Pothik Ghosh
“While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.” Karl Marx, ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’, London, 1850
Undeclared emergency and other dangers of post-fascist neoliberal dictatorship
We are late, perhaps terribly so. Yet, insofar as the revolution always lags behind itself, we ought to emphatically state that the time is upon us when a correct characterisation of the political regime we are witnessing now, in this benighted geo-political entity called the Indian nation-state, has acquired life-and-death stakes. Let us not be mistaken, this political regime is not Fascism. It is something much worse and far more intractable. This regime, as we have maintained for a while now, is characterised by a hitherto unprecedented level of generalisation of the state of exception. Much more than what was seen in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan – to say nothing of Francoist Spain or Salazarian Portugal. This unprecedented level of generalisation, and thus normalisation, of the state of exception is on account of the neoliberal conjunctural specificity of post-Fordism-induced uncontrollable all-round precarity; and India’s historically unique location within it. That is exactly why we at Radical Notes will continue to characterise this political regime – which has now emerged as an agency of full-blown counter-revolution – as the dictatorship of neoliberal capital.
There is, however, no doubt that continual politico-ideological mass mobilisation is as crucial an aspect of this neoliberal dictatorship as it was of Fascist political regimes of yore. That is what distinguishes both from plain-vanilla authoritarianism – something this country experienced, for instance, during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency years. At the mass-mobilisational level, there is a striking resemblance of discursive forms, styles, techniques and tactics between the dictatorship of neoliberal capital and a classically Fascist political regime. Nevertheless, there is also a crucial distinction between the two on this count. And that difference is at the level of the modality of operation of those mass-mobilisational discursive forms, styles, techniques and tactics. As far as this political regime of dictatorship of neoliberal capital is concerned, its discursively fascist paraphernalia of mass mobilisation does not function by deploying and articulating the politico-ideological language of blood-and-soil nationalism to the complete exclusion of the liberal language of rights. The mass movement constitutive of it is, of course, characterised by a pronounced articulation and deployment of that idiom and form of blood-and-soil nationalism. But this language, in its mass-mobilisational deployment, does not seek to suspend the (nationalist)-liberal discourse of rights. Rather, the former in its deployment and articulation tends to derive its legitimacy from the latter precisely through its internally re-orientated mobilisation. It is this that distinguishes the modality of operation of fascist mass-mobilisational politics in the dictatorship of neoliberal capital from the modality of operation of similar forms of mass-mobilisational politics in Fascism as a political regime.
There is a telling symptom that indicates the current political dispensation in India is not classical Fascism but something far more insidious. Many people have correctly pointed out that we are in a state of undeclared emergency. But what does that mean and how does it symptomatise the fact that the current political regime here is not classical Fascism but something different and more dangerous? Fascist political regimes in the past have — in being constituted by Fascistic mass mobilisation and in further facilitating such mobilisation – invoked provisions of general Emergency given in liberal constitutionality to suspend both the latter, and the normalcy its functioning is meant to characterise and enable. What we, however, see now is the state of exception – which the current political regime and its constitutive Fascist mass mobilisation have been enabling – is being realised without the official declaration of such a general Emergency; and thus without invoking the exceptional constitutional provisions to suspend the Constitution in its normal-liberal functioning. That is so because normal constitutionality and liberals rights, in their everyday practice at all levels, are now objectively conditioned to inexorably activate and draw upon various draconian legal provisions of exception, and thus become registers of the latter’s normalised legitimation.
In such circumstances, it would perhaps not be entirely incorrect to characterise this political regime of dictatorship of neoliberal capital as “post-fascist” a la Hungarian philosopher G.M. Tamas. In an article titled, ‘On Post-Fascism’, which was published in Boston Review in 2000, Tamas characterises the phenomenon thus: “Post-fascism finds its niche easily in the new world of global capitalism without upsetting the dominant political forms of electoral democracy and representative government. It does what I consider to be central to all varieties of fascism, including the post-totalitarian version. Sans Führer, sans one-party rule, sans SA or SS, post-fascism reverses the Enlightenment tendency to assimilate citizenship to the human condition.”
Fascist mass mobilisation under the condition of unprecedented precarity
Now, the mass movement that institutes and animates Fascism as a political regime is, to speak a little simplistically, always in the register of disaffection wrought by subalternisation, and attendant experiences of marginalisation, even as the content that animates this register of its mass-movemental political form is actually all about some subalternised social locations and subject-positions seeking to overcome their subalternity by further oppressing other social locations and subject-positions that are even more subalternised in relation to them. That is precisely why such a political form of mass movementality renders the state an agency and active enabler of its oppressive manoeuvres (manifest in frequently violent eruptions of the lynch-mob), precisely in the process of emphatically envisaging itself in terms of opposition to the state, and especially its constitutionally-ordained liberal-institutional architecture.
Clearly, Fascism as a political regime is constitutive of the mobilisation of objective revolutionary possibilities, which inhere in increasing subalternisation of the masses, against the liberal form of the capitalist state precisely in order to reproduce that state by recomposing the political form of its embodiment. (The state, we would do well to realise here, is nothing but the institutionalised congealment of the value-relational grammar of social relations.) In this process, it cannibalises the earlier liberal-institutional form of the state. This unambiguously reveals why Fascism is a mystification of revolution and is, therefore, a counter-revolution.
Now all of this is equally true for the dictatorship of neoliberal capital – arguably the character of the current political regime in India. There is, however, one very important difference between it and a political regime that is classically Fascist. And the difference is this: both the (less) subalternised group of oppressors and the (more) subalternised group of the oppressed are, in this phase of the dictatorship of neoliberal capital, far less internally homogeneous and socially cohesive than they were in those moments of history when we had Fascism as a political regime. That is to say, the level and intensity of subalternisation of the masses as a whole is far greater now than in the conjuncture that gave us Fascism as a political regime. And this, as we have earlier observed, is on account of unprecedented increase in the level and intensity of overall precarity. Something that has been effected by a qualitative leap in productive forces, and which is conjuncturally characterised by the accelerating generalisation of Post-Fordism as the dispersal and fragmentation of the production process, intensified fragmentation of social labour, functional simplification of the labour process leading to a hitherto unprecedented increase in same-skilling, and direct productivisation of affective and emotional life.
What this has resulted in is not only a marked decline in the overall value of labour-power due to the diminishing of socially necessary labour time, but also a marked decline in the price of labour-power due to significant diminution of living labour employed directly in the creation of value. In simpler terms, what the latter amounts to is the following: increasing levels of automation (increase in organic composition of capital) has led to an unparalleled surge in supply in the labour market, thereby depressing the overall price of labour-power. This is reflected not only in wage-cuts – and/or decline in real wages – but also in the significant fall in various kinds of social wages as well. In fact, the systemic regimentation accomplished through increasing mutual competition among different segments and sections of productive and so-called unproductive social labour – something that is registered by the bloodthirsty politico-ideological forms of such competition – is nothing but an index of appropriation of social wages of some by others under the condition of overall decline in social wages.
That the level and intensity of subalternisation of the masses as a whole is far greater now than in the conjuncture that gave us Fascism as a political regime shows up as a significant difference between the two at the level of their respective political effects. While discussing the difference between Fascism and the dictatorship of neoliberal capital in terms of internal homogeneity and coherence of social groups of both the oppressor and the oppressed, the key word to be borne in mind is “less”. Only then can one clearly grasp the significant difference in political effects produced through the deployment of similar kinds of Fascist mass-mobilisational political forms and tactics in two conjuncturally distinct instances.
Anti-fascist united fronts: From instrumentalisation to oppression
Even in regimes that are classically Fascist, the (less) subalternised group of oppressors engaged in forging and articulating Fascist mass-mobilisational discursive forms and tactics, to further oppress the more subalternised oppressed, are by no means fully internally homogeneous and cohesive. There are way too many mutual contradictions among the various sections and segments supposedly constituting the Fascist social corporatist unity for them to actually be “fasces” (a bundle of sticks). In fact, the Fascist politico-ideological project is, in the first place, necessitated by the system– of course, in the absence of an effective and viable capital-unravelling politics – to preserve itself by regimenting and controlling the anarchy that it has itself produced. So, while Franco-Greek philosopher and militant Nicos Poulantzas showed us how Fascism is constitutive of a coherent articulation of different, and mutually contradictory, socio-historical locations; some Marxist and Functionalist historians of Nazi Germany have demonstrated the obverse of that phenomenon – how this united articulation is continually marred by the objective contradictions among its different constituents. The historiographic work done by Tim Mason is, in this regard, particularly important. In order to devise a strategy to effectively fight a counter-revolutionary, mass-mobilisational advance – whether it is articulated within a Fascist political regime or that of a post-Fascist neoliberal dictatorship – a dialectically inflected reading of both Poulantzas and the Functionalist-Marxist historians such as Mason is likely to be immensely helpful. In fact, such a dialectically articulated reading of Poulantzas and the Marxist-Functionalist historians is almost indispensable for those trying to devise an accurate line and an effective strategy to defeat and destroy the political regime of the dictatorship of neoliberal capital. The context provided by our concrete situation, it must be said once again at the risk of ad nauseam repetition, is one that is integral to just such a political regime.
