Michael Perelman 

The Financial Crisis Goes Beyond Finance

The crisis today in mortgage lending does not come as a surprise to me. I discussed the build up to the crisis in a book published last year, The Confiscation of American Prosperity (1).

The book describes more than three decades of concerted efforts to restructure the economy to respond to the antiauthoritarian spirit of the 1960s. Most important of all, the counterrevolution to the 60s was concerned about a decline in the rate of profits. The objective was to remake the United States as a capitalist’s utopia with strict market discipline for ordinary people, while showing special favors on business. Tax cuts, deregulation, and a more business-friendly legal structure became the order of the day.

In this environment, the legal framework for union organization soon became unfriendly. Success showed up relatively quickly in the labor market, where capital halted the increase of wages by 1972  – the year when real hourly wages peaked. Since then wages have oscillated but never again reached that level.

Profits began to recover, but on closer examination the recovery was unusual. In competitive industries, profits were not particularly high. Profits in producing goods concentrated in industries protected by intellectual property or government favoritism were better. But the big profits came in finance. Even major industrial firms, such as General Motors, Ford, or General Electric began relying on their financial divisions for much of their profits.

What was happening? According to the textbook model of economic growth, new productivity translates into higher wages, which, in turn, create more demand, which spurs industry to produce newer or better products, increasing productivity. In recent decades, debt rather than income spurred demand.

As profits recovered, more affluent people saw their portfolios increasing, creating what economists call the wealth effect: the increasing value of their stocks, and later of their houses, was treated as income, which generated demand. Frequently, people used their houses to borrow money to support this demand.

Production of physical goods was largely neglected. I am reminded of a conversation between Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, a quarter millennium ago. Boswell observed:

“Very little business appeared to be going forward in Lichfield. I found however two strange manufactures for so inland a place, sail-cloth and streamers for ships: and I observed them making some saddle-cloths, and dressing sheep skins: but upon the whole, the busy hand of industry seemed to be quite slackened. “Surely, Sir, (said I,) you are an idle set of people.”

“Sir (said Johnson) “We are a City of Philosophers: we work with our Heads, and make the Boobies of Birmingham work for us with their hands.”(2)

Johnson, of course, was being ironic. The philosophers of the new economy were not. They breathlessly referred to a weightless economy (3). Tom Peters, the management guru, derided old-line businesses as “Lumpy-object purveyors” (4). Even Alan Greenspan is fond of rhapsodizing about how modern production techniques are making the economy lighter and lighter:

“The world of 1948 was vastly different from the world of 1996. The American economy, more then than now, was viewed as the ultimate in technology and productivity in virtually all fields of economic endeavor. The quintessential model of industrial might in those days was the array of vast, smoke-encased integrated steel mills in the Pittsburgh district and on the shores of Lake Michigan. Output was things, big physical things.

“Virtually unimaginable a half century ago was the extent to which concepts and ideas would substitute for physical resources and human brawn in the production of goods and services. In 1948 radios were still being powered by vacuum tubes. Today, transistors deliver far higher quality with a mere fraction of the bulk. Fiber-optics has [sic] replaced huge tonnages of copper wire, and advances in architectural and engineering design have made possible the construction of buildings with much greater floor space but significantly less physical material than the buildings erected just after World War II. Accordingly, while the weight of current economic output is probably only modestly higher than it was a half century ago, value added, adjusted for price change, has risen well over threefold”.(5)

Nobody seemed to sense that anything was awry. Leaders in the U.S. were content to let the modern equivalent of the boobies of Manchester produce their goods in Asian sweatshops, and then borrow the proceeds from their masters to support their consumption.

The game depended upon continued growth, whether illusory or real. Deregulation helped to promote illusions of prosperity. So did the dot.com hysteria of the late 1990s. When the bubble burst, the Federal Reserve came to the rescue with low interest rates. Temporarily lacking sufficient confidence in the stock market, real estate seemed a better bet.

Real estate prices soared. People could borrow more on their houses. And with rapidly rising real estate prices, people could comfortably lend money to people who could not afford the loans because, after all, real estate would always increase in value.

To make the illusion even more solid, people believed that they could avoid risk. Ratings agencies told investors that paper based on this real estate was just a shade more risky than U.S. government bonds. To seal the deal, investors sold “insurance,” which promised to cover losses if the investment would go sour.

This insurance business was so brisk that the amount of insurance sold was many times more than the face value of the investments. After all, selling this insurance was an easy way to profit from real estate market, which had ahead to go nowhere but up.

When the music stopped playing, the regulators discovered that nobody was watching the store. Far more insurance was sold than the insurers could afford to cover. The ratings agencies are putting their seal of approval on the paper to get more fees.

The government just agreed to buy up bad debt to the tune of $700 billion, bailing out both crooks and incompetents. The government debt will give the neoliberals excuse to cut more programs to help needy people, while bailing out the rich.

Something similar happened a few decades ago with another war, a different Bush, and the same John McCain. Many years ago, Lyndon Johnson, who would have just celebrated his hundredth birthday, found himself stuck in a war he couldn’t win. He also knew that if he raised taxes to pay for the war, the public would demand an immediate halt with a fury that he could not resist. Johnson relied on borrowing, which raised interest rates.

Savings and loan institutions, like the investment banks today, borrowed short and lent long. In this case, people put their savings in the banks and the banks lent out money on 30-year mortgages. To prevent gouging and make mortgages affordable, the savings and loans were prevented from paying interest rates high enough to keep depositors from exiting, which could leave them bankrupt.

The Reagan administration, including daddy Bush, moved to deregulate the savings and loans. Given this newfound freedom, crooks and nincompoops (including the current President Bush’s younger brother) rushed in to take advantage of profiting from other people’s money. As the scope of this disaster was becoming obvious, five senators, including John McCain along with Alan Greenspan (perhaps the Godfather of the recent financial crisis), rushed in to defend one of the more egregious Savings and Loan operations run by Charles Keating. Oh, yes, a small savings-and-loan in Arkansas, which was connected with Bill Clinton (who later allowed Congress to deregulate the current financial system, led by Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain’s chief economic adviser) also ran into difficulties.

The savings-and-loan scam crashed leaving the government to pick up the pieces at a cost that is still debated, but which was still well over $100 billion – pocket change today.

The difference today is that our politicians now promise effective regulation this time around, just as they did with Sarbanes-Oxley in the wake of crash of Enron and the rest of the dot.com boom.

The Financial Side of the Financial Crisis

This crisis should be a teachable moment, but speculative excesses are a part of the DNA of capitalism. Leo Tolstoy began his epic novel, Anna Karenina, with the famous observation, “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Much the same can be said about depressions. Each depression seems unique and subject to as many interpretations as the most dysfunctional family. Hence what is unique to this crisis is the way that its build up departs from the general textbook model. Also, as I mentioned above, the other defining characteristic of this crisis is that debt rather than income spurred demand.

Financial assets demand a different treatment. Capital reacts with horror when wages increase, demanding the Federal Reserve to slam on the brakes. In contrast, soaring prices of financial assets are presumed to be incontrovertible evidence of a healthy economy.

The increasing value of these assets spurs people to increase consumption, often taking on debt, confident that their assets will appreciate even more. As Mark Twain observed about an earlier Gilded Age: “Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society … “I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars”.”

In 2000, when the excesses and frauds of Enron, World Com, and the dot.com boom came to light, financial markets shuddered. The Federal Reserve came to the rescue lowering interest rates, which reduced monthly mortgage payments, allowing people to buy more expensive housing.

Once housing prices begin to rise, housing becomes an investment as well as the source of shelter. In addition, people, who suffered losses during the dot.com bust, saw housing is a safer investment than the stock market. Housing then transmuted into personal ATM machines, allowing people to borrow freely on the rising value of their property.

Underlying this financial froth, something more ominous was occurring. Business refused to spend much for investment in productive activities. Again, the textbooks tell a different story. They teach that high profits translate into investment, which create jobs, spurring demand, and making the economy grow. Such was not the case this time around.

Earlier this year, the British financial journalist, Martin Wolf, observed:

“The US itself looks almost like a giant hedge fund. The profits of financial companies jumped from below 5 per cent of total corporate profits, after tax, in 1982 to 41 per cent in 2007.”(6)

This estimate is probably too conservative because many nonfinancial companies increasingly depend upon finance. General Electric, and in their more prosperous years, Ford and General Motors, largely depended upon finance. Retail companies offer credit cards in effect, selling insurance on their products in the form of extended warranties.

The U.S. Department of Commerce reported that in 1992 about a third of all workers employed in U.S. manufacturing industries were actually doing service-type jobs (e.g., in finance, purchasing, marketing, and administration). Updating this work, needless to say, has not been a high priority for government agencies.

Corporations also spend mind-boggling quantities of money just to purchase their own stock. After all, increasing stock prices boost executives’ bonuses. For years, Exxon has been spending more money for stock buybacks than capital expenditures, all the while whining that the company needs more incentives to drill for oil.

What investment does occur is largely financed by depreciation allowances rather than previous profits.  John Bellamy Foster offers an important measure of this reluctance to invest:

“Nine out of the ten years with the lowest net non-residential fixed investment as a percent of GDP over the last half century (up through 2006) were in the 1990s and 2000s. Between 1986 and 2006, in only one year – 2000, just before the stock market crash-did the percent of GDP represented by net private non-residential fixed investment reach the average for 1960-79 (4.2 percent). This failure to invest is clearly not due to a lack of investment-seeking surplus. One indicator of this is that corporations are now sitting on a mountain of cash – in excess of $600 billion in corporate savings that have built up at the same time that investment has been declining due to a lack of profitable outlets.”(7)

Finance is attractive for another reason: it employs relatively few people. The intriguingly-named FIRE sector, which includes finance, investment, and real estate, employs only about 8 percent of the private labor force. So, 8 percent of the workers generate 41 percent of the profits. Massive investments in information processing make such results possible.

Of the investment that does appear, finance may represent a disproportionate share. The government does not have recent data on types of investment by industry. The data do show that investment on information processing and software is about 37 percent greater than investment in industrial equipment and manufacturing equipment. Of course, information processing is also important in manufacturing, but the data is suggestive.

Where Did The Money Go and Will Jobs Also Disappear?

On Monday, September 29 the stock market lost more than $1 trillion, about as much money as the Gross Domestic Product for an entire month. The next day, two thirds of the value suddenly reappeared. Yet, for the most part the tumult left most people unaffected, at least for the moment. More important, will the evaporation of all of this wealth affect ordinary people?

