 April. https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/04/08/leasing-the-rain, last accessed on 19 December 2021. Godelmann, Iker Reyes. 2014. The Zapatista Movement: The Fight for Indigenous Rights in Mexico. Australian Institute of International Affairs, 30 July. https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/news-item/the-zap atista-movement-the-fight-for-indigenous-rights-in-mexico/, last accessed on 19 December 2021. Gorz, Andre. 1982. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-industrial Socialism. London and Sydney: Pluto Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books. Harnecker, Marta. 2007. Rebuilding the Left. London: Zed Books. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1965. Introduction. In Marx (1965). New York: International Publishers. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1978. The Forward March of Labour Halted. Marxism Today, September: 279–286. Hussain, Athar, and Keith Tribe. 1983. Marxism and the Agrarian Question. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press. Kingston-Mann, E. (1974). Proletarian Theory and Peasant Practice: Lenin 1901–04. Soviet Studies 26 (4): 522–539. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 150676, last accessed on 18 June 2022.

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Klein, Hilary. 2019. A Spark of Hope: The Ongoing Lessons of the Zapatista Revolution 25 Years On. 18 January. https://nacla.org/news/2019/01/18/ spark-hope-ongoing-lessons-zapatista-revolution-25-years, last accessed on 19 December 2021. La Via Campesina. n.d. La Via Campesina: The Global Voice of the Peasants. https://viacampesina.org/en/international-peasants-voice/, last accessed on 19 December 2021. Levien, Michael, Michael Watts, and Yan Hairong. 2018. Agrarian Marxism (Introduction to Special issue). Journal of Peasant Studies 45 (5–6): 853–883. Minter, Adam. 2016. So Long to the Asian Sweatshop. Live Mint, 6 September. https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/x65QVNjY8CeLrLmIne 9iBI/So-long-to-the-Asian-sweatshop.html, last accessed on 20 December 2021. Moyo, Sam, and Paris Yeros, eds. 2005. Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. London and Cape Town: Zed Books and David Philip. Moyo, Sam, Praveen Jha, and Paris Yeros. 2015. The Agrarian Question in the 21st Century. Economic and Political Weekly 50 (37) (12 September): 35–41. Musto, Marcello. 2020. The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography. California: Stanford University Press. Nigam, Aditya. 2018. The Kisan Charter—Farmers Are Not Just a Residue from Our Past but Integral to the Future of India and the World. Kafila, 1 December. https://kafila.online/2018/12/01/the-kisan-charter-farmersare-not-just-a-residue-from-our-past-they-are-integral-to-the-future-of-indiaand-the-world/, last accessed on 15 June 2022. Nigam, Aditya. 2020b. Early ‘Marxism’ and the Parapolitics of Revolution: Thinking the Question of Thought. In Chatterjee (ed.) (2020), 73–111. Pandey, Ashish. 2020. Hyderabad: Farmers Protest Against 3 Agricultural Bills Tabled in Lok Sabha. India Today, 15 September. https://www.indiatoday. in/india/story/hyderabad-farmers-protest-against-3-agriculture-bills-tabledin-lok-sabha-1721851-2020-09-15, last accessed on 15 June 2022. Patnaik, Utsa. 1999. The Long Transition: Essays on Political Economy. New Delhi: Tulika. Pun, Ngai, and Huilin Lu. 2010. Neoliberalism, Urbanism and the Plight of Construction Workers in China. World Review of Political Economy 1 (1) (Spring): 127–141. Ram, Mohan. 1973. The Telengana Peasant Armed Struggle, 1946–51. Economic and Political Weekly 8 (23) (9 June): 1025–1032. Ramakrishnan, Shriya. 2017. Q and A: MS Swaminathan on India’s Agrarian Crisis. Aljazeera, 14 June. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/6/14/ qa-ms-swaminathan-on-indias-agrarian-crisis, last accessed on 15 June 2022.

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Rifkin, Jeremy. 1995. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-market Era. New York: GP Putnam’s Sons. Sanyal, Kalyan. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-colonial Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge. Sehgal, Rashme. 2018. As India Runs Out of Water, Its Desertified Land Comes into View. The Wire, 21 June. https://thewire.in/environment/as-india-runsout-of-water-its-desertified-land-comes-into-view, last accessed on 15 June 2022. Shanin, Teodor. 1983/2009. The Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism”. New Delhi: Aakar Books. Shanin, Teodor. 1986. Russia 1905–1907: Revolution as a Moment of Truth. Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of the Century, vol. 2. Basingstoke and London: The Macmillan Press. Shiva, Vandana, and Kunwar Jalees. n.d. Farmers Suicides in India. New Delhi: Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. Shiva, Vandana, and Kunwar Jalees. 2006. Seeds of Suicide: The Ecological and Human Costs of Seed Monopolies and Globalization of Agriculture. New Delhi: Navdanya. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Tripathi, Rahul. 2020. NCRB Date Shows 42,480 Farmers and Daily Wagers Committed Suicide in 2019. Economic Times, 1 September. https://econom ictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/ncrb-data-shows-42480farmers-and-daily-wagers-committed-suicide-in-2019/articleshow/778776 13.cms, last accessed on 15 June 2022. Viola, Lynn. 1996. Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waterman, Peter. 1983. The Concept of the ‘Semiproletarianized Peasantry’: An Empirical and Theoretical Note. Contemporary Marxism (6) (Spring) (Proletarianization and Class Struggle in Africa): 172–182. Ziegler, Jean. 2019. Foreword. In Hubert (2019).

CHAPTER 4

Climate Crisis, Productivism and Waste

Relocating Pollution and waste---The Global Story In May 2019, the Philippines shipped 69 containers containing contaminated garbage back to Canada, where they had come from. In early July that same year, Indonesia sent back 210 tons of waste paper “contaminated with hazardous material”, back to Australia. Around the same time, Malaysian Energy and Environment Minister, Yeo Been Yin, announced that 3000 tons of plastic waste would be sent back to 14 different countries. “Now we know,” said Yeo Been Yin, “that garbage is traded under the pretext of recycling.”1 In 2018, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc “slashed monthly trash import quotas by 90 percent and announced that his government would stop issuing licenses to import waste. Vietnam plans to ban all imports of plastic scrap by 2025”, said another report. (Jain 2020) Over 2019, the Philippines turned back approximately 2700 tons of Canadian waste. (Ibid) This is just a glimpse of what have come to be termed the “trash trade wars”, for the actual scale of the dumping of waste in the global South is far greater and threatens to burgeon into more serious conflict in coming years. E-waste, of course, adds another dimension altogether, both in terms of the quantum and in terms of the hazards it poses.

1 All these instances have been reported in Aljazeera 2019

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22895-7_4

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Things reached such a pass that leading US oil and chemical companies like Shell, Exxon, DuPont, Total and Dow, all members of the American Chemistry Council, decided to throw money at African states like Kenya to lure them to take their plastic waste. They “proposed investments in recycling in Kenya, provided that the recipient country accepts US plastic waste. Kenya would get about 500 million tonnes of plastic waste exports from the US per year.” (Whitehouse 2020, emphasis original) According to this same report, the plastic waste exports to Kenya had quadrupled in 2019 alone. (Whitehouse 2020) “Documents obtained by Unearthed show the same lobby group – and the US recycling industry— also lobbied against changes to an international agreement that puts new limits on plastic waste entering low- and middle-income countries,” says the website of Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s award-winning journalism project. (Howard 2020) The lobby group in question is the one comprising the oil and chemical companies mentioned earlier, and the “international agreement”, changes to which they lobbied against, refers to the United Nations’ Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. US Democratic Senator Tom Udall, who had introduced a legislation in 2019 to tackle the plastic waste crisis, accused the companies of “double dealing.” He minced no words when he told Unearthed: It is outrageous that petrochemical and plastic industries claim the solution to our mounting plastic waste crisis is to produce more disposable plastic. These same companies and corporations then point the finger at developing nations for the plastic waste showing up in our oceans. This double-dealing makes clear what the true source of our plastic waste crisis is: companies and corporations off-shoring their responsibilities to make billions of dollars… Requiring these companies to take responsibility for their excessive waste and pollution is the only way we will tackle our colossal plastic waste problem. (Howard 2020)

This big shift—and the sudden escalation of trash trade wars—started taking place worldwide, once China, in the beginning of 2018, “closed its doors to almost all foreign plastic waste, as well as many other recyclables, in an effort to protect its environment and air quality, leaving developed nations struggling to find places to send their waste.” (AFP 2019) “It was like an earthquake”, said Arnaud Brunet, director-general

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of the Brussels-based industry group, The Bureau of International Recycling, reported South China Morning Post. (AFP 2019) China’s new rules that were passed in 2017 and became operational from the beginning of 2018, were followed in mid-2018, by an announcement that China would stop companies from importing solid waste (unrecyclable, often toxic and hazardous waste) by December 2020. (Rapoza 2021) In March 2018, China’s environment minister at the time, Li Ganjie, noted that the volume of solid waste had grown from around 4 to 4.5 million tons to 45 million tons in just twenty years. (Rapoza 2021).2 Thus began the shift from China to Southeast Asian and African countries as the new destinations for different kinds of waste. “In the small town of Jenjarom, close to Kuala Lumpur, plastic processing plants appeared in large numbers, pumping out noxious fumes around the clock,” says the AFP report cited above. Residents soon noticed the acrid stench over the town, and “people were attacked by toxic fumes” that woke them up at nights, coughing. (AFP 2019) That was when the initial community investigations began into these factories, many of which ran illegally, leading to major campaigns. By 2019, many of these countries were refusing to take garbage produced in the metropolises of advanced capitalism. The question naturally arises as to why this waste of advanced capitalism was going to these poor countries, in the first place. Why was this waste not being either processed or dealt with by the countries that generated it? The answer is given in terms of a perverse version of the old comparative advantage theory: Ostensibly, this large-scale dumping of garbage, with horrible environmental and health consequences for the inhabitants of these countries, was not dumping at all but simply mutually beneficial “trade”. These poorer countries would undertake to recycle the garbage, using their pools of cheap labor, and then sell the recycled goods profitably. (Aljazeera 2019)3 The fact that is conveniently hidden behind the rhetoric of comparative advantage is that most of the waste is either 2 India too is supposed to be a “notorious hub of mounds of recyclable waste going nowhere” but the government in India has not shown much awareness of the disaster that garbage—both its own and imported from the “developed nations” constitutes, for India happens to be the one of the leading generators of its own 62 million tons of waste, of which only about 15 percent is processed. (Swaminathan 2018; Rapoza 2021) However, the India story is not relevant for our present purposes. 3 The Aljazeera story features a video of a panel discussion, where panelists included activists from Indonesia (Yuyun Ismawati, co-founder Nexus3 Foundation), Philippines

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not recyclable or it is hazardous in the extreme. [See CIEL, Earthworks et al. (2019), for plastic waste]. It bears emphasizing here that neither this argument nor the business of relocating waste and hazardous industries to countries of the global South is new. Indeed, far from being an isolated instance, this argument has very deep roots in economic thinking—which of course, has always merely reinforced the dominant interests of the global North. Recall that in 1991, Lawrence Summers, then Chief Economist at the World Bank, signed a memo, where it was argued that the World Bank should be encouraging the “migration of dirty industries to the LDCs (less developed countries)” for, as he put it, “I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.” (Vallette 1999; Swaney 1994, capital letters in original) “Only the lamentable facts”, Summers’ memo went on to say, “that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high, prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.” (Vallette 1999) It was later claimed that this memo was meant to be sarcastic when it leaked to the media. However, even if we give Summers the benefit of doubt, there is absolutely no denying the fact at all that industries that moved out of the highly industrialized North around that time, relocated precisely to those parts of the world that were not just low-wage areas but equally were extremely lax in terms of environmental regulations. In these countries, even in the worst case scenario, the corporations could simply buy their way out, rather than get tied up in getting environmental clearances for their industries. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Lawrence Summers’ career saw meteoric rise within the US administration, for he went on to serve first as the 71st Secretary of the US Treasury (1999–2001) and subsequently Director of the US National Economic Council (2002–2010). Also worth recalling here is the fact that the leaked Summers memo came close on the heels of the adoption, in 1989, of the Basel Convention by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which happened to be the “first attempt to establish an agreement on global standards for hazardous waste, including the trade and disposal of toxic waste.” (Lea Guerrero, country director Greenpeace) and Kate O’Neil (academic from University of California, Berkeley). These arguments figure in the panel discussion.

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(Benson 2021) Therefore, it is not irrelevant to the problem at hand that the United States, while repeatedly rewarding Lawrence Summers, has studiously avoided ratifying the Basel Convention, which “limits the movement of hazardous waste (excluding radioactive materials) between countries. It was written to help curb the practice of richer, industrialized nations dumping their hazardous waste into less developed and less wealthy countries.” (Lohan 2021) What better way to deal with the problem than to shift entire industries themselves to the global South? Of course, the sheer volume of garbage and hazardous waste is so huge that it cannot really circumvent the problem of its “transborder movement”. Thus, says the above report, “the convention is now taking on the global scourge of plastic waste, of which the United States is the largest contributor. A new provision went into effect this year [2021] that seeks to curb the amount of waste shipped to other countries that can’t be recycled and ends up instead being burned or escaping into the environment.” (Lohan 2021) This was the provision that the oil and chemical companies had been lobbying against with the Trump administration in the United States.

Waste and Power My purpose in recounting these developments of the recent past and the increased conflicts over garbage disposal, however, is not to track down different aspects of these new conflicts in detail but rather to draw attention to the key issue that I want to discuss in this chapter: the absence of waste from theoretical discourse, despite its centrality in practice to the whole business of capitalist production.4 This absence is quite stark and built into the theoretical discourses of economics and mainstream social sciences to be sure; it is equally striking in Marxism in all its versions. The single-minded focus of all modernist discourses on production and productivity structures them in such a way that they are never quite able 4 Throughout this chapter, I use the term “waste”, “garbage” and “trash” interchangeably. For the present, I am not interested in the way the term was used in early political theory of Lockean vintage and its mutated form in subsequent economic theory, which understood “waste” as that which lay “unused” for the generation of capitalist wealth. This is the famous—or notorious—argument that was made in favor of taking over Native Americans’ lands for instance. This aspect is discussed at some length by Gidwani and Reddy (2011). My concern is entirely with the trash that is generated alongside capitalist production and modern living.

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to account for this very material product of production, whose effects we are now living through, some three centuries after the theoretical and philosophical foundations of modernity and capitalism were laid. As a matter of fact, this theoretical absence of “waste” in the context of capitalist production is of a piece with the larger philosophical preoccupation with structured, closed totalities which are seen to function in accordance with certain laws—that is to say, assumed to be possessed of a certain self-correcting rationality. Matters like waste are excised from vision and ejected from the system, and therefore, not worthy of theoretical consideration, just as “nature” had once come to be seen as little more than the provider of “natural resources” and “raw materials” for production. In that sense, “nature” too lay “outside” the system. Waste then appears simply as what remains after production—and since the early twentieth-century era of mass consumption—after consumption, and is supposed to go back to nature, like human excreta. In an ongoing paradigm shift in the wake of the climate crisis, “nature” and “ecology” have become theoretically important for the reconceptualization of “the economy” and critique of the spirit of world mastery that undergirds capital’s colonization of the planet. The question of waste, however, still remains a purely empirical question—that of something to be managed and disposed of—except in the more recent work in the new sub-discipline of ecological economics and the field of political ecology, as we will see in the last section of this chapter. In the discourse of economics, this space “outside the system” has a name—it is the domain of “externalities”. Characteristically therefore, neither its inputs (except as raw materials) nor its output (as pollution, depletion of reserves, and destruction of the environment) have entered into the calculation of production costs and value—though they are now being grudgingly accepted as costs to be factored in. In Marxism, it is simply not considered and the few places in which Marx does refer to waste, is in relation to “refuse” that becomes fresh raw material, as we will see. The cognitive power of the concepts of totality and structure that Marxism relies on, lies precisely in this, that it renders invisible and irrelevant what is ejected from the “system”. Vinay Gidwani, a Marxist scholar working on waste notes that in describing the “economical use” that such “conditions of production” yield, Marx mentions “the transformation of the refuse of production, its so-called waste product, back into new elements of production, either in the same branch of industry or in other; the processes by which this so-called

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refuse is sent back into the cycle of production, and thus consumption— productive or individual.” (Marx cited in Gidwani 2018: 192, emphasis added) Gidwani’s essay intends to set the stage for a “Marxist theory of waste” and, therefore, presents a very sympathetic reading of Marx. He follows up the above quote with a passage from Marx’s Volume 3 of Capital , a part of which is worth reproducing here: It is the resulting massive scale of these waste products that makes them into new objects of trade and therefore new elements of production. It is only as the waste products of production in common, and hence of production on a large scale, that they acquire this importance for the production process and remain bearers of exchange value. The waste products, quite apart from the service that they perform as new elements of production, reduce the cost of raw material, to the extent that they can be resold, for this cost always includes normal wastage, i.e. the average quantity that is lost in the course of processing. (cited in Gidwani 2018: 192, emphasis added)

Clearly, the “waste” that Marx talks of, sometimes as “so-called refuse”, sometimes as “waste products” which by the very scale of their “production in common”, become “new objects of trade” and “new elements of production” is not the waste that goes out of the system—of the kind around which the new trash wars are being fought today. Gidwani himself is circumspect, not willing to hazard the risk of unpacking the expression “waste products of production in common”. Rather, he raises a series of questions which go like this, Is this waste reusable as raw material in future production without further transformation or transportation? Does it require application of new labor to revive or restore its exchange value? Should the ‘trade’ Marx alludes to be considered ‘productive labor’ or simply mercantile acts of arbitrage that add no new value? Would Marx have altered his assessment if he were attentive to the diverse material properties of ‘so-called waste’? What if Marx had lived in a world saturated with postconsumer waste? (Gidwani 2018: 192)

Consequently, Gidwani does not present before us any leads as to what a possible Marxist theory of waste could be. However, some of his very insightful discussion of “waste”, from different angles, can be more useful in helping us theorize waste in a more contemporary way without there being anything necessarily Marxist about it.

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John Bellamy Foster (2003), in his well-known excavation of what he calls “Marx’s ecology”, cites Marx on the question of soil erosion from the first volume of Capital to say that all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art of robbing, “not only the worker but of robbing the soil” and follows this up with a quote from the third volume of Capital, where Marx discusses capitalist ground rent. Here Foster cites Marx as saying that “In London…they can do nothing better with the excrement produced by 4.5 million people than pollute the Thames with it, at monstrous expense.” (Foster 2003: 161) The implication here is that such excrement could have been better utilized in recharging the soil. Observations such as these, says Foster, “deeply affected” subsequent thinkers in the Marxist tradition such as Kautsky and Lenin, citing the following passage from Lenin’s The Agrarian Question and the “Critics of Marx”, The possibility of substituting artificial for natural manures and the fact that this is already being done (partly) do not in the least refute the irrationality of wasting natural fertilisers and thereby polluting the rivers and the air in suburban and factory districts. Even at the present time there are sewage farms in the vicinity of large cities which utilise city refuse with enormous benefit to agriculture; but by this system only an infinitesimal part of the refuse is utilized. (Cited in Foster 2003: 162)

These are important observations no doubt, by way of a criticism of existing policies being followed by the respective regimes in Marx’s and Lenin’s time, and they do show an awareness of (i) erosion of soil quality and (ii) the pollution caused by releasing excreta into the rivers rather than utilizing them as “natural fertilizers”. However, such observations do not go beyond the level of empirical observations and policy criticism. They certainly do not add anything to the theoretical scheme of Marxism. In an earlier essay, Gidwani and Reddy (2011) had proposed a suggestive thesis that “waste” must be seen as the “political other” of capitalist “value”, “repeated with difference as part of capital’s spatial histories of surplus accumulation”, whereby “things, places and lives…are cast outside the pale of “value” at particular moments as superfluity, remnant, excess, or detritus…” (Gidwani and Reddy 2011: 1625) This is a very interesting formulation and what is really striking about it is that it takes into consideration “things, places and lives” that are cast outside the pale of value. If we return to our opening discussion in this chapter, we can see that

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this connection between “things” (garbage), “places” (the global South) and the “lives” (the humans and non-humans who inhabit them) are tied together quite intricately. However, once again, the authors do not present us with any further theoretical elaboration of the key idea of the central thesis—that of waste as the “political other” of “capitalist value”. The connection between “things, places and lives” comes out in all its starkness in a study of the wastes in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, especially the city of Iqaluit. The authors Myra Hird and Alexander Zahara tell us that in 2014, in just over a year, the four-story pile of waste spontaneously caught fire for the fourth time. The fire continued to burn for over three months, with residents complaining of all kinds of healthrelated problems, leading to the closure of schools and postponement of many community events. (Hird and Zahara 2017: 121) The authors tell us that most of the waste at this and other dumps in Iqaluit “are left over from federal government military and resource development initiatives” with no clarity as to the responsibility for their cleaning up. (Hird and Zahara 2017: 122) Hird and Zahara, however, link waste to “neocolonial governance” which “leads to the configuration of waste as capitalism’s fallout – its unanticipated supplement…” (Ibid: 122) One of the authors’ respondents, an Inuit Iqaluit resident explained the beginnings of waste, quite starkly, It’s a catch-22 kind of thing…Because we didn’t need television, we didn’t need rifles, we didn’t need snowmobiles. We were living just fine the way we were. And this white man comes, ‘oh you need shelter, oh you need furniture to get status in your life. Oh you need pots and pans.’ But we didn’t…As soon as the white man said, ‘you need to be in communities’…we were scattered all over the place, and then the government said we got used to money… (Hird and Zahara 2017: 134)

So if waste is capitalism’s “unanticipated surplus”, it is also, the authors note, “a provocative material concept with which to think about neocoloniality because of the important part this has played and continues to play, in ‘excluding certain groups of people from specific social, political, and physical spaces.’”.5

5 The quote within the quote is from an article by Sarah A. Moore, “Garbage Matters: Concepts in New Geographies of Space.” The resonance of Moore’s formulation with the specific operations of the deep interconnections of exclusion of the “untouchable castes”

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There is another dimension of waste that needs to be considered, especially in relation to the ideas of waste as the “other of capitalist value” on the one hand, and that of “capitalism’s unanticipated surplus” on the other. In themselves, both these formulations, interesting though they are, do not tell us anything about the fact that while, in capitalist production “value” (in the most general terms) is privately appropriated, waste as its “expunged other” is nobody’s property. And to say that it is nobody’s property, that it has no claimant, means essentially that it is left to invade the commons.6 In its more benign forms as biodegradable waste, it gets absorbed in the elements—which was the way precapitalist/ premodern waste largely disappeared over time. In its more malign forms, its invasion of the commons leads to the pollution of the air and water, ever increasing toxification of the soil, groundwater and rivers, acidification of the oceans, increasing health hazards for populations left to deal with it. It is at this point that I want to bring together the two formulations of waste as the “political other of capitalist value” (Gidwani and Reddy 2011) and as “capitalism’s unanticipated surplus” (Hird and Zahara 2017). First, the idea of the “political other” of capital suggests something more than simply saying waste is the “other” of capitalist value. The latter seems to suggest something closer to the idea of “unanticipated surplus”—as something that simply accompanies capitalist production. The idea of a “political other”, however, has to mean something else from specific social, political and physical spaces” in the premodern Indian context are very striking and invite us to think of the larger issue that may be involved in this connection between waste and exclusion—after all these population groups were defined by the fact that they were forced to deal with the waste of caste Hindu society. Linked to these is the “longstanding association of waste, dirt, and disease with racialized and colonized peoples as justification for practices of subjugation” that Hird and Zahara talk of (2017: 123). Some of these questions are tied to notions of purity and pollution, taboo and danger, which have been discussed by Mary Douglas (1966) in her classic, Purity and Danger, but are beyond the scope of our discussion here. 6 There are many different ways in which the term “commons” is used. One of these senses, tied to activist and policy discourses, see the commons as tied to communities of use and self-governance. In this sense, we cannot possibly talk of the atmosphere, the oceans and so on as the commons. Much of the opposition to this idea comes from the way in which institutions like the World Bank have started talking of the “global commons” to take over their control and “governance”. This is a perfectly justified objection but at a philosophical level, it is important to claim these as the common wealth of all human and non-human life on the planet whose governance cannot be left to institutions like the World Bank, to whom we would not entrust even the right to govern national economies.

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that exceeds unanticipated surplus. It seems to me that at some level, it must also connect to the idea of “neocolonial governance” (Hird and Zahara 2017), for both in a very important sense seem to take the question beyond the level of production to the political moment in which it is implicated. Both the ideas of “unanticipated surplus of capitalist production” and the “other of capitalist value” make sense in terms of what occurs at the point of production, but clearly both sets of authors point us to the way “things, places and lives” get connected and “cast outside the pale of value”. This inescapably involves the political moment of othering, which is tied to cultural and class power at the same time.

Expanded Reproduction of Waste Beyond the realm of theory, however, it would not be entirely correct to say that economists and policy-makers did not take waste production seriously. For, as far as the capitalist economy was concerned, production of waste on an expanded scale was not just an accidental outcome of the production process but integral to accumulation or what Marx called reproduction on an expanded scale. And economists and policy-makers have known it all along—and so have industrialists and market strategists. With the onset of the era of Fordist mass consumption in the 1920s, followed by the Great Depression beginning in the end of that decade, the phenomenon of expanded reproduction of waste acquired an altogether different dimension with the emergence of planned obsolescence as strategy, and was to remain an enduring feature of capitalism. Vance Packard, in his pioneering The Waste Makers (1960), observed citing a marketing expert that “consumption must rise, and keep rising”. Many among them, he said, ‘‘have been announcing that the average citizen will have to step up his buying by nearly 50 percent in the next dozen years, or the economy will sicken.” (Packard 1960: 11).7 But does it mean that they were aware of the effects of this consumerism in terms of waste generation? Here Packard cites Victor Lebow, an important figure among marketing consultants, who made a forceful plea for “forced consumption”, in the mid-1950s and who, in

7 It should be clear, here as elsewhere in the book, that I am not at all interested in addressing the tired intra-Marxist debate between “underconsumptionist” and “overproduction” theories of capitalist crises.