Let us now focus on the struggles of the more subalternised oppressed against the Fascist mass-mobilisational forms and tactics of the relatively and relationally less subalternised oppressors. It turns out that such struggles, left to themselves, are prone to be instrumentalist. The internal differentiation of the oppressed social groups in Fascist political regimes often resulted in the dominant segments within those groups instrumentalising the particular concerns and discontent of the subordinate segments, by way of building a larger anti-Fascist unity, to envisage a politics that sought to merely accomplish the interests specific to the former. That, as we now know, turned out, in the final analysis, to be the bane of United Front/Popular Front anti-Fascism. Something that not only ensured that anti-Fascism did not become anti-capitalism, which would have destroyed both Fascism and its necessary condition of possibility at one go, but also led to incomplete de-fascisation of societies that had been under Fascist political rule.
The objective basis for such instrumentalist politics now stands further compounded due to conjunctural reasons of both intensified segmentation and heightened precarity of the segments thus produced. And such has been its accentuation that this instrumentalist politics has undergone a mutation to be transfigured into something qualitatively new. Whereas earlier movements based on the United Front/Popular Front principle of anti-Fascist unity led merely to instrumentalisation of subordinate segments by the dominant ones within that larger anti-Fascist unity of historical blocs, now such kinds of anti-Fascist unity ensure the movement itself ends up doing the work of not only ideological state apparatuses but of repressive state apparatuses as well.
Such anti-Fascist unity usually tends to articulate its struggle against Fascist mass-mobilisational politics, and the political regime that is its constitutive enabler, by internalising the discursive terms set by the reactionary politico-ideological project it is battling. As a result, such an anti-Fascist unity finds itself articulating and conducting its struggle in discursive-ideological terms generated by its political adversary. Now this has often been the case even with united-frontist anti-Fascist movements of the past. However, what makes this strategy even more troublesome now in this neoliberal conjuncture is that in articulating the politics of anti-Fascist unity in discursive-ideological terms set by Fascist forms and tactics of mass-mobilisational politics, it starts acting as a kind of extension of the repressive state apparatuses.
It is a situation, wherein a movement against reactionary-Fascist forms of mass-mobilisational politics not only polices its own ideological boundaries but, in the process, finds itself objectively (and eventually also subjectively) helping the state and its political regime to physically police certain sections and elements within itself even as it exists as an ongoing movement. Clearly, what we have here, as a consequence, is a manifold accentuation and intensification of the ‘kapo’ syndrome that is, thereby, rendered into something qualitatively new on account of it being much more pervasive and generalised than that kapo phenomenon originally was in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Fascist Europe. So, while the trouble with movements based on such a conception of anti-Fascist unity, in the conjunctural phase of classical Fascism, was one of instrumentalism; in this conjunctural phase the problem with such united-frontist anti-Fascist movements is that their constitutive instrumentalism is now condemned to be almost immediately oppressive in its functioning. As a result, what was ethically undesirable and, in the final analysis, politically ineffective, about such anti-Fascist unity in the phase of classical Fascism, is now also rendered entirely unfeasible in this neoliberal phase. The resultant trust-deficit among diverse sections and segments, which are supposed to constitute such an anti-Fascist unity, tends to assume such gargantuan proportions that the actualisation of such unity either fails to take off, or, collapses after a very short and unhappy life. In fact, this kind of anti-Fascist unity, thanks to its current conjunctural situation, is not only condemned to be a form of subalternisation of some sections of the movement by other sections within it, but simultaneously also verges on the oppression of the former by the latter. In this, such anti-Fascist unity, as the movement-form it is, becomes an almost perfect mirror-image of the Fascist mass-mobilisational form of the reactionary political regime it is ostensibly up against. Not just that. This almost perfect mirroring of the Fascist mass-mobilisational form by the anti-Fascist movement-form renders the latter, just like the former, an extension of the political regime that is the conjuncturally-specific form articulating the epochal logic of the capitalist state. It is precisely on this count that the current political regime in India, which we have characterised as a post-Fascist neoliberal dictatorship, is fundamentally distinct from classically Fascist political regimes.
‘Progressive’ nationalism, the bad faith of JNU’s ‘anti-fascism’
The ongoing JNU movement is a perfect demonstration of such a united-frontist anti-Fascist strategy and its problems. It is, therefore, also a demonstration of the post-Fascist nature of both the current political regime of neoliberal dictatorship, and the discursively fascist forms of mass mobilisation such a regime is necessarily constitutive of. The JNU movement was evidently sparked off by state repression let loose on the left and left-liberal student community of the university after anti-India slogans were raised on campus by those aligned to the Kashmiri national-liberation struggle. And yet the movement began, right from the word go, by posing itself in defensive terms of ‘our’ progressive and democratic nationalism against ‘their’ reactionary and Fascist nationalism. That has, ever since the movement began, been the principal ideological basis of its larger, so-called anti-Fascist unity. That this ideological basis of JNU’s ‘anti-Fascist’ struggle has emerged from various kinds of ‘progressive’ nationalist positions that different Indian left organisations – of both the parliamentary and self-proclaimed radical kind – hold on to makes the situation even more despairing. It is this that has impelled the JNU movement to dispute the validity of the specific charges of anti-nationalism and sedition levelled by the current political dispensation (in tandem with its reactionary goon-squads) without, in any way, questioning the very validity of the draconian legal provisions on which those charges are based. In other words, the movement has consistently refused to adopt the tactics of directly challenging the democratic, and jurisprudential, validity of draconian laws of sedition.
Such tactics, had they been adopted and operationalised, would have revealed constitutionality for what it essentially is: a force-field of differentially inclusive social relations, and thus concomitantly a terrain constitutive of the determinate antagonism between the tendency of preservation/making of nationhood as an historical index of capitalist sociality, and the counter-tendency of its unraveling. This would have been accomplished because the adoption and operationalisation of those tactics would have served to disrupt the uneasy balance between constitutionality and draconian legality, which is its constitutive exception, by pitting them against one another.
What the JNU movement has done, instead, is insist that the levelling of charges of sedition and anti-nationalism at some members of its community of progressive students is baseless, and that the state should find the “miscreants” who really raised those anti-India (and Kashmiri national-liberationist) slogans and slap those charges on them. This it has done, as we have observed above, by strongly asserting the ‘progressive’ nationalism of the leftist and left-liberal students and teachers of the university against the reactionary and fascist nationalism of the current political regime and its mass-mobilised goon-squads. Apart from revealing that these leftists and left-liberals refuse to see how nationalism is the necessary ideological condition of possibility for Fascist mass-mobilisational politics, this ‘anti-Fascist’ movement has separated out both the Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri anti-nationalist sections of the university from its nationalist leftists and left-liberals.
The voice in which the movement continues to articulate this separation has, of course, not been homogeneous. There are various registers in this voice that range from despicable ambivalence on the question of the right to raise slogans in favour of national self-determination of Kashmir and other areas under Indian occupation to an unambiguous nationalist assertion that raising of such slogans is wrong, seditious and criminally anti-national. What, however, does bring all these registers — which ought to be ascribed to a wide variety of left and left-liberal positions – into the coherence of a single voice is the ineluctability of nationalism as the either the default, or the conscious, ideological position as far as all those groups and individuals are concerned. That their respective articulations of ‘progressive’ Indian nationalism varies from one another does not change the fact that there has been absolutely no practical questioning by any of them of the abstract idea of nation-state, which is basically a conception that in its concrete operation always amounts to one or the other form of social relations of differential subalternisation and oppression. As a consequence, these nationalist Leftists and Left-liberals have shown themselves to be incapable of interrogating each and every form of concrete politics, including their own, based on that idea. It is precisely this that has prevented all these sections of Indian Leftists, to say nothing of the individual Left-liberals, from adopting the tactics of directly questioning the democratic and jurisprudential validity of draconian and nationalistic legal provisions of sedition.
Not surprisingly, this ‘anti-Fascist’ movement has, as a result, clearly marked out the anti-nationalist radicals and/or “miscreants” from the nationalist ‘progressives’. By separating out the former from the latter, JNU’s glorious ‘anti-Fascism’ has ensured that it marks out and isolates the anti-nationalist radicals and/or “miscreants”– which includes in its ranks supporters of Kashmiri national self-determination among others – both ideologically and physically. By doing this it has clearly, and may we say, quite deliberately, served to legitimise, bolster, and even enable, the dogged pursuit of the anti-nationalist radicals by the repressive state apparatuses, and the Fascist lynch-mobs mobilised by the current political regime. That members of some of the self-proclaimed radical Left organisations – particularly, a rather media-savvy woman leader of one such ‘party’ – have at last begun talking about upholding the right to life and liberty of some of those anti-nationalist radicals is no cause for cheer.