Karl Marx’s concept of fictitious capital is very useful in understanding these wild swings. I have explored this subject in more detail in an earlier book, entitled Marx’s Crises Theory: Scarcity, Labor, and Finance.(8)

For Marx, capitalism uses markets to distribute labor into productive activities, but it does so very imperfectly. Part of the problem is that lack of knowledge about the future causes imperfect investments. These imperfections magnify as the economy seems to prosper making people become giddy about their chances of success.

Crises are capitalism’s way of purging unproductive investments. In this way, crises eventually make the economy stronger, unless they become so severe that they shatter the foundation of capitalism.

The crises will become more violent if the distribution of income becomes too lopsided, leaving investors flush with money, while consumers are relatively strapped. Massive amounts of money will flow into speculative ventures, creating bubbles. In effect, a market which is supposed to be a wonderful feedback system to inform capitalists about the needs of society, takes on a perverse logic of its own.

Eventually, the bubble pops and there is hell to pay. The question today is how extreme this shock will be. Capitalism has shown quite a bit of resilience in the past. What is happening now could turn out to be relatively mild or could be severe.

I use San Francisco as an analogy for my students. There will eventually be a serious earthquake that will do enormous damage. Nobody can predict what will happen. Even when the earth begins to tremble, the severity of the event may be in doubt.

Wall Street uses a somewhat related term, leverage, to describe the ability to magnify potential profits by investing borrowed money. When the economy begins leveraging, business borrows money to invest – not necessarily in productive assets. Leveraging can continue as long as people feel confident enough to finance these investments.

The government’s modest limits on leverage have been systematically weakened, to the point where investment banks would be putting up as little as 3 cents, and even less, for each dollar invested. The riskiness of such practice should be obvious. A mere 3% drop in the investment would wipe out the bank’s own share of the investment.

The Federal Reserve also promoted increased leverage by holding interest rates low. Other regulators also paved the way for more leverage. Companies that choose the path of lower profits and lower risks are written off as stodgy and old-fashioned. Their stocks will flounder, reducing executive’ bonuses. So, Wall Street investors willingly increased their leverage and risk. After all, investors prefer companies with high profits. Few are willing to take the time or have the expertise to understand the risks that might make profits appear high.

In Wall Street-talk, increasing leverage works so long as investors maintain a balance between fear and greed. By fear, Wall Street means a reluctance to take on too much risk. Although Wall Street normally applauds greed, it associates excess greed with a foolhardy approach toward risk. During euphoric times when fear of risk subsides, people put money in ridiculous schemes.

In his delightful book, Charles Mackay, related tales of shady operators bilking early investors a few centuries ago.

“One projector set up a company to profit from a wheel for perpetual motion. Another projector proposed “A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.” “Next morning, at nine o’clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when be shut up at three o’clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2000 pounds.  He set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.”(9)

The newfound wealth during times of growing leverage can create more demand, which can increase jobs and wages. As noted previously, such has not been the case. Speculative wealth has not produced growth in wages for ordinary people or any significant growth in jobs. In fact, cutting jobs to increase profits has been a major factor in sustaining the boom. A few years ago, the business press praised this practice as financial engineering, as if it were providing a productive service.

One factor that contributed to the lopsided economic growth without jobs, which characterized the recent decades, is the practice of leveraged buyouts. Private equity companies, as they are known, buy up other companies using borrowed money, often based on the assets of the target companies. The takeover artists claim that they can create managerial efficiencies, making their takeover look attractive to potential investors. In reality, they charge their targets exorbitant fees, often paid for by debt that the companies must eventually pay back. Then, to cover this burden, the companies must cut both wages and jobs, as well as looting significant value from pension plans. Private equity businesses than turn around and sell these supposedly rejuvenated, but actually hobbled companies to an unsuspecting public, which fail to see the similarity between such investments and the perpetual motion machine that Mackay described.

In describing the necessity of a bailout for finance, the alarmists, who are not necessarily wrong, point to the job losses associated with the corporate restructurings that will follow bankruptcies. But these restructurings have been going on for decades. The bailout, however, is intended to facilitate a continuation of the destructive financial practices, which have also caused significant hardship to labor.

Obviously, a collapse will also harm workers and other ordinary people, but in the wake of a collapse the country will stand a better chance to restore some sanity to the economy.

Conclusion: Capitalism 101 (A Foundational Course)

Capitalism is the most efficient system known to mankind. Central to this efficiency is the supposed ability of markets to channel capital where it is most effective. The current financial crisis might be expected to throw some doubts on this dogma, but I do not expect that to be the case.

For example, in 2001, in the wake of dot.com bubble, the New York Times reported on one of the many excesses of the period:

“In the last two years, 100 million miles of optical fiber – more than enough to reach the sun – were laid around the world as companies spent $35 billion to build Internet-inspired communications networks.  But after a string of corporate bankruptcies, fears are spreading that it will be many years before these grandiose systems are ever fully used.”(10)

As mentioned earlier, the response was not to rethink the system, but to double down lowering interest rates to re-ignite the stock market. Investors, the government, and even ordinary people applauded the decision of Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan, who appeared to be the wisest man in the universe at the time.

Greenspan’s manipulation of the interest rate appeared to be so beneficial, because it occurred without any direct effect on the proverbial taxpayer. Parenthetically, why is it that this taxpayer ranks so much higher in our concern relative to the workers who make everything possible?

In retrospect, Greenspan’s policy provided the fuel that helped to make the current crisis more threatening. Just as the solution to the dot.com crisis produced the current crisis, the present bailout, if it works at all, will create the preconditions for the next one.

The purpose of the bailout is to create confidence. Back in the 19th-century, the governor of Illinois gave an excellent analysis of the way confidence worked in financial markets. He said that confidence “could only exist when the bulk of the people were under a delusion. According to their views, if the banks owed five times as much as they were able to pay and yet if the whole people could be persuaded to believe this incredible falsehood that all were able to pay, this was ‘confidence’.”

His words may perhaps be the most succinct analysis of fictitious capital that I have read.

Now class, here is the question for all the students in Capitalism 101: explain to me how is that markets are so efficient in directing capital where it is most needed. Extra credit if you can do so without any giggles.

Michael Perelman is professor of economics at California State University at Chico, and the author of fifteen books, including Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity, The Perverse Economy: The Impact of Markets on People and the Environment, Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology, and The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression. His daily reflections on various political economic issues can be found at his blog, Unsettling Economics.

References:

(1) Michael Perelman, The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From Right Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression, Palgrave Macmillan (2007)

(2) James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 6 vols., Oxford University Press (1934-64)

(3) Diane Coyle, The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy, MIT Press (1998).

(4) Tom Peters, The Circle of Innovation: You can’t shrink your way to greatness, Knopf (1997).

(5) Alan Greenspan, “Remarks” at the 80th Anniversary Awards Dinner of The Conference Board, New York, October 16, 1996.

(6) Martin Wolf, “Why it is so hard to keep the financial sector caged”, Financial Times, February 6, 2008.

(7) John Bellamy Foster, “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis”, Monthly Review, April 2008.

(8) Michael Perelman, Marx’s crises theory: Scarcity, labor, and finance, Greenwood Press (1987)

(9) Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

(10) Simon Romero, “Shining Future Of Fiber Optics Loses Glimmer”, The New York Times, June 18, 2001.

Partho Sarathi Ray 

Science and the Age of Enlightenment

Modern science, as we know it today, is the daughter of the European Enlightenment. That age of intellectual ferment beginning in the early 18th century established “reason”, instead of divinely ordained revelation, as the basis of knowledge. At its core was the questioning of traditional institutions, morals, and customs which had previously upheld the supremacy of the church in the intellectual sphere, and feudal relations in the social sphere. In this intellectual atmosphere, science, the process of systematic pursuit of knowledge, underwent a huge qualitative change from its earlier reliance on scriptures and classical Greek authorities like Aristotle, into a methodology dependent on reason, critical questioning, and establishment of clear relationship between cause and effect by direct observation. As Rene Descartes, one of the intellectual giants of the Enlightenment, famously declared, and Karl Marx, probably the most complete intellectual offspring of the Enlightenment, adopted as his favourite motto, “de omnibus dubitandum“, that is, “Doubt everything”, became the reigning methodology of scientific enquiry.(1) Based on this methodology of critical questioning emphasized by the rationalists like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and the complementary methodology of direct observation emphasized by empiricists like Locke, Berkeley and Hume, modern science was born, and further developed over the period of three hundred years. Therefore science, as we know it today, is considered to be an objective understanding of nature, a system of knowledge that explains the material basis of reality, independent of the nature of the observer and transcending the social or political conditions of the time.

Modern science is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of humanity, as man has taken a giant leap forward from the infancy of his curiosity, when every natural phenomenon bore divine or diabolical agency, to an age where all of his questions seem to be answerable under the powerful illumination of science. Science seems to have revealed objective truths about material reality, truths independent of the time and space of their discovery, truths for all ages, truths that give science the aura of transcendence. And attesting to this power of science has been the great advances of technology that have sent humans to the moon and given us insights into the very basis of life.

The dialectical nature of science

As practicing scientists, this aura of objectivity of science gives us a sense of destiny, makes us feel that we are in the pursuit of understanding material reality as it is, independent of the subjective conditions around us. And to the layperson this makes science appear to be infallible and all-powerful, representative of ultimate truths. However, this objectivism in science also opens the door to a mechanical materialism as science is now thought to deal with objective properties of matter that transcends the subjective conditions that might be a result of human activity, although science is essentially a human activity. It also gives rise to reductionism and determinism, where the properties of smaller and smaller parts of matter are thought to solely influence the properties of “wholes”, in increasing orders of magnitude. Marx, who had also arrived at a materialist conception of the world, however rejected this mechanical materialism, instead insisting on a dialectical analysis of nature that recognized that humans and nature exist in a coevolutionary, and interactive, relationship.(2) Engels’ Dialectics of Nature was an unfinished attempt in this direction which was advanced by a generation of British scientists in the 1930’s, who were committed to a historical materialist and dialectical philosophy.(3) These scientists, Hyman Levy, Lancelot Hogben, J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham, J. B. S. Haldane, and historian/philosopher of science Benjamin Farrington – struggled to retain within the emerging natural sciences the possibility of dialectical uncertainty and opposed their reduction to the mechanistic materialism which has been the reigning philosophy of science.(4) Growing out of the work of these early critical intellectuals, though undeveloped and still at times insufficiently dialectical, a more developed science grounded in materialist dialectics came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of Marxist-influenced biologists – particularly Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, and Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard, then the leading center of evolutionary biology. Their work provided a genuinely dialectical materialist approach to science that questioned some of the long-held beliefs about the transcendence of science and suggested that science, and our understanding of it, is a product of the dialectical relationships between humans and nature and between humans and their social condition.