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Packard’s view, most powerfully expressed the “emerging philosophy” of the time, in two essays in The Journal of Retailing: Our enormously productive economy ... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate. (Cited in Packard 1960: 24, emphasis added)

Mark the expression “at an ever increasing rate” in particular, and it will become clear how the US economy in the mid-twentieth century was already dependent on the production of waste on an expanded scale. Susan Strasser, in her important study, traces the emergence of the problem of trash to an even earlier time. While people have always disposed of waste, she argues, it underwent a major transformation “during the forty or so years around the turn of the twentieth century”, when “mass production and mass distribution created unprecedented quantities of trash that disturbed private citizens and plagued city administrations.” (Strasser 1999: 17, emphasis added). Lebow, in other words, could not have been unaware of what “burned up, worn out, replace and discarded at an ever increasing rate” meant. Strasser continues: A crucial element in this culture of mass consumption was embodied in what French social critic Gilles Lipovetsky has called the “empire of the ephemeral”, whose central feature is the extension of the principle of fashion, that is to say, obsolescence based on style, on to other domains. (Cited in Strasser 1999: 187)

Already by the 1920s, this mass consumer culture had become linked to a widely discussed idea—planned obsolescence. According to Strasser, the term itself was perhaps used for the first time only in 1955, “when Business Week described the expansion of ‘planned obsolescence’ from the auto industry to the marketing of consumer goods in general.” As a concept, planned obsolescence was discussed endlessly in business magazines, often under different names. She cites, for instance, a “provocative editorial” about “product death-dates” in Design News, which sparked a debate about engineering ethics among its readers and writers. (Strasser 1999: 274–75) Thus, says Strasser, mass consumer culture, by this time, was already characterized by the phenomenon of consumers discarding

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objects long before their life was over. The advent of newer technologies too produced obsolescence as they continue to do even now, which in itself is still understandable. What was remarkable though was that even in sectors like automobiles, yearly model changes, first introduced by General Motors, managed to establish an idea of obsolescence that was often not about technological change for those would have been too expensive; they were simply stylistic changes but GM managed through advertising, to sell those hard enough to convince consumers to discard cars as they would their out-of-fashion clothes. (Ibid: 193). With planned obsolescence, the mass production of waste now became part of corporate strategies of growth. This is what Vance Packard’s books drew popular attention towards.8 And for doing so he was attacked and reviled not only by big business and the advertising industry but also by leading sociologists and economists of the time. What is interesting is not that Packard was attacked but the terms in which he was criticized. Thus, for instance, no less a figure than Seymour Martin Lipset branded him a conservative and dismissed his book as “a nostalgic rejection of a materialist culture written for those who believe that the only good society was the pre-industrial, pre-commercial, agrarian civilization.” (Cited in Ibid: 277) The celebration of the new, per se, as embodied in the strategy of planned obsolescence and the more general discourse of Progress, as expressed in Lipset’s diatribe, are both of a piece. Together, they form the lynchpin of the new philosophy of the times, indeed, of our times as well. It is not outlandish to suggest that the philosophy of Progress and the new imagination of Time undergirded the worldview that corporate and business strategies drew their language from. But in more concrete economic terms, their exponential growth was anything but part of some “objective historical laws”—unless one sees plans and strategies themselves as instantiating a larger “cosmic purpose”. Consumers, as I have argued in Chapter 2, were not waiting and ready to be convinced about discarding their perfectly functioning belongings, simply to replace them with new ones. A whole elaborate apparatus assembled through the conjunction of “economic science”, sociology, philosophy, government and the advertising industry had to be pressed into service in order to accomplish this task. The fear of the failure of 8 The Waste Makers (1960), was the third of a trilogy—the other two being The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Status Seekers (1959). All three “stayed on the best-seller list for at least six months” and “each hit number one”. (Strasser 1999: 276).

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effective demand has haunted capital through the last hundred years and continues to do so. Long ago Andre Gorz, citing Swedish economist Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, reported that “90 per cent of chairmen of large companies questioned by the Harvard Business Review reckon that it is impossible to ‘sell a new product without an advertising campaign, 85 per cent that advertising often leads to the purchase of products for which the purchasers have no use and 51 per cent that advertising leads people to buy things they don’t really want.” (Gorz: 1989: 119) He also cited the chairman of J. Walter Thomson, “one of the largest American advertising agencies”, made in the early 1950s, where he says, I see advertising as an educational and activating force capable of producing the changes in demand which we need. By educating people into higher living standards, it ensures that consumption will rise to a ’level justified by our production and resources’. (Cited in Gorz 1989: 120, emphasis added)

The only way companies could grow at an exponential rate and keep up the supposed “logic of accumulation” was by something far more sinister than creation of new needs through the use of advertising; it was by ensuring that products have a limited life span. Indeed, it is only when, not merely commodities of direct consumption, but technology itself becomes subject to planned obsolescence that we begin to see the so-called logic of expanded reproduction (i.e., accumulation of capital) in all its resplendent glory. Then alone does the myth of the secular development of productive forces—as the hallmark of capitalism—work. This can be seen at work routinely in the “growth” of the most destructive sector, namely the automobile sector, where periodically new models replace old ones and where even legitimate ecological concerns are turned into reasons for planned obsolescence. New technologies are apparently clean and greener and must therefore replace older ones. But this happens across sectors—even where excuses of “environment friendliness” are unavailable. One such instance was seen when, in a decision that affected innumerable countries in Asia and Africa most, Microsoft withdrew backup of technical support to its XP operating system in April 2014.9 Higher software versions beyond a certain limit require, as we know, much higher hardware configurations. That is why millions 9 The Microsoft site puts it most succinctly. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ WindowsForBusiness/end-of-xp-support, last accessed on 29 August 2022.

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of computers, televisions, refrigerators, dishwashers, DVD players and mobile phones pile up as waste across Europe and the Western world. (Latouche 2009: 19) It was estimated about a decade ago that “every year, 150 million computers are shipped to the Third World for sorting and recycling (500 ships sail for Nigeria every month) [from France] and they contain toxic heavy metals such as mercury, nickel, cadmium, arsenic and lead.” (Alain Grass cited in Latouche 2009: 19). It is important to remember that this is not something that only corporations do but also something that governments must step into, in order to keep the myth of Progress going. All governments must now show that “the economy” under their tutelage is “growing”. Thus, for instance, in India, in recent times, successive governments and courts together have, in the name of cleaner non-polluting technologies, mandated that cars must be dumped after fifteen years, in the city of Delhi. Or one may take the instance of the virtual outlawing of analog technology and the compulsory switch to digital technology mandated by the decision of the Indian parliament, which forced all consumers to move to digital technology for satellite television viewing via Direct to Home (DTH) transmission. Although this measure was pushed through ostensibly in the interests of consumers, it was interesting that deadlines had to be extended repeatedly, because the bulk of the consumers were not interested in making the switch. (Shukla 2011; Sinha 2011; PTI 2012) The fact of the matter was that major corporations had made huge investments in the projected transition to digitalization and the transition was therefore to be enforced by law. Planned obsolescence makes waste production integral, in a way it could not have been earlier, to technological advance.

Marxist Productivism The key issue linked to waste production is obviously the question of disposal. I have argued above that waste must be seen as belonging to nobody, that is to say, quite ironically, it is the only part of capitalist production that is to be “consumed” in common, with the poorest and least powerful getting the most of it. Who disposes of your waste? Where do you dispose of your waste? In whose backyard? Whose water and air do you pollute? The answer to these questions takes us straight to the question of power, more precisely class power. The answer should be obvious to anyone who is even faintly aware of how the dynamics

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of power operates—glimpses of which we have seen in the discussion in the earlier sections of this chapter. It has been emphasized that “things, places and lives” are inescapably tied in this understanding of waste. What is not immediately obvious is that here lurks another of the unstated assumptions of growth-fetishism: it is not just objects that are waste and disposable; entire populations have to be seen as disposable for the logic of growth to work. They are to be uprooted in order to make common lands and forests available for satisfying the corporate lust for profits and the consumption needs of the consuming classes. The commons also serve as the dumping ground, quite literally, for the toxic waste that is produced in the course of satisfying that lust. We have read stories of the mass transportation from Europe, of the populations uprooted by industrialization, once they were forced to turn to petty crime for their survival. We also know of the Atlantic Slave Trade that went in to power the growth of early capitalism. We have stories of indentured workers who were herded from India and other parts of the world for the same purpose. And we know of the genocide, of the virtual elimination of native populations in the Americas. All these are stories of the populations that were turned into waste—the excreta of capitalist growth. And much of this takes place “outside” the sphere of capitalist production. Once again, the political moment appears as constitutive of the capitalist reorganization of the world, of time and space. We have yet to compile stories of the millions of people who perish, being subjected to disease and slow death as a result of waste dumping, water poisoning, air pollution and so on. In other words, if all these go into the production of the dazzling metropolises of advanced capitalism, they also constitute, what we might call antivalue—that is to say, not just the “other” of capitalist value but what its production negates.10 Every unit of value produced by capitalist production, then, is predicated on a series of negations. The fact that some of this garbage or waste may be recycled or repurposed by population groups living at the edge, does nothing to change its character as negation. The problem of waste must therefore be seen, not as an incidental byproduct of growth-oriented capitalism, but as something integral to it. It has returned today to haunt us—as much as the issue of depletion of 10 My use of the term “value” here should be understood in the most general sense (e.g. in the expression value-added), and not in the Marxist sense, on which there have been endless debates, but which sheds little light on the actual workings of exchange and exploitation of labor.

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finite resources has. One might even wager, therefore, that if the twentieth century was a century of obsession with production, the twenty-first will have to be one of preoccupation with the question of waste. It is the shared ground between the modernist discourses of economics and the social sciences on the one hand, and Marxism on the other, that makes it so easy for the latter to shade into the former, repeatedly, at critical moments. One such moment was that of the collapse of state socialism and the global victory of neoliberalism in the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Revolutionaries brought up on the twentieth-century legacy of productivist Marxism, therefore, took little time to concede defeat and accepted that capitalism is the only salvation and that they too must build capitalism wherever they are in power. If this defeatism came to define Marxists-in-power at the precise moment of the global victory of neoliberalism, it is also remarkable that this shading into neoliberalism, of Marxism-in-power, was also coeval with the rise of a global concern about climate change—if one were to take the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (also known as the Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro as a crucial milestone in that direction. Marxismin-power managed to effect this change by adopting an ever more hostile stance towards whoever dared to talk of the looming ecological crisis or raise questions that were seen as an attack on the “underdeveloped” countries’ right to development. China, of course, took the lead in this regard but the experience is far more widespread as is well acknowledged now. In India, the raising of ecological concerns was seen by the communist parties as a ploy of “imperialism”, meant to hold back the development of formerly colonized, underdeveloped countries—even when these concerns were raised from within sections of the Left. One of the early instances was that of an open conflict between the ruling CPI(M)-led government in the state of Kerala and some leaders of the popular science organization, the Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) (affiliated to the same party), over what was known as the Silent Valley project, in 1978. The controversy broke out in public as the state government set in motion a plan to dam the Kuntapuzha river, which would have submerged an entire rainforest called the Silent Valley, known for its rare biodiversity. M.P. Parameswaran, the most prominent KSSP leader opposing the

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government’s project, was dubbed an “imperialist agent” and condemned for being “anti-development”. (Menon and Nigam 2014: 116–117).11 That stance of the party, unfortunately, remains as entrenched today as it was then and the current state government, also led by the CPI(M), has gone on with its numerous “development” projects that have endangered the fragile ecology of the Western Ghats mountains, the latest being the Silver Line Rail project, that has been criticized for its lack of economic viability, but, more importantly, its social and environmental impacts. (Hariprasad 2022) Among the other flashpoints today is the Vizhinjam International Seaport project, owned by Gautam Adani, one of the biggest benefactors and beneficiaries of the current right-wing regime at the Centre. This project is facing massive protests from local inhabitants, most of whom belong to the fishing community and whose livelihoods are being adversely affected by the project. “The estimated cost of construction for the Adani seaport project is around $900 million at the moment. The Kerala government will also invest huge amounts of money in various aspects of the project, which will be owned by the Adani group for at least 40 years”, according to reports. (Louis 2022) It is quite telling that the CPI(M) has made common cause with the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party at the Centre) in opposing and vilifying the protesters. The interesting thing is that when in opposition, the CPI(M) had opposed the project and the current chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, had claimed that the Vizhinjam project involved “colossal corruption by exchanging land worth Rs. 60,000 million to the Adani Group under the pretext of development.” (Louis 2022) Apart from adversely affecting the biodiversity and fish population in the sea, environmentalists fear other long-term impacts from the project. “A total of 450 hectares of land will be used for the construction of the project, which will include reclaiming 120 hectares of sea and dredging of the seabed as well…The port development has already seen nearly 600 metres of shore lost to erosion, which has left hundreds of locals homeless, who are now staying at relief camps”, says the report by Thomas Louis cited above. (Louis 2022) The project is estimated to affect the livelihoods of 50,000 families in the area as fisherfolk will be unable to go fishing any more.

11 M.P. Parameswaran interestingly went on to elaborate his own version of an “ecological Marxism” by synthesizing Gandhian critiques of development and Marxist theory. He was eventually expelled from the party in 2004.

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I want to argue that this change in the thinking of Marxists since the 1990s has little to do with the intentions of the revolutionaries in power for it is fundamentally a matter of the discourse that constitutes them as Marxist and “revolutionary”. It is about the language they have grown up in, within which their thought is constituted, to which their “worldview” is inextricably tied. Both together constitute the productivist and “progressist” imagination that has dominated the world over the past three centuries. In our contemporary language, we could call it growth-fetishism—a vision that remains forever caught in the idea of the “historical inevitability” of capitalism and of modernity-as-emancipation. Such a vision fails to distinguish between the cancerous growth of capital on the social body, and the all-round improvement in the lives of ordinary people which it continues to see as an emanation of the former. The two do not go together in the long run, even though, in the short run the prosperity of the industrialized Western world has dazzled and drugged political elites (including radical elites) in the postcolonial world into believing that the Western path is the only path available to humanity. But as always happens, the dazzling light also blinds us and throws other parts into darkness. What we could not see when the sun of neoliberalism was at its zenith, is increasingly coming into view as its light begins to wane under the impact of the climate emergency that we confront today. Increasingly, we have to reckon with the fact that if the rest of the world were to strive to achieve the life styles of the modern West, we might require another three or may be four earths not just to milk and exploit, but to enslave their inhabitants, colonize their lands—first for production and then to dump waste in. In other words, we are talking of an impossibility, if we believe that Western modernity (read capitalism) is the only way to emancipation that the whole world must follow. Dazzled by the “achievements” of capitalist modernity, the revolutionaries of the Old Left failed to see what lay beyond. This failure is all the more striking, considering that it was precisely in the “underdeveloped” parts of the world that the socialist revolutions took place. It was the attempt to replicate within the space of a few decades what Europe and the USA had achieved over a couple of centuries that, among other things, brought the USSR to such a sorry pass.12 It certainly makes 12 Accomplishing in a couple of decades what the West did in a few centuries is a point repeatedly made by Stalin in his speeches.

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no sense to point to the relative affluence of a section of the global population today, and celebrate it, while excising all concerns of justice (across population groups) and inter-generational equity from our frames of reference. It is not possible to first let capitalism wreak its havoc, turn everything from land and the natural commons into saleable commodities (into bourgeois private property) or to destroy them—and then try to find a way “beyond” it.13 For there is no beyond it except the common disaster that we are faced with today—what scholars and thinkers are beginning to see as the sixth extinction.14 I have argued in Chapter 2 that the productivist imagination was put in place over a few centuries through the conjunction of a range of new bodies of knowledge—moral philosophy, Lockean political theory and political economy, later economics. The tragedy of state socialism lay, as discussed above, in the fact that it too partook of the fundamental assumptions that lie behind this modernist vision and sought to defeat capitalism “on its own ground”. That was an impossible task for another reason—it never radically questioned the fundamentals of the new capitalist creed, namely economics, central to which is the abstract idea of “creation” of wealth and “growth”. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries post-Lockean universe, reason was co-terminus with “civilization” and “industry”; “creation of wealth” was justification enough for taking over lands and putting them to “productive use” which, it was believed, was simply being wasted because the savages knew not how to produce wealth from them. (Arblaster 1984; Perelman 2000) Economics was and remains a discipline constituted by capitalism and capital.15 For,

13 In the manner in which Slavoj Zizek, for instance, in his riposte to Evo Morales’ lament that “Mother Earth no longer exists” insists that “the only good thing about capitalism” is that it has turned Mother Earth too into a commodity. (Zizek 2009: 96– 97) At work in this claim is the same tired idea that capital/ism is that sole historical agency that draws ‘people’s without history’ into the orbit of civilization and world history that there can be no ‘progress’ without capitalism running its course. 14 Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, cited in Richard Grusin (ed. 2017: viii). 15 At this stage it is necessary to clarify that I use the term “capitalism” as a short hand

term for this new comportment, this new mode of being and relation to the world that I have termed post-Lockean and which in an earlier era, CB Macpherson called “possessive individualism”. I have argued elsewhere that what we know as “capital” and its inner logic, is but an assemblage where new bodies of knowledge reconstitute the world. See Nigam (2020a).

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apart from the ecological imperative, to which I will turn in a moment, the discipline was fundamentally hostile to all but bourgeois forms of property/ownership and production. Progress, in the modern vision, meant the destruction of all other social forms—which in its blinkered view were merely providers of the “factors of production”, namely land and labor. These social and cultural forms that embodied complex relations among people, their labor, “technology” and their environment, were now reduced to their barest “economic” descriptions, as forms defined by just one characteristic—their being “non-productive of wealth” in this modern bourgeois sense. Lest we forget, these non-bourgeois forms of property included not just “feudal” property but also various kinds of small peasant and artisanal ownership linked to commodity production, where the producer maintained a large degree of autonomy and control over his/her life and time in comparison to the industrial worker who was subjected to the brutal discipline of the factory. We also know from the history of militant struggles against land acquisition in contemporary India that both land and labor are tied in a far more serious relationship, embodied in living cultures and hence often articulated in the language of sacredness. Once all these social forms are defined as purely economic entities, they can very easily be pronounced as relics of earlier times, which cannot survive in the modern bourgeois world, where competition becomes the key element defining Time. Only that survives and is worthy of surviving in the present and passing into the future which can prove itself to be the “most suited to the times” in purely economic terms. Thus economics assumes that all such forms that must perish have already perished. If they have not, then it is the discipline’s historic mission to ensure that they perish. In its universe then, the “enclosure of the commons” has to be seen as an always already accomplished fact everywhere: the land acquired, and the mass of people already waiting in urban labor markets with nothing but their labor power. In a sense, that was Marx’s assumption too, though he never took labor or land to be simply available for redeployment. He recognized that the “historical process of the separation of the laborer from the means of production/means of labor” was violent and murderous, and it deeply revolted him. (Marx n.d.: 677–678) Marx, nevertheless, resolved the problem by attributing it to the working of an inexorable historical law. Transcendence of capitalism became a matter deferred to an indefinite future of the transcendence of capitalism, when the death knell of capitalist exploitation will be sounded and the “expropriators will

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be expropriated”. In a very fundamental way, however, this seems to have absolved communists of all responsibility in the present. Productivism-as-progress was thus predicated upon a vision that saw production as a self-contained activity with the “science” of economics to back it up. As discussed above, the question of waste was as much of a non-issue for mainstream economics and social theory as it was for socialist thought. In their essentials, both capitalism and twentiethcentury socialism were predicated upon an exaltation of production. All their quantitative indices, therefore, only speak of growth rates, GDP and so on, ignoring altogether the fact that for every unit of growth, there is as much of waste production in the form of effluents, air and water pollution, mountains of undisposed, non-biodegradable and often toxic remainder.16

Ecology and the So-Called ‘Logic of Capital’ Today, therefore, the reconstruction of the socialist idea—a socialism for the twenty-first century—cannot base itself on what is understood to be the so-called logic of capital, predicated upon the productivist imaginary inherited from nineteenth-century Europe. It must think of a different way of being that recognizes the multiplicity of social forms that always exist simultaneously in any social formation; it must recognize that there is actually no “objective law” of history that only ever moves “forward” in a linear fashion, eliminating older social forms in its train. I will discuss the issue of a possible future socialism in the final chapter. Suffice it to say here that it can only base itself on an entirely different “political ontology” so to speak, which puts “the economic” in its proper place, as merely one of the many dimensions of life as such, instead of seeing it as a reified

16 It is important nevertheless to underline, as Zsuzsa Gille does, that the ideological assault on state socialism in the West portrayed it as “wasteful” in ways that are fundamentally at odds with the discussion and argument of this chapter. In the West’s ideological universe, from where this assault was mounted, state socialism was said to be wasteful because it used outmoded technology, was based on a faulty, mismanaged economic system and worst of all “wasteful” spending on welfare. The last bit was, of course, always euphemistically put: “state ownership and lack of market-controlled prices led to squandering of resources”. Gille compares these ideological representations with her experience of growing up in socialist Hungary and the huge efforts at recycling and minimizing waste that had been a part of everyday life. (Gille 2007: 2–3).

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moment of a totality or a structure that is supposedly determinant, in the first or the last instance. How deeply this idea of capitalism is embedded in Marxist thought is evident from the fact that even some philosophers and theorists of “twenty-first century socialism” seem to still labor under this delusion, occasioned by capital’s self-presentation. In what follows I discuss one such argument below. The Hungarian philosopher, István Mészáros, has reflected and written at length on capitalism after the collapse of state socialism and subsequently on what has come to be known as “socialism in the twenty-first century”—which also happens to be the subtitle of the book whose argument I want to examine. Mészáros argues that, …the pursuit of ultimately uncontrollable growth was always (emphasis original) a fundamental characteristic of capital, as a matter of innermost systemic determination. Without it this unique mode of social metabolic control could not have conquered the historical stage the way in which it actually did. (Mészáros 2009: 387, emphasis added)

Mészáros posits a distinction between capitalism as “the sociohistorically specific form” and what he calls the “capital system in general” (Mészáros 2009: 63), which he describes as a “system of “social metabolic control” that is broadly coterminous with the “rule of capital”. ((Ibid: 62) Before I discuss Mészáros at greater length, a word about the revival of the term “metabolism” will not be out of place here. The term in its various forms has been revived in a big way lately and expressions like “social metabolism”, “metabolism of nature and society” (Foster 2001, Chapter 5) or “metabolism of political economy” (Saito 2017, Chapter 2) have made their appearance in a certain kind of Marxist discourse that claims that contrary to the widely held belief, Marx actually had an “ecology” and an ecological vision. This term has been excavated from Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, and some of his hitherto unpublished notebooks in which Marx had taken extensive notes and commented upon developments in the sciences in his time. As would be evident by now, I am not interested in the project of scholars like Foster and Saito who seek to establish that Marx was indeed able to foresee the approaching ecological crisis a hundred years in advance. In the first place, it goes against the very grain of Marx’s own philosophical position to argue that any thinker, however great, can transcend his or her time. It is not that philosophers like Marx do not remain

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relevant beyond their times but that is not because they are prophets; they remain relevant, rather, because their philosophy often resonates with people across vastly different contexts, as does Marx’s critique of capital and his later investigations into communal forms of ownership that came to light long after his death. It makes no sense to see Marx as a prophet who has left messages for us to deal with each new turn in history, which we can dig out at appropriate moments to guide us through catastrophic times. Marx is relevant today because some of the themes that preoccupied him in his time continue to engage us today and he proves a useful interlocutor to think with or against. Secondly, such an exercise of discovering hidden messages in Marx may end up saving him in some fashion, but it throws no light on the challenges that the climate catastrophe presents before us today. Thirdly, even if we are able to excavate a large number of references that show Marx’s concern for “nature” (for instance, his references to the relationship of society and nature as one of organic unity and metabolism, his claim in the Critique of the Gotha Programme that nature too is a source of wealth), if it does not lead to a reconstruction of theory, such references serve little purpose. To take one instance of what I mean, we know of the classical version of historical materialist theory whereby social change occurs through the “dialectic of productive forces and production relations”. As opposed to this kind of economic determinist schema, we have later theoretical innovations which privilege “class struggle” as the motor of social development. Such innovations deploy the notion of “class struggle” to bring in the moment of conflict and struggle centrally, in our understanding of historical transformation, in order to disrupt the neat linearity of the dialectic of productive forces and production relations. In yet other versions, the focus shifts beyond “class struggle” to “overdetermination” and the accumulation of conflicts and struggles, leading to a focus on the conjuncture rather than the structure and its objective laws. No such reconstruction of theory is suggested by the advocates of “Marx’s ecology”. At the very least, such an argument must undertake the task that Marx himself might have undertaken, of breaking out of notions that see capitalism as some kind of inevitable stage of history, and which works, in accordance with its “innermost systemic determination”, which sees capital working according to some objective law that makes it “incapable of acknowledging its own limits” and the “dangers of its uncontrollable growth.” (Mészáros 2009: 62–63) After all, it is this belief in its tendency of relentless growth that

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drives both the postcolonial state governments and elites, as well as socialists of different kinds when they come to power. It is this assumption that drives them to act “as if” there is no other way but to go along with capitalism’s inexorable tendency of uncontrollable growth. It is imperative for any reconstructed theory (in the light of “Marx’s ecology”) that it answer questions posed by life itself, which include questions of ecological justice and inter-generational equity among others, which is only possible if the whole structure of a primarily economic theory of history is dismantled and life-forms that were seen as “primitive” so far, are theoretically reinstated. It is also worth lingering for a while on the term “metabolism” that has acquired a new life among such “ecological Marxists” today, as I have noted above. The term is not presented to us just as an expression that Marx used in his day, but instead offered as some kind of a concept that is adequate in order to grasp the challenges of our times. Parenthetically, it should also be mentioned that this term has also acquired currency in the sub-discipline of ecological economics and the field of political ecology over the last couple of decades—and even there, it has been lifted straight out of its nineteenth-century usage. (See Martinez-Alier 2002: 19, 31) However, in these new fields of “human ecology” and “industrial ecology”, the term “social metabolism” has a very specific meaning, namely as a way of understanding the “flows” and “patterns of flows of materials and energy”, counting the “material and energy input into the economy, and counting also the waste products.” (Martinez-Alier 2002: 30, emphasis added) In this sense, the use of this term in ecological economics serves an important contemporary conceptual purpose unlike the way it is recovered in “ecological Marxist” discourse and in Mészáros, which I discuss below. Thus, says Martinez-Alier: “Although Marx adopted the notion of ‘metabolism’ (Stoffwechsel ) to describe human relations with Nature…, Marxists did not take up the study of human ecology in terms of energy and material flows.” (Ibid: 31). To return to our discussion of Mészáros, let us first look at the distinction that he makes between “capitalism” and the “capital system”. He says, Constitutive elements of the capital system (like monetary and merchant capital, as well as original sporadic commodity production) go back thousands of years in history. However, for most of those thousands of years they all remained subordinate parts of the specific systems of social

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metabolic control which historically prevailed at the time, including slaveowning and feudal modes of production and distribution. Only in the last few centuries, under the bourgeois capitalist form, could capital successfully assert its rule as an all-embracing ‘organic system’. (Mészáros 2009: 61)

One can easily agree with Mészáros that elements and practices like merchant capital, commodity production and money have existed in different societies for a few thousand years in some cases. One can also agree with the proposition that they were then parts of different arrangements of things that “historically prevailed at that time”. The problem lies in calling it the “capital system”, which virtually “ontologizes” capital by making it part of human history going back “thousands of years”. This arises from the illegitimate assumption drawn from capital’s selfpresentation, as well as some of Marx’s writings, that treats all these elements as nothing but capital’s prehistory.17 However, it is the expression “social metabolic control” that I want to linger on a bit. Clearly, it does not refer to the unity of society and nature, as in the case of Foster and Saito but to society itself as a kind of organic totality. Thus he goes on to explain, citing Marx, It must be kept in mind that the new forces of production and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of the self-positing Idea, but from within and in antithesis to the existing development of production and the inherited, traditional relations of property. While in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system. This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself , or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks; this is historically how it becomes a totality. (Cited in Mészáros 2009: 61–62, emphasis added)

Notice that even though Marx uses the expression “organic system”, his explication leaves little doubt that the development of the new 17 Here I am referring especially to Marx’s well-known claims, both in the Grundrisse as well as in Capital , Vol. I , that the “the bourgeois economy supplies the key to the ancient” and the “anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape”.