Considering those so-called radical Leftists have come out with such declarations only after they have done their bit to conclusively forge the larger ‘anti-Fascist’ unity on a nationalist basis, it reveals the absolute bad faith that underpins those noble declarations. That they continue, as always, to hedge their bets on taking an unambiguously affirmative position on the question of Kashmiri national self-determination serves to further underscore this bad faith of theirs. Unfortunately, such declarations in favour of the anti-nationalist radicals by these so-called radical Leftists, given the timing and tenor of those declarations, amount to no more than cynically pragmatic manoeuvres to either further the cause of mechanical organisation-building or, worse; identity-management to bolster the student vote for the next JNSU elections.
In such circumstances, those declarations by some nationalist Leftists in favour of the anti-nationalist radicals would serve, at best, to objectively enable the disciplining of the latter by the former on behalf of the Indian nation-state. This would be exactly like the family, or civil-societal institutions, seeking to discipline their subversive members on behalf of the state while apparently protecting those members from the direct coercive disciplining by the repressive state apparatuses. At worst, and which is as likely as the best, it would result in those self-proclaimed radical Leftists facilitating the ‘surrender’ of those anti-nationalist radicals to the repressive state apparatuses without those apparatuses having to do much on that score. And not a thing stands changed by the fact that one of the prominent anti-nationalist radical students, who has returned to JNU after having remained ‘untraceable’ for almost a week, was apparently accorded a warm reception by the ‘#StandwithJNU’ movement, and was able to address the assembled university community from its platform.
Kashmir’s National Liberation and the Blindness of the Indian Left
The ‘progressively’ nationalist ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement demonstrates that its various nationalist Leftist and Left-liberal constituents have absolutely no understanding of how central the Kashmiri struggle against Indian occupation is to the revolutionary organisation of various working-class struggles in the Indian mainland. This also underscores their failure, actually unwillingness, to grasp how the movements of various nationalities against their occupation-induced integration into Indian nationhood is precisely what tends to integrate those movements with various mainland working-class struggles, which are also incipiently nation- and state-unravelling in their orientation.
It must be stated here that such a politico-theoretical understanding with regard to Kashmir, and other nationality struggles against Indian occupation, is lacking even among those ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist student-radicals of JNU, who, consistently and with immense courage, publicly assert Kashmir’s right to national self-determination, and secession from India. This is borne out by the fact that the courageous declarative vigour with which such anti-nationalist radicals have consistently upheld the cause of Kashmiri national liberation has not been matched by any practice on their part to organise working-class struggles in the mainland in a manner that would serve to concretely weaken the nationalist consensus here, thereby enabling the Kashmiri national-liberation struggle to significantly improve its position vis-à-vis the Indian occupation. In fact, it is the absence of such strategy and concrete practice on the part of ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radicals in the Indian mainland that has rendered their courageous affirmation of Kashmiri national liberation vulnerable to coercive assaults by the current political regime of neoliberal dictatorship, and its Fascist mass mobilisation.
Not unlike the lilly-livered nationalist Indian Leftists and Left-liberals, these ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radicals too do not clearly see how the Indian occupation of Kashmir (or for that matter its so-called Northeast) also functions in the Indian mainland as a racist ideology that serves to systemically regiment both various sections and segments of the Kashmiri (and the north-eastern) migrant-workers, and the non-Kashmiri working people by dividing them from one another along an axis of segmentation and mutual competition in terms of access to social wages such as rented accommodation and so on. Therefore, they have been unable to grasp, their unqualified support for nationality struggles against Indian occupation notwithstanding, that such occupation in functioning as a racist ideology in the mainland is constitutive of axes of segmented socio-economic relations among and within various sections of migrant-workers from the occupied territories, and the so-called local working populace. It is this that has prevented these ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radicals from figuring out the concrete points of molecular convergence between the everyday concerns and anxieties of migrant-workers and the local working-people that surface precisely amid and through the concrete contradictions within and among them. And that has prevented these otherwise courageous anti-nationalist radicals from devising a strategy to forge an effective and concrete unity among those different, and mutually contradictory, segments of social labour by working through their mutual contradictions.
Such a strategy and concrete practice of organising the everyday concerns of various segments of social labour in the Indian mainland into a new revolutionary social subject would have, needless to say, rendered the virtuous anti-nationalism of our ‘Maoism’-inspired radicals into an effective and concrete form of nation-state-unravelling revolutionary-proletarian internationalism. (We would do well to observe here that most mainland radical Leftists, both nationalist and anti-nationalist, are faced with a similar kind of failure when it comes to grasping and practically articulating the strategic import of how reactionary and oppressive ideologies and cultures of Islamophobia and Brahminical casteism also similarly function as axes of hierarchical and mutually competitive economic relations both between and within Muslim and non-Muslim – and/or lower-caste and upper-caste – segments of social labour in their quotidian existence.)
This theoretical, and thus strategic, failure of the ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radicals has, needless to say, enabled the ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the nationalist Left and Left-liberals of JNU to be more effective than usual in articulating its constitutively vicious instrumentalism. In other words, this theoretical and strategic failure on part of the former, in spite of their admirable ethical courage, has made it extremely easy for the ‘anti-Fascist’ movement of the nationalist Indian Leftists and Left-liberals to act as an agency of subalternisation, and even oppression, with regard to Kashmiri national-liberationists and other non-Kashmiri anti-nationalist radicals. That, in turn, has obviously furthered the counter-revolutionary cause of the current regime of neoliberal dictatorship, and its Fascist mass mobilisation, by politico-ideologically yoking the ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the nationalist Leftists and Left-liberals to its reactionary political project. It is the triumph of such “post-Fascism”, and the concomitant failure of united-frontist/popular-frontist anti-Fascist unity, that the nationalist ‘anti-Fascism’ of the ongoing JNU movement has thrown into sharp relief.
JNU’s Leftish ‘Anti-fascism’ and the Subalternisation of Dalit Radicalism
On a slightly different plane, the nationalist ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement has equally viciously instrumentalised and subalternised the radical Dalit movement, which had been sparked by Rohit Vemula’s revolutionary suicide at the Hyderabad Central University earlier this month. Impelled by the radical republican project of annihilation of caste, the movement for justice for Rohit Vemula seeks radical democratisation of universities and the system of higher education. In doing that, it tends to lay bare the cultural and economic hierarchies and culturally-articulated economic segmentations – both caste-based and otherwise – within universities. As a consequence, it also ends up problematising the segmented separation of universities from the world outside along the hierarchical axis of mental/intellectual labour over manual labour. Such radical republicanism, given its current conjunctural location, is objectively orientated to call into question the system of socio-technical division of labour – both caste-based and otherwise – and the value-relational logic of capital that this system of social division of labour now mediates and realises. As a result, such a movement objectively tends towards being a determinate affirmation of revolutionary-proletarian politics precisely by virtue of operationalising itself through its radical-republican ideological self-representation. We would do well to state here that revolutionary-proletarian politics is the ceaseless process of complete functionalisation of division of labour as the struggle that tends towards negating its hierarchised socio-technical division.
The nationalist ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the JNU movement, on the other hand, has been all about saving JNU as a university-island of democracy and critical thinking from the assault of the current political regime and its Fascist mass-mobilisational politics. As a result, this movement has tended to close and paper over the concrete segmentations and contradictions internal to the university space. It has, in the same movement, served to reinforce the hierarchised separation of the university from the world outside. Clearly the two movements for university democracy – #JusticeforRohitVemula and #StandwithJNU – are entirely at odds with one another when it comes to defining such democracy. That the ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the #StandwithJNU movement has been paying unending lip-service to Rohit Vemula’s politics – and has sought to mobilise the discontent unleashed by his death to strengthen itself as that ‘anti-Fascist unity – demonstrates its intrumentalising and subalternising orientation even more. Once again we are witness to how the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement renders itself an extension of the state apparatuses in their current political articulation, and Fascist mass-movemental animation. Once again we see how such ‘anti-Fascist’ unity is programmed to be fully integrated with the ideological and repressive workings of a counter-revolutionary political regime like the one we are currently confronted with, and how such a regime is, therefore, not classically Fascist but a post-Fascist dictatorship of neoliberal capital.
Other subalterns of JNU’s ‘anti-fascist’ front
The instrumentalising, subalternising and oppressive functionality of nationalist-democratic ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement is, however, not limited to Kashmiri national-liberationists, the ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radical students of the university, or Dalit radicals. Insofar as it has sought to separate the world outside from the university by emphasising the preservation of the latter’s ‘progressively’ nationalist democratic space, it has served to subalternise many other elements among the working people, who, on account of their social locations, are likely to be opposed to the current post-Fascist regime and its Fascist mass mobilisation. That the movement has sought to accomplish this by seeking to separate out anti-national “miscreants” and “outsiders” from the ‘progressively’ nationalist university community in order to protect the ‘progressive’ nationalist’s right to life and liberty from attacks on it by the current political regime and its mass-mobilised Fascist nationalists, clearly indicates that.