Science and capitalism

To understand this dialectical nature of science, we need to look at the socio-economic context in which modern science was born and have henceforth developed. At the time when the Enlightenment was changing the intellectual horizon of Europe, the socio-economic conditions were also being fundamentally and irreversibly changed by the birth of a new mode of production, capitalism. As the Enlightenment was questioning the traditions that upheld the feudalistic relations of production, capitalism was breaking down the same production relations. The two processes were so complementary, that looking at it from the basis of historical materialism, we can understand that the material basis for the intellectual ferment that gave rise to the Enlightenment was actually the change that was happening in the way in which the productive property was owned and controlled, combined with the corresponding changes in the social relations between individuals based on their connection with the process of production. As the feudal nobility and the church was losing the ownership and control over the means of production and the serf, previously bonded to his feudal master and his estate, was becoming an agent free to sell his labour, the intellectual climate that had upheld these relations for the past five hundred year or so, was also disappearing. The idealism inherent in the philosophical thought of the previous centuries had looked at the world as an idealized place, divinely conceived and maintained, where man’s relationship with nature, just as his relationship with other members of the society, was static and ideal. These ideas of stasis and stability were being fundamentally changed into a notion of natural and social evolution. Change was in the air, and change was in the thoughts of the intellectual giants of the time. And out of this ferment was born modern science, with the imprint of the times as its birthmark. Therefore, if the Enlightenment is the mother of modern science, the father is undoubtedly capitalism. And the new science, as it developed, carried the indelible marks of this birth, such that science, as we understand it today, is capitalist science. The concept of change, of impermanence, which was so important to the process of replacement of feudalism by capitalism, also became a central tenet of science. Just as the ideas of change in society were formalized and systemized by Marx in his historical materialism, the concept of change in nature was ordained as the central tenet of the theory of evolution by Darwin, undoubtedly one of the greatest scientific achievements of all times. The idea of the constancy of change, rather than constancy itself, has become a central idea of science, and especially of biology.

Capitalism also put the individual as the central player in society. It was no more the church, or the nobility, or the royal families that owned the means of production in society. It was no more the serf tied to his master and his land by ancient feudal relations who was required for the mode of production that capitalism was engendering. Instead, it was the free individual, freed from the age-old ties of kinship and loyalty, from the hierarchy of the church, free to sell his goods and labour power, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, who was the motive force behind the capitalistic mode of production.  This new emphasis on the individual was celebrated in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, where he stated that individuals in society had “natural rights”, including the right to property.(5) Locke’s writing had great influence on the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century, the American and French revolutions. This celebration of individualism in the social sphere left its imprint over scientific thought, in the form of Cartesian reductionism.(6) Descartes contributed the idea of studying smaller and smaller parts of matter to understand the nature of material reality, and this methodology called “reductionism” is universally followed in science today. Reductionism placed the atom in the centre of the physical world, just as the individual occupied the centre of the social. This idea of the freely-interacting atom, free to make and break bonds with other atoms, gave birth to the atomic theory of matter and the to fields of nuclear physics, and later of quantum mechanics, areas that defined scientific enquiry in the 20th century.

Reductionism has also played a very influential role in biology. The rediscovery of the laws of heredity, originally formulated by the Austrian priest Gregor Johann Mendel, in early 20th century, gave birth to the field of genetics.(7) Later, the discovery of the material basis of heredity, the gene, showed that it was this all important molecule, the DNA, which transferred genetic information from the parent to the offspring, and suggested that it could determine every property of an individual, from his height to his intelligence. The gene was accorded the same place in biology that the atom had been accorded in physics and chemistry. This gave rise to what is referred to as “genetic determinism”, which, more to the awestruck common man than to the practicing biologist, meant a determination of every human trait and behaviour by the genes one carried.(8) Bourgeois ideology, which sought to justify existing social hierarchies, has utilized genetic determinism to justify and rationalize social and economic inequalities in terms of domination that was biologically derived and teleologically predetermined – whether in terms of racism, sexism, or differences in intelligence. Posited against this, and somewhat as a reaction to extreme formulations of genetic determinism, has been a sort of superorganic holism, mainly in ecology. This holism preferred to look at entire ecosystems, at the sum total of the interactions between individuals or between individuals and the environment. These two schools of thought in biology, at many times in opposition to each other, went on along with the nature versus nurture debate that rages on in biology, where the contention is whether it is the genes or the environment which controls and determines human traits and behaviour.

Dialectical biology

The above-mentioned biologists, Lewontin and Levins, and Gould, rejected these one-sided notions of mechanical reductionism and superorganic holism and the hierarchical conceptions of life and the universe that they both generate. Instead they suggest a dialectical and materialist approach that understands that the world “is constantly in motion. Constants become variables, causes become effects, and systems develop, destroying the conditions that gave rise to them”.(9) They propose that “things change because of the actions of opposing forces on them, and things are the way they are because of the temporary balance of opposing forces”.(10) This introduces a dialectical understanding of relations between organisms and nature. This is very important for biology, as biology is at the same time at the cutting edge of science today and is also close to our lives as individuals and species. Understanding of biology influences our responses to multiple things of vital importance to the well being of our society and the world, from the Nazi conception of racial superiority, to the caste divides that still render our society apart, to the religious fundamentalist opposition to the teaching of evolution in U.S. schools. An understanding of the dialectics of biology allows both practicing biologists and lay people to formulate responses to such issues without being overawed by the objectiveness and infallibility which are claimed for science.

It would be interesting to look at a particular example to illustrate the dialectical approach to biology, drawing from Lewontin and Levins’ book, The Dialectical Biologist.(11) If we look at the disease tuberculosis, which is still a major affliction of people in India, and also in other countries of the world, the reductionist approach tells that the disease is caused by the pathogenic bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. However, from a holistic point of view it would be said that malnutrition is the cause of tuberculosis, because many people infected by the bacteria do not develop the disease if they are not suffering from malnutrition. In contrast, a dialectical understanding of biology will suggest that it is the interaction between Mycobacterium infection and nutritional status which determines whether a person will have the disease or not. So, looking at cures for tuberculosis should involve studying both these conditions which dialectically interact to bring about the disease. However, it can also be argued that many people who have healthy nutritional status also have tuberculosis after being infected by M. tuberculosis. The dialectical approach can be further extended to explain this phenomenon: in the case of nutritionally sufficient people suffering from tuberculosis, it is the dialectical relationship between the infecting bacterium and the susceptibility genes of the individual which determines whether the person will suffer from the disease or not. Therefore, at every level of interactions that exist in nature and constitute life, an entity is both a subject and object, and a dialectical analysis is necessary to understand these interactions between organisms and the environment and genes and the environment.

The field of biology where the dialectical approach is most important is evolutionary biology. Evolution by natural selection is the grand unifying theme of all modern biology and its proposition by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species was a monumental achievement in the history of science.(12) However, Darwin’s theory of natural selection was also formulated in the backdrop of the socio-economic context of his times, marked by the intense class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class in the well developed capitalist economy of contemporary England.  Indeed, the Darwinian idea’s of the struggle for survival and the survival of the fittest was influenced by the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who in his An Essay on the Principle of Population suggested that as the rate of increase of the population is greater than the rate of increase in available resources, there is always a competition for the limited resources which results in a segment of the population being relegated to poverty.(13) Darwin’s theory of selection between the individuals of the same species, based on their “fitness” or the ability to leave the maximum number of offsprings, was therefore a product of the intellectual climate of that heyday of capitalism. However, to suggest that the theory of evolution by natural selection was the product of a certain socio-economic context certainly does not detract from its validity as the most appropriate, and proven, explanation of the diversity and complexity of life.

Darwin elevated the conditions of existence – external selection pressures – to primacy in explaining evolution, so as to establish natural selection as the dominant force behind the evolution of species. However in this process, he established a view of natural selection as predominantly one-sided – i.e., the external factors were seen as largely determining the evolutionary process, and not as equally the consequence of the evolution of life. Whereas this ultra-Darwinian view of evolution focuses nearly exclusively on the external, modern evolutionary biologists often focus nearly exclusively on the internal in their acceptance of genetic determinism. Lewontin and Levins suggested a third, a dialectical approach to understanding the interactions of internal and external factors in determining evolution, stating “natural selection is not a consequence of how well the organism solves a set of fixed problems posed by the environment; on the contrary, the environment and the organism actively codetermine each other.”(14) This focus on interactions, transformation, and historical constraints over the process of natural selection is immensely important in developing a dialectical understanding of the process of evolution. The other great evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould went further to state “the three classical laws of dialectics [formulated by Engels] embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction among components of complete systems, and sees the components themselves…as both products of and inputs to the system. Thus the law of “interpenetrating opposites” records the inextricable interdependence of components: the “transformation of quantity to quality” defends a systems-based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of state; and the “negation of negation” describes the direction given to history because complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states.”(15) Gould’s influential idea of evolution by “punctuated equilibrium”, in which organisms evolve by large leaps interspersed by long periods of evolutionary stasis explicitly follows the laws of dialectics.(16) Gould considered the dialectical laws to be explicitly punctuational. According to him “They (the laws of dialectics) speak, for example, of the ‘transformation of quantity into quality.’ This…suggests that change occurs in large leaps following a slow accumulation of stresses that a system resists until it reaches breaking point. Heat water and it eventually boils. Oppress the workers more and more and bring on the revolution.”(17) The dialectical approach is an immensely powerful methodological advance in our conception of science and is essential for the transition from “capitalist science” to a “socialist science”.