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productive forces and production relations into a totality “consists in subordinating all elements of society to itself”, or in “creating organs which it still lacks”. That is how, he emphasizes, it historically becomes a totality. It is precisely this point that Mészáros too highlights when he says that “by extricating its age-old organic constituents from the shackles of earlier organic systems…capital as an all-embracing organic system could assert its rule in the last three centuries as generalized commodity production.” (Ibid: 62) It is clear beyond any doubt, both in Marx but also in Mészáros’s assertion, that the different elements that go into the making of the “capital system” are not coeval; they neither have the same origins, nor arise at the same time. That is why capital must subordinate all pre-existing elements of society to itself (Marx) and extricate itself from its age-old organic constituents from the shackles of earlier systems (Mészáros). Then alone does it become a totality. The “totality”, in other words, does not exist prior to the elements that constitute it. Thus, from Marx’s quote and Mészáros’ own comment, it is evident that the elements actually have very different histories. The metaphor of an “organic system” and of “metabolism” on the other hand, refers to bodies and organisms that take birth as bodies, all the organs being therefore an integral part and coeval with the birth of the whole. An ecosystem, in that sense, is not an organic entity for which the term metabolism can be used. An ecosystem certainly displays relations of symbiosis and mutual dependence between elements but they do not arise all at once like a baby human or a baby elephant. Rivers and water bodies may attract animals and birds and certain kinds of vegetation may emerge partly because the visitors bring seeds of plants in their droppings. Human habitations too may come up around such rivers or water bodies. Metabolism is a totally inappropriate metaphor for describing society where, what are accidental relations, develop into relations of mutuality, like in an ecosystem. Society, in that sense, can hardly be described through terms like “organic system” and “metabolism”. This is even truer of the relation between human society and nature—if one were to consider that the emergence of the human race itself inaugurates something of a departure. Humans interfere with or intervene in the processes of nature, by making even the most primitive tools, by taking to agriculture and by the use of fire and by building structures. To that extent “Anthropocene”—the term currently in vogue—actually describes a specifically human relationship to nature, even though we need to be wary of the depoliticized ways in which

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it is often used, letting capital and modernity off the hook for having introduced a fundamental rupture in the human-nature relationship. Another sense in which Mészáros’ narrative is simply trapped within the self-presentation of capital, is apparent when he insists on the capitalist system (that is the historically specific form) as being “overwhelmingly” an “economic mode of extracting surplus-labor as strictly quantified surplus-value”. (Mészáros 2009: 62) Consider that even in the West, where bourgeois relations of production managed to establish unchallenged sway, there is no dearth of evidence that shows that politics—indeed the state itself—is deeply imbricated in the organization of the factory and the capitalist workplace. Mészáros sees the more explicit interventions of the state “from Keynesian to Soviet type” as evidence of a failure—going against the “innermost determination” of capital. (Ibid: 63) There is enough evidence to show that in matters ranging from the eight-hour working day to the various factory legislations, it is impossible to conceptualize the factory floor as one where surplus is extracted simply through the economic mode, given that workers’ struggles and the state’s mediating intervention are always present in it. Most often the state intervenes on behalf of capital but often, under the impact of mass struggles that traverse it, it is also forced to reorganize relations in the workplace in ways that are favorable to the workers. The distinction that Mészáros makes between bourgeois capitalism and the capital system becomes more interesting, however, when he explicates the latter as the “rule of capital” rather than as a “social metabolic system” with its “innermost determination”. For, in this sense, the idea of the “rule of capital” draws our attention to its weakness as well, despite Mészáros’ own construction. Thus, in a very striking passage, he argues, Capitalism may have gained the upper hand in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, but it is quite wrong to describe the present state of the world as successfully ruled by capitalism everywhere, even though it is certainly under the rule of capital . In China, for instance, capitalism is forcefully established in coastal ‘enclaves’ only, leaving the overwhelming majority of the population (that is, well over one billion) outside its framework. And even in those areas where capitalist principles prevail, the economic extraction of surplus-labor must be propped up by heavy political constituents so as to keep the cost of labor artificially low. (Mészáros 2009: 64)

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This formulation acquires, perhaps, a very different meaning from that intended by Mészáros, if by the expression “rule of capital” one understands that it is the political force that dominates and has the power to include or leave out large sectors of the people as in China. This political force one might assume, functions through the state—or as the state—because it constitutes the dominant economic common sense, which could also be reinforced through powerful international institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. The idea of the “rule of capital” as distinct from the capitalist system, actually brings Mészáros’ argument much closer to my own argument in Chapter 2, especially when he says, It is a fact of world-historical significance that the capital system could not complete itself in the twentieth century in the form of its capitalistic variety, based on the economic regulation of surplus-labor extraction. So much so, that today approximately one half of the world’s population – from China to India and to important areas of Africa, South East Asia and Latin America – do not belong to the world of capitalism proper, but live under some hybrid variety of the capital system, either due to chronically underdeveloped conditions, or to massive state involvement in regulating socioeconomic metabolism, or indeed to a combination of the two. (Mészáros 2009: 76–77, emphasis added)

These descriptions of the actually existing world certainly do not show us an all-powerful organic entity whose “innermost systemic determination” is “uncontrollable growth”; rather they reveal an entity that is riven with problems precisely because it has to deal with heterogeneous elements, with different origins, that it cannot subdue. We can then see that this “rule”, more as an “apparatus of capture”, to borrow an expression from Deleuze and Guattari, that always tries to expand its dominion but never quite succeeds in subduing other social forms. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: Plateau 13). I have discussed Mészáros’ work at some length here because, apart from some interesting theoretical moves that he makes, he had also influenced the former Venezuelan President, the late Hugo Chavez, and is therefore often invoked in certain circles which otherwise distance themselves from the legacy of twentieth-century socialism. His theoretical vision of capital/ism is based on a specific reading of Europe’s history and of the world from Europe’s vantage point and is at variance even with the history of capitalism in the West at large as it emerges from

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the discussion of waste and planned obsolescence earlier in this chapter. However, his idea of the “rule of capital”, if understood in the above sense, takes us away from the unhelpful distinction between “formal” and “real” subsumption of labor under capital, that Marx himself made but which makes no sense except as a transitional form. I have argued, in Chapter 2, that the entire debate in the non-Western world, from the 1960s onwards, has precisely centered on the failure of capitalism to develop—a far cry from supposedly “conquering the historical stage”. This recognition led, in these debates, to the coining of various neologisms like “retarded capitalism”, “arrested development”, “development of underdevelopment” and so on. (Nigam 2010; Nigam 2020a) Mészáros’ notion of the “rule of capital”, reworked in the above sense, is helpful in order to conceptualize the difference between the vast areas in the Global South which confront it as an “apparatus of capture” but which cannot really be seen as parts of an “organic totality”. Not being part of capitalism in Mészáros’ sense, production relations and forms of ownership in these areas exhibit a range of diverse forms that range from the commons to the private—which need not necessarily be capitalist as we will see below. It has also been argued by some Latin American scholars like Anibal Quijano, among others, that within this framework, from a European perspective, capitalism remains the “field of relations that gives meaning to any ‘alternative’ ‘mode’ or ‘system of production’.” (Quijano 2006: 417) Quijano refers back to the 1960s Latin American debate to tell us that “Latin American researchers were the first to point out emerging trends in capital-labor relations, beyond the well-known capital expansion/ contraction cycles, trends that were depriving a growing number of workers of stable salaried employment.” (Ibid: 421–22) However, these scholars used the term “marginalization” in order to refer to the phenomenon, which steered clear of any suggestion that the affected population “was left completely outside of the capitalist system”. They nonetheless referred to what they called the “marginal pole of the economy”, that is to say, the informal economy. (Quijano 2006: 422) There is a hint in this body of work, however, that even though not completely outside, the “marginal pole of the economy” was not quite in the middle of it either. In contrast, in India, in the late 1980s, scholars like Kalyan Sanyal were insisting that “capitalist development” in most of the third world had not only failed to eliminate “pre-capitalist” forms but had actually reinforced it and large parts of the economy remained “outside

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the domain of capital”. (Sanyal 1988: PE28) In his later work, Sanyal developed on this insight and argued that in most of the third world, this “informal economy”, which he now called the “need economy”, remained in uneasy tension with the capitalist “accumulation economy”. The need economy functioned, according to an entirely different logic and ethic from that of the accumulation economy and even though there might be linkages and connections between the two, the need economy provides employment to a large number, rather than profit to an increasingly smaller number of people. (Sanyal 2007). This conundrum of whether it lies inside or outside is a product of the imagination of capitalism as some kind of closed totality. This problem vanishes the moment we posit capitalism as the “apparatus of capture” and see these formations as being under the “rule of capital” in the sense described above. Also worth recalling briefly here is the work of Hernando de Soto, whom I have discussed in Chapter 2 and who was lionized by neoliberals the world over. His investigations indicate that in most parts of the world ordinary people do not “naturally” take to accumulation. For the burden of his song has been that capitalism has failed everywhere except in the West. And this while the poor all over the non-Western world have “accumulated” huge amounts of wealth and have shown a great spirit of enterprise, so much so that according to de Soto and his Institute of Liberty and Democracy, this wealth created by the poor is far larger than what is there in national capital markets. (De Soto 2001) But says de Soto, all this is dead capital as it lies outside the formal economy because people do not want to invest these resources (say their houses), put them up as securities on capital markets and so on. His diagnosis that this is because of faulty property systems which are still mired in forms that are not bourgeois is relevant for us, if for just that opposite reasons to his. From our point of view, the real issue is that this creation of bourgeois property is not the consequence of some immanent development of society and is brought into being only with the use of force. Wherever the bourgeois property form has established sway, it has been through a process of violent annihilation of older forms. If one were to follow de Soto’s argument, which tells us a fundamental truth about capital, then it is only through a massive process of state intervention and the incorporation of the “informal” economy into the formal, that accumulation of capital can actually take the form it did in the West.

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If we agree that there is no historically ordained inner logic behind the “growth” of capital, then we can begin to think of the future emancipatory project too in a radically different way—a way that will seek to close the gap between humans and nature, once opened up by capitalist modernity. We can begin to think of it in a way that fundamentally reconstructs our thought and knowledge apparatus such that it enables different ways of being that already exist, to come into view.18

The “New Copernican Revolution” Such a new “socialism” can only be one that takes cognizance of what has been called a “new Copernican Revolution” that is now underway. (Lester Brown 2001) If the earlier Copernican Revolution overturned the way we saw the relationship between the sun and the earth, the new one does no less: it transforms the very way we must conceive of the relationship between the economy and ecology. If the reigning paradigm taught us to see the ecology as a mere subset of the economy (as provider of raw materials), the new Copernican Revolution has already overturned that idea and made us aware that it is indeed humans and their “economy” that are the subset of the larger ecology. As I have argued above, there are no purely economic forms; there are simply complex forms of life. However, once they are defined as purely economic entities and inserted within a discourse of Progress, a certain logic takes hold, which we now identify with the so-called logic of capital. The advent of modernity instituted what many philosophers have called the “great divide”—the separation of “humanity” from “nature”, of humans from non-humans. (Latour 1993) In that modernist vision “nature” was reduced to a mere object of consumption, whose forces were to be harnessed for the progress of

18 In a sense, this task was very suggestively and productively undertaken by JK GibsonGraham in their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). In this the author/s undertook a move parallel to what feminism does in relation to patriarchy, in the context of “capitalism”. Thus while recognizing the hegemonic place occupied by “capital”, they sought to bring it down from the pedestal on which social theory had placed it and question its position as the norm. Just as the questioning of patriarchy and the heterosexual relation as the norm allowed other sexual practices and forms of family to become visible, their intervention sought to displace capital from its pre-eminent position as norm and make visible myriad other forms of economic relations that exist in any society— but especially in societies where capital has not yet managed to violently annihilate other forms.

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humankind. Progress in turn was defined as that which drew us away from the state of natural existence—a vision that emphasized the so-called cultured-ness of the bourgeois as opposed to the rusticity and idiocy of “rural life”. Industry had to replace the so-called natural economy. It was this division that framed our understanding of “capital” itself. And it framed Marx’s own understanding. That is why, when Marx was writing about “capitalism”, he saw the source of “surplus value” only in unpaid labor—that is to say, as something entirely internal to the labor process. The entire logic of accumulation or expanded reproduction, in his view, rested on the surplus that was saved after payment of wages, as the capitalist’s profit. Nature was the mere provider of natural resources which came into the production process as raw material—and therefore as contributor to overall wealth (as Marx put it in the Critique of the Gotha Program). Thus the capitalist was left with a significant amount of money that he could reinvest for accumulation on an expanded scale. It did not and could not have occurred to Marx, before the ongoing new Copernican Revolution, that in the capitalist production process, one more cost remains unpaid: The capitalist pays the cost of raw materials but has never been made to pay what many thinkers have insisted are the ecological costs of production—the cost of polluting the air and water of the local community where production is located, the destruction of the environment, the dangerous spread of radiations in the atmosphere and so on. What is striking, however, is that it was in the early twentieth century, in what came to be known as the “socialist calculation debate” of the 1920s, that many of the issues that concern ecological economists so centrally today were first raised. The debate occurred in central Europe, “in the aftermath of the First World War, when it seemed practically relevant because of the wave of revolutions in central and eastern Europe”. (Martinez-Alier 2002: 33) Among the key figures in the debate was Otto Neurath, the lone Marxist member of the celebrated positivist Vienna Circle and whose work was in turn influenced by that of Josef PopperLynkeus in 1912, where the latter is said to have initiated a whole field of material and energy analysis and “discussed the perspectives for the substitution of biomass energy for coal”, for instance. (Ibid: 32) In discussing the question of whether coal-intensive or labor-intensive methods should be used within a socialist dispensation where the market in coal or labor does not exist, Martinez-Alier tells us that Neurath responded thus: the answer “depends… on whether one thinks that hydraulic power may be sufficiently developed or that solar energy might come to be better

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used. If however one is afraid that when one generation uses too much coal, thousands will freeze to death in the future, one might use more human power and save coal. Such and many other non-technical matters determine the choice of a technically calculable plan… we can see no possibility of reducing the production plan to some kind of unit and then to compare the various plans in terms of such units.” (Martinez-Alier 2002: 33–34) Clearly the number of determinations that Neurath brings into his response reveal the depth in which he had thought of the question of “material and energy flows” in deciding the “energy composition” of the economy so to speak. Martinez-Alier cites philosopher John O’Neill to the effect that “the current debate on environment and the economy may be seen as a very large and delayed footnote to the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s.” (Ibid: 33) The fact is that though some these questions did come up within the broadly socialist-Marxist tradition, they could not go much further in that specific time, perhaps because there was not much receptivity for them. Ecological costs, or more precisely, ecological debt, has been discussed by ecological economists like Joan Martinez-Alier (and others) in the context of what the global North owes the global South. Martinez-Alier identifies two broad areas of conflict, with reference to which it is possible to grasp the concept: Internationally, the ecological debt arises from two separate ecological distribution conflicts. First, as we shall see immediately, the exports of raw materials and other products from relatively poor countries are sold at prices which do not include compensation for local or global externalities. Second, rich countries make a disproportionate use of environmental space or services without payment, and even without recognition of other people’s entitlements to such services (particularly, the disproportionate free use of carbon dioxide sinks and reservoirs). (Martinez-Alier 2002: 213, emphasis added)

It is argued that the more recent recognition that production also involves the destruction and degradation of the environment, changes our perspective on trade between countries and regions. “The ecological view of the economy as an open system which necessarily depends on nature for resources and sinks has given rise to a new theory of ecologically unequal exchange, building on earlier notions such as Raubwirtschaft or

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‘plunder economy’ coined by geographers and almost forgotten in the discipline” (Martinez-Alier 2002: 214, emphasis added).

Ecological Debt Difficulties abound of course, in trying to assign a money value to the various kinds of and levels at which this unequal exchange takes place— though that does not mean that no quantification should be attempted at all. After all, the idea of an ecological debt was first articulated by researchers and non-governmental organizations in Chile, in response to the problem of third world debt. So, while efforts at quantification continue, ecological economists like Martinez-Alier also insist that we constantly bear in mind the fact that “the essential point…is that incommensurability applies not only to money value but also to physical reductionism. Can ‘biopiracy’ be reduced to energy calculations?” (Martinez-Alier 2002: 218). My concern in this chapter is not with the mathematical quantification of ecological debt but with the conceptual space it opens up for making similar claims on global/ transnational corporations—a handful of which have been responsible for the disproportionate grabbing of environmental space and service without payment to the rest of this planet. This kind of an exercise hasn’t, to my mind, been undertaken as yet. As scientist Michael E. Mann underlines, seventy-one percent of global emissions come from the same hundred fossil-fuel companies that take no responsibility for the state we are in (Mann 2021). The need is to turn the question ecological debt and costs on to private corporations, for then alone can they be made to take responsibility. While in purely philosophical terms there can be very legitimate objections to quantifying and assigning money value for calculating the costs of corporate ecological debt, this is an expedient that can perhaps be understood as the only way in which some claim can be made on the prime culprits. The heads under which the ecological debt is sought to be calculated by ecological economists have been listed by Martinez-Alier under the two broad rubrics that were identified earlier—and here I quote a length as it is not possible to summarize them: “Regarding Ecologically Unequal Exchange

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• The (unpaid) costs of reproduction or maintenance or sustainable management of the renewable resources which have been exported: for instance, the nutrients incorporated in agricultural exports. • The costs of the future lack of availability of destroyed natural resources: for instance, the oil and minerals no longer available, or the biodiversity destroyed. This is a difficult figure to compute, for several reasons. Figures on the reserves, estimation of the possible technological obsolescence because of substitution, and a decision on the rate of discount are needed in the case of minerals or oil. For biodiversity, knowledge of what is being destroyed would be needed. • The compensation for, or the costs of reparation (unpaid) of, the local damages produced by exports (for example, the sulphur dioxide of copper smelters, the mine tailings, the harm to health from flower exports, the pollution of water by mercury in gold mining) or the present value of irreversible damage. • The (unpaid) amount corresponding to the commercial use of information and knowledge on genetic resources, when they have been appropriated gratis. For agricultural genetic resources, the basis for such a claim already exists under the terminology of Farmers’ Rights. • Regarding Lack of Payment for Environmental Services or for the Disproportionate use of Environmental Space • The (unpaid) reparation costs or compensation for the impacts caused by imports of solid or liquid toxic waste. • The (unpaid) costs of free disposal of gas residues (carbon dioxide, CFC and so on), assuming equal rights to sinks and reservoirs.” (Martinez-Alier 2002: 227) Once such costs are factored in as well, into the cost/s of production— by “internalizing the externalities” to use the economics euphemism—it can easily be seen how difficult it will be to sustain the idea of a so-called immanent logic of capital—of its endless accumulation and expansion. The “labour theory of value” was a very specific nineteenth-century European invention. Today we need to have a much more complex theory that factors in unpaid ecological costs as well—in order to be able to calculate actual costs of production. And we need to bear in mind that when we

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are talking of ecological debt , we are not talking simply about production in the present but what is the accumulated debt of a few centuries.19 After all, we know how in recent decades, capital has been forced to move out production and jobs from first world countries to those in Asia or Africa, largely due to a combination of high wages and strict environmental regulations. Long before the issue of the environment became a serious accounting issue, scholars were already talking of the “profit squeeze” and the “accumulation crises” in the West. (O’Connor 1984) That was what spurred capital to move out into the “third world” where there were hardly any infrastructural facilities available but wages and environmental standards were low and as we have seen; it was thought that it will be easier to bribe politicians and bureaucrats and get environmental clearances—things that had become increasingly difficult and very costly in the home countries. The very idea of a “profit squeeze” or an “accumulation crisis” in these circumstances should direct us to be suspicious of the so-called immanent law of capital accumulation. Thus, once we start factoring in these costs as the unpaid debt that capital owes to life on this planet at large, a very different picture of possibilities emerges.

Bibliography Agence France-Presse. 2019. How China’s Ban on Plastic Waste Imports Became an ‘Earthquake’ That Threw Recycling Efforts into Turmoil. South China Morning Post, 23 April. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/pol itics/article/3007280/how-chinas-ban-plastic-waste-imports-became-earthq uake-threw, last accessed on 19 August 2022. Aljazeera. 2019. Why Is Southeast Asia the World’s Dumping Ground? 17 July. https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-stream/2019/7/17/why-issoutheast-asia-the-worlds-dumping-ground, last accessed on 19 August 2022. Arblaster, Anthony. 1984. The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Benson, Emily. 2021. The Basel Convention: Hazardous Waste to Plastic Pollution. Centre for Strategic and International Studies, October 19 Here I am not entering into a debate on the very notion of “value” within Marxism that will open up a Pandora’s box. The question of ecological debt can of course be formulated independently of any theory of value. In any case, the function that the concept performed in Marx’s discourse—of distinguishing the “accidental form of prices” from that “constant” that made commodities exchangeable—never really worked. In actual life, prices are all that matter and exchange depends upon a whole range of “subjective” valuations made by owners of commodities and money.

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7. https://www.csis.org/analysis/basel-convention-hazardous-waste-plasticpollution, last accessed on 20 August 2022. Brown, Lester R. 2001. Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth. New York: W. W. Norton. Centre for International Environmental Law (CIEL), Earthworks et al. 2019. Plastic and Health: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet. https://www.ciel. org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Plastic-and-Health-The-Hidden-Costsof-a-Plastic-Planet-February-2019.pdf, last accessed on 19 August 2019. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. De Soto, Hernando. 2001. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. London: Black Swan. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Foster, John Bellamy. 2001. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. Kharagpur: Cornerstone Publications. Foster, John Bellamy. 2003. Ecology Against Capitalism. Kharagpur: Cornerstone Publications. Gidwani, Vinay. 2018. For a Marxist Theory of Waste. In The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present, ed. Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder, 187–207. New York: Fordham University Press. Gidwani, Vinay, and Rajyashree N. Reddy. 2011. The Afterlives of ‘Waste’: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus. Antipode 43 (5): 1625– 1658. Gille, Zsuzsa. 2007. From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gorz, Andre. 1989. Critique of Economic Reason. London: Verso. Grusin, Richard, ed. 2017. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Hariprasad, V.M. 2022. Why the Proposed Silver Line Rail Project in Kerala Is a Non-Starter. Down to Earth, 4 March. https://www.downtoearth.org. in/blog/environment/why-the-proposed-silver-line-rail-project-in-kerala-is-anon-starter-81816, last accessed on 28 August 2022. Hird, Myra J., and Alexander Zahara. 2017. The Arctic Wastes. In Grusin (ed.) (2017), 121–145. Howard, Emma. 2020. Oil-backed Trade Group Is Lobbying the Trump Administration to Push Plastics Across Africa. Unearthed, 30 August. https://une arthed.greenpeace.org/2020/08/30/plastic-waste-africa-oil-kenya-us-tradedeal-trump/, last accessed on 20 August 2022.

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Jain, Aarushi. 2020. Trash Trade Wars: Southeast Asia’s Problem with the World’s Waste. Council on Foreign Relations, 8 May. https://www.cfr.org/ in-brief/trash-trade-wars-southeast-asias-problem-worlds-waste, last accessed on 20 August 2022. Latouche, Serge. 2009. Farewell to Growth. Cambridge: Polity Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Lohan, Tara. 2021. 4 Major Environmental Treaties the US Never Ratified—But Should. The Revelator, August 2. https://therevelator.org/environmental-tre aties/, last accessed on 20 August 2022. Mann, Michael E. 2021. The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. Melbourne and London: Scribe Publications. Martinez-Alier, Joan. 2002. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Menon, Nivedita, and Aditya Nigam. 2014. Power and Contestation: India Since 1989. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Mészáros, István. 2009. The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century. New Delhi: Aakar Books. Nigam, Aditya. 2010. After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism and the Postcolony. New Delhi: Viva Books. Nigam, Aditya. 2020a. Decolonizing Theory: Thinking Across Traditions. New Delhi: Bloomsbury. O’Connor, James. 1984. Accumulation Crisis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Packard, V. 1960. The Waste-Makers. New York: David McKay Perelman, Michael. 2000. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. PTI (Press Trust of India). 2012. Making Set-Top Boxes Compulsory Will Hurt Common Man: Mamata Banerjee. The Economic Times, October 1. http:// articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-10-01/news/34198226_1_settop-boxes-digitisation-mamata-banerjee, last accessed on 24 November 2015. Quijano, Anibal. 2006. Alternative Production Systems? In Santos (2006). Rapoza, Kenneth. 2021. China Quits Recycling US Trash as Sustainable Start-Up Makes Strides. Forbes, 10 January. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ kenrapoza/2021/01/10/china-quits-recycling-us-trash-as-sustainable-startup-makes-strides/?sh=3a2a2f4c5a56, last accessed on 19 August 2022. Saito, Kohei. 2017. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press. Sanyal, Kalyan. 1988. Accumulation, Poverty and State in Third World: Capital/Pre-capital Complex. Economic and Political Weekly 23 (5) (30 January): PE27–PE30.