For instance, the national-democratic ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement has, thanks to its emphasis on saving the ‘progressively’ nationalist democratic space of the university, left many of its former students, now living as tenants in the surrounding villages of Munirka, Ber Sarai and Kishangarh, to the vagaries of coercive disciplining – and thus cut-backs in social wages – by rent-seeking landlords in those neighbourhoods. The latter have been integral to the Fascist mass mobilisation of the current regime. In view of the JNU incident, this mobilisation has been visibly stepped up to organise those rent-seeking reactionary landlords into lynch-mobs, which are quite likely to unleash their fatal fury on some former JNU students and other working-class elements suspected of being in solidarity or sympathy with the attacked students of JNU.
The ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement has virtually ensured that even within JNU various excesses of its nationalist-democratic institutional canonicity will be regimented and disciplined much more than earlier. And this will likely be ensured by its Leftist and Left-liberal students and teachers themselves. One can, for instance, safely assume that from now on there will inevitably be a marked piping-down of certain kinds of radical activism – not least, students’ activism in support of various struggles against Indian occupation – within the university. For, in seeking to preserve the ‘democratic’ space the university has purportedly been, the ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the JNU movement has ensured that all kinds of hierarchical social relations – officially legitimate and otherwise – through which the university is constituted are preserved. This means the movement has, for now, accepted that the university will legitimately continue as an ideological apparatus of the Indian state, and has, thereby, implicitly agreed to heed the commands of the counter-revolutionary political regime that currently animates this state. The way the students participating in the JNU movement quietly agreed to call off the indefinite strike at the behest of their Leftist and Left-liberal teachers should be read as a foreboding of the long winter of normalised emergency that is descending on the university.
The Question of Correct Strategy and Marx’s “Revolution in Permanence”
The question now is, if the strategy of such popular-frontist anti-Fascist unity is unfeasible, and doubly undesirable, in the face of a post-Fascist dictatorship of neoliberal capital, what would an effective strategy look like? Our contention, in the light of recent developments, would be that an effective unity against this post-Fascist political regime of neoliberal dictatorship, and the Fascist mass mobilisation integral to it, ought to be envisaged in terms of a perpetual dynamic of the simultaneity of struggle in unity and unity in struggle. The unity posed against the current political regime through the strategic articulation of this perpetually processual dynamic will be far more politically effective because it will be extremely cohesive in its internationalist anti-statism and anti-systemicness. That will be so because the unity posed by the strategic articulation of the dynamic of struggle in unity and unity in struggle will be a unity that is forged through synchronisation of various determinate struggles against oppression and the segmentation of social labour such oppression secures.
It must be clarified here that such synchronisation of different determinate struggles against oppression and segmentation will not simply be an aggregation of struggles. The latter is precisely the salient feature of the constitutively instrumentalist strategy of anti-Fascist unity that we have here sought to criticise and reject. However, such an anti-systemic unity accomplished through synchronisation of different determinate struggles against segmentation and oppression is not supposed to be the actualisation of some kind of Deleuzian strategy of coordinated accelerationism of difference either. Rather, the unity posed by the strategic articulation of the dynamic of struggle in unity, unity in struggle is supposed to be a constellational unity, which is radically distinct from the simple aggregative unity of different struggles. This constellational unity of different determinate struggles against segmentation of social labour and oppression qualitatively transforms those determinate struggles in constellationally synchronising them with one another. What that amounts to is the following: each of those determinate struggles against segmentation seeks to generalise what it incipiently is by synchronising among themselves in a manner that each of them ceases to be the competitive struggle it is destined be in its isolated operation by being a mutually coordinated manoeuvre that strives to abolish segmentation of social labour at all levels by completely functionalising division of labour.
Clearly, the strategy we seek to affirm here is one that is constituted in, as and through the dialectically articulated simultaneity of political, social and cultural revolutions. In other words, the anti-systemic strategy that will arguably be most feasible and effective against the current political regime of post-fascist neoliberal dictatorship is one that does not envision itself in terms of a temporal lag between revolution and communism. For us the only effective way to fight this insidious political regime, and the barbaric moment of capital it secures is to envisage communism as “revolution in permanence” (Marx).
Radical Notes 
Lessons from Jhandewalan and JNU: XIII Theses on Annihilation of Caste and Abolition of Classes
I
Here are a couple of questions that every Indian radical worth his (or her) salt must now squarely and sincerely confront. Is it his lot now, in this second decade of the twenty-first century, to passively contemplate various struggles against oppression being mercilessly thrashed around and beaten to a pulp? Can such struggles, and their radical protagonists, do no better than turn their unmitigated physical brutalisation and political defeat into spectacles of sorry victimhood, and wait for the collective liberal conscience of the Indian nation to be moved enough for it to toss those struggles a few scraps of legalistic relief?
These questions are doubtless inconvenient and irksome for radicals currently immersed in a misplaced sense of victory and valour. They certainly do tend to poop the self-congratulatory party our spectacle-addled leftists and left-liberals have been busy hosting for a while now. Nevertheless, those questions have become particularly pressing after the Delhi police, acting in concert with reactionary lynch-mobs, unleashed an unsparing physical assault on university students demonstrating against casteist discrimination, while demanding justice for Rohit Vemula, outside the Delhi RSS office in Jhandewalan on January 30. And now, in the wake of a concerted counter-revolutionary offensive that was jump-started at JNU, our radicals simply have no other option than to seriously grapple with those questions.
Now is perhaps the right time for them to begin considering how their sundry protest-demonstrations can turn into forms of effective urban resistance. Something that will ensure the repressive state apparatuses and the counter-revolutionary goon-squads get as good as they give.
Our radicals need to think how slogan-shouting can cease to be the raising of demands and, instead, become a call for direct political action. However, this, contrary to first appearances, is not a plea for reactive violence. It is, instead, meant to be a proposal for developing a strategy that will enable the concrete articulation of direct transformative action.
II
A protracted period of hard work is required to put such a strategy in place. This cannot happen until and unless the concrete social spaces (or spatio-temporalities) – like, for example, the university – from which such protest-demonstrations emanate, and which are themselves internally segmented and hierarchised, are rendered sites of internal struggle.
Such internal struggles are needed not so that those social spaces function better as democratic islands – that is, function more efficiently as the (differentially) inclusive spaces they have always been. Rather, such struggles are needed so that the spaces in question are reorganised in a manner that they are internally de-segmented. All politics of so-called democratisation that seek to render social spaces more inclusive do no more than reproduce the logic of differential inclusion by recomposing that logic merely at the level of its concrete socio-historical forms or appearances. Until now, such types of politics have achieved that by mainstreaming social identities and forces by intensifying segmentation – i.e., by internally segmenting them.
Clearly, such politics of progressive democratisation does no more than enhance the democracy of negotiating better the terms of one’s systemic enslavement and domination. As opposed to such politics of so-called democratisation, the politics being proposed here is that of struggles for a complete functionalisation of social division of labour, and its constitutive hierarchy.
Socio-technical division of labour – or technical composition of social labour – is the constitutive basis of the internally segmented nature, and the attendant undemocratic and exclusivist culture, of all extant social spaces. There is absolutely no doubt that struggles need to target this undemocratic culture in order to destroy it. But the destruction of this culture, by way of its radical transformation, needs to be envisaged in a fashion that it articulates the destruction of the objective, material basis of that culture – the latter being a phenomenal manifestation of the former. In other words, struggles against undemocratic culture must target it as a mediation of its objective, material basis – which is social division of labour. This basis has to be negated in, as and through an affirmation of complete functionalisation of division of labour in its various concrete forms.
This would, to reiterate our point, negate social division of labour in its caste-like operation, and the logic of value-relationality that animates it. Among other things, this is the only way in which the radical-republican Ambedkarite project of annihilation of caste can be prised free from its bourgeois intsrumentalisation to be rendered an indispensable and integral moment of the revolutionary programme of abolition (not equality) of classes in the concrete specificity of the Indian subcontinent.
But what exactly would this proposed functionalisation of division of labour amount to? This would mean the elimination of individuated and fixed work-roles by rendering them rotational, fluid and thoroughly dynamic. That would ensure the hierarchy among different moments of the overall labour process – the social-industrial process – becomes dynamic and functional too. Among other things, this would also ensure the unleashing of technological potential in a manner that people doing certain kinds of degrading work such as manual scavenging are liberated from it.
Now, class struggle-induced development of capitalism through a progressive increase in the organic composition of capital has, as Marx had predicted in Capital, Volume I (‘Machinery and Modern Industry), already brought us close to realising the complete functionalisation of division of labour. The unstoppable rise in same-skilling due to functional simplification of the labour process on account of growing technologisation of production has ensured that.
But precisely because the production process is still orientated to enable and realise capital accumulation through exchange, it continues to be structured to enable extraction of surplus-value. As a result, the growing functionalisation of division of labour is registered, experienced and lived as unprecedented economic and social precarity, even as that precarity itself is continually segmented and differentially distributed. Not for nothing does Italian Marxist Paolo Virno characterise this conjuncture of capitalist development as “the communism of capital”.