Towards a socialist science

Every epoch in human history is marked by its own intellectual tradition. Therefore, the Enlightenment, and the revolution in scientific thought that it engendered, marks the epoch of capitalism. It does not mean that science becomes subjective, but the imperatives before science, the questions scientists ask, and the methodologies adopted to answer them reflect the dominant socio-economic relations of the time. Therefore, the transition to a socialist society must be accompanied by a revolution in scientific thought that would result in the development of a “socialist science”. This new science would be based on a clear dialectical materialist understanding of the relationships between man (and all organisms) and nature, and between man and society. The failure to bring about this revolutionary change in scientific thought and practice was one of the major failings of the socialist experiments of the 20th century, and contributed in no small part to their collapse. Yet for sometime in the 1920s and early ’30s, a materialist and dialectical approach was the intellectual foundation for many prominent Soviet scientists, such as V. I. Vernadsky, N. I. Vavilov, and Alexander Oparin, in their various research projects regarding the creation of the biosphere, the original centers of the agricultural world, and the emergence of life.(18) All of this subsided, however, with the tightening grip of Stalinism in the 1930s. A more rigidly mechanistic approach became dominant in Soviet science (taking the name of “dialectical materialism” while vacating it of any meaning), putting an end to the early stages of a hopeful and exciting investigation that had begun to mark the birth of socialist science. The most adverse, and long-lasting, effect of this approach was the rise of Lysenkoism, which pretty much destroyed biology in the Soviet Union and barred the way for the budding revolution in scientific thought.(19) Trofim Lysenko, who was in charge of agricultural affairs in the Soviet Union, practiced a form of Lamarckism, which derived from the theories of heritability of acquired characteristics and had already been disproved by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.(20) With the blessings and active support of the Stalinist establishment Lysenko went about imposing these non-scientific practices, mainly in agricultural science and genetics, and denounced practicing geneticists as proponents of “fascist” or “bourgeois” science, leading to the execution of many and the imprisonment of Vavilov, the greatest Soviet biologist. Lysenkoism replaced a proper dialectical understanding of heredity and evolution by a forced belief that heredity had a limited role in evolution and changes could be brought about in organisms by human intervention which would be inherited in subsequent generations. Although these ideas were mainly adopted in agricultural practice, leading to processes like “vernalization” of wheat, it had a wider ideological implication that Soviet practices could actually purge humans of “inherited” bourgeois instincts and lead to the creation of the “socialist man”. Lysenkoism marked a complete failure of understanding the dialectical approach to science, instead adopting a mechanistic approach based on pseudo-scientific theories. When Lysenkoism was finally discarded in 1964, Soviet science tried to return to the mainstream of western scientific practice, any attempts at developing a truly dialectical approach to science having been long abandoned. A socialist science never came into being in the Soviet Union.

As the internal contradictions of capitalism are becoming more glaring, the scientific thought processes that have been the product of the capitalist era would also become insufficient for explaining, and managing, the various challenges confronting humanity. Just as science of the feudal era was replaced by capitalist science, the latter would have to be replaced by a socialist science. A dialectical understanding of science is needed in order not only to comprehend how the world came to be, but also to understand how it can be changed.

References:

(1) Descartes R. The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes in 3 vols. Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., Kenny, A., and Murdoch, D., trans. Cambridge University Press (1988).

(2) Foster J.B. Marx’s Ecology. Monthly Review Press (2000).

(3) Engels F. Dialectics of Nature. International publishers Co (1968).

(4) Clark B. and York R. Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Levins and Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist. Monthly Review (2005).

(5) Locke J. Two Treatises of Government. Book Jungle (2008).

(6) See (1)

(7) Bardoe C. Gregor Mendel: The Friar who grew peas. HN Abrams (2006).

(8) Gould J. S. The Mismeasure of Man.  Revised and Expanded. Norton (1996).

(9) Levins R. and Lewontin R. C. The Dialectical Biologist. Harvard University Press (2006).

(10) Ibid.

(11) Ibid.

(12) Darwin C. The Origin of Species. Barnes and Noble Classics (2003).

(13) Malthus T. R. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Prometheus Books (1998).

(14) See (8)

(15) Gould J.S. “Nurturing Nature” in An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas. Norton (1987).

(16) Gould J.S. and Eldredge N. “Punctuated equilibria: An alternative to Phyletic gradualism” in Thomas J. M. Schopf, ed. Models in Paleobiology. Freeman (1972).

(17) Gould J.S. “The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change” in The Panda’s Thumb. Norton (1980).

(18) See (4)

(19) See (9)

(20) Lecourt D. Proletarian Science? : The Case of Lysenko. Humanities Press (1977).

“EMBEDDED” IN ARROYO’S MILITARY, US SOLDIERS ENGAGE MUSLIM INSURGENTS IN THE PHILIPPINES

“With six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded – counting that nose and that elbow.  The enemy numbered six hundred – including women and children – and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.” – Mark Twain, Weapons of Satire (Syracuse University Press, 1992, p.172)

Unless US soldiers rape a Filipina date, or Abu Sayyaf bandits kidnap American tourists, nobody notices what’s going on in the Philippines today. But now that Britney Spears just belted out her tempting warble of “sneaking into the Philippines,” can the PENTAGON Special Forces not be far behind to get a piece of the action? Before you can say “Yo Mama!” US troops are found already “embedded” in the Empire’s most Americanized islands where savage class wars have been raging for decades.

The US invaded the Philippines in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, but it created the “first Vietnam” (to quote the historian Bernard Fall) when 1.4 million Filipino recalcitrants had to be “neutralized” to convert the revolutionary Philippine Republic into an “insular possession.”  Mark Twain praised the US government’s success in acquiring “property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu,” referring to the “civilizing mission” of US diplomacy over the Muslim inhabitants of the southern Philippines (E. San Juan, US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines, 2007). But in the 1906 siege at Mt. Dajo and the 1913 rout at Mt. Bagsak, both in Jolo, the US military had to massacre thousands of Muslim men, women and children to complete the islands’ pacification. The victors seemed not to have learned anything, so history is repeating itself.

A hundred years after, the U.S. seems to be doing the job again.

Washington-Manila Homeland Jihad?

The government offensive to retake space occupied or “liberated” by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) enters its seventh week. Disguised as a police action, the 6,000 soldiers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) battled about 3,000 MILF guerillas in the provinces of Lanao del Norte, North Cotabato, Maguindanao and Sarangani.  By the last week of September, the total casualty figure surpassed three hundred as government troops (with their US advisers/trainers) and Moro (Muslim citizens of the Philippines) militants clashed in the southern Philippines. The scale of violence and magnitude of civilian suffering reached a crescendo enough to alarm the European Union, but not Bush, Condoleeza Rice, nor the two US presidential candidates.  BBC News (9/26/2008) reported that the International Committee of the Red Cross bewailed the plight of tens of thousands of refugees and evacuees, the killing of civilians by indiscriminate AFP aerial and artillery bombardments, and the potential for sectarian “ethnic cleansing.” According to the National Disaster Coordinating Council, more than 300,000 people have fled their homes, several hundred people have been killed and injured, and $2 million worth of crops and infrastructure damaged. At least 120,000 people have died since fighting broke out 40 years ago between the Muslim separatists and the neocolonial state, with no end in sight.

With full-scale war between the formidable Moro guerillas and the AFP about to sweep the country, the U.S. military presence suddenly caught media attention. It was confirmed by government officials that the headquarters of the U.S.-Philippines Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines (JSOTF-P) is found inside Camp Navarro of the AFP’s Western Mindanao Command in Zamboanga City, Mindanao. Accessed only by U.S. personnel, the physical infrastructure was sealed by permanent walls, concertina wires and sandbags, with visible communication paraphernalia (satellite dishes, antennas, etc.). From this place, US military operations against domestic insurgents – whether belonging to the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) or to the MILF, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), or the New People’s Army (NPA) – are launched and directed. In lieu of economic-social reforms, the government’s militarist solution to poverty, unemployment, and extra-judicial killings and kidnappings – over 1,000 victims so far – will only create a refugee crisis, more atrocities and “collateral damage” of innocent civilians, loss of national sovereignty, and impunity for criminal violence committed by the military and police.

Re-occupying “Our Possessions”

The Camp Navarro U.S. outpost is only one of many disposable, low-profile “lily-pad” stations of “forward deployment” for the US military in the post-9/11 period.  Tom Engelhardt recently counted more than 750 US military facilities in 39 countries. But many more are not officially acknowledged, such as the 106 bases in Iraq or those in Afghanistan; or in countries like Jordan and Pakistan where bases are shared (Tomgram 2008; Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 2003). This applies to US military installations in the Philippines. US troops in the Philippines refer to their Jolo launching-pad as “Advance Operating Base-920” devoted to “unconventional warfare”(Herbert Docena, Focus on the Global South Media Advisory, 8/15/2007). The JSOTF-P started in 2002 in Mindanao, part of the Pentagon’s realignment of overseas basing network (Michael Klare, “Imperial Reach,” The Nation 4/25/2005). The bases are now called “cooperative security locations” (CSL), a euphemism mentioned in the May 2005 report of the US Commission on Review of Overseas Military Facility Structures, or Overseas Basing Commission. CSLs can be existing military or private facilities available for US military use. These are located in Clark, Subic, Mactan International Airport in the Visayas, in General Santos City airport, in the aforementioned Zamboanga AFP outpost, and in other clandestine areas (Julie Alipala, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Mindanao Bureau, 11/26/2007).

The Arroyo regime readily hands out apologias for the presence of 400-600 US military personnel in the country purportedly serving “mutually beneficial ends,” as the US Embassy claims. Retired General Edilberto Adan of the Presidential Commission on the VFA (Visiting Forces Agreement) openly excuses the U.S. embedded military headquarters as a necessary fixture to maintain “control over their units.”  When Arroyo visited the US in May 2003, she boasted of having obtained from Washington $356 million in security-related assistance, the largest military aid package since the closing of US bases in 1992. She claimed that US military aid had grown to “more than 100 million dollars annually from 1.9 million dollars three years ago” (Inquirer News Service, 5/27/2003). Two million dollars were allocated for “Sulu rehabilitation” while four million was allocated to Basilan, the site of the Balikatan exercise in 2002.  As a “major non-Nato ally,” Arroyo announced that Bush will continue to give aid to support the Philippines’ “war on terrorism,” not for economic development or for social services, much less for social justice and equity.

“War on terrorists” (“terrorists”, of course, refer to those opposed to US policies; the exploitative neoliberal impositions of the World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund) becomes the Arroyo regime’s blanket term to legitimize US infringement and violation of Philippine sovereignty. What results is a war of terror on humanity, a “homeland security imperialism” whose latest symptomatic crisis is the collapse of the US financial system and the erosion of US economic capacity to maintain hegemony (John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, Pox Americana, 2004).