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Sanyal, Kalyan. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-colonial Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge. Shukla, Archna. 2011. Why the Set-Top Box Will Now Be Mandatory? The Indian Express, 20 October. http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/ why-the-settop-box-will-now-be-mandatory/862334/, last accessed on 24 November 2015. Sinha, Ashish. 2011. Mandatory Set-Top Box in Metros to Become Bane for Small Time Local Cable Operators. The Financial Express, 19 April. http:// archive.financialexpress.com/news/mandatory-settop-box-in-metros-to-bec ome-bane-for-smalltime-local-cable-operators/777817/1, last accessed on 24 November 2015. Strasser, Susan. 1999. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Swaminathan, Mathangi. 2018. How Can India’s Waste Problem See a Systemic Change? Economic and Political Weekly 53 (16) (21 April). https://www.epw.in/engage/article/institutional-framework-implem enting-solid-waste-management-india-macro-analysis, last accessed on 19 August 2022. Swaney, James A. 1994. So What’s Wrong with Dumping on Africa. Journal of Economic Issues 28 (2): 367–377. Thomas, Louis. 2022. India: Solidarity with the Protests Against Adani Vizhinjam International Seaport. In Defense of Marxism, 14 December. https://www.marxist.com/india-solidarity-with-the-protests-against-adani-viz hinjam-international-seaport.htm, last accessed on 2 February 2023. Vallette, Jim. 1999. Larry Summers’ War Against the Earth. CounterPunch, 15 June. https://www.counterpunch.org/1999/06/15/larry-summers-waragainst-the-earth/, last accessed on 20 August 2022. Whitehouse, David. 2020. Kenya Is Not a Dumping Ground for US Plastic. The Africa Report, 19 November. https://www.theafricareport.com/51072/ kenya-is-not-a-dumping-ground-for-us-plastic/, last accessed on 20 August 2022. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Puducherry and New Delhi: Navayana.

CHAPTER 5

Exiting the Time of Historical Materialism

From its foundations, capitalism had never been—any more than Europe— a ‘closed system’. (Cedric Robinson 2000: 4) Of the numerous and many-pronged attempts made by the colonial state to assimilate the indigenous society to itself there was none that was not fully or at least partially thwarted. (Ranajit Guha 2009: 330) History here is nothing but the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to be accomplished, without our knowing in advance, whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will come about. Simply, one day new hands will have to be dealt out, and the dice thrown again on the empty table. (Louis Althusser 2006: 174)

Introduction Our discussion in the previous chapters raises some obvious questions regarding the Time of historical materialism, which is also the Time of modernity. The questions that have emerged from our discussion problematize the linearity of that conception of Time but it should be underlined here that the point is not to juxtapose this linear time to something called “cyclical” time. Of course many “premodern” communities may have conceptions of time that are cyclical and it is important to take © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22895-7_5

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them into account. However, my concern in this chapter is with the ways in which the linear time of historical materialism (and modernity), with its neat separation of the past, present and future stands problematized from within its own “theoretical practice”, so to speak.1 In an interesting argument, Lindner and Lindner argue that Marx himself, towards the end of his life, “got rid of historical materialism” (Lindner and Lindner 2022: 41). In their telling of the story, it is not so much the practice of Marxism but rather Marx’s own turn towards critical social science that leads him to abandon among other things, what they call historical materialism’s “functionalist teleology”. Functionalist teleology, according to them involves “a recipe or a schema for neatly trimming the epochs of history” on the one hand, and “an endless anachronism” that ascribes features of the present to the past, thus “producing false historical overgeneralizations” (Lindner and Lindner 2022: 47). Lindner and Lindner see Marx’s last phase, from 1868 to 1883 in particular, as the phase of his “overcoming of historical materialism” (ibid.: 46). Though chronologically prior in actual historical sequence, it is something that Marxism itself remained quite unaware of till more recent decades. In a sense, this change in Marx’s own understanding has had little impact on the subsequent development of Marxism and it is that body of theory that we are concerned with in this chapter. It is that Marxism which is forced to confront its own conceptual apparatus from within its own theoretical practice—and it happens in a number of ways. In the first place, the idea of a single past, present or future presuppose a single totality or structure (e.g. World History, Capitalism, World System) whose past present or future we are talking about when we use these terms. In such a conception, whatever is seen to belong to the past is simply relegated to the realms inhabited by “people without history”, “precapitalist/premodern/uncivilized” peoples who remain to be drawn into the ambit of civilization and history through the agency of Capitalism or the supposed immanent logic of World-History. This is the kind of problem that the first epigraph to this chapter by Cedric Robinson 1 I use this term to distinguish the way in which concepts, when they are put to use, must inevitably encounter actual practice that is carried out under the aegis of those concepts and force revisions, reworking or simply putting their more problematic parts in abeyance. This is a level which Althusser referred to as that of “practical concepts”. We can talk of “practical theory” which operates on this register and does not really refer to what Althusser and Althusserian Marxism called “theoretical practice”, which operates on an entirely different register altogether.

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points to where he asserts that neither capitalism nor Europe were ever the “closed systems” that they were made out to be for there were always modes of being which lay “outside” their imagined totalities. Second, we have the neat separation between the past, present and future that this notion presumes, which continues to drive modernist elites, acting as history’s agents, towards eliminating “the past”, which in fact, is never single. Meanwhile, modes of being that had never contemplated their own past, present or future as anything other than the community’s being, suddenly find that they are declared as somebody else’s past—most often, of an abstract entity like “humanity” or “World History”. They must therefore be subjected to somebody else’s understandings of time, which privilege a certain abstract present at whose altar these multiple pasts must be sacrificed. Much of our earlier discussion has already referred to this particular aspect and the second epigraph from Ranajit Guha underlines the fact that even the all-powerful colonial state could not eventually absorb or assimilate indigenous South Asian society unto itself and all its efforts were largely thwarted. What was seen as the past, in other words, refused to disappear into the pages of history textbooks. This is what appears to us in the form of the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” or “synchronicity of the nonsynchronous”, or the co-presence of the “past” and “present”.2 Third, there is the powerful idea of the irreversibility of time and history—the idea that you can only go forward in time and not backwards or maybe, even sideways. The idea of “forward” and “backward” here is quite clearly tied to a certain substantive idea of the “content” of time—of what happens in time, or what we call history in modern language. It is this idea that Louis Althusser, in the course of his discussion of Machiavelli, challenges in the third epigraph, when he asserts that history is nothing but the “permanent revocation” of one “accomplished fact” by another, without our ever knowing in advance when or how the event that revokes it will come about. There is also a fourth sense in which the idea of linear time stands problematized today. Linearity is about sequence and chronology—a series in which say a is followed by a1, which is followed by a2, which is in turn followed by a3 and so on. However, no moment in time, in real life, is constituted by a single sequence. Every moment is a heterogeneous 2 I have discussed this question in the Introduction and at length in Nigam (2022a). The term itself is borrowed from Ernst Bloch.

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complex of many sequences b, b1, b2, b3 and c, c1, c2, c3 and so on. Different sequences may run parallel and never meet or they may intersect but nevertheless carry on without producing an “event”. On some occasions, however, these intersections or collisions of different sequences can fuse to produce an explosive moment, an event that sets in motion new sequences. The point may perhaps be better understood through the example of India’s encounter with the recent outbreak of COVID-19. As long as our eyes were fixed on the sequence of developments in India till that point we could have said with some confidence that mass struggles against the regime would continue to escalate, taking the lead from the ongoing movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act. Our eyes, neither in India nor indeed elsewhere in the world, were on another sequence playing out in the domain of agribusinesses and biotechnology at the global level. Indeed, it is possible to break up even that sequence into many further sequences. It is only when COVID-19 hit the Chinese city of Wuhan with full force and rapidly spread to other cities in China before engulfing the whole world that we were able to recognize that something else too had been going on simultaneously. Something that could “intrude” into our hopeful sequence of rising mass struggle, to completely overturn its logic. The point at which any moment in time, heterogeneous by definition, becomes “overdetermined”, with different sequences, different chronologies, coming together is the point at which older sequences may be placed in abeyance or cease to matter in the old way. It is at that point that we might be able to see how problematic the idea of linearity or linear time really is. It is also worth underlining here that when we are talking of different sequences and heterogeneous time in that context, we are no longer talking only of sequences in human societies but in fact of entirely unanticipated ways in which these sequences may be disrupted by eruptions from elsewhere—say those consequent upon climate change. Heterogeneity of time here concerns the time of the non-human as well. In what follows below, I will discuss four instances in which the time of historical materialism stands problematized by experiences from “within” the multiple histories of Marxism in the global South—MN Roy, Cedric Robinson, Subaltern Studies and Samir Amin. Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to say they are from “within” Marxism, arising as they do within what I have called “untimely encounters”. These are encounters of Marxism with worlds other than its birthplace. Almost always therefore, these encounters are collisions of different chronologies and sequences. Not

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in all the instances discussed below have the encounters led to an actual “exit” or if they have, not always in ways we might expect.

Pathways of Exit: MN Roy In Reason, Romanticism and Revolution, a text published in 1948, the early Indian Marxist, MN Roy, argues that “Marxism is an attempted synthesis between the two apparently antithetical views of life—the rationalist and the romantic” (Roy 1948/1989: 12). Though published in 1948, much of the preparatory work for the book was done by Roy during his years of incarceration (1931–1936) in various prisons in India. At the time of the publication of this volume, Roy still saw himself as functioning within a broadly Marxist field but had already moved way beyond conventional Marxist theory. He believed that because Marx himself perhaps never saw the “far-reaching implications of this philosophy”, it demanded further elaboration, in the absence of which, it remained full of fallacies that were then explained “by dogmatic interpretations and spurious interpolations”. The need was therefore to “complete” Marx’s attempted synthesis so as “to combine various currents of past thought into a comprehensive system of the philosophy of life” (Roy 1948/1989: 12). The book was supposed to be an attempt in that direction and though it shows a sharp intellect at work, it wasn’t quite able to achieve the goal that it aspired to. In my opinion, Roy failed to achieve his stated goal because he remained trapped within the rigid binaries (“rationalism” and “irrationalism”) of post-Enlightenment thought and a Eurocentrism that his own explorations seemed to have been suggesting a way out of. In other words, he had no sense of the synchronicity of the non-synchronous nor of the fact that the rational and irrational weren’t two separable or separate types or modes of “thinking” and that affect, emotions or passion often underlay the apparently rational. It is pertinent to recall that once having been involved in the thick of the Communist International’s politics, his thinking began to register a shift after the Comintern’s fateful “Left turn” and its disastrous consequences in China where Roy had been sent as its emissary along with Mikhail Borodin. It was then that he decided to return to India and having fundamentally rethought his own sectarian positions of his earlier days, became an advocate of the communists’ closer collaboration with the mainstream of the nationalist struggle, as represented by the Indian National Congress. It was a foregone conclusion that he would be

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arrested on his return, given the fact that there was already a warrant of arrest against him in connection with the Cawnpore and Meerut conspiracy cases (Rai Chowdhuri: 88). For many months he did manage to successfully “dodge the police and establish(ed) contacts with almost all political parties, trade unions and youth organizations upon all of which he made a very favourable impression” (Rai Chowdhuri: 88). Along with his shift away from the stance that had once led him to contest Lenin’s position on the revolutions in the colonies, Roy now also started rethinking a number of other, primarily philosophical questions. In a sense, his life in incarceration could be said to have initiated his turn to philosophy in a very big way. He read and made notes on the history of philosophy in the West but also started studying Indian philosophy seriously, especially exploring materialist traditions in ancient India (Roy 1943: 28, 43). The key change that occurs in Roy’s thinking during his prison days is that while remaining a thoroughly committed materialist, he comes to appreciate the autonomy of the domain of ideas. No revolution has ever occurred in history, he now claims, whose ground has not been prepared in advance by a philosophical and cultural revolution. In Reason, Romanticism and Revolution, he links the development of philosophical ideas, especially materialism, to humanity’s “quest for freedom”. The “romantic view of life” enters his thinking at this point as to him, “it leads to the liberating doctrine that man is the maker of the world”, which he identifies with the whole line of thinkers from Vico to Marx (ibid.: 12). Romanticism, Roy claims, originated in the Renaissance, “which represented the revolt of man against the tyranny of teleological reason and the theological moral order” (ibid.: 12). He thus goes on to claim that The passionate belief in the creativeness and freedom of man is the essence of the romantic view of life. The idea of revolution, therefore, is a romantic idea; at the same time, it is rational because revolutions take place of necessity. Revolution, thus may appear to be a self-contradictory concept. Can reason and revolution be fitted into the self-same revolutionary process? That is the fundamental problem of the philosophy of history. (Roy 1948/1989: 11)

We know from our own vantage point today, with the benefit of our larger philosophical experience, that this attempt to reconcile “necessity” and “free will” is a doomed attempt and, sure enough, it does tie Roy himself up in knots as well. However, that is not relevant for our present

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purposes. What is relevant is the problem that the question of free will and the autonomy of ideas poses. Thus the programmatic question, in his own words: To put the proposition more precisely, what is needed is a restatement of Materialism so as to recognise explicitly the decisive importance of the dynamic of ideas in all the processes of human evolution – historical, social, political and cultural. Epistemologically, Idealism stands rejected. (Roy 1948/1989: 9)

From this new importance attached to the domain of ideas, arises Roy’s problematic. The logical development of ideas and the generation of new social forces take place simultaneously, together providing the motive force of history. But in no given period can they be causally connected except in the sense that action is always motivated by ideas. A new idea must be referred back to an old idea. Philosophy has a history of its own, and it is not a kaleidoscope of phantoms. (ibid.: 10–11, emphasis added)

We might recall here Louis Althusser’s claim, two decades later, that each level of the “structure”, including the intellectual-philosophical has its own specific temporality, punctuated by its own particular rhythms, irreducible to the logic of the “economic”. In more contemporary language we could call Roy’s stance one of the “co-constitution” of ideas and new social forces—though the idea of co-constitution in itself does not tell us much about the actual relations between ideas and new social forces or material life for that matter. Be that as it may, once Roy takes this position, certain implications follow. The most important of these is that the emergence of new ideas in twelfth-century Europe can no longer be explained with reference to the “internal dialectic” of the emergence of new social forces—especially in a context where the social forces that are supposedly the harbingers of change are not yet to be seen anywhere. Thus: The thousand years from Constantine to Columbus were not an intellectual void. The intellectual resurgence at the close of the Middle-Ages cannot be directly connected with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Its roots can be traced…through the movement of ideas taking place long before the appearance of the bourgeoisie to struggle against the Lords, temporal and

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spiritual, who amongst themselves dominated the economic life of Europe. The economic life of Europe was stagnant; but the movement of ideas was not suspended. (Roy 1948/1989: 45, emphasis added)

If the ideas that led to the great transformations in Europe, till then engulfed in its “dark middle ages”, cannot be traced back to the rise of any new social forces (a consequence of a stagnant economic life), how does one understand the new developments? It is to be sought in the history of ideas that belong to other histories, whose roots go far back in time and to spaces outside Europe. Disowned by Christian Europe, the inspiring tradition of man’s early struggle against nature was treasured by the infidel Arabs, who eventually passed it on to the natural heirs, so to say. Learning from the Greek masters, particularly Aristotle, a succession of Arab scholars from the tenth century onwards, occupied themselves with the science of history. The culmination was Ibn Khaldun’s Universal History, written at the close of the fourteenth century. It was such a profound treatise on the philosophy of history that Ibn Khaldun has been called the ‘founder of the science of history’. The Arabic culture, inspired by the secular and rational spirit of the ancient Greek philosophers, reached Europe through universities of Spain and Italy. Its contribution to the European Renaissance was incalculable. (ibid.: 6)

Many of the things that Roy is saying here were of course known then as they are known now, among a narrow circle of specialists. However, social and political philosophy has pretended to be oblivious of these connections of the rise of modern Europe to histories elsewhere, of other times. And Marxism, by making ideas derivative of the rise of new social forces, reduced the entire story to one of Europe’s internal development. It is a common misconception that all these Arab or Islamic philosophers were simply “disciples of Aristotle”, for they were actively engaging with his thought for their own purposes. At other places in this text and his other writings, Roy seems to be well aware of the fact that the Islamic thinkers, philosophers and scientists were not merely “passing on” Greek wisdom in translation to the Europeans, but that they were indeed pioneers of thought in their own time. However, what is really important here is the fact that having once given up on the economic or materialist determination of ideas in a crude sense, Roy had to inevitably turn his

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gaze towards the “outside” of Europe. “To what extent the Arab philosophers contributed to that intellectual movement, can be judged from the well-known saying current in those days: ‘Nature interpreted by Aristotle and Aristotle interpreted by Averroes [Ibn Rushd] (1126–1198)—the greatest of Arab philosophers”, says Roy and asserts that “In Averroism culminated the contest between faith and reason, despotic ignorance and free thought—a contest that had begun in the ninth century when Erigena counterposed philosophy to theology”. Of course, in the Islamic world, such a philosophical battle had been already initiated in the ninth century, with philosophers like Al Farabi arguing for the priority of philosophy over religion but that is not our concern here. Suffice it to note that Roy registers the fact that Abubaker of Andalusia rejected the geocentric view of Ptolemy three hundred years before Copernicus (ibid.: 42). All these explorations lead us to pathways out of the self-enclosed idea of Europe and it’s Renaissance as an entirely “endogenous” development, arising with the rise of capitalism. As Roy puts it, “science and philosophy developed as the result of man’s age-long quest for freedom and search for truth” and the “bourgeoisie, later on, patronised them because they served their purpose. The relation was accidental, not causal ” (ibid.: 46, emphasis added).

Pathways of Exit: Cedric Robinson African-American historian Robin D.G. Kelley says of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (2000) that “building on the work of Black radical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, Robinson directly challenges the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism”. Instead, says Kelley, Robinson explains that “capitalism emerged within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West—most notably in the racialism that has come to characterize European society. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism and genocide” (Kelley 2000: xiii). First published in 1983, Robinson’s book was virtually ignored outside Black radical circles but its reprint in the new conjuncture of the passing of Western hegemony in the domain of knowledge ensured that it was taken seriously—at least to some

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extent. Kelley further underlines that “anticipating Martin Bernal’s Black Athena” and “building on the pioneering scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop, George G.M. James, and Frank Snowden”, Robinson exposed the efforts of European thinkers “to disavow the interdependence between ancient Greece and North Africa” (Kelley 2000: xiii). Robinson reads this ancient connection between Greece and North Africa, says Kelley, not to establish the superiority of North Africa but rather to “remind us again today, as it did sixteen years ago, that the exorcising of the Black Mediterranean is about the fabrication of Europe as a discrete, racially pure entity solely responsible for modernity, on the one hand and the fabrication of the Negro, on the other” (ibid.: xiv). The important point to register here, before we proceed any further, is that in contrast to even a colonized Asian subject like Roy who believed—and celebrated—the universalism of Euromodernity, a scholar like Robinson simply had no option but to question it. For AfricanAmerican scholars, the very fact that they were Africans in America was a constant reminder of the past-in-the-present; race and racial oppression in the here and now is/was tied by a thousand threads to both, Trans-Atlantic slave trade as well as the continuation of slavery thereafter. The violence of this enterprise is so closely tied to both modernity and capitalism that it calls for a separate investigation and a scholar like Robinson obviously cannot be satisfied with the story that so appealed to Roy—of modernity as the great march of “Man” to “freedom”. However, Robinson like many others who constitute the “Black radical tradition” was attracted to the universalism and the emancipatory vision of Marxism. Nevertheless, in the course of the exploration of the roots of racial constitution of the modern West, Robinson finds that it is not always possible to exonerate Marx himself of the ease with which he too is able to overlook this central question. Indeed, to a very large extent, Robinson finds that the blind spots are a consequence of Marx theory itself—at least on two counts. First, the privileging of the economic/mode of production and the relegation of the cultural to a derivative position leaves no space to separately examine the ways in which racism and “racial capitalism” is constituted. Second, by privileging the system or structure and its internal dialectic, Marx’s theory also presented capitalism as a consequence of endogenous development within Europe (class struggles and decline of feudalism for instance). It therefore, effectively excised the role

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and significance that crucial elements like Atlantic slavery and colonization of Africa and the world, held for the “rise of the modern West”. Robinson therefore argues: (T)he Atlantic slave trade and the slavery of the New World were integral to the modern world economy. Their relationship to capitalism was historical and organic rather than adventitious or synthetic…Certainly, slave labor was one of the bases for what Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation.’ But it would be an error to arrest the relationship there, assigning slave labor to some ‘pre-capitalist’ stage of history. For more than 300 years slave labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor, peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion. Ultimately, this meant that the interpretation of history in terms of the dialectic of capitalist class struggles would be inadequate, a mistake ordained by the preoccupation of Marxism with the industrial and manufacturing centers of capitalism; a mistake founded on the presumption that Europe itself had produced, that the motive and material forces that generated the capitalist system were to be wholly located in what was a fictive historical entity. (Robinson 2000: 4, emphasis added)

One may have legitimate objections to the characterization of the relationship of slavery to the modern world economy as “integral” and “organic”, especially if one believes, as I do, that nothing really was “internal” or “integral” to capitalism, which was from the beginning an “apparatus of capture”. After all, Robinson in his own discussion, marshals a huge amount of evidence to show that long before the Atlantic slave trade, “in Spain, (Catalan and Castile) and in the Italian colonies on Cyprus, Crete, and in Asia Minor and Palestine, Genoese and Venetian masters used both European and African slaves in agriculture on sugar plantations, in industry, and for work in mines” (Robinson 2000: 16, emphasis added). What capital does to common lands and agrarian and artisanal communities alike, in Europe and England, is “capture”, no less than it is in the rest of the world. So I do not think Robinson’s point is really about what is “integral” as opposed to what is “outside” or contingent; rather it is that one needs to see Atlantic slavery and slavery in general as constitutive of modern capitalism. I read his claim to mean that Atlantic slavery is not something that can be consigned to capitalism’s pre-history, just as colonialism cannot be seen as an effect of a capitalism that emerged fully formed from within Europe. The claim that

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capitalism was an exclusively European product does not imply that it was fashioned entirely from materials sourced from within Europe. What is important in this passage then, is the claim that it is incorrect to interpret the history of capitalism’s emergence as one of class struggles within feudal Europe, as if it is something taking place within a closed system—as an internal dialectic. That is why Robinson concludes this passage with the sentence cited as the first epigraph to this chapter: from its very foundation, capitalism never was—any more than Europe—a closed system. The first part of Robinson’s book that engages in a detailed reconstruction of the history of capitalism therefore, places that history at the intersection of many sequences and histories—the history of racism within Europe, the history of slavery from the thirteenth century to the Atlantic slavery, the history of colonialism at large, the history of the African people and their struggles and so on. In the “Preface” to the 2000 edition, Robinson reiterates that “to Black radicals of the twentieth century, one of the most compelling features of Marxism was its apparent universalism”. “Unlike dominant historical discourses of the nineteenth century, historical materialism was inflected by an internationalism and a scientific rigor which plainly transcended the obnoxious and sinister claims to destiny exhibited by such conceits as German nationalism, British imperialism, the racism of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ and so forth” (Robinson 2000: xxx). And yet, “Marxism’s internationalism was not global; its materialism was exposed as an insufficient explanator of cultural and social forces; and its economic determinism too often politically compromised freedom struggles beyond or outside the metropole” (ibid.: xxx). Here Robinson’s explanation of why this was so is striking: For Black radicals, historically and immediately linked to social bases predominantly made up of peasants and farmers in the West Indies, or sharecroppers and peons in North America, or forced laborers on colonial plantations in Africa, Marxism appeared distracted from the cruelest and most characteristic manifestations of the world economy. This exposed the inadequacies of Marxism as an apprehension of the modern world, but equally troubling was Marxism’s neglect and miscomprehension of the nature and genesis of liberation struggles which already had occurred and surely had yet to appear among these peoples. (ibid.: xxx, emphasis added)

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That is why Robinson makes the strong claim that “Black radicalism is a negation of Western civilization” though, he emphasizes, not in the sense of a simple dialectical negation. It is a negation in the sense that “the evolving tradition of Black radicalism owes its peculiar moment to the historical interdiction of African life by European agents” (ibid.: 73). It is a negation also in the sense that it is not simply a “variant of Western radicalism” (and Marxism) “whose proponents happen to be Black”, but in the sense that it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era” (Robinson 2000: 73). He cites Walter Rodney to underline that “the similarity of African survivals in the New World points not to tribal peculiarities but to the essential oneness of African culture. That culture was the shield which frustrated the efforts of Europeans to dehumanize Africans through servitude” (ibid.: 73, emphasis added). Throughout Robinson’s discussion, we can see the presence of the African “past” as something that is constitutive of Black radicalism even when it claims to be Marxist which is the case with all the key protagonists in his book, namely W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Richard Wright. Thus at one point, discussing James’ Black Jacobins, originally published in 1938, Robinson says that while the theoretical frame of the text was provided by “the theories of revolution developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky”—and James asserted this fact frequently—there was more to the book than that. “From Marx and Engels, he had taken the concept of a revolutionary class and the economic foundations for its historical emergence. But the slaves of Haiti were not a Marxist proletariat” (Robinson 2000: 274). So, if at one level, James saw in the Haitian slaves working on the land, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, the same desire to exterminate their oppressors, he even saw in the “gangs of hundreds [of slaves] on the huge sugar factories which covered the North Plain”, a force “closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time” (Robinson 2000: 275). Despite this way of reducing the specificity of slave labor to the peasant or the proletarian, Robinson sees something else going on as well. While Marx and Engels “had been content to locate the formation of the modern revolutionary proletariat at the core of capitalist industrial relations”, says Robinson, “James was insisting that the sphere be broadened”. In a theoretically potent move, Robinson suggests, this broadening needed to be done by recognizing that

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Capitalism had produced its social and historical negations in both the poles of its expropriation: capitalist accumulation gave birth to the proletariat at the manufacturing core; ‘primitive accumulation’ deposited the social base for the revolutionary masses in the peripheries. (Robinson 2004: 275, emphasis added)

This formulation, let me underline, makes a different kind of sense today, when we can no longer see the second pole of the “formal subsumption of labor under capital” (therefore, “primitive accumulation”) as a mere transitional stage to the first, that is to “real subsumption”. By arguing that capitalism produces its social and historical negations differently at both the poles of its expropriation, this formulation does away with the teleology of transition altogether. Indeed, it will be useful to recall our discussion in Chapters 2 and 4, where a distinction was made between the areas or domains subject to the political domination of capital and those that functioned on the logic of accumulation. In the discussion in Chapter 4, I had also linked this distinction to the one made by István Mészáros, between the “capital system” and “capitalism”—though I disagreed with his putting everything under the rubric of capital in this way. If “primitive accumulation” is to be seen in the specific sense of the dispossession of pre-capitalist communities and their separation from the means of labor, where expropriation is not subject to the so-called internal “economic laws” of capitalism, then clearly, Robinson’s rendering of James forces us to recognize these as two different and concurrent modes that call forth different kinds of “social and historical negation”, producing two different kinds of revolutionary subjectivities. Where the two subjectivities differ is in the fact that while the “European proletariat had been formed through and by the ideas of the bourgeoisie (‘the ruling ideas’, Marx and Engels had maintained, ‘were the ideas of the ruling class’), in Haiti and presumably elsewhere among slave populations, the Africans had constructed their own revolutionary culture” (ibid.: 275). This revolutionary culture obviously drew from the larger repertoire of African culture. Continuing his paraphrase of James, Robinson says: “One does not need education or encouragement to cherish a dream of freedom. At their midnight celebrations of Voodoo, their African cult, they danced and sang, usually this favorite song:

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Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu! Canga, bafio te! Canga, Moune de le! Canga, do ki la! Canga, li! ‘We swear to destroy the whites and all that they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow.’ The colonists knew this song and tried to stamp it out, and the Voodoo cult with which it was linked. In vain.”3

Voodoo was the medium of the conspiracy, says James. In spite of all prohibitions, the slaves traveled miles to sing and dance and practice the rites and talk; and now, since the revolution to hear the political news and make their plans (cited in ibid.: 275). Robinson comments that it implied that bourgeois culture and thought and ideology were irrelevant to the development of revolutionary consciousness among Black and other Third World peoples—even though James himself could not see this (ibid.: 276). This is of course the story of Haiti. Robinson however, also gives enough instances from the revolts of African slaves in the United States, right up to the nineteenth century. Citing the work of Gerald Mullin, he says, “‘Outlandish’ Africans often reacted to their new condition by attempting to escape, either to return to Africa or to form settlements of fugitives to recreate their old life in the new land. These activities were not predicated upon the Africans’ experience of plantation life, but on a total rejection of their lot” (cited in Robinson 2004: 169). When the actualization of resistance in all the myriad forms—including escape—was frustrated, “it became a obeah, voodoo, myalism, pocomania” (ibid.: 169). All this was obviously very “different from what was made of the individualistic and often spontaneous motives that energized the runaway, the arsonist, the poisoner…”, for here, not only was the success or failure of resistance, not an individual question but was based on an epistemology that “granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material” (ibid.: 169). The vocabulary here is a bit anachronistic for the point that Robinson seeks to highlight is not of an epistemology and an ontology nor of mind versus matter but rather modes of being where these distinctions make no sense. Robinson seems to me to be referring 3 The quote within the quote is from James himself.