In such circumstances, the only way forward would be to accentuate and organise the functional simplification of the labour process in a manner that various work-roles tend to become more and more dynamic, and thus less and less individuated and fixed, even as exchange-relations among different sites of production are simultaneously sought to be abolished. That would be a movement in the direction of complete functionalisation of division of labour, which is the only way for us to overcome “the communism of capital” and the abject levels of precarity and suffering it entails.
III
At this point, we would do well to flesh out the theoretical contours of a political strategy that strives to accomplish that. Let us begin by exploring in some detail the relationship between social division of labour and segmentation of social labour. Social division of labour has been the organising principle of all social formations, capitalism included. That is the reason why all such social formations have been class-divided societies.
Social division of labour is actually “division of labourers”. It is the principle of segmentation in operation. Ambedkar had demonstrated that while dealing with the problem of caste and its annihilation.
What needs to be properly grasped, however, is the crucial distinction between the functionality of social division of labour in socio-economic formations of yore and its functionality in capitalism. In pre-capitalist societies, social division of labour functioned purely as the arbitrariness and irrationality of power-relations that are intrinsic to such a division. In capitalism, the rationality of objectification, which is the mutual commensurability of different things – and thus exchange-relationality as its social-phenomenal realisation – mobilises and structures the social division of labour and the irrationality of power-relations intrinsic to it.
This does not imply that in capitalism the arbitrariness of power-relations, inherent in the operation of social division of labour, disappears. All it means is the rationality of objectification and thingification – which is manifest through exchange-relations as the law of value – validates the irrationality and arbitrariness of power-relations. This is accomplished by mobilising it in a way that the irrationality of power becomes integral to the rationality of value even as it retains its intrinsic irrationality and arbitrariness.
Not for nothing did Marx characterise capital as a “living contradiction”. Capital, as should be amply evident now, is constitutively an irrationalised rationality. So, insofar as social division of labour in capitalism is concerned, its functionality gets structured by exchange-relations to be their condition of necessity. Consequently, the functionality of social division of labour is structured to be the extraction of surplus labour time (or surplus-value). Its structural functionality is no longer what it used to be in various pre-capitalist epochs: simply the extraction of surplus use-values and surplus (concrete) labour.
This is precisely the reason why the division of labourers, which social division of labour unmistakably articulates in all socio-economic formations, functions in capitalism – even in concrete situations where such division of labour and labourers is not ostensibly mediated by the sphere of exchange – as the integral systemic digit of transfer of value from some segments of social labour to others. Therefore, it also functions as the systemic digit of extraction of value from social labour by social capital.
Social division of labour, insofar as it is the function through which the structure of value-relations institutes and organises itself, becomes the basis for generalisation of division of labourers, or segmentation of social labour.
What does this generalisation of segmentation of social labour – with its basis in the functioning of socio-technical division of labour – imply? Clearly, segmentation of social labour not only exists in, as and through concrete forms of socio-technical division of labour; it often exists even within the same work-function where there is no such division of labour possible.
In other words, not only does socio-technical division of labour in capitalism directly and immediately amount to segmentation of social labour, it also generates an overall culture of segmentation. Social labour is often hierarchically divided across various relational axes where there is no such socio-technical division of labour at work in an immediate sense.
In capitalism, social division of labour not only functions directly as division of labourers, it is also the overall condition for segmentation of social labour. An example of segmentation of social labour without the direct functioning of socio-technical division of labour – albeit certainly under its condition – is the division among permanent, contract and temporary workers within the same work-function or labour-process.
IV
But the most apposite example that demonstrates segmentation of social labour both with and without its socio-technical division is the functionality of the caste system in its animation by capital’s value-relational logic. The appropriateness of this example stems from the fact that the context of this discussion happens to be that of caste-based oppression of Dalits – together, of course, with the oppression of nationalities such as Kashmiris – and struggles against it.
Not only does the caste system as social division of labour – thanks to it being a functional system of caste-occupation correlation – segment social labour, the culture it generates also serves to segment, or hierarchically divide, lower-caste and upper-caste labourers engaged in the same work-function. For instance, the caste-system in its functioning not only hierarchically divides the sweeper or the cobbler from the university student or teacher, but its culture also hierarchically segments lower-caste students (or teachers) of a particular discipline in a particular university from upper-caste ones in the same discipline and in the same university. This latter kind of segmental relationship, and the struggle it engenders, cannot be grasped in terms of it merely being the superstructure generated by the economic base of caste as social division of labour.
Of course, caste as a system of caste-occupation correlation has been rendered a key constituent of capitalist social division of labour in the historical specificity of the Indian subcontinent. It is, without doubt, a necessary condition for the existence of the culture that segments, or hierarchically divides, lower-caste labourers from the upper-caste ones within same work-functions. That said, the cultural struggle engendered by this kind of segmental relationship within the same work-function or labour-process is relatively autonomous of its economic basis in caste-based socio-technical division of labour. Which is to say, this culturally-articulated segmental relation, and the specific kind of struggle it engenders, is merely conditioned by the caste-based economy of socio-technical division of labour. It, therefore, has an autonomy all its own.
The relative autonomy of such culturally-articulated segmental relations between labourers engaged in same work-functions means that such cultural relations of hierarchy must also be grasped as economic relations of production in their own right. (It must be mentioned here that caste is only one of the indices, together with religion/ community, gender, sexuality and oppressed nationality, of such culturally-articulated economic relations of segmentation. In fact, the occupation and colonisation of Kashmir by India, together with the concomitant ideology of Indian nationalism in its ethno-racial and communal articulations in the Indian mainland, serves to regiment social labour by being constitutive of segmentation of social labour in its subcontinental specificity.)
V
The question, however, is how does one grasp a culturally-articulated relation of hierarchy in economic and productive terms. Marxists could, for one, attempt to do that by engaging rigorously with Ambedkar’s critique of socialism in Annihilation of Caste. Ambedkar had forcefully insisted that the conceptual centrality of property relations in socialist analysis was responsible for the paradigmatic blindness of Indian socialists to the problem of caste.
That problem was, as Ambedkar saw it, primarily one of social recognition and dignity, and only secondarily that of property relations as and where it manifest itself along the axis of caste relations. What Ambedkar was arguing is that caste-based discrimination and casteist atrocities, and the concomitant absence of dignity in caste relations, is not necessarily and directly correspondent to the level of tangible property or economic wealth one holds. The examples with which he substantiated his argument are all logically foolproof. In fact, his contention is also borne out by our example here of caste-based culturally-articulated segmentation of labourers engaged in the same work-function.
Clearly, it is the burden of Marxists to adequately address the issue raised by Ambedkar by re-conceptualising property relations. They should be able to show how property relations are not to be grasped merely in terms of possession of tangible wealth, but primarily in terms of one’s relational and relative control over conditions of production and/or reproduction. Tangible means of production or property being, in such circumstances, merely a socio-historically specifying subset of conditions of production.
It is only through such a reconceptualisation of property relations that one will be able to rearticulate the question of social recognition and dignity – raised so pertinently by Ambedkar from the Dalit location within the overall composition of social labour – as a question of psychologically-articulated labour for social reproduction, or production of labour-power (the abstract capacity for living labour). Such a re-conceptualisation of property relations is something that Marx, particularly the Marx of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value, arguably enables by virtue of having made his theory of value-relations the conceptual bedrock of property relations and/or social relations of commodity production.
Clearly, property relations as social relations constitutive of degrees of control (or lack of control) over conditions of production basically amounts to social relations constitutive of degrees of control over one’s labour-time. Marx’s value-theoretic analysis of property relations as social relations of production reveals precisely that – for, value is the ratio of surplus labour-time to socially necessary labour-time.
Now, in such circumstances, what would it mean for Marxists to rearticulate Ambedkar’s conception of caste as a system of relations constitutive primarily of hierarchisation of social recognition and dignity, in terms of psychologically-articulated labour for production of labour-power? The differential distribution of social dignity – more precisely, the differential distribution of social indignity – which is constitutive of a culturally-articulated segmental relation between lower-caste and upper-caste labourers engaged in the same work-function, amounts to a relative intensification of psychologically-articulated labour for production of labour-power for the lower-caste labourers in relation to their upper-caste counterparts.
In other words, lower-caste labourers in having to perform the additional psychological labour of grappling with the relative lack of social dignity, experience a relative intensification of labour-time for social reproduction – which is the time for production of labour-power – vis-à-vis their upper-caste colleagues.
This insight is the result of an encounter between Marxism as a theoretical approach of revolutionary class politics and Ambedkarism as a radical-republican epistemological project of annihilation of caste. It is particularly significant now in this neoliberal conjuncture of affective capital. Most importantly, it helps us grasp and rearticulate Dalit Bahujan struggles against various forms of denial of affirmative action – qua reservation in jobs and educational institutions – as a determinate index of struggle against segmentation of social labour, which is wrought through caste-based discrimination and/or oppression in the concrete specificity of the so-called systems of modern employment and education.
More accurately, such struggles against caste-based discrimination and/or oppression ought to be grasped and rearticulated as struggles for social wage specific to a particular kind and form of segmentation of social labour. Once we do that, we will see that such anti-caste struggles, not unlike all other struggles against various other forms of differentiation based on wages and/or social wages, tend to be determinate struggles against the logic of segmentation of social labour.