Ghouls of Pacification 

A brief historical background may be helpful. When the U.S. granted nominal independence to the Philippines in 1946, one of the conditions for this grant was the retention of 23 military installations all over the pacified colonial territory. It was legitimized by the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty which, under the aegis of Cold War anticommunism, provided for US intervention in case of foreign military invasion by a communist power (Daniel B, Schirmer and Stephen Shalom, The Philippines Reader 1987).

In reviewing the historical record of US colonial subjugation of the islands, William Blum reminds us how the US helped suppress the Huk peasant rebellion in 1940-50. At least one US infantry division collaborated with the Filipino military in killing Huk sympathizers (about 500 peasants, with thousands jailed and tortured) during the months before and after the elections of 1946. In the 1950s, through the Joint US Military Advisory Group and Col. Edward Lansdale (who became notorious for the Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam), then President Ramon Magsaysay used US military advisers, weapons and logistics in unconventional types of counterinsurgency schemes against peasant rebels. Among the CIA agents in government, Arroyo’s father Diosdado Macapagal “provided the Agency with political information for several years and eventually asked for, and received, what he felt he deserved: heavy financial support for his campaign…” Blum concludes that by the early fifties, “Fortress America” in the Philippines was securely in place: “From the Philippines would be launched American air and sea actions against Korea and China, Vietnam and Indonesia…. On the islands’ bases, the technology and art of counter-insurgency warfare would be imparted to the troops of America’s other allies in the Pacific” (Killing Hope, NY 2004, p. 42).”

The methodology of US domination changed after the end of the Cold War. Covert intervention adopted the guise of “persuasion” through the rituals of electoral democracy. This was clearly demonstrated after the February Revolution in 1986 when Marcos was overthrown by a popular-cum-military uprising and the elite oligarchy headed by Corazon Aquino was restored to power. The scenario that Philip Agee described in 1992 may still be valid: “As for the Philippines, absent agrarian and other significant reforms, US military intervention could be a last resort should the New People’s Army achieve enough momentum to create significant destabilization or even victory.  For the time being, continue the CIA-Pentagon ‘low-intensity’ methods already under way.  If unsuccessful and stalemate continues, consider a negotiated settlement as in El Salvador and rely on CIA-NED electoral intervention to exclude the National Democratic Front from power” (Ellen Ray and William Schaap, Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism, 2003). It appears that it is with the separatist MILF, not the NPA (debilitated by vigilante incursions and internal squabbles), that the US is interested in striking a deal with the help of the US Institute of Peace and partisan Malaysian mediators. It is also an implementation of a flexible divide-and-rule strategy.

Visiting to Overstay: Penetration and Bondage

Immediately after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, the Philippines became the second battlefront in the “war on terrorism.” In February 2002, Arroyo allowed the U.S. Special Operations Command-Pacific to conduct “training exercises” in Mindanao.  Earlier, 660 US soldiers arrived in the Philippines, expanding Washington’s “preventive” war to Southeast Asia. The San Francisco Chronicle (18 Jan. 2002) editorialized on the “Next Battle: Philippines,” pointing out that the demonized ASG is so discrepant from Al Qaeda, and that poverty and land reform are the causes of conflict in the US neocolony. The first Balikatan war games were held involving 4,773 Filipino and U.S. troops. About 2000 US soldiers participated in counterinsurgency operations disguised as “civic action” in several provinces where the NPA was active: Pampanga, Zambales, Nueva Ecija, Cavite and Palawan. This intrusion of the US military was considered legal under the VFA ratified in 1998, just seven years after the Philippine Senate rejected the renewal of the 1947 RP-US Military Bases Agreement, thus closing the two huge US bases in Asia Clark and Subic) where the US enjoyed extraterritorial rights and inflicted all kinds of abuses and indignities on Filipinos (see Teodoro Agoncillo and Milagros Guerrero, History of the Filipino People, 1970). In June 2002, at least 1,200 military personnel comprised the largest US mission outside Afghanistan (Bobby Tuazon, Unmasking the War on Terror, 2002).

The VFA signifies the legitimized sell-out of Philippine sovereignty. Under the VFA, the US can enter the Philippines anywhere and hold military operations. It restricts the Philippine government in checking US aircrafts and ships for nuclear weapons banned by the Constitution. US authorities have jurisdiction over their servicemen who commit crimes in the Philippines while on duty. The flagrant example is the case of Marine Corporal Daniel Smith, convicted for rape last Dec. 4, 2006. Even before his appeal could be acted upon, the Arroyo government surrendered Smith to the custody of the US Embassy, placing him beyond the jurisdiction of local authorities. In October 2007, US officials promised that rape will no longer be committed during war games. Col. Ben Matthews II, commander of the Marine Aircraft Group and co-director of the Talon Vision ’08 exercise (in which Smith and his three co-accused officers were involved), spoke about “the ethics and morality of individuals, not just soldiers” (Tonette Orejas, “US Marines promise no more rape,” Inquirer10/21/2009). Meanwhile, the whereabouts of Smith has become a matter of public speculation, or “rumor-mongering” (to use the Marcos dictatorship’s neologism) as the Supreme Court investigates the legality of his transfer.

Aside from the VFA, US troops, attached employees, and their war materiel have been given unlimited and unrestricted freedom of movement, flexibility and maneuver by the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MlSA, 2003; renewed 2008), and the Security Engagement Board (SEB, 2006). The MLSA permits US forces to use government facilities for storage and pre-positioning of equipment as part of strategic deployments during US war maneuvers in the Asian-Pacific and Middle Eastern regions. All three agreements (reinforcing the Cold-War vintage 1951 Mutual Defense Pact and the Joint US-RP Military Advisory Group) that legalize a permanent  “temporary” U.S. military base of operations within the country eviscerate national sovereignty. Both the Arroyo bureaucracy and the mercenary AFP continue to demonstrate their function as tried-and-tested instruments of US global foreign policy and imperialist aggression.

Today, the new agreement covers “non-traditional threats,” a rubric covering a wide spectrum of reasons including terrorism, drug trafficking, piracy, and disasters such as floods, typhoons, earthquakes and epidemics.  According to Arroyo’s factotums, the US is not engaged in actual fighting; instead, US servicemen are merely providing critical combat support services by way of intelligence purveyance, logistics and emergency evacuation for AFP counter-terrorism operations. In addition to Balikatan, Kapit-Bisig war exercises have been carried out with three components: training and equipping the AFP, giving humanitarian and civil assistance, and supporting local military campaigns against Muslim militants (E-Balita, 7/25/06). Counter-terrorism thus merges with anti-narcotics and disaster preparedness to produce the public-relations mantra of fighting “transnational crimes” (E-Balita, 5/25/2007).

When typhoon Frank wrought havoc in the islands, Bush dispatched the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier group led by the USS Ronald Reagan to the Philippines allegedly to assist in local relief and recovery efforts with its F-18s and 6,000 crew. Arroyo cited its tasks of aerial damage assessment and search-and-rescue operations.  The fleet hovered around the Sulu Sea (where Moro insurgents operate) and Panay Island (where the NPA is active). Senator Rodolfo Biazon and progressive groups questioned Arroyo’s welcoming of nuclear-powered vessels (which violates the Philippine Constitution’s ban on the entry of nuclear weapons) and the secrecy of its movements (Juliet Labog-Javellana, “US aircraft carrier stays at edge of RP waters,”Philippine Daily Inquirer, 6/28/2008). Arroyo’s flunkeys cheered this “humanitarian” gesture of GI Joes as more consoling than the Presidential group-hug of disaster victims which Arroyo herself couldn’t give while she was tied up in Washington begging for more money to prop up her beleaguered, subalternized regime.

An earlier intrusion of the USS Blue Ridge in February 2007 occurred during Operation Friendship, a community service project with the AFP. The ship was reported to be involved in a goodwill mission, providing medical assistance and building furniture for a school in Manila (http://rjhm.janes.com/21 March 2007). It was also in this year that the joint war-games named  “Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT)” to enhance the interoperability of the navy and marines were transferred from Subic and Zambales in Luzon to Zamboanga and Basilan, known bailiwicks of the ASG and the Indonesian-based Jemaah Islamiyah (EBalita, May 25, 2007).

One other alibi for US military presence in the Philippines is provided by the Pentagon doctrine of “stability operations,” non-combat activities aimed at “quieting domestic disturbances” such as the U.S. pacification drive (1899-1916) to suppress native and Moro resistance, leading to the genocide of 1.4 million Filipinos.  The chief excuse for US military presence, however, invokes the threat of international and domestic “terrorism” which justifies U.S. security support for development projects and AFP counterinsurgency actions. Beginning with the Reagan administration in the eighties up to today, the U.S. doctrine of “low intensity warfare” envisioned a flexible combination of “economic assistance with psychological operations and security measures” (Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh, Low-Intensity Warfare, New York 1989). With the demise of the Soviet Union, “low-intensity warfare” evolved into the preventive or preemptive war on Al Qaeda and extremists, including torture, “extraordinary rendition,” and other “shock-and-awe” tactics.

Hypocrisy and Mystification Galore

In a “Focus on the Philippines” Special Report, Herbert Docena has summarized from various news reports and documents the characteristics of the US “unconventional warfare,” among them, the mixture of covert combat actions with humanitarian projects, training, and other civic actions, which are viewed as “integral” to “foreign internal defense.” Static defensive garrison forces have also been replaced by “mobile expeditionary operations,” as shown in the US operations in Sulu and Mindanao. Such counterinsurgency schemes are conducted “under the guise of an exercise,” as a US official stated (Unconventional Warfare, 2007, p. 24). Further, massive documentary evidences now exist that confirm US troops handling military equipment, defusing landmines, and using military equipment during actual hostilities. Post 9/11 US military doctrine and practice form part of a larger global war effort to repair and buttress US hegemony in various parts of the world, including the Philippines and other “friendly” nations. To achieve military and political supremacy, the US cannot accept the limitations imposed by orthodox diplomacy, treaties, and formal agreements.