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to a cosmology where it is the community that is the subject and it is its endurance in time that matters, not the lives of individuals who live and die in the struggle for freedom. The theoretical gist of Robinson’s argument is best understood in his own words: The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. (ibid.: 170, emphasis added)

This formulation of Robinson’s, it can be seen, directly connects with the second epigraph to this chapter where Ranajit Guha talks of the failure of the colonial state to assimilate indigenous society into itself. It is of critical importance to recognize that this presence of the past that characterizes the Black radical tradition refers to an entirely different chronology and sequence from that which defines White America, and even when the two collide, the African past is never erased, for it functions (and has functioned) as the shield and armor of Black radicalism, to recall Walter Rodney’s formulation cited earlier. Once again, the resonances with Subaltern Studies are striking. As we will see in our next section on Subaltern Studies, there are a number of resonances between the way its scholars have attempted to grapple with the time of historical materialism (which is often referred to in their literature as the “universal time of capital”) and the way in which Robinson’s discussion of the Black radical tradition problematizes the time of historical materialism.

Pathways of Exit: Subaltern Studies Subaltern Studies began as an intervention in Indian historiography from an explicitly Marxist perspective, inflected by a reading of Gramsci and his innovative readings of Marxist theory. In the event, Subaltern Studies also became an intervention in Indian Marxism itself, giving rise to a whole range of scholarly works on Indian history and politics on the one hand, but also opening up the closed world of Indian Marxism to some extent, on the other. For someone like me, coming from the world of fulltime Marxist activism, encountering Subaltern Studies was like breath of fresh air—in the first instance, not so much for its innovations but for simply acknowledging “real life” concerns within theory. The period of the early 1990s, when Indian politics rapidly changed within a matter of

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three years—the conjuncture of 1990–1992 that I have elsewhere called the “discursive break”4 —we were witness to what Antonio Gramsci has described as the crisis of hegemony: At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organizational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them are no longer recognized by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny’. (Gramsci 1971: 210)

This was certainly not the domain of Subaltern Studies, concerned as it was with subaltern history in during colonial India but the sudden crisis of hegemony of secular-nationalism that had ruled since the end of colonial power, raised, for some of us, questions about the very structure and composition of the nationalism that had come to power in 1947. Marxists however, continued to fight rearguard battles, as they do even now, continuing to simply mouth formulaic defense of the “legacy of the freedom struggle” and the “values of the national movement”, where our explorations were leading us to question those very values as upper caste, Hindu, North Indian—even in their secular-nationalist incarnation. This too was not directly related to Subaltern Studies scholars’ concerns but their relentless critique of both colonial and nationalist (including Marxist) historiography suddenly opened up the space for an exploration of the “voice of the subaltern” in unprecedented and unexpected ways. While to me this was quite exciting, I was quite aghast to see the reaction of established Marxists intellectuals, who seemed intent on not allowing any questioning of their bland versions of history writing, where the “working class” or the “peasantry” were supposed to behave only in certain specific ways; everything uncomfortable was to be explained 4 I have discussed the conjuncture of 1990–1992 when within a very short time three parallel developments with very different histories, came together to produce the crisis of hegemony that led to an almost overnight transformation of political common sense. To this conjuncture belongs the crisis of what came to be known as “Nehruvian consensus” and the simultaneous rise of the politics of the Hindu Right on the one hand, and the upsurge of lower caste, especially Dalit and Other Backward Classes’ politics. It was in this conjuncture too that the neoliberalism finally won, overturning the old import substituting industrialization model. See Nigam (2006) for further details.

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away or simply brushed aside. And why not? After all, the search for the “autonomy of the subaltern” could not but lead to a confrontation with questions of the most uncomfortable kind that had come up before C.L.R. James when he wrote the history of the revolt in Haiti. In this section on Subaltern Studies, needless to say, my concern is not with the entire range of issues that has come up and been debated over the past few decades but with two specific ways in which the questions raised by its scholarship challenge the time of historical materialism. An exploration of the “autonomy of subaltern consciousness” demanded, so the scholars associated with the project soon realized, placing their Marxism and social science-inherited categories in abeyance and listening to what actually was going on. The first has to do, precisely, with the modes of being (including socalled “forms of consciousness”) of the subaltern of the kind that defy our secularized language of Marxism and social sciences and have till recently been seen simply as signs of “backwardness”. “Gods, kings, warriors and servants, rather than capitalists, proletarians, landlords and laborers, inhabit the precolonial world represented in oral texts”, argued Gyan Prakash in his study of “debt-bondage” among the kamias in Bihar (Prakash 1990: 34). “Preserved, transmitted and performed as oral traditions by the Bhuinyas—a group that ranked as outcaste, has historically existed as kamias—the traditions make the precolonial society of the kamias and maliks [the owners to whom they were bonded] appear irreducibly different from the colonial world of bonded laborers and landlords” (Prakash 1990: 34). “Depictions of how, overcoming adversity, displaying courage and cunning, these birs 5 performed miraculous feats and defeated powerful enemies, become appropriate events for interpreting the past” (Prakash 1990: 42). Prakash’s explorations included his own field and oral history work among the Bhuinyas in the 1980s and he is careful to remind his readers that while many of these figures continue into the period of his research, the myths and narratives are not exactly unchanged repositories of tradition. “(I)t should be clear”, Prakash tells us, “that the convergence of narratives and the structured nature of episodes do not necessarily imply that the tradition has retained its original meaning. Insofar as oral traditions are not antiquarian remnants of the past but a form of historical 5 The suffix “bir” is attached to the names of figures appearing in Bhuinya narratives and means “the courageous one”.

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consciousness deployed dynamically to construct the Bhuinya identity, it is necessary to see traditions as a living process…We should note, however, that because the traditions are remembered in terms of formulaic themes, plots, and images, the mythic trope figurates the interpretive account of the Bhuinya history” (Prakash 1990: 44–45, emphasis added). Prakash’s detailed account and the complex discussions therein of the methodological challenges posed by taking these community narratives seriously, obviously cannot be discussed here in any detail. However, I do want to register here that while Prakash correctly underlines that these mythical narratives must not be treated as “antiquarian remnants of the past”, there is perhaps an unwarranted slippage that wants to see them as forms of historical consciousness, which is a very specific mode of relating to the past and not quite appropriate to what we see in South Asian societies at large. To be fair to him, Prakash himself might actually see this question very differently today. However, the key question here is of the recognition, if in a limited fashion, of the limits of our secular categories in dealing with subaltern lives and histories. Fellow Subaltern historian Shahid Amin (2002) reads in Prakash’s account an important methodological departure: “To persist with the category of ‘debt’ [in reading Kamia bondage] where its liquidation is not a real possibility is to read a relationship arising out of such a transaction misleadingly. It is to overvalue the ‘economic’ and to disregard the ways in which the ‘political’, the ‘cultural’, the ‘supernatural’—physical force, hierarchy, belief in the power of the ‘gods’ of the masters (malik devatas ) constitute and reproduce the person kamia and his family” (Amin 2002: 20).6 If this was the situation with the Bhuinya peasants in the relatively “backward” parts of Bihar, Dipesh Chakrabarty (1996) tells us about the workers in the heart of the “modern” jute industry in Kolkata. “The subordination to the machine that the worker suffered in the jute mill, however, was not very technical. The worker did not comes to terms with the machine on the basis of even an elementary understanding of its working principles….In fact, the worker’s relationship to the machine, was mediated through the North Indian peasant’s conception of his tools, whereby the tools often took on magical and godly qualities” 6 As Amin’s note explains, malik devatas were a special class of extra-local gods, who kept watch on the low-caste laborers in the field, and exerted an important influence on their “commonsense”, i.e. their sense of right and wrong, causality and explanation, reward and punishment (Note 59, page 44).

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(Chakrabarty 1996: 89). Of these “peasant-workers”, Chakrabarty tells us, “(t)heirs was a largely pre-capitalist, inegalitarian culture marked by strong primordial loyalties of community, language, religion, caste, and kinship” (ibid.: 69). Put in Amin’s terms, we could also say that once again, where historical materialism would insist on privileging the economic instance as the determinant, here workers’ behavior was largely shaped by culture and local power relations. This way of putting it also means that there is no structure or totality that we can refer back to, for the time of “culture” (embodying local histories and power relations) has a much longer history that is very different from the time of the newly emerged “economic” (capitalism)—the former does not, and simply cannot derive from the latter. Indeed, culture provides the antecedent conditions within which the new economic must act and take shape. In other words, the linear time of historical materialism and its relationship to the idea of a structure in motion, transforming in accordance with its own internal laws from say feudalism to capitalism certainly does not work here.7 I should, of course, clarify that this is my reading of Subaltern Studies scholars’ work, they do not themselves present this temporal disjuncture in these terms. Nevertheless, when attempting to confront subaltern subjectivity, they did not try to explain these “forms of consciousness” away as remnants or survivals of the past or as “false consciousness” but rather, saw them as having real effects in the present. As a matter of fact, as Ranajit Guha asserted in his classic description of the Santal revolt, “religiosity was by all accounts, central to the hool [the Santal word for revolt]…It was not that power was a content wrapped up in a form external to it called religion” (Guha 1993: 34). “Hence the attribution of the rising to a divine command rather than to any particular grievance; the enactment of rituals both before (e.g. propitiatory ceremonies to ward off the apocalypse of the Primeval Serpents—Lag and Lagini, the distribution of tel-sindur [oil and vermillion] etc.) and during 7 Etienne Balibar has shown in his early reading of Capital and Grundrisse that indeed, to Marx as well, “the elements combined by the capitalist structure have different and independent origins. It is not one and the same movement which makes free labourers and transferable wealth. On the contrary, in the examples analysed by Marx, the formation of free labourers appears mainly in the form of transformations of agrarian structures, while the constitution of wealth is the result of merchant’s capital and finance capital, whose movements take place outside those structures, ‘marginally’, or ‘in the pores of society’”. He thus goes on to add: “Thus the unity possessed by the capitalist structure once it has been constituted is not found in its rear” (Althusser and Balibar 1977: 281).

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the uprising (e.g. worshipping the goddess Durga, bathing in the Ganges, etc.)…” (Guha 1993: 34). Despite a comment, borrowing from Marx, to the effect that it was a demonstration of self-estrangement that made the rebels look upon their project as predicated on a will other than their own, Guha does nevertheless take seriously their statement that “Kanoo and Seedoo Manjee are not fighting. The Thacoor himself will fight” (ibid.: 34).8 He cites at length from a radical Bengali account of the revolt to underline that it showed up the “failure of a shallow radicalism to conceptualize insurgent mentality except in terms of unadulterated secularism”. Guha goes on to observe that “unable to grasp religiosity as the central modality of peasant consciousness in colonial India he [the author] is shy to acknowledge its mediation of the peasant’s idea of power and all the resultant contradictions” (Guha 1993: 37). The contradictions, one presumes, arise from the irreducible fact that the historian, scholar or radical activist can never partake of the rebel’s imaginative universe, however much one may move away from “unadulterated secularism” and try to understand that world. Thus, the “real effects” of these “forms of consciousness” were to be seen, not just in the way they determined the actions and behavior of the peasants and workers but also in the sense in which Robinson says of the Black radical tradition—that it “cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life”. It is also worth stating here that in the context of colonialism, where capitalist relations were supposed to have been super-imposed upon existing pre-capitalist relations, much greater theoretical work was called for which was never done. At the very least, it was necessary to ask how, in what ways, colonialism transformed indigenous society. It was necessary to ask what the idea of the “superimposition” of capitalism on a precolonial structure could have meant beyond the obvious level of the introduction of capitalist relations of production in different areas, with differing degrees of success. This brings me to the second way in which the work of Subaltern Studies scholars challenged the time of historical materialism. As we have already seen in the preceding paragraphs, in the course of their research and explorations, they realized that not only was the extent to which capitalism could penetrate South Asian society thwarted by pre-existing 8 Seedoo and Kanoo Manjee here refer to the two leaders of the revolt, Sidhu and Kanu Manjhi (the more correct contemporary English spelling), while Thacoor refers to their God (Thakur) at whose command the rising was supposed to be taking place.

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modes of being, even the colonial state could not, as Guha puts it in the second epigraph, assimilate indigenous society within itself. There is always an ambiguity of course in the way some of the Subaltern Studies scholars articulate this aspect, largely because it is not always clear as to what they mean by the term “political domain”. As Shahid Amin put it, “the distinctive statement of the Subaltern Studies project was that the domain of politics in twentieth-century colonial India was not one”. He goes on to say, the initial position “has been reworked in many ways from the manner in which it was first posited by Ranajit Guha in 1982” (Amin 2002: 12). The formulation in the initial statement went like this: “What is clearly left out of this un-historical [elitist] historiography is the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the laboring population and intermediate strata in town and country—that is, the people” (Guha 2009: 324). The statement further said: “The co-existence of these two domains or streams…was the index of an important historical truth, that is, the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation. There were vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people which were never integrated into their hegemony” (Guha 2009: 325). Was this “failure of the bourgeoisie to speak for the nation” a political failure? Was it the failure to develop capitalist relations at large, a precondition for its hegemony? Or is it the case, as Partha Chatterjee has more recently suggested, that the term bourgeoisie here did not refer to the capitalist class at all but rather to the middle class—in a sense closer to the original French meaning of the term? (Chatterjee 2013: 70) At times, especially in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), the argument becomes more specifically about the failure of capital to be—especially when he discusses the “two histories of capital” (Chakrabarty 2000: 58– 63). I see these as two separate questions—the “failure” of capital to take hold and the “failure” of the modern state (colonial and postcolonial) to colonize indigenous society. From my point of view both the arguments are important and represent the same larger phenomenon but one cannot be reduced to the other. The reason I put “failure” within quotation marks is because the failure is only in relation to our historical materialist (and perhaps modern) belief that capital and modern state are universal

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entities that must eventually subdue and replace the other, precapitalist forms (economically) and institutions (at the political level). Amin underlines that “it was the notion of the split domain of politics which was our principal difference with colonialist and nationalist historiography” because both the tendencies remained committed to the idea of one, unitary domain of politics, integrated either by administration or by the intervention of the nationalist elite (ibid.: 12). Guha reiterates this idea in a later essay and explicates that Subaltern Studies’ “critique of the universalist pretension of capital leads logically to a thematization informed not by any primacy attributed to the state but by an awareness of the unresolved problems of its negotiation with civil society”. As a result, questions like the growth of communal, casteist, regionalist, and other particularist interests figure in the work on Subaltern Studies scholars not within the usual binaries of modernity and tradition, development and underdevelopment, progressivism and conservatism or East and West “but as witness to the historic threshold that the so-called universalism of a Eurocentric reason and its engine of global expansion—capital—failed to cross in the age of colonialism” (Guha 2009: 331). Here it becomes clear that “capital” is so central to Guha’s understanding, not so much as an economic formation but more because he sees it, in classical Marxist fashion, as the engine of the global expansion of “the so-called universalism of a Eurocentric reason”. Guha, however, seems to link this “failure to cross the historic threshold” to colonialism. This ties up well with his argument, developed at length later, that colonial power constituted a “domination without hegemony” (Guha 1997) and therefore remained an externality that could not carry out its project of capitalist transformation in the colonized society. While this may be true, it is not convincing enough because, at some level, the failure is still seen as contingent to the inability of the colonial state to become hegemonic. If however, we have to explain the continued failure of the modern postcolonial nation-state and postcolonial capitalism to “cross the historic threshold”, the explanation with reference to the “domination without hegemony” of the colonial state is insufficient. It is in the work of Partha Chatterjee that this dimension—that of the exploration of this continued split in the political domain in the postcolonial phase—takes center-stage, especially in his later theorization of the second level of popular politics as “political society”. By the time Chatterjee comes to formulate his idea of political society, the idea of a possible transition to a full-blooded modernity or capitalism, even in the distant

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future has been given up. Moreover, we are now faced, not with peasants and workers in colonial India but with contemporary practices of Indian democracy. What began with the recognition of the split domain of politics in the colonial context, becomes in Chatterjee’s later work, an exploration of popular politics in urban postcolonial India, where it is now counterposed to “civil society”—the narrow high ground of modern politics. This also leads to a more explicit recognition in his work on the conflict between the search for “modernity” and the practices of “democracy”, which once again refers us back to that split domain of politics. Since I have discussed his work as well as that of Kalyan Sanyal, with respect to capitalism in the postcolonial world at length in Chapter 2, delineating my own differences with their stance, I will not go into their work here. Suffice it to say that in their work the argument about the limits to the expansion of capital in this world, also reveals the limits to which it is possible to conceptualize the same within the framework of Marxism (Chatterjee 1984; Sanyal 2007).

Pathways of Exit: Samir Amin In a formulation that is reminiscent of C.L.R. James’ formulation, but underlining the question of politics, Samir Amin says, “in the problem of accumulation on a world scale, where relations between different formations are concerned, politics is dominant, and this is why we have to look at these relations as bound up with the analysis of primitive accumulation, and not with that of expanded reproduction” (Amin 1974: 22, emphasis added). The phenomenon of underdevelopment, he continues, “is thus merely the result of the persistence of phenomena of the order of primitive accumulation for the benefit of the center…” (Amin 1974: 22).9 In this work, Amin deploys the distinction between the “capitalist mode of production” and the “capitalist social formation”, arguing that at the center, the capitalist mode of production, which “tends to become one (the formation tending to merge ideally with the mode of production)”, 9 Amin takes this idea of the “dominance of politics” in the context of contemporary capitalism from a particularly interesting and complex formulation by Nicos Poulantzas to the effect that: “the economic ‘instance’ which is dominant in the system of pre-monopoly capitalism is accompanied by the political character of the ideological ‘instance’; the shift of the dominant ‘instance’ to politics under monopoly capitalism is accompanied by a parallel shift of the ideological ‘instance’ to economics, which becomes an ideology (‘the technocratic ideology’)” (cited by Amin 1974: 21).

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whereas in the periphery this does not happen. For this reason, the theory of accumulation on a world scale that he proposes “cannot confine itself to the narrow framework of the capitalist mode of production but must extend to the wider setting of the theory of capitalist social formations, which are marked by the co-presence of pre-capitalist economies as well” (Amin 1974: 21). At this stage of his work, Amin was still functioning within a more orthodox historical materialist frame but already, he was concerned with the fact that though transformations at the center had been studied, first by Lenin in his study of imperialism and later brought up to date by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, the transformations in and the structure of the peripheral economies had not been studied (ibid.: 20). In a sense, that was what Amin’s aim at that time was and he does so at a purely economic level, bringing in his skills in the discipline to do so primarily through a critique of mainstream economic theories. Many of his propositions in this work, like class struggles on a world scale, the idea of a “global bourgeoisie” or the “global proletariat” are difficult to agree with. It is in his later work, especially Eurocentrism, written in the wake of the Saidian intervention that we see Amin make some very interesting moves, even while pledging to remain loyal to historical materialism. Already before this work, Amin had reworked the historical materialist schema of historical development, especially with regard to the vexed question of “stages” and had come to reformulate it significantly. To quote him, I propose to distinguish between five modes of production: (1) the ‘primitive-communal’ mode, which is anterior to all the others; (2) the ‘tribute-paying’ mode, which adds to a still-existing village community a social and political apparatus for the exploitation of this community through the exaction of tribute; this tribute-paying mode of production is the most widespread form of precapitalist classes, and I distinguish between (a) its early and (b) its developed forms, such as the ‘feudal’ mode of production, in which the village community loses its dominium eminens over the soil to the feudal lords, and this community continues as a community of families. (Amin 1976: 13)

Apart from these, Amin also talks of the “slave-owning mode of production” and the “simple petty-commodity mode of production”, aside from the capitalist mode. The simple petty-commodity mode is found to exist in different social formations but is never a dominant mode in any social formation. The tributary or tribute-paying mode actually

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points to a more generic transformation that takes very different forms in different places and only in one extreme version assumes the form of feudalism. The difference between the primitive communal mode and the tributary mode is that by this time there is in existence a “political apparatus for the exploitation of the community through exaction of tribute”. Amin’s idea of the primitive communal mode too is not a simple one but is based on his sense of the variations that he noticed in Africa. Thus, Access to the land is not necessarily on an equal-basis for everyone in these communities. It is so in the most primitive of them, but in the others this access is hierarchical, with some families, or clans having the right to better holdings, more conveniently situated, for example, or larger. It is at that stage that an embryonic distinction between classes is observed. Such privilege is, as a rule, closely connected with a hierarchy of political and religious authority. Black Africa offers a wide spectrum of modes of production of this kind—some, especially in the Bantu part, having only a slight element of hierarchy, while others are extremely unegalitarian [sic], such as those found among the Toucouleurs in the Senegal valley, the Ashanti in Ghana, the Hausa in northern Nigeria, etc. In all of them, however, the peasant enjoys access to the land: by the mere fact of belonging to a clan he is entitled to a part of this clan’s territory. (14)

The interesting thing about this scheme of historical development is that the linearity is now broken up to yield many trajectories and possibilities of say, the transition from primitive communal (which itself is several) to the tributary mode, which again may or may not develop into feudalism. The slave-owning mode is a “less frequently encountered form though it is found in some places” but there is no indication about its “before” and “after”; in other words, there is no saying at what stage it will appear and where. The simple petty-commodity mode, in contrast, is ubiquitous by its presence in various social formations, though it never appears by itself or as a dominant form. The neat linearity of the historical materialist schema is already scrambled by the time Amin is through with this still early work. In Amin (2009), he makes further departures from the standard historical materialist narratives, though still declaring his commitment to Marxism. He is able to do this because he believes that “Marxism is the effective instrument which makes it possible both to analyze the challenges and define the strategies that are capable of changing the world… provided also that we recognize that Marx only initiated the thinking

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and the action in this area…We define ourselves as starting from Marx and not as stopping with him” (Amin 2009: 22–23, emphasis added). From his earlier purely economic analyses, he now moves into a serious engagement with religion. “Religions”, he says, “are part of the picture of reality and even constitute an important dimension of it. It is, therefore, important to analyze their social function, and in our modern world their articulation with what currently constitutes modernity: capitalism, democracy, and secularism” (Amin 2009: 26). It is clear that by the time he writes this work, religion is no longer a mere “superstructure” even if there is still a lingering attempt to find a functional relationship between it and transformations in the economic domain. However, the seriousness of the engagement is evident from the fact that from the very beginning, Amin now takes religion as a factor of no less explanatory significance than material developments. Indeed, it is the “dialectic” of mutual imbrication of the material and the religious that becomes the focus of his attention. With this aim, he attempts to enter the world of the believer and instead of lumping all religions into one category, looks at specific ways in which theological differences between say Judaism, Christianity and Islam could relate to the demands of their time and the ways in which they change—and indeed, enable change. Thus for instance, he says I have proposed another hypothesis concerning this major question that I believe is in agreement with the logic of historical materialism. I interpret the long period of history from 500 B. C. E. (the era of Zoraster and Confucius) through Hellenism (beginning from 300 B. C. E.) and the birth of Christianity to 600 C. E. (the birth of Islam) as being a long revolution in the course of which the old forms of social organization based on kinship within small communities were permanently replaced by a group of social organizations based on the dominance of the political power of the state, which I have called ‘tributary’ formations. This reading of history relativizes the rupture between Antiquity and the Middle Ages produced by the later Eurocentric ideology. The legitimacy of submitting to these new powers of the state required, for its reproduction, that the societies concerned accept an adequate ideological form. The ‘great religions’ responded perfectly to this requirement. (Amin 2009: 62)

Here, our concern is not really with how correct Amin’s thesis—which is really sweeping—is in all its details; rather it is with the fact that this way of seeing this long history really points to a far more complex relationship between the religious/cultural, the political and the economic.