It must be stated here that in its moment of being a determinate struggle overcoming the logic of segmentation of social labour in its concrete specification, such an anti-caste struggle, like all other determinate struggles against segmentation, is singularity as a monad of its own universalisability. So, unless a struggle, which tends to determinately negate the logic of segmentation of social labour, is able to generalise that which it instantiates in its determinateness, it will tend to inevitably reproduce the logic of segmentation of social labour. That is because in its failure to generalise that which it determinately instantiates it effects the recomposition of socio-historical form of segmentation or value-relationality.
Clearly, struggles generated by various forms of segmentation of social labour are, with regard to their respective specificities, articulations of determinate destruction-recomposition of social labour in its constitutively segmental existence. Hence, struggles against denial of social wage through casteist discrimination and oppression – not unlike struggles against various other forms and types of wage-based and/or social wage-based differentiation – are, at once, the instantiation of the tendency of revolution and the mediation of the counter-tendency of juridical reform.
In that context, radical sections of the Dalit Bahujan movement, together with radical sections from within the largely non-Dalitised subcontinental Left, would do well to engage with various politico-ideological forms generated by the larger Dalit project of social emancipation by way of grasping those forms as a dialectic of the positive and the negative. That is, those forms, which are respective experiences of oppression and subalternisation rendered as articulations of resistance, ought to be grasped as a dialectic of determinate instantiation of the politics of de-segmentation, and the inhibition of such politics by its hypostasis into an ideology of recomposition.
It must be clarified here that such a politico-ideological form would, in its moment of being the tendency of recomposition, become constitutive of the internal division of the oppressed social group into sub-groups that are, in relation to one another, oppressor and oppressed. Meanwhile, the original relationship of domination of the overall Dalit segment of social labour by its non-Dalit segment would also stand reproduced. A good example of that is the socio-economic differentiation – often concomitant with segmentation based on “sanskritisation” and other forms of cultural modernisation – between educated, professionalised sections of Dalit Bahujans and the not-so-fortunate Dalit ‘underclass’, even as the former find themselves hierarchically separated out from their non-Dalit compatriots through culturally-articulated socio-economic processes.
It ought to be mentioned here that the non-Dalit segments of social labour, in the meantime, too keep undergoing internal differentiation along various other socio-economic axes that are either directly based on socio-technical division of labour or indirectly conditioned by it.
VI
We must, at this point, realise that there is a crucial condition to be fulfilled if the proposed dialectical engagement with politico-ideological forms generated by various Dalit-Bahujan struggles is to be theoretically comprehensive and politically productive. The suggested dialectical engagement with politico-ideological forms constitutive of various Dalit Bahujan struggles for social emancipation should enable the radical sections from within the largely non-Dalitised Left to recognise that the various ideological forms of their own Marxism too are as much a dialectic of determinate instantiation of the politics of de-segmentation and its limit, as the politico-ideological forms of various Dalit Bahujan struggles.
Only then will those non-Dalitised radicals realise that the organisations and groups to which they belong now function as ideological state apparatuses constitutive of the perpetuation of segmentation of social labour; and not only along the axis of caste. Clearly, there is no point in demonstrating the reformist moment of Dalit Bahujan politico-ideological forms unless one is able to simultaneously reveal the reformist and petty-bourgeois identitarian moment of the ‘Marxist’ politico-ideological forms of the non-Dalitised Left. In theoretical terms, it would amount to an abject abuse of dialectics if one were to be ‘dialectical’ with regard to the former while choosing not to train that dialectical gun at the latter.
Politically, this would, of course, imply that sizeable sections of the non-Dalitised Left continue with their preponderant propensity to instrumentally mobilise Dalit struggles and Dalit social locations, all in the name of building an inter-caste unity of proletarians. That, needless to say, would amount to an intensified and accelerated perpetuation of the value-relational logic of segmentation of social labour precisely in the process of building a movement that is supposedly committed to the destruction of the law of value.
Of course, it is only by engaging in a comprehensive dialectical criticism that radical sections from within the Dalit Bahujan movement can overcome the reformist politics of progressive democratization, which thwarts the potential for revolutionary generalisation of abolition of classes inherent in its project of annihilation of caste. On the other hand, it is only such dialectical criticism that will likely enable the non-Dalitised subcontinental Left – certain sections of it at any rate – to break out of the double-bind it is currently caught in with regard to Dalit Bahujan struggles for social emancipation.
VII
On that score, the Indian – or the subcontinental – Left can be broadly divided into two categories. First, there are those sections of the non-Dalitised Left, which even as they recognise the specificity of caste-based oppression, deny the various Dalit politico-ideological forms their relative autonomy and their moments of radical validity. These non-Dalitised Leftists reject, out of hand, those forms as so many articulations of reformism and petty-bourgeois identity politics without any dialectical-critical engagement with them. Their contention being that oppressed social groups such as Dalit Bahujans – or Muslims for that matter – ought to hitch their respective socio-political destinies to the cart of an abstractly articulated programme of working-class politics. Here class is envisaged as a sociologised category, a master-identity as it were, which is embodied by this or that party-like organisation, and which is meant to subsume all struggles against different forms and kinds of subalternisation and oppression into a larger single movement to capture state-power.
These party-Leftists tend to insist that only after such a ‘united’ working-class movement has taken state-power can their so-called party of the proletarians go about the business of putting an end to different kinds and forms of oppression and subalternisation by way of exercising the state-power so captured. Such a ‘party of the working class’, it must be reiterated here, strives to institute itself by uniting various sections and segments of the working people by having them submerge their relatively autonomous and determinate politico-ideological articulations against the logic of segmentation into that single movement for capturing state-power.
What is clearly missed by such a strategic approach of premature universalisation is the fact that this party-like organisation – which strives to forge such a unity in order to build a movement for capturing state-power – becomes the embodiment of an algebra of measure. It is, therefore, an adjudicatory form, vis-à-vis different segments of social labour. As a result, it functions as a form of instrumentalist politics, which is, therefore, rendered an interpellated and interpellating apparatus that tends to preserve and reproduce the value-relational logic of segmentation of social labour along various relational-identitarian axes, including that of caste.
Consequently, it tends to be the embodied form of preservation and reproduction of the capitalist state-form constitutive of the segmental grammar of value-relations while purportedly struggling against it. The inadequacy, or absence, of representation of oppressed social groups such as Dalits, Muslims, women and so on in important leadership positions of such party-like organisations is a symptom of the dangerously fallacious political strategy constitutive of such organisations. Our point here is, however, not to figure out how such Left organisations can become more comprehensively representative. Not at all! The point is, instead, to reconceptualise the mode of revolutionary-proletarian organisation of social labour in a manner that the problem of representation is precluded.
Such reconceptualisation can take place only as an integral and indispensable moment of rethinking and re-envisaging the strategic mode of revolutionary generalisation with regard to various anti-oppression struggles. It must be reiterated here that such struggles are determinate and thus monadic instantiations of the politics of de-segmentation. What such a reconceptualisation of the mode of revolutionary-proletarian organisation of social labour requires is one engage with every such struggle, and its concomitant politico-ideological form, as an asymmetrical dialectic. This would be an asymmetrical dialectic between self-activity of a particular segment of social labour determinately instantiating the self-organisation of the class in its collectivity, and simultaneously the limit of such self-organisation.
But let us not get ahead of ourselves. We shall discuss what is arguably the most appropriate and politically productive form of revolutionary-proletarian organisation while attempting later to describe and explicate in some detail the correct strategic mode of revolutionary generalisation. For now, let us focus on the second category of non-Dalitised subcontinental Leftists, and particularly and mostly non-party Left-liberals.
The strategic approach of these sections of the non-Dalitised Left and Left-liberals, which also includes in their ranks some libertarians and self-styled anarchists, is underpinned either by the rights-based discourse of progressive democratisation, or by one of the several poststructuralist discourses of difference. In terms of socio-political effects, the strategies that emanate from this second camp of non-Dalitised Leftists and Left-liberals – regardless of whether those strategies are theoretically orientated by the discourse of rights and essential human freedom, or a poststructuralist discourse of difference – are similar. That is to say, the socio-political effects produced by those strategies, regardless of their respectively distinct theoretical and philosophical accents, are reformist. And this shows that the strategic orientation of their politics, especially with regard to the Dalit question, is instrumentalist.
This particular section of non-Dalitised Leftists seeks to recognise the autonomy of various politico-ideological expressions of Dalit struggles to either bring them within a larger aggregative space of unity of struggles against different forms of oppression; or to mobilise the coordinated acceleration of difference those struggles are. In either case, the systemically-articulated objective relations of segmentation among those various social locations of oppression are obscured and left untouched. In such circumstances, the swiftness with which this second category of non-Dalitised Leftists recognise the autonomy of various politico-ideological forms of Dalit struggles has more than an air of instrumentalist bad-faith about it.