The fraud of “humanitarian” succor has been repeatedly exposed. Dr. Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, chair of BAYAN (the largest federation of nationalist groups), addresses this pretext in her commentaries in Business World (9/20/2008). She asserts truth to power: “The Arroyo regime deliberately obfuscates the unbending aim of US geopolitical and military strategy in the Philippines and elsewhere: the pursuit of its own Superpower interests.  These include securing areas with strategic communication and supply lines and resources, primarily oil (such as in the Middle East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia), trade routes (such as the South China Sea) and other geographically strategic areas that will ensure its achievement of unrivaled global power.  Domestically, the US has a keen interest and long history of interfering in the country’s internal affairs, most especially countering the growing strength and influence of the local anti-imperialist, patriotic and democratic movement.”

No one today is fooled by the alibi that the miniscule ASG militants numbering 400 (wrongly identified as an al-Qaeda affiliate) constitutes a real threat to US internal security. The real targets of US intervention are the New People’s Army and the Communist Party of the Philippines, classified on 8/9/2002 by Colin Powell’s State Department as “terrorists.” In 2005 then Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz stated that the Maoist NPA is the “greatest internal security threat,” requiring the government to enter peace talks with the larger insurgent MILF (Gary Leupp, “Maoist and Muslim Insurgencies in the Philippines,” Bulatlat, 5/22-28/2008). This view dovetailed with the belief of Admiral Timothy Keating, chief of the US Pacific Command, who confirmed that the US priority targets included not only the ASG and the Jemaah Islamiyah but also the NPA: “If the government of the Philippines tells us that they need help on the New People’s Army, we would consider and respond. So, yes,” the US would lead the military assault on the NPA” (Christine Avendano, Inquirer.net, 6/28/2007).

Keating recently participated in the meetings of the RP-US Mutual Defense Board and the Security Engagement Board, two agencies directing joint war games and planning counterinsurgency agendas. In response, Fidel Agcaoili of the National Democratic Front called Keating’s remarks “interventionist,” adding that US military support for the puppet government has failed to quell the 37-year old insurgency. Communist Party spokesperson Gregorio “Ka Roger” Rosal said that the US military has long been directly engaged in unconventional, covert combat operations against the 13,500 NPA fighters in 120 guerilla fronts, backed by several thousand militias and mass partisans. Using humanitarian missions as cover, US military conducted intelligence-gathering activities in Bicol and Quezon, as well as gave training, technical assistance, weaponry and intelligence information to the Arroyo regime (Inquirer.net, 6/29/2007).   This may also explain the acrobatics of Arroyo’s stance toward the MILF and the US willingness to support MILF notions of “ancestral domain.” In short, US military presence is meant to help preserve the Philippines as a neocolonial dependency, a bastion of US hegemony, by supporting the corrupt and morally bankrupt ruling elite (landlords, compradors, bureaucrat capitalists) as their faithful agents in exploiting and oppressing 90 million Filipinos.

Ancestral Domain as “Killing Fields”

Events have overtaken the good intentions of everyone. Arroyo’s abrupt scrapping of the already initialled Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between the neocolonial state and the MILF last August 4 exploded into fierce bloodletting. Over 250,000 civilians became refugees, with several hundreds killed, chiefly due to the indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombardment of the AFP against two small MILF detachments. Why the sudden unilateral deceit and treachery?

After more than four years of peace negotiations facilitated by the Malaysian government and the US Embassy (through the US Institute of Peace), Arroyo’s officials initialed a peace pact that would end several decades of conflict between six million Moros (the 2008 CIA World Factbook counts only 4.5 million out of 96 million Filipinos) and successive administrations since Marcos. But local officials appealed to the Supreme Court to stop the final signing, thus precipitating the hostilities. MILF chair Al Haj Murad Ebrahim said that Arroyo failed to inform her constituencies (local officials, other indigenous groups, etc.). It turned out that the real motivation behind the agreement was a secret stratagem to change the Constitution and install a federalist system so that Arroyo and her clique can maintain power after 2010 when her term ends. Clever ploy, indeed, but easily exposed and deflated.

Apart from the possibility of charter change, one may ask: Was Arroyo really intent on pacifying the MILF, just as former president Fidel Ramos pacified the MNLF? One lesson that escaped both parties today is the neutralization if not dismantling of MNLF gains won through enormous sacrifices by way of Misuari’s acquiescence to the 1996 peace agreement, which provides a working model for the MOA. Kenneth Bauzon drives home a point not fully articulated by academic pundits: the 1996 agreement “is essentially a neoliberal formula designed to bring to an end the MNLF’s more than two decades of insurgency. At the same time, the agreement provided legal cover for the entry of capital – both domestic and foreign, and both commercial and philanthropic – to facilitate the integration of an otherwise untapped region, the ARMM, into the global neoliberal world economic order” (in Rethinking the BangsaMoro Crucible, ed. Bobby Tuazon, CENPEG 2008). This explains why US Special Forces have tenaciously and not so surreptitiously embedded themselves in the deeply compromised state apparatus. And why the US Embassy (via the US Institute of Peace and Islamic mediators) insinuated itself in the peace talks, hoping that the Moro “ancestral domain” would easily become grist to the predatory “free market” machinery, the global capitalist commodifying engine, now suffering serious breakdown in Wall Street and Washington.

Amid this stormy landscape enter the “humanitarian” do-gooders. In the AFP’s pursuit of two MILF commanders (Ameril Ombra Kato and Abdullah Macapaar, alias Commander Bravo), US Special Forces were sighted inside the 64th Infantry Battalion Camp in Datu Saudi Ampatuan, Maguindanao. Bai Ali Indayla of the Moro human rights group Kawagip testified that the soldiers were engaged in covert operations, such as the supervision of drones or spy planes (used in 2006 to track down the ASG leaders) and predator missile strikes. This was confirmed by Major Gen. Eugenio Cedo, then commander of the Western Mindanao Command (Philippine Daily Inquirer 9/10/2008). As usual, the US Embassy denied that the soldiers were involved in actual combat; they were only responding to the AFP request for aerial surveillance to determine conditions of the terrain and visibility, for “future civil-military projects,” to quote Rebecca Thompson, US Embassy Information Officer.

Cheering from the Sidelines?

The record of US “non-involvement” in combat is too long to be fully rehearsed here. Marites Danguilan Vitug and Glenda Gloria’s well-researched book Under the Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao (2000) may be consulted for the larger context of US meddling. Suffice it here to mention some tell-tale examples.  Asia News (July 2004) reported that US Special Forces established a training camp in Carmen, North Cotabato, to teach 150 AFP soldiers unconventional warfare tactics, night combat sniping and surveillance techniques (People’s Weekly World, 7/17-23/2004). Two German interns of Bantay Ceasefire, supported by the European Center for Conflict Prevention, witnessed US P-3 Orion planes conducting surveillance flights in contested villages in Maguindanao where the Abu Sayyaf and MILF elements operate (Evgenia Lipski and Tobias Schuldt, “What are US soldiers doing in Mindanao?” Bulatlat, 8/21-27/2005).

One is reminded of an earlier incident in 2002: the house of a Moro peasant in Basilan island, Buyong-buyong Isnijal, was raided. He was shot in the leg by an American soldier, Sgt. Reggie Lane, who participated in the actual operations. Up to now, no serious investigation has been undertaken to render justice to the victim, Just as nothing has been done to clear up the complicity of four US soldiers in the murder of Corporal Ibnul Wahid, as witnessed by his widow Sandrawina Wahid. She was also one of the witnesses who survived the Feb. 4, 2008 Maimbung massacre. She testified to the presence of US troops during the assault of AFP elite forces on Barangay village, Ipil, Maimbung, Sulu, Eight civilians (a three-month pregnant woman, two children, two teenagers, and her husband, a soldier on vacation) were slain in that combined civic-military action (Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, “Streetwise,” Business World, 9/12-13/2008).

In November 2005, 4 fully armed US soldiers joined the AFP in an encounter with the MNLF followers of Nur Misuari in villages around Indanan, Sulu. They were presumably on a “humanitarian mission,” as claimed by Col. Mark Zimmer, public affairs officer of JSOTF-P (Inquirer News Service, 9/25/2005). Two OV-10 planes dropped several bombs and fired rockets on several villages, killing 15 civilians. After the 2004 bombing of a ferry with over 100 victims, the hunt for the ASG and the Jemaah Islamiyah intensified. Two main suspects of the 2002 Bali bombings were supposed to be holed up with Khaddafy Janjalani, the ASG leader, in Jolo (E-Balita, 8/2/2006). The MNLF in Sulu were accused of coddling ASG gunmen. Despite the disclaimers, two groups (Union of Muslims for Morality and Truth, and Concerned Citizens of Sulu) demanded the immediate pullout of US troops from Sulu province for violating the VFA.  Jolo city councilor Temojin Tulawie asked: “What would US soldiers be doing within the perimeter of the area of engagement right after the bombs have fallen in Indanan if they were not party to the military offensives?” (Inquirer News Service, 9/28/2005). “They are not peacemakers but provocateurs and warmongers,” Tulawie added. Human Rights Commissioner Nasser Marohomsali asserted that the involvement of US troops clearly violated the 1987 Philippine Constitution which prohibits foreign military from participating in direct combat operations on Philippine soil.

One last incident caps this brief review. In December 2007, US troops ordered the shutting down of a hospital in Panamao town, Sulu, and prevented medical personnel from treating patients after sundown with threats to shoot anybody in the hospital if there is an attack (Al Jacinto, Arab News, 1/13/2008.  This has angered Muslim villagers and activists early this year, amid preparations for Balikatan 2008 war games in Sulu and Zamboanga where hundreds of US troops are stationed.  Washington bureaucracy, however, cannot be deterred by native complaints. In the midst of successive military exercises in Basilan, Sulu, and Zamboanga in 2005, US ambassador Francis Ricciardone revealed that the US Agency for International Development was giving two-thirds of its grants to the region at an average of $50 million a year.  Why such generosity?  Obviously, to suppress the “bad guys” of the Moro and communist insurgencies, Ricciardone confessed. This is the reason why the US “established a semi-continuous military presence,” hence the bases issue is, for Ricciardone, “an artifact of people’s imagination” (Carolyn Arguillas, MindaNews, 1/11/2006).