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The direction of causality is also no longer clear for it is the extended era of the great religious or quasi-religious systems that marks the long revolution that puts in place the “tributary” mode of production. What is even more interesting is the fact that his understanding of religion now exhibits doubts about the standard narrative that sees the move from pagan/natural religions to monotheism as progress. Thus, Is monotheism really a wonderful advance in the history of thought, a qualitative progress? There are plenty of cunning minds…who draw a parallel between this unique God… and the patriarch of the patriarchal system, the autocrat of the power systems…This is a projection into heaven that legitimizes the patriarchal order and autocracy which prevails on earth. In addition, the elimination of female deities, always important in nonmonotheist religions, only accentuates patriarchal domination. Those cunning minds will add that this only and all powerful God deprives them…of all power. For with numerous Gods, competing and fighting with each other, you may call for help from the one who is best provided to help you and, in the Greek manner, thumb your nose at the one who is bothering you! Is it a coincidence that Greek democracy is polytheistic? Is it a coincidence, as well, that in the areas which will later be dominated by the major religions—Christianity and Islam in this case—this democracy disappears? But it may be objected that the authority that adopts a nonreligious metaphysic in China and a religious pluralism in India was also nothing but autocratic. (Amin 2009: 35)

Though the passage is a bit confusing, it seems the confusion arises from the fact that it stages an argument between the proponents of monotheism and the defenders of polytheism, without presenting it as such. The reason for this is that at one level, Amin continues to see the rise of monotheism as linked to the “long revolution” which was progress in some fashion, in his view. And yet, he cannot but notice that in many ways, it negated the positive aspects of pagan/polytheistic religions. Thus Amin is quite inclined to see the point of the pagan or the polytheist where the implication is that monotheism represents a negative development—in tune with patriarchy and centralized political power— but is also simultaneously faced with the fact that autocratic power can be quite compatible with both, a nonreligious metaphysic (China) or religious pluralism (India). Amin’s residual historical materialism still wants

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to see the rise and entrenchment of patriarchy and class power as a sign of historical progress though that sense is quite shaken by this time.10 This ambivalence seems to mark even his understanding of the larger historical processes by which modernity and capital emerge—and as the very title of the book indicates, the critique of Eurocentrism leads him to an exploration of Arab and African history, an appreciation of the “Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization” (via Martin Bernal 2002) and an engagement with the philosophical developments in the Islamic word and a consequent questioning of the naïve evolutionism that had come to define Marxism as well. He therefore argues, Marxism is constituted as part of a contradictory movement that is at once the continuation of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and a break with this philosophy. To its credit, it successfully demystifies the fundamental economism of the dominant ideology, to such an extent that after Marx it is no longer possible to think the way people did before him. But Marxism encounters limits that it always finds difficult to surmount: it inherits a certain evolutionist perspective that prevents it from tearing down the Eurocentric veil of the bourgeois evolutionism against which it revolts. This is the case because the real historical challenge confronting actually existing capitalism remains poorly understood. In its polarizing worldwide expansion, capitalism has proposed a homogenization of the world that it cannot achieve. (Amin 2009: 156)

If the autobiographical narrative of Euromodernity that imagines the whole world to be living in darkness before it came along with the light of Renaissance and Enlightenment no longer cuts any ice with Amin now, he is also far less confident about the universalizing and liberatory role of world capitalism. Here, Marx shared the excessive optimism of his time. He believed that capitalist expansion was irresistible and that it would rapidly suppress all vestiges of earlier modes of production, as well as the social, cultural, and political forms associated with them; in a word, that this expansion would

10 Thus, in an instance of his commitment, he says “(T)he association between tributary forms of social organization and the prevalence of a religion with a universal calling gave legitimacy to the political authorities, which was a necessity for the reproduction of the society” (Amin 2009: 62, emphasis added).

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homogenize global society on the basis of a generalized social polarization (bourgeoisie/proletariat), similar from one country to the next. (Amin 2009: 192)

In a proposition that recalls Amin’s earlier formulation regarding “primitive accumulation” rather than expanded reproduction being the main modality of appropriation in “the peripheries”, Amin now presents a modified version of his thesis: On the contrary, this expansion created a new polarization, subjecting social forms prior to capitalism at the periphery of the system to the demands of the reproduction of capital in the central formations. Reproducing and deepening this polarization stage by stage in its worldwide expansion, capitalism placed a revolution on the agenda that was not the world proletarian revolution: the revolution of the peoples who were victims of this expansion. This is a second expression of unequal development. (Amin 2009: 192)

The key thesis that he shares with C.L.R. James about two different modes of appropriation—one of accumulation at the center, and the other of extraction/primitive accumulation at the periphery—is retained here. However, where Amin (1974) had argued for a worldwide “class struggle” between a global bourgeoisie and a global proletariat, Amin (2009) now underlines that it is not the “proletarian revolution” that is on the agenda but the “revolution of the peoples who were victims of this expansion” into non- or precapitalist regions of the world. This does away with the forced attempt at reducing all other class formations into the straightjacket of the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat”. What Amin undertook to accomplish in Eurocentrism, takes another form in his subsequent work—that of “recreating the world from the Global South” to put it in Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s words. With respect to Samir Amin’s Global History: A View from the South (2011) for instance, Ndlovu-Gatsheni says, “recreating the world entailed rewriting global history and freeing human history from Eurocentrism. In this ‘deEuropeanization’ of global history, Amin delved deeper into histories of Central Asia (the East), highlighting how modernity moved ‘from the East to the West, from China of the Song to the Arab-Persian Abbasid Caliphate then to the Italian towns, before finding its European form that took shape during the sixteenth century in the London–AmsterdamParis triangle’” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2022: 97). My own position on this

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question is that though many of the knowledges, practices and elements that went into the constitution of what we call modernity, were sourced from different parts of the world, modernity itself was a purely European assemblage that cannot be imagined without the deep epistemic rupture with the past (even the European past) that it entailed. The new philosophical “atmosphere” constituted by the combination of individualism (including the bourgeois property right) and the spirit of world-mastery that emerged from this break, is where modernity, as we know it, incubated. However, this is not to minimize the significance of the shift that Amin sought to make, while retaining his commitment to Marxism.

Towards Alternative Conceptions In bringing this discussion of the internal challenges to the Time of historical materialism to a close, I will briefly consider two very different ways in which the challenge has been sought to be met. The first by Japanese thinker Kojin Karatani (2014) seeks to show a way out of this notion of time, even while insisting that his argument remains within Marx’s own framework—read, of course, in a very novel way. The second, by Indian scholar Jairus Banaji (2013), who also insists on remaining close to Marx and offers an interpretation of historical materialism that he claims is closer to Marx’s, though it is quite heterodox in terms of the shifts it marks from existing interpretations of Marx and Marxism. In Banaji’s case, as distinct from Karatani’s, because the discussion largely centers around the older debates on the mode of production, it remains tied to the limits of the concepts and terms of reference of those debates. “Modes of production”, Karatani tells us in his Preface to the English translation of his book, “have been regarded as the ‘economic base’, while the political, religious and cultural have been considered the ideological superstructure. In the way it splits the economic from the political, this view is grounded in capitalist society. Accordingly, the view runs into difficulties in trying to explain precapitalist societies: in Asiatic or feudal societies, to say nothing of the clan societies that preceded these, there is no split between political and economic control. Moreover, even in the context of contemporary capitalist societies, viewing the state and nation as simply ideological superstructures has led to difficulties because the state and nation function as active agents on their own” (Karatani 2014: ix, emphasis added).

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Marxists believed that these superstructures would behave in ways that would be subordinate to the developments in the base but, says Karatani, “reality betrayed their expectations, and they were tripped up in their attempts to deal with the state and the nation” and so they began to “stress the relative autonomy of the superstructure” (ibid.: ix). Karatani is not happy with the fact that this meant a move away from “economic determinism” and, as a consequence, historical materialism had to be supplemented with knowledge from other fields such as psychoanalysis, sociology and political science. Hence, his project is to produce another explanatory frame that remains within “economic determinism” but gives adequate weight to politics and culture. I think what he produces is an interesting alternative framework but I am not sure he succeeds in remaining within what he calls “economic determinism”. Karatani begins his exposition by first re-reading Marx himself to argue that in Capital , he considered the capitalist economy not only in terms of modes of production but also in terms of commodity exchange - what Karatani calls “mode of exchange C”. Marx theorized “how the ideological superstructure could be produced from the mode of exchange C…Particularly in volume 3 of Capital, he took on the task of explicating how a capitalist economy is above all a system of credit and therefore always harbors the possibility of crisis” (Karatani 2014: x). Karatani notes that though Marx paid scant attention to the problems of pre-capitalist societies, it is pointless to criticize him: “our time and energy would be better spent in explaining how ideological superstructures are produced through modes of exchange A and B, in the same way that Marx did for mode of exchange C” (Karatani 2014: x). So what are modes of exchange A and B? “Since Marcel Mauss, it has been generally accepted that mode of exchange A (reciprocity of the gift) is the dominant principle governing archaic societies”. However, this principle did not exist, he says, in band societies of nomadic hunter-gatherers that had existed in earliest times. “In those societies, it was not possible to stockpile goods, and so they were pooled, distributed equally. This was pure gift, one that did not require reciprocal countergift… In sum, it was a society characterized by an equality that derived from the free mobility of its individual members” (ibid.: x). Clan society, grounded in the principles of reciprocity, arose only after nomadic bands took up fixed settlement. Fixed settlement made possible an increased population; it also gave rise to conflicts with outsiders. Moreover,

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because it made the accumulation of wealth possible, it also inevitably led to disparities in wealth and power. Clan society contained this danger by imposing the obligations of gift-countergift. (Karatani 2014: x)

Marx and Engels saw in such clan society, their idea of “primitive communism” on which they built their idea of the future communist society. Today this view of “primitive communism” stands rejected, says Karatani, for it is not supported by anthropological evidence. The problem, he says, is that this view of “primitive communism” was erected on Lewis H. Morgan’s idea of clan society, whereas Marx and Engels should have looked “not to clan society but to the nomadic societies that preceded it”. They overlooked this difference between the nomadic societies and clan societies because they were seeing social formations in terms of the mode of production and in terms of the “shared ownership of the means of production, there is no difference between nomadic and clan societies. When we view them in terms of the mode of exchange, however, we see a decisive difference…” (Karatani 2014: xi). Karatani further posits a mode of exchange D, of which he sees “communism” as an instance which signifies the return of mode of exchange A but on a higher plane. I will not go into this speculative part of Karatani’s argument here but it is worth looking a bit further into his own explication of his schema and why he arrived at it. Karatani revisits the argument of his own earlier book Transcritique, where he had posited the idea of the Capital-Nation-State as the trinity of modern society, where each, despite being a distinct entity was entwined with the other two as in a Borromean knot and where each being based on different principles of exchange, nevertheless sustains the other. Karatani tells us that his thinking has changed since and that he now seeks to go beyond that argument (Karatani 2014: xiv–xv). It is in the course of this need to rework the earlier argument that he began “a comprehensive rethinking of the history of social formations from the perspectives of the modes of exchange”, for that alone would allow a proper investigation into the logic of mutual imbrication of the trinity of Capital-Nation-State. Once again, as far the speculative and programmatic aspect of Karatani’s argument goes, I find myself at the opposite pole from him. For instance, when he says, What becomes clear from the perspective of the ‘structure of world history’ is that Capital-Nation-State is a product of the world system, not of any

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one nation. Accordingly, its sublation cannot occur within a single nation. For example, if a socialist revolution occurs in one country, other countries will immediately interfere or otherwise take advantage of the situation. (ibid.: xix)

Such assertions have been made very frequently in recent decades as a response to the collapse of Soviet bloc socialism—as if a mere theoretical return to Trotsky’s permanent revolution would solve the problem. What, for instance, does it even mean to talk of an international revolution in today’s world? Will it be—can it ever be—the product of a simultaneous global revolutionary overthrow of capitalism? Hence, once again, I leave the speculative part of the argument here and return to the modes of exchange. We have seen what Karatani means by mode of exchange A. But what is the mode of exchange B? Let us hear from him, Mode of exchange B also arises between communities. It begins when one community plunders another. Plunder in itself is not a kind of exchange. How then, does plunder get transformed into a mode of exchange? If a community wants to engage in continuous plunder, the dominant community cannot simply carry out acts of plunder but must also give something to its targets: it must protect the dominated community from other aggressors, as well as foster it through public works, such as irrigation systems. Herein lies the prototype for the state…The state protects its constituent peoples by prohibiting nonstate actors from engaging in violence. In other words, the establishment of the state represents a kind of exchange in that the ruled are granted peace and order in return for their obedience. This is mode of exchange B. (Karatani 2014: 6, emphasis added)

We have already encountered the third mode of exchange C, or commodity exchange, which Karatani asserts, is grounded in mutual consent. “This mode arises when exchange is neither constrained by the obligations inherent in gift giving, as in mode of exchange A, nor imposed through violence, as in the pillaging mode of exchange B. In sum, commodity exchange arises only when the participants mutually recognize each other as free beings” (ibid.: 6). About mode of exchange D, one more point needs to be mentioned: “The most direct instances of mode of exchange D are found in the communistic groups that existed in the earliest stages of universal religions such as Christianity and Buddhism. In subsequent periods too, socialist movements have taken the religious form” (ibid.: 8). That is to say, according to Karatani it is not just the

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reappearance of mode of exchange A in the form of a future communism but is a mode that has often existed in egalitarian communities, be they religious or socialist in their orientation. Finally, the most crucial point from our point of view, is that “actual social formations consist of complex combinations of these modes of exchange”. To jump to my conclusion, historical social formations have included all of these modes. The formations differ simply in terms of which mode takes the leading role. In tribal societies reciprocal mode of exchange A is dominant. This does not mean the modes B or C are nonexistent—they exist for example, in wars or trading…On the other hand, in a society in which mode B is dominant, mode A continues to exist—for example in farming communities. We also find the development of mode C—for example in cities. In precapitalist communities, however, these elements are administered or coopted from above by the state. This is what we mean when we say that mode of exchange B is dominant. (Karatani 2014: 10)

In this schema then, there is no linearity in the “succession” of modes of exchange; rather, there is the simultaneous coexistence of different modes within the same social formation. Further, asserts Karatani, the autonomy of the state and nation can no longer be explained in terms of the capitalist economic base. Rather, “the autonomy of the state and nation arises because each is rooted in its own distinct economic base— its own distinct mode of exchange” (ibid.: 10). The rest of the book is an intricate working out of the conceptual details of the argument by engaging with a phenomenal amount of evidence from anthropological research and cannot be restated here. But it is interesting to note that many of the directions of Karatani’s explorations resonate with those of Amin, even though both work through very different frameworks. At another level, Karatani’s investigations—and indeed some of his references to recent anthropological literature—lead him to conclusions quite similar to those of David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021), especially with regard to questions like settled agriculture being the turning point or the cause in the emergence of both class societies and the state or the diverse histories of nomadism and hunting gathering, not always as prehistories of later settled societies. However interesting these aspects may be, we cannot pursue them here.

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Finally, I now turn to a brief discussion of Jairus Banaji’s argument. In the 1970s and 1980s “mode of production” debate, one of the issues of contention was regarding how to identify capitalist relations in agriculture. If one goes through the various positions elaborated by different scholars there or in the Maurice Dobb-Paul Sweezy “transition debate”, or for that matter, in the subsequent Brenner debate, it is evident that Marxist scholars have had great difficulty in agreeing on what constitute capitalist relations, especially in agriculture (that is, the non-industrial sector). This sense in fact gets even stronger as one reads Jairus Banaji’s work. In opposition to the general tendency to identify the existence of wage-labor with capitalist relations, Jairus Banaji, in an early intervention, had argued that it was wrong to identify forms of exploitation/labour relations —which is what wage-labor was—with either the production relations or the mode of production. A specific form of exploitation such as wage-labor could, in principle, be found in any mode of production even in ancient times just as slavery as a form of exploitation was perfectly compatible with different modes of production including capitalism. It is this initial insight that Banaji has pursued throughout his work and built upon.11 It should be reiterated here that the early intervention referred to earlier, was made in the context of the so-called “mode of production debate” in relation to Indian agriculture (though it had parallels with similar debates in other parts of the world). While many of the protagonists in the Indian debate were arguing that relations in Indian agriculture were predominantly “feudal”, “semi-feudal” or “precapitalist”, where Banaji’s own position was that they were capitalist. These positions were of course, not entirely unrelated to the fact that at that time, those defending the position that these relations were “semifeudal” came from a Maoist or quasi-Maoist position that India was a “semi-feudal and semi-colonial” country which implied that the Indian revolution was in its democratic (people’s democratic or new democratic) stage. In opposition to those characterizations, the position of the Trotskyites (and Banaji was an important intellectual among them) was that these relations had to be seen as capitalist, notwithstanding the fact that precapitalist forms of exploitation existed, perhaps even predominated. That position had a lot to do with the Trotskyite position that the stage 11 For purposes of this discussion, I have used Banaji (2013), which incorporates all of his important earlier work and arguments, if in somewhat modified and updated form.

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of Indian revolution was socialist. Today the entire debate sounds like one from another era. However, to be fair, Banaji’s own engagement with the question has continued far beyond the immediacies of the Indian debate. In his recent restatement of the argument, Banaji has introduced further levels of nuance in order to distinguish between different levels of theoretical abstraction at which different statements made by Marx or Engels or Lenin need to be read. For Marx, says Banaji, modes of production “comprised the ‘relations of production’ in their totality”, a nuance “completely missed by Marxists who simply reduce them to historically dominant forms of exploitation or forms of labor, for example, positing a slave mode of production wherever slave-labor is used or ruling out capitalism if ‘free’ labor is absent”. The underlying assumption is that Marx means by relations of production the relations of the immediate process of production (Banaji 2013: 4). But, Banaji insists, “the immediate process of production can be structured in all sorts of ways, even under capitalism”. He illustrates the point with reference to an early 1980s study by Lewis Taylor on the haciendas in Peru, where the author had cited Lenin to the effect that “a Marxist analysis of rural society cannot mechanically identify forms of exploitation and relations of production” and adds: “The distinction drawn there between the (capitalist) relations of production and (precapitalist) forms of exploitation permeated much of the historical work on South African agriculture such as when Helen Bradford…noted that ‘quasi-feudal’ relations of exploitation, and the racist relations of oppression, were created in the very course of capitalist penetration” in South African countryside (Banaji 2013: 4). I cite this long extract here to underline that the distinction that Banaji—and the scholars he cites—are positing, are made in the context of 1970s and 1980s Peru and South Africa, where to the naked eye, as it were, precapitalist relations would seem to predominate. By introducing this distinction, what Banaji and kindred scholars do, is to refer to “the larger totality” of global capitalist relations to underline that what we see with our naked eye is illusory because its reality is located elsewhere. To take another instance, When Carlo Poni described the struggle of the Bologna landowners to impose new methods of ploughing on their mezzadri and the different ways in which the peasants thwarted or circumvented those methods because they involved considerably more effort, this was not a statement about the ‘mode of production’ that prevailed in northern Italy in the

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seventeenth century. Sharecropping or labour-tenancy or even the forms of labour-service described by Lenin in The Development of Capitalism in Russia lie at a very different level of abstraction from serfdom, peonaje etc. conceived as historical categories…The historical forms of exploitation of labor…cannot be assimilated to the actual deployment of labor as if these were interchangeable levels of theory. (Banaji 2013: 5, emphasis added)

So here we have a very strong statement about the different levels of abstraction and of theory—though it is not always clear which statements are at a supposedly higher level of theory from others and why. Banaji does not provide an answer to this question but that is not my present concern here. What I want to pursue a bit more is his claim that if this fundamental distinction (between relations of production and forms of exploitation) is accepted, then the task that follows is one of constructing the concept of the mode of production as an object of “much greater complexity” (ibid.: 6). There are a number of things that this can entail, says Banaji, the first of which is to strip the theory of its evolutionism and refurbish it to allow for more complex trajectories (Banaji 2013: 6). This is indeed the level at which Banaji’s work shows remarkable innovativeness and he produces, like Samir Amin in a very different way, narratives of such complex trajectories—from the idea of tributary modes of production to the reworking of the idea of the “Asiatic regimes”. The other imperative is that this attempt to construct more complex concepts of the mode of production must lead to giving up on the idea of a single unique configuration, which must now be thought of as having many forms. These distinctions [between production relations and forms of exploitation] generate another (a second level of complexity) because if, say the accumulation of capital, that is capitalist relations of production, can be based on forms of exploitation that are typically precapitalist, then clearly there is not one ostensibly unique configuration of capital but a series of distinct configurations, forms of the accumulation-process, implying other combinations. (Banaji 2013: 9)

From this recognition arise a number of interesting moves which then also turn out to be equally problematic in my view. While it enables Banaji to see capitalism as a complex configuration of capitalist relations and all kinds of precapitalist forms of exploitation, yielding numerous different actual historical forms (rather than one abstract model), it also leads him to reject any idea of the “coexistence of different modes” or of a “social

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formation”, because all these different variations are now, in the final analysis (at some common level of abstraction), only and only instantiations of the capitalist mode. A no less serious issue of contention among scholars working on the transition question has been the difficulty in characterizing the precapitalist economy from which capitalism is said to have emerged, since it is now largely accepted that feudalism was a form specific to Western Europe. On this question too, Banaji takes an unconventional tack, by providing evidence of multiple trajectories and opening out a conceptual space for “stripping the theory of its evolutionism”, to use his own phrase. Looking at the wide variety of forms prevalent across the world, Banaji concludes that “agrarian capitalism…did take radically different forms even within individual countries”, and that the entrenched idea that “England’s history supplies us with the archetype of capitalist agriculture is a myth…There is no ‘pure’ agrarian capitalism” (Banaji 2013: 335). Given these very interesting directions in which Banaji’s work takes him and the ways in which he is able to transcend the “abstract formalism” of much of Marxist theory, it is unfortunate that there is eventually no breakthrough that leads us out of the labyrinthine discussions of otherwise very fascinating material. While we have a much thicker and more grounded sense of both the precapitalist formations as well as of the many configurations of capitalism, one is also left wondering if the only thing that holds Banaji back from acknowledging that there are eventually no laws at work here but contingent historical configurations, is a desire to hold on to some kind of orthodoxy. That would seem like the obvious conclusion to follow from his own discussion of the wide-ranging materials that he presents us with. The question from my point of view, additionally, is what is really at stake in arguing that the whole world is simply capitalist, regardless of what forms of exploitation actually exist and indeed predominate in most contexts? This question is also tied, from my point of view, (elaborated in Chapters 2 and 4), to the whole question of what, if any is the role of the non-West/Global South, in Banaji’s understanding? From all appearances, the sole agency in this regard rests with capitalism and whatever other forms of exploitation it may have to end up using, it remains the sovereign power determining the course of historical development. Actually we aren’t even sure, eventually, if capitalism “uses” all kinds of extant “forms of exploitation” because it is its very nature to make peace with what exists, or to put it more theoretically, it is in essence multiple. Or,

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is it the case that capitalism makes peace with existing forms of exploitation, as some African scholars have argued, because it is more profitable as it takes care of various expenses that comprise the “reproduction of labor/labor power”. To take just one example, Dan Motuang (2022), discusses South African scholar Harold Wolpe’s work on the “articulation of the modes of production” to underline his contention that “the traditional economy…was the oxygen to the life processes of capital”. Unlike the Dependency school and orthodox Marxism, “Wolpe adhered to the notion that the capitalist economy was not bound to exterminate traditional economy” for at this level, it found the traditional economy useful (Dan Motuang 2022: 131). The most important question in this respect is the one raised by Subaltern Studies scholars—are these multifarious “configurations of capital” not eventually signs of capital’s failure to transform these precapitalist relations (and forms of exploitation) into more modern capitalist forms? Banaji can of course answer that there aren’t any abstract modular forms of capitalism to which such precapitalist relations must be transformed because capital is multiple in its very essence. At this point, it seems to me that for all his claims of different levels of abstraction and different levels of theory, Banaji succumbs to a plain, naïve empiricism that evades the question of defining (in however limited a fashion) capitalism in conceptual terms. It is simply what it is—available in as many forms as you can see. I have no quarrel with this position really, but then what was the point of making the elaborate statements about levels of abstraction and levels of theory? I also do not see any point in telling scholars or activists engaged in understanding the specificities of their respective societies that, in the end, they are all the same—the many variations of the One. It does not enlighten them/us at all to know that everything is the manifestation of that One—which essentially means that all agency of transformation lies in capital. Everything else that exists—the precapitalist forms of exploitation for instance—is because capital neither wants nor needs to eliminate it. In a fascinating review essay of Banaji’s book, Neeladri Bhattacharya (2013), whose engagement with the former’s work goes back to the 1970s, raises some very pertinent issues. One of the key issues raised by Bhattacharya has to do with the negative stance adopted by Banaji towards what he calls the “critical turn”, whereby Marxism opened out to newer ideas and tendencies. One of the direct consequences of his

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stance, argues Bhattacharya, is that in discussing the forms of exploitation and modes of production, Banaji’s vision remains steadfastly fixed on “the usurers, merchants, money-capitalists, slave-owners, jotedars—those with the power to dominate, control, subordinate” (Bhattacharya 2013: 14). “In this frame”, argues Bhattacharya, “workers, peasants, tenants and slaves inevitably always become objects of control…They do not have the constitutive power to reshape the relationships of exploitation, rework the forms of control over their lives and labour” (ibid.: 14). The question of agency, in itself, is an important point that I have raised in a different way above but what is critical in Bhattacharya’s critique is how the agency of the oppressed/exploited actually plays out in determining the forms and relations of exploitation. In this context, Bhattacharya brings in a discussion of the work of Juan Martinez-Alier whom Banaji too discusses in his work: “Like Banaji, Martinez-Alier shows that in the latifundias of southern Spain, there was a flexibility in the use of labour, a shift from share-cropping to hired labour and back, and that these shifts in labour-use follow no linear pattern” (Bhattacharya 2013: 15). But, says Bhattacharya, this is not all that there is to Martinez-Alier’s argument. “He also shows that choices of labour-use were critically defined by actions of the tenants and labourers…Martinez-Alier’s study demonstrates in rich detail how unionisation, collective action, strikes during harvests, opposition to piece rates, and the landowners’ fear of losing symbolic power and social legitimacy, crucially defined employer choices in southern Spain” (ibid.: 15, emphasis added). And further, even more strikingly: “Similarly, in his studies of highland Peru, Matinez-Alier shows how the Indians resisted any move towards wage labour within the haciendas” (ibid.: 16). What I read as an absence in Banaji’s work, and at work more importantly, in Bhattacharya’s critique of it, is not just that forms of exploitation are independent of what we understand as the mode of production but that there is also present, at the very heart of the constitution of these forms, a moment of “politics”. It is the absence of any conception of such politics that makes Banaji’s work problematic, even though it constitutes a herculean effort to break away from notions that assign linearity or fixity to these forms. It seems to me that everything in Banaji’s work points to the fact that the category of the “mode of production”, even in the way he redefines it, is an unnecessary imposition that is at the root of the problem. We can

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indeed visualize different social formations comprising different combinations of a variety of labor regimes and forms of exploitation, held together not by any economic logic of the mode of production but through contingent formations of political power at the top and negotiated at the local level in different historical contexts, depending upon the relative strength of the laboring populations. The question of politics and political power has virtually no role in Banaji’s schema but it seems to be the only glue that holds together different labor regimes, forms of exploitation and indeed, modes of being into one social formation. This means that the role of political power is also an aggregative one that provides a logic of articulation to all these heterogeneous elements—even if the power bloc is always constituted by coalitions of the dominant classes or class fractions. If that is so, we need to see these societies of the Global South as embodying specific combinations of different forms of labor whose relative importance can change over time—as we have seen above in the case of the working class and the peasantry. In conclusion then, to return to the discussion of the Time of historical materialism that we began this chapter with, we can see the ways in which all the scholars and thinkers discussed attempt to break out of its linear conception. These attempts are most clearly visible in the way they grapple with the “synchronicity of the non-synchronous” and the coexistence of different modes of production in different periods of history, in different parts of the world. Indeed, the very idea of “non-synchronicity” seems to be now open to question, predicated as it is on the assumption that some forms represent “the present”, while other belong to “the past”. If we take these different ways of exiting the Time of historical materialism (and modernity) seriously, we might need to see the coexistence of these different social forms and forms of exploitation and labor, not in linear chronological terms but as specific, contingent historical formations with no necessary temporal content.