The imaginary at work, as far as both categories of non-Dalitised Leftists are concerned, is a redistributionist, statist one. Not surprisingly, both types of non-Dalitised Indian Leftists suffer from an incurable state-fetishism, which makes them, in the final analysis, nationalist. It must be stated here that the two categories of the largely non-Dalitised Left are, notwithstanding the apparent differences in their tactical-programmatic articulations, two sides of the same coin.
VIII
In the light of our discussion so far, we ought to unambiguously assert that struggles against brahminism as a form of caste-based social domination are struggles that determinately instantiate the destruction of segmentation of social labour. In other words, they in their respective particularities militate against the concrete mediation of the value-relational logic of segmentation that a particular form of social oppression maintains and operationalises. In such circumstances, struggles against culturally-articulated caste-based economic segmentation between lower-caste and upper-caste labourers engaged in the same work-function militate against the value-relational logic of economic segmentation in its concrete specification.
It also tends to concomitantly challenge the culture or ideology of casteism/brahminism, which is generated by caste-based articulation of the capitalist economy of socio-technical division of labour, and which, in turn, tends to reinforce that economy. Clearly, such struggles are indispensably integral to the destruction of the economy of caste-based socio-technical division of labour and the capitalist mode of production that animates it now. Such caste-based social division of labour is a constituent historical moment of the capitalist mode of production as socio-technical division of labour along various axes of both caste-based and non-caste forms of social relations.
Hence, struggles against culturally-articulated caste-based segmentation of labourers engaged in the same work-function constitute the necessary condition for the destruction of the capitalist mode of production. That is so because those struggles challenge the capitalist logic of segmentation and value-relationality in their concrete mediation by those culturally-articulated casteist economic relations. They also tend to ensure the culture of segmentation, which reinforces and legitimises the economy of caste-based social division of labour, is undermined. However, the economy of caste-based social division of labour, and the capitalist mode of production within which it stands rearticulated, is what generates such culture, and thus culturally-articulated economic relations of segmentation, in the first place. As a result, to privilege the waging of struggles against the culture of segmentation, and culturally-articulated casteist economic relations, over struggles against the destruction of the caste-based economy of socio-technical division of labour, and the capitalist mode of production, would be self-defeating.
The culture of segmentation, and culturally-articulated economic segmentations, cannot be decisively destroyed without negating the economy of caste-based socio-technical division of labour and the capitalist mode of production as a whole. In that context, an effective strategy will be one that is constitutive of the dialectical simultaneity of struggles against the culture of segmentation, which reinforces the economy of caste-based social division of labour and the capitalist mode of production; struggles against the caste-based economy of social division of labour, which generates and maintains that culture; and struggles against the capitalist mode of production, which is the constitutive value-relational logic of both caste-based and non-caste forms of socio-technical division of labour.
It must be reiterated here that the brahminical caste-system in its immediate discursive functioning is as much a culturally-articulated economic and social relationship of power and oppression now in capitalism as it was in pre-capitalist social formations in this part of the world. But while in pre-capitalism it accomplished the extraction of surplus labour, in capitalism the same functionality of power and oppression accomplishes transfer and extraction of surplus labour-time. This renders caste-based relations of power and oppression a key constituent of the differentially-inclusive totality of social relations of commodity production in all their caste and non-caste variety.
This is the actuality of capital, or the law of value, as a value-chain. In other words, brahminism – and the caste relations it manifests in its operation as both economy and culture – is a specification of capital in the concrete context of the some of the key sectors of socio-economic life on the Indian subcontinent. Hence, caste-based economic relations, and their constitutive ideology and habitus of brahminism, is a discursive specification of capital. In such circumstances, anti-brahminical struggles engendered by caste relations are as much moments of militation against the caste system as they are determinate moments of struggle against capital.
Now capital is not a stock or an entity external to caste that has to be destroyed for caste to be annihilated. Rather, capital is, as we have seen above, a differentially-inclusive mode of organising social relations to transfer and extract surplus labour-time. In other words, it is a differentially-inclusive force-field – or conjuncture – of various types of social relations of doing and appropriating labour. These social relations in their totalised articulation are tantamount to the production and extraction of surplus-value and surplus labour-time respectively.
It is in this context that one needs to appreciate the importance of the aforementioned strategy of dialectically-articulated simultaneity of the three types of struggles. Different forms of each of those three types of struggles – struggles against the culture of caste and culturally-articulated casteist socio-economic segmentation; struggles against caste-based social division of labour; and struggles against non-caste forms of socio-technical division of labour – are all equally necessary conditions for the total negation of capital.
But none of these struggles, by themselves, constitute the sufficient condition to accomplish that. The sufficient condition for the total negation of capital would be the dialectically-articulated simultaneity of all different forms of each of those three types of struggles. It is in this sense that various types and forms of struggle against segmentation of social labour are characterised as being relatively autonomous. That is to say the various forms of each of those three types of struggles must be mutually synchronised for them to be rendered the sufficient condition for the total negation of capital.
Without such mutual synchronisation – which Alain Badiou would describe as the mutual partaking of generic singularities – each of those three types of struggles in their isolated articulation would end up undermining themselves as the necessary condition for the abolition of capital that they are in their respective moments of emerging. In fact, those struggles in their isolated operation lead to the recomposition of capital as a force-field of differentially-inclusive social relations.
IX
It must, however, be clearly stated here that the mutual synchronisation of these three types of struggles is not simply their aggregation. It is not coordination among them in their respectively isolated operation either. Such synchronisation is, instead, the constellating of those different types and forms of struggle with one another.
To rigorously and fundamentally distinguish between aggregation and constellation one needs to understand that every juncture of struggle against a particular kind of oppression, and the form of segmentation that such oppression secures, is in a mutually segmented relation with every other phenomenal and/or typological juncture of struggle. That is precisely how the character or mode of capital as the force-field of differentially-inclusive social relations is that of a conjuncture – the unity or contemporaneity of different and thus non-contemporaneous spatio-temporal junctures of oppression and struggle. This clearly indicates the unity of all such struggles shall be more than ephemeral and pragmatic only when such unity is, in turn, forged through struggles to abolish the segmental relations among those junctures of struggles.
The strategic articulation of this perpetual dynamic of struggle in unity and unity in struggle is what the constellating of those various junctures of struggle amounts to. Such a constellational strategy will be nothing but the uninterrupted process of complete functionalisation of division of labour as the struggle to abolish both its socio-technical structuring and the culture of segmentation such structuring concomitantly generates. This is the unrelenting process of production of politics in radical antagonism to the relentless process of the politics of production. This is the process of technical composition of social labour being rendered its political composition in antagonism to the process of political composition of social labour being technically recomposed.
It is, therefore, logically and strategically fallacious to talk of deferring the struggle for annihilation of caste till the struggle for abolition of capital is accomplished. By the same token, one cannot talk of holding in abeyance the question of total negation of capital until caste is annihilated by way of full democratisation of caste-based social relations. As a matter of fact, the programme for complete democratisation of caste relations will be a reality only through the abolition of classes. So, the two seemingly contradictory political positions above are actually historicist mirror-images of one another.
Annihilation of caste is an indispensable historical moment of the revolutionary politics for abolition of classes, even as the abolition of classes is the necessary condition for the annihilation of caste. What is being strategically proposed here is the dialectically-articulated simultaneity of cultural, social and political revolutions. More precisely, this strategic proposal is for the short-circuiting of struggles for democratisation with the movement for communism.
That would be the uninterrupted simultaneity of struggles for democratisation as tactically determinate instantiations of the real movement of communism, thereby rendering that real movement actual as the process of uninterruptedly simultaneous articulations of the former.
X
We would, at this point, do well to clarify that the position we are staking out here is neither ‘classist’ nor intersectionalist. We do not think the working class is another closed sociology or identity that needs to either subordinate and subsume the struggles of other oppressed identities within its own larger struggle; or, figure out and forge points of intersection with them. If anything, the theoretical position that underpins our strategic proposal is sedimentalist.
For us, class is the sedimental logic of every identity or socio-historical group, which renders each one of them an internally divided and asymmetrically dialectical terrain of two antagonistic tendencies – capital as real abstraction, and the singularity that is its determinate overcoming. It is this that renders every struggle against oppression, and the socio-historical group constitutive of such a struggle, relatively autonomous.
This sedimentalist approach to the twinned problems of capital and class is, without doubt, theoretically indebted to the concept of “overdetermination” as developed and explicated by Althusser. But unlike Althusser, the political strategy we seek to infer from this concept of overdetermination is not entryism.
An entryist strategy would return us, once again, to the party-state conception and modality of organisation, wherein an external party-form seeks to unite various relatively autonomous struggles by entering their respective specificities in order to be the generalisation of the determinate overcoming of capital that each of those struggles autonomously instantiate in and as their respective emerging. In seeking to accomplish this unity-as-generalisation, the external party-form tends to necessarily regulate, in a state-like fashion, the contradictions among those relatively autonomous struggles. Clearly, this strategy of entryism, thanks to the party-state modality that is integral to it, ends up reproducing the capitalist logic of instrumentalisation and subalternisation precisely in the moment of fighting against it.