Despite the wrath of the Sulu communities, Christopher Hill, US assistant secretary for East Asia and the Pacific, justified the US role of assisting AFP campaigns, together with the police, in countering terrorism (GMANews.TV, 5/25/2006). What he meant was that it was all right to violate the Philippine Constitution and circumvent the vaguely and loosely formulated VFA. BAYAN secretary general Renato Reyes contended that US intelligence work, reconnaissance, and training of AFP soldiers “are part and parcel of actual combat operations” and their embedding in AFP units “shows that GI Joe is more than just an adviser and observer” (News Release, 8/15/2007). A melodramatic but highly prejudiced “insider” account of how US intelligence personnel (CIA and other unsavory characters) and US Special Forces collaborated with local officials and military agents may be found in Mark Bowden’s narrative of the pursuit and killing of one ASG leader, Abu Sabaya, entitled “Jihadists in Paradise” (The Atlantic, March 2007; for a corrective to Bowden’s racist-ethnocentric, perspective, see Jose Torres Jr, Into the Mountain: hostaged by the Abu Sayyaf, 2001).

Amid daily testimonies of the carnage and destruction affecting millions of inhabitants in the southern Philippines, progressive representatives in the Philippine Congress have urged a thorough probe into the permanent presence of US troops. Personalities such as Rep. Maria Climaco of Zamboanga City and Amina Rasul, lead convenor of the Philippine Council for Islam and Democracy, have also urged action to stop US meddling on behalf of the corrupt, bankrupt Arroyo despotism. BAYAN and other civil-society groups recently petitioned the Legislative Oversight Committee on the VFA to terminate all agreements allowing foreign troops (not only the US but also the Australians and other nationalities) interfering in the ongoing hostilities, thus violating the Philippine Constitution (News Release, 9/25/2008). They also demanded that the Department of National Defense and AFP arrange “the immediate pull-out of US troops and the dismantling of their facilities in Mindanao. However, unless millions of Filipinos commit open civil disobedience and paralyze traffic, business, and government operations – that is, unless massive “people power” erupts to protest the corruption, puppetry and criminality of the US-Arroyo regime – it is unlikely that the Arroyo clique and its American patrons would scrap the VFA and all other instruments of US control. Fighting in the jungles and countryside, in synchrony with parliamentary mass urban mobilizations, may have to accelerate until the comfortable lives of the elite and the complacent middle class becomes impossible to sustain.

E San Juan, Jr. directs the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA. He was recently visiting professor of English & Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines, and will be a 2009 Spring Fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. His recent books are US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave), In the Wake of Terror (Lexington Books), Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader (Ateneo University Press), and From Globalization to National Liberation (University of the Philippines Press).

 Dave Hill

In this paper I examine the interconnections between ‘race’ and social class, with some reference to caste, in schooling and, society.

I need to state that this is a panoptic paper that attempts to bring together, to link, empirical and theoretical data and conceptual analyses across a number of areas: These are: firstly, culturalist and materialist issues and analyses of ‘race’, caste and class oppression, particularly in Britain, the USA and India; secondly, South Asian, other Black and Minority Ethnic group (BME) and White working class labour market and educational experience in Britain; thirdly, Marxist, revisionist socialist and social democratic educational and political analysis; and neoliberal and neoconservative policy and its impacts. In particular, this chapter attempts to compare BME oppression and exploitation in the UK and, tangentially, in the USA, with caste oppression and exploitation in India and also as it manifests itself in Britain. Both are examined through a materialist, class perspective, a Marxist analysis.

Panoptic approaches in papers/chapter/analysis can have value: a bringing together, an interrelating, of different aspects and areas of analysis, enabling, potentially, wider social theorizing. They potentially enable a wider understanding, or facilitating a wider evaluation of an overarching theory, such as Marxism, as it analyses a variety of linked issues. In this paper, the issues above are linked in terms of Marxist analysis of capitalism, class oppression, and the implications of such analysis for the politics of resistance. A hazard with panoptic papers is that they can be dense, heavily referenced and/or endnoted. But this is to enable pursuit of further study/reading across a number of fields.

I critique three forms of analysis/theorizing of ‘race’, caste and class oppression:

1. Critical Race Theory, a theory that sees ‘race’ as the most significant form of oppression, rather than social class. This theory originated in the USA (where its main theorists include Bell, e.g. 1992, 2004; Mills, e.g. 1997, 2003, Delgado, 1995; Delgado and Stefanic, 2000, 2001). It has been recently(pretty much since Gillborn, 2005) imported into Britain by writers such as David Gillborn (2005, 2006a, b, 2008), John Preston (2007), and Namita Chakrabarty (e.g. Chakrabarty and Preston, 2008)

2. ‘Parallelist’ or ‘Equivalence’ theories, widespread in the USA, and, for example, espoused by Michael W. Apple (Apple and Weiss, 1983; Apple, 1988, 1993, 1996, 1999, 2001). These argue that there is an equivalence or parallelism, between ‘race’, class and gender as forms of structural oppression in society;

3. Caste Analysis, theories salient in India (and other South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Nepal), but present in Indian (and some other south Asian) heritage/Diasporic communities, for example in Britain, that the dominant form of oppression is caste oppression, of Dalits (‘Untouchables’) by (high-caste) Brahmins and other castes (for sustained critiques in India, see Quadri and Kumar, 2003; Iliah, 2005; Kumar and Kumar, 2005, Murali Krishna, 2007; and, in the UK, Borbas et al, 2006).

I critique these from empirical and theoretical/analytical perspectives, concluding that the salient forms of discrimination, oppression and inequality in the classroom, as in the economy and society, whether in the UK, USA or India, or elsewhere, are those relating to (‘raced’ and gendered and caste divided) social class.

While recognising the power of subjective identities and consciousness, and while not being dismissive of racism as intrinsic to global capital’s agenda, I suggest that these forms and processes of (race’, gender, caste) marginalization and inequality are functional for the capitalist system of exploitation, which uses schooling and formal education and other agencies of the state to reproduce the existing patterns and forms of educational, social and economic inequalities.

They are functional in a number of ways: they occlude class consciousness and impede the development of the working class movement by dividing the working class; they lend themselves to the creation of bourgeois groups among immigrant descended/black/caste groups which have a self interest in perpetuating the capitalist system of exploitation; and they facilitate the extraction of surplus value by sustaining pools of marginalised cheap labour.

PART 1:  ‘RACE’, CLASS AND CAPITAL 

In this section, I examine the interconnections between ‘race’, and social class, with some reference to caste and gender, in schooling, society and economy in the UK, in particular relating to the two million heritage children and adults in Britain who are of South Asian heritage.

Education policy relating to ethnic diversity in Britain springs (though not unproblematically, or in an unmediated fashion) from capitalist ruling class demands for capital accumulation and profit, as does wider policy. (Hill, 2001, 2007a, b, c, d). This is classic Marxist analysis. Education policy is linked to wider ‘race’ policy in society, for example labour/employment law, welfare rights law, settlement/immigration rights and laws, and economic and fiscal policy.

These ‘race policies’ and education policies can be analysed, variously (and sometimes in combination) as (i) racist (or caste) supremacist or (ii) assimilationist/monoculturalist, or (iii) multiculturalist/celebrating cultural diversity; (iv) integrationist, recognising (some of) the diversity of ‘race’ and ethnic cultures, but within (in Britain) an affirmation of ‘Britishness’; or (v) anti-racist/critical policy for equality. These types of ‘race’ policy have a class dimension.

How is this so? It is because these policies have impacts on the extents to which policy serves to include and empower, or exclude and disempower, sections and strata of the (‘raced’ and gendered and caste divided) working class. Thus some education and other policies are clearly class-supremacist as well as ‘race’ or caste supremacist, other education and cultural policies accept aspects of working class cultures and/or ethnic minority cultures, and other policies – egalitarian policies – attempt either a reformist meritocratic or slightly redistributive set of policies (social democratic policies).

The classical Marxist analysis I am suggesting here is that social class is the primary explanation for economic, political, cultural and ideological change. This is an assertion not an argument. Social Class, though manifestly layered into strata, and structured along lines of ‘race’/ethnicity, gender and caste, for example, is the essential and dominant form of Capitalist exploitation and oppression.

Kelsh and Hill (2006) (see also Kelsh, 2001) argue that it is

“necessary to bring the Marxist concept of class back into educational theory, research, and practice. It has the explanatory power to analyze the structure of ownership and power in capitalist social relations and thus to point to ways of restructuring society so that public needs take priority over private profit”.

Marxist analysis suggests that we live in a Capitalist society and economy in which the capitalists – those who own the banks, factories, media, corporations, businesses, that is, the means of production – profit from exploiting the workers. Capitalists exploit workers’ labour power – the labour power of men and women workers, workers from different, ethnic groups and religions, and those from different castes. Capitalism appropriates surplus value from the labour of the (‘raced’ and gendered and caste-divided) working class (see, for example, Marx, 1867/1996, explained in the Appendix to chapter 8 of Cole 2009 for an explanation, and also the explanation in Faivre, 2009).

The capitalist system – with a tiny minority of people owning the means of production – oppresses and exploits the working class. This, indeed, constitutes the essence of capitalism: the extraction of surplus value – and profit – from workers by capitalist employers. These capitalists may be white, black, men, women, (high caste) Brahmin or (‘untouchable’) Dalit. In India as well as in Britain, there are millionaire men, women, Brahmin, and Dalit capitalists – and politicians.

Marxist analysis also suggests that class-conflict, which is an essential feature of capitalist society, will result in an overthrow of capitalism given the right circumstances (whether by revolutionary force or by evolutionary measures and steps, i.e. social democracy) has, historically, been much debated in different countries, from the late nineteenth century debates in Germany over ‘Revisionism’ associated with Eduard Bernstein (e.g. in 1899, his The Prerequisites for Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy – see Tudor and Tudor, 1988) on the one hand, and on the other, his orthodox revolutionary Marxist critics such as Rosa Luxemburg (for example, in  Reform and Revolution, in 1899/1900).

By whom? Which countries? Who is much debating this? Historically, and in current times, it has, of course been the armed/police forces of the capitalist state that shoot first – and where the local capitalist state is not powerful enough in the balance of class forces in any particular site, then in come the United States cavalry, acting on behalf of transnational capital and its national capital – on behalf of the international capitalist system itself (see, for example, Brosio, 1994).

And yet there are denials, by postmodernists and other theorists of complexity and hybridity and postmodernists and post-ists of various stripes that we o longer live in a period of metanarratives, such as mass capitalism, social class, working class, or, indeed, ‘woman’ or ‘black’ (1). For many theorists ince the 1980s, history is at an end, the class war is over, and we all exalt in the infinite complexity and hybridity of subjective individualist consumerism. It is interesting, and rarely remarked upon, that arguments about ‘the death of class’ are not advanced regarding the capitalist class. Despite their horizontal and vertical cleavages (Dumenil and Levy, 2004), they appear to know very well who they are. Nobody is denying capitalist class-consciousness.