References Althusser, Louis. 2006. The Philosophy of Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87 . London and New York: Verso. Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. 1977. Reading Capital. London: New Left Books. Amin, Samir. 1974. Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment, vol. 1. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.

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Amin, Samir. 1976. Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. Sussex, UK: The Harvester Press. Amin, Samir. 2009. Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion and Democracy. A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Amin, Shahid. 2002. Alternative Histories: A View from India. Amsterdam and Calcutta: SEPHIS-CSSSC. Banaji, Jairus. 2013. Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. Delhi: Aakar Books. Bernal, Martin. 2002. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New York and London: Vintage. Bhattacharya, Neeladri. 2013. Lineages of Capital. Historical Materialism 21 (4): 11–35. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1996. Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890– 1940. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1984. Bengal 1920–1947. Volume One. The Land Question. Calcutta CSSSC and K.P. Bagchi and Company. Chatterjee, Partha. 2013. Subaltern Studies and ‘Capital’. Economic and Political Weekly 48 (37): 69–75. Dan Motaung, Tlhabane M. 2022. “Convergence and Divergence of Marxism and Decolonization of the 21st Century,” in Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ndlovu (Eds), pp. 127–147. Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Guha, Ranajit. 1993. The Prose of Counter-Insurgency. In Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press. Guha, Ranajit. (Partha Chatterjee ed). 2009. The Small Voice of History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Karatani, Kojin. 2014. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kelley, Robin D.G. 2000. “Foreword”, in Robinson (2000). Lindner, Kolja, and Urs Lindner. 2022. “How Marx Got Rid of Historical Materialism”, in Lindner 2022, pp. 41–63. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo. 2022. “Triple Internationalism: Imperialism, Marxism, and Decolonization”, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ndlovu (Eds), pp. 89–108. Nigam, Aditya. 2006. The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of SecularNationalism in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Prakash, Gyan. 1990. Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Roy, M.N. 1943. Fragments of a Prisoner’s Diary, Vol. III. Letters from Jail. Dehra Dun: Renaissance Publishers. Roy, M.N. 1948/1989. Reason, Romanticism and Revolution. Delhi: Ajanta Publications (India). Sanyal, Kalyan. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Looking Ahead: Socialism is not the “After” of Capitalism

Commoners today repudiate the progressive role of capital, demand control over the decisions that most affect their lives, assert their capacity for self-government, and reject the imposition of a unitary model of social and cultural life, in the spirit of the Zapatistas’ ‘One No and Many Yeses’, that is, many roads to the common, corresponding to our different historic and cultural trajectories and environmental conditions. Furthermore, 150 years after the publication of Capital , we can verify that the technological development to which Marx consigned the task of constructing the material bases of communism is destroying not only the last remaining communitarian regimes but also the possibility of life and reproduction on this earth for a growing number of species. (Silvia Federici 2019: 7–8)

This last chapter is not really a conclusion. Rather, it aims to look ahead towards what possible meaning “socialism” can have in today’s world, if we were to give up on the Marxist philosophy of history and its reliance on productivism and the idea of “progress”. As discussed at length in Chapter 1, twentieth-century state-socialism’s failure had posed the problem of democracy in politics and highlighted the monstrosities associated with statism in the economic realm, forcing Marxists in different parts of the world to rethink these two questions seriously. As indicated in that introductory chapter, along with this rethinking came a rejection of the Leninist idea of the vanguard Party on the one hand, and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22895-7_6

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the need to think the economics of socialism afresh, on the other. Liberated from the bureaucratic pressures of functioning as a state ideology, socialism now began to be rethought in relation to the new movements on the ground that emerged towards the end of the twentieth and in the twenty-first centuries. These movements ranged from the Zapatista revolt in Mexico to the various struggles grouped under the rubric of the “Arab Spring”, Occupy Wall Street and other movements across Europe. I have already discussed some of the questions that emerged in the wake of attempts to chart out a path of democratic transition to socialism as also how this period saw the emergence of deep suspicion of the party-form itself in popular struggles across the world. Any attempt to rethink the socialist project in today’s world must naturally take these developments on board. In this chapter, I focus on another set of questions that haven’t been addressed in the Introduction but emerge from our discussion in subsequent chapters. Quite apart from the empirical challenges that the Marxist philosophy of history—and historical materialism—faces in terms of the inability of capitalism to conquer large parts of the world, or the question of the persistence of the peasantry, discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, there are larger theoretical challenges posed to that vision by the climate crisis. At the very least, the climate crisis demands abandoning of the productivist imagination and the relation of domination vis-à-vis nature that enabled it. In philosophical terms, this relationship to “nature” has been criticized for the dualism between the human and non-human or between subject and object that produces the dichotomy between “society” and “nature” in the first place. Bruno Latour has termed this the “Great Divide” but it also has its parallels in critiques that have emerged from the search for relational ontologies, notably drawn from indigenous peoples’ cosmologies that I refer to later in this chapter (Latour 1993: 97). Isabelle Stengers describes the ecological crisis in terms of the “intrusion of Gaia”, drawing on James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis who, in naming Gaia, “contributed to bringing to light the dense set of relations that scientific disciplines were in the habit of dealing with separately—living things, oceans, the atmosphere, climate, more or less fertile soils”, which change the way we see the world (Stengers 2015: 44). “Gaia, the ‘living planet’ has to be recognized as a ‘being’ and not assimilated into a sum of processes…” (Ibid: 44). Recognizing this means that we must give up on an idea that has often been crucial in struggle: the difference “between what this struggle demands and what

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will become possible afterwards, if capitalism is defeated”, says Stengers. She underlines that naming Gaia signifies that there is no afterwards (Ibid: 57, emphasis original). It is a matter, therefore, of learning to respond now, notably of creating cooperative practices and relays with those who are already responding, for instance, “the conscientious objectors to economic growth and the inventors of ‘slow’ movements, who refuse what capitalism presents as rationalization and who seek to reclaim what has been destroyed” (Stengers 2015: 57). Any serious move away from productivism also involves a fundamental rethinking of the centrality that had been accorded to the “economy” in Marxist discourse. The argument in this book, especially in Chapters 2 and 4, challenges the idea that “capitalism” is an out-of-control system or mode of production that must be propitiated at any cost. I have argued that such an idea is an illusion that is maintained by giving “capitalism” a “scientific” status of “objectivity”, which hides the reality of the constant intervention of the state and the apparatuses of knowledge (especially economics) and advertising which together keep up the endless drive towards consumption. In Chapter 4, I have also argued that the notion of “surplus value” that undergirds the conception of accumulation or expanded reproduction, becomes possible only because, over and above unpaid labor, ecological costs remain unpaid. To these we must, of course, also add the social costs of lives and life-forms destroyed—if we are really serious computing the costs of “progress” and accumulation. All these questions call for a reformulation of the socialist project for it can no longer be the inheritor of this quintessentially capitalist worldview. In the discussion that follows, I draw on ideas and concept that have already appeared in the course of movements and struggles over the past few decades which, in a very significant way, are changing the way we might think of socialism. The term no longer has the fixed meaning that it had acquired in official statist Marxist discourse. In a very fundamental sense, the idea of socialism has now become open-ended and that is a precondition for its making connections with movements on the ground. Needless to say, such a socialism can no longer be linked to any kind of vanguard or vanguardist thinking and attempts are being made to reconceptualize it in different ways—some of them even connecting to the

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idea of “degrowth” and “post-growth society” that is now being seriously considered as the only way ahead, if the planetary crisis is to be averted.1 An argument has been lately advanced, basing primarily on a re-reading of Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 in the light of his notebooks of the last years of his life, that Marx not only abandoned his Eurocentrism by the end of the 1860s, but that he also “consciously discarded historical materialism” (Lindner 2022; Saito 2022: 182). The argument is persuasive and Saito has developed it further to even claim that, in the light of this new material and the new reading enabled by it, Marx can indeed even be seen as a “degrowth communist” (Saito 2022: 173). According to Saito, in Marx’s last “epistemological break” of 1868, “the issues of ecology and pre-capitalist societies are connected from the very beginning” (Saito 2022: 200, 209). This is perhaps where this re-reading of Marx resonates with the argument put forward in this book. Saito’s latest work is interesting precisely because it goes beyond the purely textual attempts to reclaim “Marx’s ecology”, in order to espouse the idea of degrowth. Deeply aware that even those Marxists, who espouse some kind of ecological vision, are reluctant to accept the idea of degrowth, Saito draws on Walter Benjamin’s idea of revolutions as “emergency brakes” in order to argue that. In the face of ecological disasters, environmentalism starts to demand radical systemic change by ending limitless economic growth in order to terminate the ceaseless exploitation of humanity and the robbery of nature. In short, today’s emergency brake implies a call for degrowth. (Ibid: 216)

This is a bold and much-needed move, especially for those who need Marx’s sanction to go beyond Marxism. The question can, of course, be asked as to why we still need terms like “socialism” or “communism” at all, if their meanings are so open-ended. The answer to this question is not exactly theoretical but rather connected to the fact that many movements on the ground, across the world, still see in socialism a negation of capitalism and its rapaciousness. The idea of a “socialism in the twentyfirst century” is one of the more well-known expressions of this quest for a world beyond capitalism but even in other parts of the world, including

1 For a discussion of degrowth and post-growth ideas in the Indian context, see Gerber and Raina (eds. 2018).

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India, the socialist idea still gestures to some idea of justice and end to relations of exploitation.

Socialism and the Global South In order to bring together the different strands of the argument in this book then, I want to recall my primary assumption that in the first place, the “principal contradiction”—if one were to use Maoist terminology— today is between “life as such” on the planet and Capital. Regardless of whether it is human life or non-human, all stand threatened, in the face of the catastrophic situation that Capital has hurled the planet into. It follows then, that the question of “life after capitalism” is on the agenda for the entire planet. The urgent quest for life after capitalism is not just about some privileged space (say, Europe or the United States of America) or some privileged revolutionary subject (the proletariat). That is to say, regardless of whether societies have been “really subsumed” under capital or not, liberation from capital is on the immediate agenda for them. In fact, it has become far more pressing for them than it perhaps ever was for the advanced centers of capitalism or its proletariat. So, in a sense, what I am arguing may seem to be self-contradictory: if the quest for life after capitalism is at least as critical for the Global South as it is for the advanced centers of Europe and USA, then how can we assert that socialism is not the “after” of capitalism? Socialism is not the “after” of capitalism, firstly, because it never was. Wherever capitalism entrenched itself, socialism could not. Rather, by the last decade of the nineteenth century itself, Social Democratic parties that swore by socialism, had transformed into bureaucratized mass parties that sought adjustment within the system. It is well-known that already by the end of that century, the likes of Eduard Bernstein had raised the “reform” versus “revolution” debate and European Social Democracy was showing signs of making peace with capitalism. Even after the split in the Second International and the formation of the “revolutionary” Third International, things did not change much except for a brief period that lasted till the end of the Second World War. In the 1970s, the move for a “historic compromise” in Italy and the new Europe-wide trend that came to be identified as “Eurocommunism”, were further signs of the fact that the communist parties were only finding their place in the capitalist universe. It is also interesting that this shift was happening soon after the entire Western world had been shaken by massive student revolts of the late

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1960s, which indicated the fact that newer concerns were beginning to animate people inclined to the Left, which included challenging imperialist attempts to suppress ongoing national liberation struggles in Asia and Africa. This is the story, in brief, of Marxist socialism in the centers of capitalist development. In the Global South, where Marxist parties “made” revolutions or led the national liberation/decolonization struggles, they have been reduced to mimicking capitalist industrialism—as in Stalin’s Russia or building capitalism as in post-Mao China. The socialist ideal, in any case, has long been given up. The desire as we have seen, in the case of China (but also other Marxist socialist states) was, and still is, to catch up with the West at any cost, while the ethical-normative concerns of justice, autonomy and equality have been excised from post-revolution Marxist discourse. It started with Lenin himself and acquired a grotesque form with Stalin. In a sense, however, this was inevitable, given Marx and Engels’ production of socialism as a supposed “science”, for the very first principle of science is that it must be value-neutral. Although Marxism declared its partisanship to the proletariat and, in its post-Leninist incarnations, with the “oppressed peoples of the world”, the idea that the historical process entailed the development of capitalism and industrialization, the emergence and rule of private property, the dispossession of the peasantry and other pre-capitalist communities was underwritten by the so-called “scientific” understanding of socialism. Its partisanship was simply an extension of its commitment to its evolutionary understanding of social development. We might feel revolted and angry at the injustice of the dispossession of precapitalist communities but we had to understand that this was simply “collateral damage” of a historically inevitable process. The whole idea that socialism is what comes after capitalism was the product of this scientific imagination and there is no doubt that many of the brutalities of socialism in the Global South derived from the path that it took—building capitalism because that was supposedly what History ordained. Indeed, so hegemonic was this idea that even many Left-leaning nationalist elites in the former colonies subscribed to it and building capitalism in some form or the other became their obsession too. It is in this sense too that I want to underline that socialism is not what comes after capitalism. It is not “destined to complete the bourgeois revolution” before it can get along with its “own” tasks. It is not socialism’s historical obligation to do what capitalism was unable to do in the rest of the world. In this sense, there is no contradiction in maintaining

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that socialism is not what comes after capitalism, even while arguing that because of the overall political domination of capital, socialism in the sense of “life after capitalism” has been placed on the agenda as an urgent question throughout the Global South. I want to refer here to our discussion in the last chapter where, through CLR James (via Cedric Robinson) and Samir Amin, we encountered the distinction between two different modes of appropriation—accumulation in the North and primitive accumulation in the Global South. In my own rendering of this argument, the Global South is not to be understood as integrated into the world-system/world-capitalism in the sense of a totality or a single structure. Rather, it is to be understood as a vast hinterland yet to be captured—something that neither capital nor the colonial states could do during the heyday of colonialism. This capture was sought to be accomplished, often through arm-twisting by global institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) (and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in more recent times) forcing Structural Adjustment Programs on postcolonial states. This was implemented by pliant national states in the Global South, which occupy the position they do, not because of supposedly structural reasons like their subordinate position in the world-system but because the national-state elites continue to be colonized by the knowledges and disciplines that go into the constitution of the modern state, as I have argued in Chapter 2. Samir Amin’s idea of “delinking” from the “metropolises”, proposed some decades ago, only made sense to the extent that it could be a real possibility—a matter of choice rather than a structural constraint that could not be transcended. However, proposals like delinking or breaking away from the WTO system for instance, will remain an impossible dream as long as there is no break with the idea that postcolonial states need to “first” build “real” full-blooded capitalism before they can even think of transcending it. The constraint, in other words, is self-imposed. That is why, in the immediate aftermath of decolonization, when Marxism and Marxism-inspired ideas were equally on offer and the presence of the “socialist bloc” made a sort of “relative autonomy” possible, many of these states had adopted a “middle path” based on partial delinking. Societies have lived in the past too, engaging in commodity production and trade but have never felt that they have to all be subjected to the “same laws of economics” because there is only one way to be and only some global institutions dominated by Western capital can tell us what that way is.

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Since the global victory of neoliberalism and the onset of “globalization”, the integration of the elites of the Global South into the global capitalist market has proceeded at a rapid pace, producing the effect of the “expressways of capital”, discussed in Chapter 2, that run across the North and the South, while massive sectors of Southern populations continue to live beneath them. The question of liberation from capital has become urgent for these populations because they are endangered in the same way in which the native populations were once endangered in the Americas and elsewhere, that is, through their violent dispossession and plunder of their land and commons. As indicated in Chapter 2, I do not use the term “primitive accumulation” for this predatory behavior as it provides a false sense of a “historical process” to something that is little more than war and conquest. Consider for instance, the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforests being dispossessed and the forests being taken over by capital—for such people “life after capitalism” is actually akin to liberation from an external aggressor. It is another question, of course, whether those indigenous people would want to see their liberation in terms of the language of “socialism”, which remains quite foreign to them and perhaps means little. They might prefer to understand “life after capitalism” in terms that come from their own language and cosmology, articulated more likely as sumak kawsay (in Quechua) or suma qamaña (in Aymara)—or some such category—which means “living well” and privileges their relationship with fellow beings and mother Earth. To that extent, when the term “socialism” is used by the Movement for Socialism of Evo Morales, for instance, or by other Latin American movements, it no longer means what it was supposed to in Marxist discourse.

Socialism---From Scientific to Utopian2 Such a re-articulation of socialism actually ties up well with Cedric Robinson’s point about the history of the idea, though not necessarily the term. Robinson has underlined, tracing the early history of socialism back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe, that “consciousness of class and the struggle against a ruling class…assumed an anti-clerical as well as a secular form, and distilled from millenarian prophecy apocalyptic 2 This sub-heading is taken from the title of a paper by Zhang Longxi, entitled “Marxism: From Scientific to Utopian (1995)”.

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and then revolutionary expectations” (Robinson 2019: 50). Property, says Robinson, was an issue in the voluntary poverty movements as well as in the peasant uprisings and urban revolts, “as an articulation of exploitation in the use, if not the ownership, of things labor produced” (Ibid: 50). In however, rudimentary a form, there is a suggestion here that opposition to “property” and “class conflict” were ideas that had a longer history and merged later into what came to be known as socialism. His claim, therefore, is that “since it can be demonstrated that Marxian socialism was not the first expression of socialism, it is probable that it will not be the last” (Robinson 2019: 17). Writing in the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet bloc socialism and in the immensely disempowering days of neoliberal globalization, Indian socialist thinker Sachchidanand Sinha argued for “socialism with a new face” (Sinha 1999: 25). Indian socialists of different hues had never quite accepted the communist version of socialism, though many of them did continue to engage with Marx’s thought from their own context and in their own way. Sinha too argues in a somewhat similar vein to Robinson’s: There is certainly some hope if we revert to the other approach [to socialism] which Marx, seeking to situate it in an unfailing law of historical evolution, abandoned. The other path seeks deliberately to build a viable and better world order, basing itself on sense of justice, on concern for other human beings, and sympathy for those who are deprived of and are suffering under the present system. This line of approach is not based on any scientific theory and so is not dependent on the infallibility of a theoretical model. (Sinha 1999: 25)

I also want to draw attention to a text by S. Kappen, an independent Indian Marxist and Jesuit priest, since it also points to some of the directions that I think are important. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of state socialism, Kappen too rejected the “scientific” and “scientistic” view of socialism, seeing it rather, as “a critique of society”, “a social project” and “a practice of radical social restructuring” (Kappen 1992: 10). This understanding places socialism in the realm of a transformative project that can only be based on considerations of justice and the achievement of a society free of exploitation—not unlike the kind invoked in Robinson’s account of early socialism that critiqued property and exploitation, even though there was no scientific theory at hand. Of course, Kappen does not suggest we rest content with the idea of

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critique of society, for he points out that it may well happen that our well-intentioned plans “may issue in ever new forms of oppression” as the experience of state socialism had demonstrated. He therefore stresses on the need “to fashion more sophisticated tools of analysis capable of doing justice to the complexity of the human situation today” (Ibid: 39). More significantly, from our present point of view, Kappen emphasizes the point that the transformative part of socialism—as distinct from critique—cannot be deferred to some indefinite moment of revolution or a post-revolutionary future. Anticipating an argument that theorists of “Socialism in the Twenty First Century” like Michael Lebowitz (2006) will make many years later, Kappen insists, “Though the full realization of socialism will always be a receding horizon, the socialist revolution is something we must address here and now. The traditional Marxist periodization of revolution into bourgeois democratic and socialist makes little sense”, he argues. For, the structuring principles of socialism such as common ownership, social control, planning, cooperation and the development of the individual “are already operative, though in a rudimentary and distorted manner in bourgeois as well as traditional society” (Kappen 1992: 35). As a matter of fact, Kappen also draws our attention, like Gibson-Graham (2006) a few years later, to the ways in which non-capitalist—and potentially socialist—practices exist within what we know as capitalist society. Wherever people exercise, directly or indirectly, some control over the economic, political and cultural systems and “wherever they cooperate to plan and construct the future, wherever they show concern and responsibility for one another, the socialist revolution is already taking place” (Ibid: 36). Here, in these different ways of understanding socialism—as critique of injustice, exploitation and private property (not just bourgeois property)—we see clear possibilities of reconstructing historically grounded visions of socialism that do not necessarily refer back to some foundational universal principle. In a manner of speaking, the articulations of “socialism” in different Latin American contexts, building upon concepts and ideas derived from indigenous people’s life-worlds, indicate precisely that the idea has already been dislocated from its scientistic conception and is being re-signified in a manner of speaking. We also see in these articulations how the idea of socialism as the “after” of capitalism no longer holds. If we agree that the socialist revolution already manifests in popular practices of cooperation, sharing and exercising control over

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different aspects of economic, political and cultural life, then the idea of an “after” makes even less sense. In another prescient formulation, Kappen underlined that today, “the role of the party has to be further devalued for the constraints of electoral politics force the so-called parties of revolution to compromise with the exploiting classes…” (Kappen 1992: 36). What would come to pass almost two decades later in diverse movements across the globe, (discussed in Chapter 1) is anticipated by Kappen when he says that such an approach “calls for a new strategy of transformatory action, one which affirms the primacy of the people over parties to the point where people may have to organize struggles even against parties” (Ibid: 37, emphasis original). It is true that the relationship of such movements with political parties is complex because electoral choices still have to be made and they can indeed be of life-and-death importance as many recent instances in different parts of the world show. However, the big shift is that in most places, parties can no longer behave like Leninist “vanguards” but must adjust to the new reality that they alone do not decide the agenda of politics. I have discussed this question of the relation of the party-form with contemporary popular struggles, in the Introduction, with reference to MN Roy’s critique of the party-form and it seems to me that the tension vis-à-vis it signals a longer-term problem that is here to stay. It may well lead to the emergence of a new way of doing politics in the longer run.

Socialism, Commoning and Solidary Economy Once one leaves the arena of state-centered politics, it becomes clearer still that in recent decades the quest for life beyond capital has taken the form of building alternatives in the here and now, by communities—and without the involvement of political parties. And often enough, regardless of whether movements and communities engage with parties or not, tensions surface between the movements and parties—even the newer parties that have emerged on the Left. Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash (2014/1998) for instance, cite an episode reported by the Brazilian Movimento Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST or the Landless Workers’ Movement). Formed in 1985, the MST, it is well-known, “liberated 6 million hectares of land from profiteering, thieving landlords, and rerooted in it 350,000 families…” Apart from engaging in direct struggle, MST also organizes assemblies and schools, operates fifty establishments

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of higher and technical education and an alternative university (Esteva and Prakash 2014: xv). Esteva and Prakash talk about MST’s 6th Congress in February 2014, which was attended by some 16,000 delegates, along with hundreds of international allies which exposed the reality lurking behind the mask of the so-called Brazilian “miracle”: “Both Lula da Silva and Dilma Roussef have supported the advance of transnational agribusiness, displacing indigenous peoples and peasants from their lands; producing immense deforestation to establish monocultures of transgenic soya and corn; massively using agrotoxics that devastate soil, water and biodiversity” (Esteva and Prakash 2014: xv–xvi). While acknowledging the value of government subsidies for half the people of Brazil that helped in alleviating their hunger, the MST Congress also denounced the policies of progressive governments such as the Workers’ Party government that are also the cause of such hunger (Ibid: xvi). Such experiences have led to the realization that even though there may have to be some limited engagement with Left-wing or radical political parties, quest for alternatives has to be located outside the domains of state and capital. In a sense, if one agrees that elements of “socialism” are already present in popular practices in contemporary societies and that the bases for “socialism” must be built in the here and now, this quest for alternatives becomes a search for life outside capitalism rather than after it. It is in this context that the quest has turned from a rejection of state-socialism to the exploration of different forms of communal and social ownership over the past few decades. On the one hand, the renewed attempts at takeover and destruction of the commons led to historical parallels being drawn between the “enclosures of the commons” in England and contemporary drives towards dispossession, leading to a re-signification of the idea of commons as the future. On the other hand, experiments with cooperatives and other forms of social ownership in the heart of the industrial sector, led to the idea of the emergence of “solidary/solidarity economy” in Brazil. The cooperative form has, of course, been far more widely experimented with in different parts of the world, including India. This experimentation with multiple forms of ownership not only challenges the idea that the bourgeois property form is the only legitimate form but in fact, raises direct questions about its legitimacy. If the emergence of the idea of “solidary/solidarity economy” in Brazil, owes its birth to the “the crisis of 1981–83, when many industries including large-scale producers” were going bankrupt and closing

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down, this led in these difficult times to the emergence of cooperatives to deal with the situation (Singer 2006: 6). Company closures and dismissal of workers continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, says Singer, prompting the workers to take opportunities offered by the law to rent or acquire the bankrupt property of their former employers and preserve their jobs (Singer 2006: 6). The trade unions intervened creatively, finding allies even in interstitial spaces, to open the way for a large-scale experimentation with cooperatives, which functioned as the basis of the solidary/solidarity economy. Thus they found support of other unions, “of the media, the parties and politicians on the Left, the Church and eventually, even the Mayor and the Governor” (Ibid: 9). The solidary economy is however, “composed of those companies that actually practice cooperative principles, i.e. self-management” and exists alongside all other forms of production, especially in the informal sector. Although it is hegemonic, capitalism does not prevent the development of other modes of production, since it is incapable of absorbing the whole of the economically active population. The solidary economy grows in response to the social crises that the blind competition of private capital periodically creates in each country. (Singer 2006: 6)

This is a point that is worth keeping in mind indeed, as we think of contemporary capitalism and the way in which it makes entire populations redundant. In Chapter 2, I discussed Kalyan Sanyal’s notion of the “need economy” where he talks of the “reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation” through the intervention of governmentality and welfarist development discourse. Here we see an instance where a solidary economy is created, regardless of governmental concern and intervention, based entirely on the collective action of the workers. Alongside the shift to the idea of solidary economy, cooperatives and mutual societies, there has also been, as indicated earlier, the shift to the idea of the commons, and of commoning as something that refers to the practice—that of producing the commons anew. The idea of “commoning” comes from historian Peter Linebaugh, whose book The Magna Carta Manifesto has itself become a widely cited reference point for all work on the commons and shows how the document affirms the rights of ordinary people over the commons. A majority of English people, known as “commoners”, derived at least part of their livelihoods from the commons before the brutal onset of enclosures by wealthy landowners. Hence, the

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word “commoning” describes people living in close connection to the commons, says Julie Ristau, who describes herself a commons animateur3 (Ristau 2011). “I use the word [commoning] because I want a verb for the commons”, Linebaugh explains. “I want to portray it as an activity, not just an idea or material resource” (Cited in Ristau 2011). The idea of the commons and commoning has been gaining ground rapidly, in recent times, as a way of dealing with real-life questions, drawing on past practices and building on them anew in the context of the challenges posed by capitalism and the individualist notions associated with it. But what is more important is that it is no longer only at the practical level that the question of the commons is being posed but is in fact accompanied by what Bollier and Helfrich (2019) have called an “Ontoshift” (Bollier and Helfrich 2019: 29). In their recent book, they have drawn on their wide field experience and research among communities to argue in favor of an ontological shift from individualism to a relational ontology that they see in terms of the figure of the “NestedI”—an I that does not exist in and of its own. “Using the term Nested-I helps us get beyond the idea—prevalent in the most respectable intellectual precincts of economics, evolutionary science, biology, and various other social sciences—that the individual is a self-evident category of thought”, they argue (Bollier and Helfrich 2019: 43). They relate this notion to the idea of “Ubuntu Rationality” that they propose, drawing from the concept as it has been used in the Bantu languages of South Africa and reworked by their contemporary thinkers. To quote them: Another term that we came up with to express the relationality of commoning is Ubuntu Rationality. In various Bantu languages in South Africa, the relationship between ‘me’ and ‘the other’ is expressed by the word Ubuntu. We use Ubuntu Rationality to refer to a way of thinking that seeks to align individual and collective well-being. The Kenyan Christian religious philosopher and writer John Mbeti translated the word Ubuntu in this way: ‘I am because we are and, since we are, therefore I am.’ The individual is part of a ‘we’—and, in fact, of many ‘we’s.’ The two are deeply intertwined. (Ibid: 43)

3 The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes animateur as “someone who leads and encourages participation in a particular activity, especially in a cultural or artistic activity.”.