The strategic approach we have sought to propose above, and which is inferred from the Althusserian concept of overdetermination, is arguably a left-communist one. This strategic approach, to summarise it here, consists of affirming the relative autonomy of every struggle against oppression in a manner that one envisages revolutionary generalisation as the constellated synchronisation of those struggles. Such a left-communist strategic approach arguably articulates an anti-substitutionist, and even a post-party, form and modality of organising politics. The post-party organisation is a form of loose organisation of militants generated by their mutual coordination. The modality of this mutual coordination is Bakhtin’s dialogical agon.
These militants belong to no external or pre-given party-form. They inhabit diverse junctures of struggle so that they can engage in a continuously ongoing process of inquiry to demonstrate to those struggles their respective limits. All this so that those struggles, and the self-activity that animates each one of them, can envisage themselves in a manner that they prefigure the overcoming of their respective limits by seeking to constellate with one another in order to emerge as a self-organising process of social labour in and as its own abolition. This would be the generalisation of destruction of segmentation by virtue of being the generalised affirmation of de-segmentation.
Clearly, the loose, post-party form of organisation is generated by the coordinated mode of mutual interactivity of militants for thrashing out, clarifying and fine-tuning the principles of inquiry and self-inquiry in the light of the specificity of their respective experiences. As we have indicated earlier, this post-party form and mode of revolutionary organisation tends to entirely preclude the problem of representation, which invariably dogs the party-form, and its substitutionist and instrumentalist modality, of revolutionary organisation.
XI
Let us now try and give our discussion here a more concrete focus by turning our attention to the specific spatio-temporality of the university. Such a focus is significant because the discussion here is framed by movements of university students against different forms of oppression – which, therefore, gives this discussion its immediate context. Besides, the significance of such a focus also lies in the modern university being the key constitutive facilitator of socio-technical division of labour along the hierarchised axis of mental and manual labour. This is reflected not only in the hierarchy internal to the university system but also between the university system as a whole and the world outside it.
Clearly, university-based higher education is an ideological apparatus of the capitalist system to segment labour-power, and thereby internally divide and hierarchise social labour. It is, therefore, also a factory that produces the commodities of knowledge and labour-power.
For a movement that erupts from within a university to generalise itself as the abolition of the hierarchised separation between itself and the world outside, it should constitute itself in the process of abolishing that logic of segmentation between mental and manual work as manifest within the university itself.
In the final analysis, the space of the university and the space of the world outside it will have to constellate with one another by way of overcoming their segmental division along the axis of mental and manual labour. Only then will the politics against the counter-revolutionary project be able to generalise and strengthen itself as the revolutionary violence of the constellational real movement. But given the immediate context of university students demonstrating in protest against the institutional congealments of the counter-revolutionary project, we would be quite justified in insisting that abolition of the hierarchised division of mental and manual work begin from within the university itself.
The undemocratic cultural separation and division between Dalit Bahujan and non-Dalit students – or, for that matter, between students along other identitarian axes of community, gender, gender in caste, caste in gender, gender in community, community in gender and so on – has to be fought against. But struggles against those versions and variants of undemocratic culture – which are constitutive of the field of separation of mental from manual work, and division of social labour – can be accomplished only when those struggles are coterminus with battles to reorganise the university space in a fashion that the hierarchical social distribution of labour among and within teachers, students and other workers of the university (mess workers, cleaning and maintenance staff and so on) tends towards being completely functionalised. Only this will render the university the ground from which revolutionary generalisation, as the constellation of the university space with spaces outside it, can be effectively envisaged.
XII
The short point of all this analysis is that unless such politics of de-segmentation of social spaces becomes the generative basis of collective demonstrations of anger and discontent that emanate from such spaces to spill out of them, such demand-raising demonstrations will lapse into mere radical bargaining and lobby politics. This, needless to say, will give the political-economic regime an opportunity to overcome its crisis. The militant energy that is registered in such protest-demonstrations will, in the absence of a concretely articulated politics of de-segmentation within the university itself, inevitably end up being exhausted by their discursive appearances.
There is a very definite reason for that. As long as concrete political actions to reorganise social spaces into sites of de-segmentation are not envisaged, the protest-demonstrations emanating from those spaces will not really and effectively be the expressions of collective rage they purport to be. In the absence of concrete political actions to reorganise those social spaces in order to de-segment them, such forms of protest-demonstrations emanating from those spaces will objectively, and finally even subjectively, amount to instrumentalised mobilisation of the concerns and discontent of some (subordinate) segments by the politics of disaffection of some other (relatively and relationally dominant) segments.
As a result, the constellational cohesiveness that is necessary for such protest-demonstrations to swiftly morph into effective formations of revolutionary action will obviously be lacking. The trust-deficit among various sections and segments of a particular social space, on account of that space continuing to exist in its constitutive segmentation, and the instrumentalism of ‘collective’ politics emanating from it, will ensure that.
The ‘collectivity’ of this politics of unity of struggles, manifest by such protest demonstrations, will, at best, be a pragmatic alliance, and thus an ineffectual, short-lived one. In fact, the reluctance demonstrated by such ‘radical’ politics of democratisation and inclusiveness to recognise the contradictions internal to the social space from which it stems, and its concomitant failure to concretely resolve them by abolishing the segmentations in which those contradictions inhere, makes the situation even worse.
The trust-deficit among segments constitutive of a social space is further accentuated by the instrumentalist politics expressed in forms of protest-demonstrations on account of those forms not being organic extensions of concrete political actions to completely de-segment the space in question. This, in turn, enables the counter-revolutionary political forces to further leverage those conflicts and contradictions among segments constitutive of an apparently homogeneous social space to either instrumentally neutralise, or mobilise and deploy some of those subordinate segments in a fascist manoeuvre against some other segments, thereby serving to strengthen the dictatorship of neoliberal capital.
In fact, it is precisely the practice of such subjectively substitutionist and objectively instrumentalist politics by various kinds of progressive political forces that has cleared the ground for the ascendancy of this political regime of neoliberal dictatorship in the first place.
XIII
This dictatorship of neoliberal capital – precisely the situation we are currently confronted with – is far more insidious than Fascism as a political regime. It tends to articulate the regimentation of the capitalist anarchy of differential distribution of insecurity across the entire spectrum of social labour by way of being the agency and enabler of differentially distributed capacities of social oppression. It is the guarantor of rights, no longer as differential distribution of positive entitlements, but as differential distribution of negative determinations. It is the fascisation of entire society – what is often called “the generalised state of exception” – and which therefore renders Fascism as a political regime redundant.
This dictatorship of neoliberal capital is a situation of fascism without fascists. In that sense, it is a post-fascist socio-political order. Unless this is properly grasped and rigorously made sense of, our everyday political practice against the counter-revolutionary project in its conjunctural specification will objectively, and at times even subjectively, continue to be in the service of precisely that which it seeks to triumph over.
When concrete political actions to reorganise a social space in order to entirely de-segment it becomes the basis for forms of political movement emanating from such a space against a counter-revolutionary state-formation, such forms acquire inestimable resources of revolutionary militancy. And that is not all. The politics integral to such forms of constellational collectivity also tend to ensure that contradictions internal to the social base of a counter-revolutionary project get further sharpened leading to the implosion of that project.
All those who aspire to institute the duration of revolutionary democracy would do well to recognise the futility of the strategic approach of fighting the current dispensation as if it were a Fascist political regime. This is a strategic approach that is currently dominant across the entire spectrum of Left and Left-liberal politics in India. This so-called anti-fascist approach seeks to counter-pose a popular frontist, homogenising unity of struggles against the counter-revolutionary bloc that it designates as the bloc of Fascism, and which it therefore sees as being homogeneous and internally cohesive.
The problem with this strategic approach – a problem that has become particularly acute in this late-capitalist conjuncture of heightened precarity – is the following: its objectively instrumentalist character becomes so accentuated that it dissipates the political energy of struggles against the counter-revolutionary advance even as the counter-revolutionary political project is able to strengthen itself by leveraging the deepening of contradictions and conflicts inevitably wrought by such instrumentalist politics of so-called anti-fascist unity.
Such a strategy is instrumentalist because in envisaging the building of a cohesive and homogeneous anti-fascist bloc – which is thoroughly informed by the principle of unity of different struggles – it seeks to aggregate various disaffected segments of society by papering over the contradictions among their various discontents. As a result, such a strategy of ‘anti-fascism’ fails to emphasise the signal importance of envisaging a politics that would target the institutional congealments of the counter-revolutionary project by necessarily basing its attack on struggles that recognise various segments within that bloc of so-called anti-fascist unity in order to abolish them.
The strategy of building a homogenised ‘anti-fascist’ unity further deepens the contradictions within that unity and leaves the ground open for the counter-revolutionary forces to instrumentally mobilise and deploy them for entirely restorative ends. Such counter-revolutionary mobilisation, needless to say, is constitutive of further deepening the segmentation of social labour, and intensification of the process of differentiated distribution of insecurity, subalternisation and oppression.