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Bollier and Helfrich in fact take their exploration of relational ontologies much further, arguing that this is reflective of a wider paradigm shift that is also now quite evident in the sciences. They say, Let us suggest how a shift towards a relational ontology has created a new paradigm of discovery, complexity science, which is revolutionizing biology, chemistry, evolutionary sciences, physics, economics, and social sciences, among other fields. Complexity science has important things to say about the commons, too, because it sees the world as a dynamic, evolving set of living, integrated systems. While individual organisms may have important degrees of agency, they can only be understood in the context of their myriad relationships and constraints by larger structures. (Bollier and Helfrich 2019: 46)

What is clear now from all the initiatives that have been—and are being—undertaken with the aim of building alternatives that go beyond capital, is that invisible though they be, as long as our gaze is fixed on capital, state and centers of power, they are nevertheless part of a much larger shift. For the first time, capital is faced with a challenge that is not simply political and economic but is ontological and challenges the most fundamental premises of modern thought on which capitalism’s edifice arose. Socialism in the sense of a critique of property and the quest for justice has to now connect to this “real movement” that is taking shape within the womb of the old society, if it has to reinvent itself. What should be very clear from the foregoing discussion is the fact that the one thing that all these movements and initiatives have in common is the desire to take back control over their own lives, from the hands of the large machines of state and capital. From this point of view, socialism can only be the name of the struggle for the autonomy and control through which people and communities seek to wrest from the hands of state and capital. This certainly means that just as Marx and Engels put socialism on a new philosophical footing, the time may have come to take it out of the death-like grip of the techno-scientific imagination and put it on a new philosophical footing yet again. Only if that happens, will socialism be able to connect with the new changes that are visible on the horizon.

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Index

A Accumulation, 37, 51, 65, 69–71, 73–75, 78, 79, 85–87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 146, 152, 162, 169, 171, 175, 192, 202, 203, 208, 211, 216, 225, 229, 235 primitive, 71, 79, 89, 90, 92, 101, 192, 202, 208, 229, 230, 235 Adani, 156 African culture, 191, 192 Afro-Asian Marxisms, 11 Agrarian, 16, 18, 79, 92, 100, 102, 104, 110, 111, 118, 120, 122, 124, 125, 127, 130, 151, 217 capitalism, 127, 217 programme, 124, 125 question, 104, 111, 120, 130 Agriculture, 31, 66, 67, 75, 77, 91, 92, 103–109, 112–114, 121, 122, 127, 146, 165, 189, 213–215, 217 Ahmad, Muzaffar, 131 Alam, Javeed, 40 Alavi, Hamza, 122

All China Federation of Trade Unions, 100 Althusser, Louis, 8, 11, 12, 22, 24, 27, 29, 180, 181, 185, 198 Amin, Samir, 52, 182, 202, 208, 216, 229 Amin, Shahid, 197, 200 Anatma, 61 Anderson, Kevin, 24 Andhra thesis, 117 Apparatus of capture, 167–169, 189 Arab Spring, 10, 49, 224 Arblaster, Anthony, 71, 74, 79, 80, 158 Arrighi, Giovanni, 101 Artificial intelligence (AI), 62, 98 Averroes (Ibn Rushd), 187 B Badiou, Alain, 7, 12, 69 Balibar, Etienne, 60, 198 Baltas, Aristides, 11, 12, 16 Banaji, Jairus, 52, 130, 131, 209, 214–220

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22895-7

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256

INDEX

Bardawil, Fadi A., 23 Basu, Jyoti, 42, 43, 118–120 Baudrillard, Jean, 81 Bauer, Otto, 18 Benjamin, Solomon, 65, 93 Bernal, Martin, 188, 207 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 42, 156 Bharatiya Kisan Union, 110 Bhattacharjee, Buddhadev, 118, 120 Bhattacharya, Neeladri, 218, 219 Bhuinyas/kamias, 196, 197 Birdsall, Nancy, 64, 74, 84 Black Athena, 188 Black Marxism, 21, 187 Bloch, Ernst, 18, 181 Bollier, David and Helfrich, Silke, 236, 237 Bolshevik, 115, 126, 127, 130 Bolshevik revolution, 12 Braudel, Fernand, 73, 83, 84 Brown, Lester R., 170 Buddhism, 3–6, 212 C Capital , 12, 145, 146, 164, 166, 198, 201, 210, 223 Capital, 13–15, 18, 35, 37, 41, 52, 58–62, 66, 70, 72–75, 80, 82, 85, 89–91, 97, 104, 107, 114, 125, 142, 152, 161–166, 168–170, 175, 192, 198, 200, 202, 208, 216, 218, 227, 229, 230, 233, 237 logic of, 14, 68, 160, 170, 174 Capital/knowledge complex, 57, 58, 61, 72, 79, 80 Capitalism, 1, 10, 12, 16, 17, 19, 21, 32, 51, 57–59, 61, 62, 67–75, 78, 81, 83, 84, 87–92, 99, 101, 106, 121, 123–126, 130, 132, 133, 141, 144, 147, 148, 152, 154, 155, 157–159, 161, 163,

166–170, 180, 187–190, 192, 198, 199, 201, 202, 207, 208, 215, 217, 218, 224, 225, 227–229, 232, 235–237 Capitalist mode of production, 13, 68, 73, 74, 92, 202, 203 relations of production, 14, 199, 215, 216 social formation, 202, 203 Cargill, 112 Castañeda, Jorge G., 115 Castells, Manuel, 49 Cesaire, Aime, 131 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 197, 198, 200 Charara, Waddah, 23 Chatterjee, Partha, 10, 71, 88, 90, 200, 201 Chayanov, 122, 130 Chen, Kuan-Hsing, 9 Chiapas mountains, 70, 106 Chinese Communist Party, 6, 9 Chinese revolution, 1, 26, 28, 117 Chun, Lin, 120, 121 Civil society, 21, 201, 202 Class struggle, 23, 36, 78, 117, 162, 188, 190, 203, 208 Climate catastrophe, 13, 162 crisis, 2, 15, 52, 144, 224 emergency, 157 Cochabamba, 70, 106 Collectivization, 127, 128, 130 Colletti, Lucio, 22 Colonialism, 61, 92, 132, 189, 190, 199, 201, 229 colonized, 11, 61, 201 colonizing, 11 Coloniality of power, 59 Commons/common, 9, 17, 25, 38, 71, 74, 79, 92, 105, 111, 128, 145, 148, 153, 156, 158, 167,

INDEX

186, 195, 217, 223, 232, 234–237 commoners, 223, 235 commoning, 235, 236 Communism, 2, 3, 10, 23, 31, 74, 211, 213, 223, 226 Communist International (Comintern), 8–10, 24, 28, 47, 115, 130, 183 Communist Manifesto, 69 Communist Party of India (CPI), 9, 10, 17, 39, 40, 43, 117, 118 Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI(M), 17, 31, 39, 40, 42, 43, 116, 118–120, 129, 156 Community, 16, 19, 58, 79, 87, 100, 124, 141, 147, 148, 171, 181, 189, 192, 194, 197, 203, 204, 212, 213, 233, 236, 237 Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 46 Confucius, 4, 205 Consumer, 35, 80–83, 109, 150, 153 Consumption, 52, 60, 75, 80–83, 144, 145, 149, 150, 152, 154, 170, 225 mass consumption, 144, 149, 150 Copernican revolution, 170, 171 COVID-19, 14, 83, 107, 182 Critique of the Gotha Programme, 162 Cultural Revolution, 7, 12, 22, 47, 48, 184 Culture, 1, 3, 20–22, 29, 127, 129, 150, 159, 186, 192, 193, 198, 210 D Dalit, 195 Daoism/Taoism, 3, 5 Dazhao, Li, 6, 7 Dean, Jodi, 32 Debord, Guy, 81

257

Decolonization, 9, 59, 228, 229 Degrowth/post-growth, 226 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, 66, 167 Democracy, 10, 30, 31, 37–41, 44, 48, 50, 87, 88, 123, 202, 206, 223 liberal, 41 parliamentary, 40 Democratic, 2, 30, 32, 36–38, 40–42, 45, 47, 49, 88, 214, 232 state, 118 Dependency, 218 Depression, 82, 149 Desmarais, Annette A., 104, 105, 109 De Soto, Hernando, 83–86, 92, 169 Devika, J., 17 Dialectics Chinese/Daoist, 5, 24, 25 marxist, 4, 24 materialist, 5, 25 Dispossession, 16, 19, 70, 71, 79, 89, 91, 92, 101, 103, 106, 111, 124, 192, 228, 230, 234 Douglas, Mary, 148 Du bois, W.E.B., 22, 191 Dunbar-Oritz, Roxanne, 115

E Ecological catastrophe, 2 Ecological debt, 172, 173, 175 Engels, Friedrich, 25, 69, 121, 123, 124, 133, 191, 192, 211, 228, 237 Enlightenment, 21, 78, 79, 207 Esteva, Gustavo, 20, 233, 234 Eternity, 3 Eurocentric, 7, 23, 201, 205, 207 Eurocentrism, 2, 183, 203, 207, 208, 226 Eurocommunism, 227

258

INDEX

Eurocommunist, 38 Europe, 11, 12, 16, 18, 38, 59, 63, 67, 76, 78, 91, 98, 100, 105, 133, 153, 154, 157, 160, 166, 167, 171, 179, 185–190, 217, 224, 227, 230 fabrication of, 188 Evo Morales, 44, 70, 158, 230 Expanded reproduction, 85, 93, 149, 152, 171, 202, 208, 225 Expressways, 59–61, 113 Externalities, 61, 144, 174, 201

F Fanon, Frantz, 131, 132 Fascism, 21, 22, 47 fascist, 48 Federici, Silvia, 78, 79, 223 Foster, John Bellamy, 146, 161, 164 Foucault, Michel, 45, 57, 58, 76, 99 Freiberg, J.W., 4, 5, 25

G Gaia, 224, 225 Gandhi, Indira, 41, 44 Garbage, 139, 141, 143, 147, 154 Gibson-Graham, J.K., 71, 170, 232 Gidwani, Vinay, 143–146, 148 Gille, Zsuzsa, 160 Global South, 1, 2, 7–10, 12, 16, 24, 31, 51, 52, 58–61, 92, 99, 102, 139, 142, 143, 147, 168, 172, 208, 217, 220, 227–230 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 30 glasnost , 30 perestroika, 30 Gorz, Andre, 98, 99, 152 Governmentality, 88–92, 235 Graeber, David and Wengrow, David, 213

Gramsci, Antonio, 11, 12, 16, 22, 45, 66, 89, 194, 195 Gramscian, 23, 44, 46, 66 Greece, 10, 12, 16, 38, 49, 188 Greenpeace, 140, 142 Green Revolution, 67, 107, 110, 113 Growth, 4, 9, 15, 66, 70, 103, 151, 154, 160, 162, 163, 201, 226 Guha, Ranajit, 45, 181, 194, 198–201 H Habib, Irfan, 31 Hall, Stuart, 13, 29 Hardt, Michael, 18, 120, 121 Harnecker, Marta, 115 Hart, Keith, 64 Harvey, David, 65, 82 Hegel, 8, 24, 25, 74 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 77 Hindu, 3, 42, 148, 195 Hird, Myra and Zahara, Alexander, 147–149 Historical materialism, 11–13, 15, 17–20, 51, 52, 68, 115, 179, 180, 182, 190, 194, 196, 198, 199, 203, 205, 206, 209, 210, 220, 224, 226 Hobsbawm, Eric, 98 Hussain, Athar, 101, 122–124, 127 I Indian Farmers’ Struggle, 107 Indigenous populations, 10, 16, 97, 104, 114 Informal sector, 64–66, 84, 93, 235 Information and communication technologies, 97 International Labour Organization (ILO), 64, 103 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 63, 82, 229

INDEX

Iqbal, Muhammad, 10, 131–133 Islam, Nazrul, 131

J James, C.L.R., 22, 191, 196, 202, 208, 229 Jha, Praveen, 104 Jullien, François, 4, 5

K Kang, Liu, 3 Kappen, S., 231–233 Karatani, Kojin, 52, 209–213 Capital-Nation-State, 211 modes of exchange, 210, 212 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 30, 87, 88, 91 Kelley, Robin D.G., 187, 188 Kerala People’s Plan, 17 Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), 155 Khaldun, Ibn, 186 Kingston-Mann, E., 129 Kisan Mukti March, 107, 109 Krugman, Paul, 82 Kulak, 127, 128

L Labor/labour, 14, 18, 29, 36, 60, 61, 68, 75–77, 79, 80, 83, 88, 90, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 110, 122, 132, 141, 154, 159, 166, 171, 189, 191, 216, 219, 220, 231 formal subsumption under capital, 68, 192 real subsumption under capital, 192 Labor theory of value, 174 Laclau, Ernesto, 12, 13 Land acquisition, 71, 86, 111, 113, 116, 119, 120, 159 Land Acquisition Act, 71, 88

259

Latouche, Serge, 153 Latour, Bruno, 170, 224 La Via Campesina (LVC), 104, 105, 109 Lebowitz, Michael, 232 Lebow, Victor, 149 Lefort, Claude, 37 Lenin, 20, 23–25, 27, 28, 30–32, 41, 45, 101, 102, 122, 124–130, 146, 184, 215, 228 Lie Zi (Lieh Tzu), 25 Life, 3, 4, 10, 13, 15, 17, 34, 35, 47, 58–60, 76, 81, 86, 90, 102, 118, 121, 133, 148, 150, 151, 157, 160, 170, 175, 181, 183–185, 191, 193, 194, 218, 223, 226, 227, 230, 233, 236 as such, 13, 14, 35, 227 forms of, 13, 19, 170 Lindner, Kolja and Lindner, Urs, 180 Linebaugh, Peter, 235, 236 Linera, Alvaro Garcia, 44, 45 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 150 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 151 Lohia, Ram Manohar, 45 Longxi, Zhang, 230 Lucas, Robert, 82

M Macpherson, C.B., 58, 158 Mahakaal , 4 Maloney, W.F., 63 Mann, Michael E., 173 Mao Zedong/Mao Tsetung Critique of Soviet Economics, 31 On contradiction, 24 particularity of contradiction, 25 principal contradiction, 24 Martinez-Alier, Joan, 163, 171–173, 219 Marxism

260

INDEX

as field, 8, 9, 51, 57 border-Marxisms, 11, 51 democratic Marxism, 10 Marxist, 2–4, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21–25, 29–31, 36, 47, 51, 67–70, 75, 78, 84, 88, 98, 101, 103, 110, 116, 119, 120, 122, 125, 129, 130, 144, 145, 149, 154, 156, 157, 161, 163, 171, 172, 183, 187, 191, 194, 195, 210, 215, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230–232 unconscious, 114, 116, 120 Marx, Karl, 73 Masses, 23, 27, 38, 45, 47, 51, 98, 192 Menon, Nivedita, 7, 11, 41, 156 Mészáros, István, 161–168, 192 Metabolic rift, 161 Metabolism, 161–163, 165, 167 Mignolo, Walter, 11 Minimum support price (MSP), 67, 110, 112 Mitchell, Timothy, 71, 75 Mitra, Ashok, 31 Modern European episteme, 58 Modernity, 17, 19, 22, 58, 59, 74, 87, 88, 157, 166, 170, 180, 188, 201, 202, 207–209, 220 Modes of production Asiatic, 16, 216 feudal, 16, 164 peasant, 16 precapitalist, 16 Modi, Narendra, 107, 114 Molecular economies, 66, 67 Monsanto, 112 Moore, Sarah H., 147 Morris, Meaghan, 72 Motaung, Dan, 218 Movement Towards Socialism, 70

Movimento Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), 233, 234 Moyo, Sam, 100 Musto, Marcello, 134 N Nagarjuna, 61 Namboodiripad, E.M.S., 40, 43 Nandigram, 17, 40, 70, 71, 116 Narmada Bachao Andolan, 111 Narodnik/narodniki, 69, 123, 124, 131 Nazism, 47 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo, 9, 208 Ndlovu, Morgan, 9 Negri, Antonio, 18, 69, 120, 121 Neocolonial, 147, 149 Neoliberalism, 17, 33, 42, 72, 106, 111, 113, 155, 157, 195, 230 Neurath, Otto, 171, 172 New Economic Policy (NEP), 128 New Left, 2, 9, 13, 17, 23, 38, 45, 115 Non-contemporaneity, 10 Non-synchronous synchronicities, 11 O Occupy Wall Street, 10, 49, 224 Other Backward classes, 195 Outside, 1, 15, 23, 27, 30, 37, 50, 51, 57, 62, 66, 69, 70, 72, 85, 101, 132, 144, 146, 149, 166, 168, 169, 181, 187, 189, 190, 198, 234 P Packard, Vance, 149–151 Parameswaran, M.P., 155, 156 Party, 27, 32, 40–46, 48, 66, 81, 115–119, 121, 126, 128, 129, 156, 223, 234

INDEX

Party-form, 46, 47, 49 Party-systems, 48, 49 Patnaik, Utsa, 130 Peasantry, 10, 16–18, 26, 51, 78, 86, 97, 101, 102, 104, 107, 111, 116–122, 124, 127–129, 131–133, 220, 228 Peasant-workers, 100, 102, 120, 198 Perelman, Michael, 76 Philosophy, 3, 4, 17, 19, 48, 58, 61, 76, 79, 102, 151, 158, 162, 183–187, 207, 223, 224 Plastic, 139–143 Plekhanov, 123, 124, 126, 127 Political theory, 50, 58, 79, 143, 158 Pollution, 52, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 154, 160, 174 Popper-Lynkeus, Josef, 171 Postcolonial, 59, 69, 72, 87–91, 99, 157, 163, 200–202, 229 Post-Enlightenment, 28, 183 Poulantzas, Nicos, 31, 33, 37, 38, 202 Power, 1, 10, 17, 19–21, 23, 30–33, 35–38, 43–46, 48, 50, 51, 58, 73, 79, 83, 90, 92, 101, 108, 114, 117, 119, 128, 144, 149, 153, 154, 157, 159, 167, 171, 195, 198, 201, 206, 207, 218–220, 237 autonomous problematic of, 20, 30, 32, 33 Power/knowledge, 57 Pozzana, Claudia, 6 Prakash, Gyan, 196 Prakash, Madhu Suri, 20, 233 Pratitya samutpada, 61 Precapitalist agrarian communities, 19 Primitive communism, 211 Private property, 41, 74, 79, 80, 86, 158, 228, 232 bourgeois, 74, 79, 80, 86, 158

261

Productivism, 51, 52, 160, 223, 225 Proletariat, 11, 12, 16, 21, 78, 98, 102, 121, 124, 125, 131, 191, 192, 203, 208, 227, 228 Prosumer, 35 Pun, Ngai and Lu, Huilin, 100, 103, 120

Q Quijano, Anibal, 59, 168

R Radical Democratic Party (RDP), 47 Recession, 63, 65, 81, 82 Reddy, Rajyashree N., 143, 146, 148 Reich, Robert, 83 Relative autonomy, 1, 20, 37, 210, 229 Religion, 13, 21, 129, 187, 198, 205–207, 212 monotheism, 206 Remnants, 11, 17, 19, 64, 67, 146, 198 Repeasantization, 103, 114 Ricouer, Paul, 20 Ristau, Julie, 236 Robinson, Cedric, 21, 33, 52, 180, 182, 187, 229, 230 Robinson, Joan, 13, 14 Romanticism, 184 Roy, M.N., 47, 48, 52, 183–188, 233 Russian peasant commune, 131

S Saito, Kohei, 161, 164, 226 Samaddar, Ranabir, 71 Samyukta Kisan Morcha, 108 Santal, 198 hool, 198

262

INDEX

Sanyal, Kalyan, 71, 88–93, 99, 168, 169, 202, 235 Satgar, Vishwas, 10 Saul, John, 101 Schram, Stuart, 1–5, 9 Second International, 20, 121, 227 Sen, Amartya, 71 Seth, Sanjay, 9, 23, 24 Shanin, Teodor, 121, 122, 124–127, 130, 133, 134 Shetkari Sanghatana, 110 Shiva, Vandana and Jalees, Kunwar, 112, 114 Shorbagy, Manar, 49 Singur, 17, 70, 71, 116, 119 Sinha, Sachchidanand, 231 Slavery, 10, 132, 187–190, 214 Social democracy, 38, 124, 227 Social Democratic Party (SDP), 122, 227 Social formations, 33, 69, 160, 203, 204, 211, 213, 217, 220 Socialism, 2, 20, 22, 26, 29, 31, 38, 39, 41, 42, 51, 52, 69, 74, 97, 98, 123, 155, 160, 161, 167, 170, 212, 223–232, 234, 237 Socialist Lebanon, 23 Socialist Revolutionaries, 125, 126, 131 Solidary/solidarity economy, 23, 99, 234, 235 Soviet Union, 29, 166 industrialization, 17, 18 Stalinist, 8, 24, 119, 130 Standing, Guy, 99 Stengers, Isabelle, 62, 224 Strasser, Susan, 150, 151 Subaltern Studies, 52, 182, 194–196, 198–201, 218 Summers, Lawrence, 142, 143 Surplus value, 68, 103, 171, 225

Survivals, 11, 12, 14, 19, 89, 108, 154, 198 Swaminathan, M.S., 113, 141 Synchronicity of the non-synchronous, 18, 19, 183, 220 Syriza, 11 T Tebhaga movement, 117 Technology, 34, 35, 84, 90, 91, 93, 98, 151–153, 160 Telangana peasants’ struggle, 110 Theoretical practice, 180 The political, 20, 21, 23, 28, 30–33, 36, 48–50, 58, 60, 101, 129, 149, 154, 167, 192, 193, 201, 202, 205, 207, 209 Thingification, 131, 132 Third Industrial Revolution, 97 Thompson, E.P., 76 Time, 3–5, 15, 17, 19, 74, 76, 115, 151, 179, 209, 220 timelessness, 3 Totality, 33, 34, 51, 57, 60, 68, 74, 93, 133, 144, 161, 164, 165, 169, 181, 198, 215, 229 Traditional sector, 64 Trans-Atlantic slave trade, 188 Trash trade wars, 52, 139, 140 Tribe, Keith, 101, 122–124, 127 Tributary, 203–207, 216 formations, 205 mode of production, 206 Trotsky, 8, 191, 212 Trotskyists, 12 Twenty-first century socialism, 10, 161 U Udall, Tom, 140 Ulrich Brand, 60

INDEX

UN Conference on Environment and Development, 155 Underdeveloped, 1, 7, 23, 155, 157, 167 Underdevelopment, 8, 168, 201, 202 Underground economies, 61, 63, 64, 93 Unequal exchange, 60, 172, 173 Uneven development, 8, 11, 24 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 142 United Progressive Alliance (UPA), 81, 113 Universalism universal, 25, 26, 28 universality, 25 universal truths, 26, 28 Untimely, 10, 113, 182 USSR, 8, 28–31, 69, 127, 157

V Vanguard, 27, 32, 50, 51, 117, 223, 225, 233 vanguardism, 46 Vienna Circle, 171 Vijayan, Pinarayi, 156 Viola, Lynn, 127–129 Vizhinjam International Seaport, 156

W Wang, Hui, 22

263

Waste, 51, 52, 139–145, 147–149, 153, 154, 157, 160, 168, 174 Water wars, 70, 106 West Bengal, 16, 18, 40, 42–45, 70, 113, 116, 118–120, 129 Western Ghats, 156 Wilhelm, Hellmut, 4 Williams, Michelle, 10 Wissen, Markus, 60 Witch hunt, 78, 79 Workers and Peasants Parties (WPPs), 8, 9 Working class, 9, 14–16, 26, 27, 40, 41, 51, 61, 74, 88, 91, 97–99, 102, 103, 115, 117, 132, 220 World Bank (WB), 63, 112, 142, 148, 167, 229 World History, 180, 181, 211 World Social Forum, 10 World Trade Organization (WTO), 70, 99, 105, 106, 108, 112, 114, 167, 229 Y Yeros, Paris, 100, 101, 103, 104 Young Marx, 8 Z Zapatista rebellion, 70 Zasulich, Vera, 133 Zhuang Zi (Chuang Tzu), 4 Žižek, Slavoj, 2–4, 24