Opposition to the rule of Capital and its policies (either its wider policies, or specific policy) is weakened when the working class is divided, by ‘race’, caste, religion, tribe, or by other factors.

When I say ‘divided’, I am using it here as an active verb, to mean the working class is divided (deliberately) by the capitalist class, its media, its formally or informally segregated school systems. This is ‘divide and rule’. Examples of schooling systems perpetuating such divisions are in apartheid South Africa, Arab-Jew segregated schooling in Israel, Protestant-Catholic religiously segregated Northern Ireland, parts of the USA – in particular its inner cities, and, indeed, parts of Britain, where, in some inner city working class schools, more than 90 percent of the pupils are from minority ethnic groups.(2)

PART 2: SOUTH ASIANS IN BRITAIN

‘Race’, Class and the Labour Market in Britain 

It is obvious to note that some workers, such as legal and ‘illegal’ immigrants, and ex-colonialised and ex-imperialised populations (as well as white, non-colonised East Europeans) are exploited far more than others. Various groups are ‘racialised’ (3), or xeno-racialised (4), a process by which they are ascribed particular social and ability characteristics, sometimes demonized and vilified, into particular labour market, housing market and education market situations.

Abbas (2007) notes, in relation to South Asians (5), that “ethnic minority immigrants were…placed at the bottom of the labour market, disdained by the host community, and systematically ethnicised and racialised in the sphere of capital accumulation” (p.3), and that “the ‘ethnic penalty’ experienced by first generations has largely translated to second generations” (p.4).

There are different typical class locations and positions within the labour market (and education attainment tables) for the different ethnic groups. Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (i.e. British Pakistanis and British Bangladeshis and those who have immigrated from Pakistan and Bangladesh) have similar labour market circumstances and in general greater disadvantage than other ethnic groups. These Pakistani and Bangladeshi men have the lowest economic activity rates of all populations, and high unemployment rates. 44 percent of all Bangladeshi men and 18 percent of Pakistani men aged 25 and over were employed part-time. This compares to 5 percent of White British.(Abbas, 2007).

Of all ethnic minorities, Indian men (British Indian and those immigrated from India and other countries) have employment rates that are, on average, most similar to White Britons. As a population in Britain they are considerably more middle class than Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. The Indian population has relatively high levels of qualifications. Nonetheless, Indians have significantly worse outcomes in the labour market compared to White Britons with similar qualifications.(Simpson et al, 2001; see also, Abbas, 2007).

Educational Attainment: ‘Race’, Class and Gender in England and Wales

With respect to educational achievement in England and Wales, Gillborn and Mirza (2000) show very clearly that it is the difference between social classes in attainment that is the fundamental and stark feature of the education system in England and Wales, rather than ‘race’ or gender.

In their analysis of attainment inequalities by class, ‘race’ and gender 1988-1997 (five or more higher grade GCSEs – General Certificates of Education – the exam taken by virtually all sixteen year olds in England and Wales – relative to the national average), the gender difference between girls and boys is half that relating to ‘race’ (comparing white students with African Caribbean). This in turn is less than half of the social class difference – the difference between children of managerial professional parentage on the one hand, and children from unskilled manual working class homes (Gillborn and Mirza, 2000:22).  Gillborn and Mirza’s study concerns a study of all social strata/social class groups.

Strand (2007, p.13) points out that

“In terms of national data, the Youth Cohort Study (YCS) has historically provided the best estimate of national figures for attainment at school leaving age by ethnicity. A representative sample of approximately 30,000 pupils is surveyed approximately every two years. Analysis of examination results at age 16 for 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002 shows a consistent picture of Indian pupils gaining higher examination scores than White British pupils, while Black, Bangladeshi and Pakistani pupils consistently achieve lower examination scores than White British. In the last published results for GCSE examinations for 2006 (DfES, 2007), 80% of Chinese pupils, 72% of Indian     and 69% of Mixed White & Asian pupils achieved the benchmark of five or more GCSE A*-C grades, compared to 58% of White British pupils. This level of success was achieved by 57% of Bangladeshi pupils, 51% of Black African and Pakistani pupils, 45% of Black Caribbean pupils and just 10% of Gypsy/Roma pupils”.

This data does not show an overall pattern of White supremacy, Indians do better as an ethnic group than Whites, so do Mixed White and Asian students. This (YCS) data cited by Strand (2007), like that of Gillborn and Mirza above, concerns a sample of all social strata/social class groups.

Dehal (2006) refers specifically to the educational attainments of ‘the poor’ – the poorest strata of the working class, those who are entitled to and claim Free School meals (FSM). Dehal points out that the impact of economic disadvantage does differ significantly across ‘BME’ (Black and Minority Ethnic) groups. He concludes that “economic disadvantage is the key driver of ethnic disparity”. In other words, economic poverty is the most important factor in low levels of academic/school attainment.

In the first figure/picture below (“Economic disadvantage is the key driver of ethnic disparity”) below, the left hand chart shows this clearly (as does the Gillborn and Mirza chart above). The right hand chart shows the proportions of school students in each of eight ethnic groups who do receive FSM, who are in the poorest 14% of the population in England and Wales.

The second figure below (“but its impact does differ substantially across BME groups”) shows that the different ethnic groups among these ‘poorest’ 14% of children at state schools do perform differently to each other. Other than Gypsy/Roma, Whites do worst.

Dehal’s (2006) conclusion is that there is a specific ‘race’ factor involved – some ethnic groups of 15-16 year olds in receipt of free school meals – such as White and African-Caribbean and Roma children – do perform/attain more poorly than the average for all 15-16 year old children in receipt of free school meals, and considerably more poorly than Chinese and Indian group of such children. (Strand, 2007, p.32 also shows figures for Free School meals – a crude marker of poverty – in relation to various ethnic groups in England and Wales. On p.29 there is data on the socio-economic class composition of each ethnic group).

Gillborn and Mirza’s  (2000) conclusion from their own data is that

“social class and gender differences are… associated with differences in attainment but neither can account for persistent underlying ethnic inequalities: comparing like with like, African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils do not enjoy equal opportunities” (p.27).

However, the ‘race’ effect, the effect of being part of a particular ethnic group, has less impact on achievement and under-achievement than does social class. Class analysis is more reliable as a measure of achievement/underachievement, than ‘race’ analysis. Demie and Tong (2007), and Demie et al (2007) provide a detailed analysis at the level of one ethnically diverse London Borough, Lambeth. In Lambeth, one sizeable White group, the Portuguese, does significantly worse on standard scores of attainment at various age levels than do other groups, for example.

Strand’s (2007) data and analysis suggest that in terms of ‘raw score’ at Key Stage 3 (age 14) test results in England and Wales, the ‘gaps’ for KS3 results are that

“The social class gap was largest with a 10 point gap between pupils from higher managerial and professional families and those where the main parent was long term unemployed. The maternal education gap was also large with a nine point gap between pupils with mothers qualified to degree level or higher and those with mothers with no educational qualifications. These compare to an ethnic gap of three points. The gender gap was just 0.8 points, with boys scoring lower than girls”.(2007, p.6)

A summary of Strand’s work (Strand, 2008a) shows that

“White British working class pupils (both boys and girls) and Black Caribbean boys were the lowest performing groups at age 16 and made the least progress during secondary school. In particular White British working class pupils show a marked decline in attainment in the last two years of secondary school. Pupils from most minority ethnic groups made good progress during secondary school and showed greater resilience to deprivation relative to their deprived White British peers”.

With respect to non-working class school students, Strand (2008a) notes that ‘Black Caribbean and Black African pupils from more advantaged homes underachieved in relation to their White British peers’.

To turn to BME groups who are not Black Caribbean or Black African, with specific respect to the education of South Asians in Birmingham, England, Abbas (2007) carried out a theoretical and empirical study of the ways in which different South Asian groups, Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani, achieve entry into the selective education system – that is, entry to either the paid for/privately purchased private school places, or entry to the (free) grammar schools.

His findings are that certain working-class South Asian parents possess strong middle-class attitudes towards selective education, irrespective of their ability to facilitate it as a function of their financial, cultural, or social capital. Middle-class South Asians were not only highly motivated but also possessed the economic, social and cultural capital to ensure successful selective school entry.

To conclude this section, Abbas’ conclusion, like those of the studies above, is that, “in general, social class status was the strongest factor in the likelihood of gaining entry into selective schools”.(Abbas, 2007, p.75).(6) Abbas, while asserting the salience of social class factors in educational attainment, also, like Dehal and like Gillborn and Mirza above, draws attention to what he sees as culturally specific attitudes to education.

PART 3: THREE CRITIQUES OF MARXIST ANALYSIS: REVISIONIST SOCIALIST/; GENDER/’RACE’/CLASS PARALLELISM; CRITICAL RACE THEORY; CASTE ANALYSIS

Marxist analysis, crucially concerning the objective salience of social class, (objective as contrasted with subjective consciousness/awareness of social class) is of course, contested, particularly in the USA not only on the right but also by radical (denoted as ‘left liberal’ or ‘revisionist socialist’ by Kelsh and Hill, 2006) scholars such as Michael W. Apple. It is also contested by Critical Race Theorists (and, indeed, by others/other theories which see ‘race’ oppression as the salient structural and policy form of oppression (such as Paul , 2001). It is also contested by those in India who prioritise caste analysis and caste suffering/oppression and caste politics as the fundamental form of oppression.

I now wish to address these three types of non-Marxist, indeed, in essence, anti-Marxist analyses and theories.

The first, Critical Race Theory sees ‘race’ as the fundamental form of social, economic political oppression.(7)

The second perspective asserts either a parallelist or tryptarchic analysis of ‘race’, social class and gender oppression (Apple’s broad view, and that of many others in the USA, such as Lois Weiss).(8)

The third contestation of Marxist analysis is caste analysis, predominantly in India, but throughout the Indian, Pakistani and Nepali diasporas. (9)

Critical Race Theory 

Critical Race Theory, imported from radical analysis in the USA, is propounded in the UK primarily by David Gillborn and by John Preston and Namita Chakrabarty. To repeat, there is full agreement with Gillborn (and great appreciation of his substantial corpus of work over a twenty year period) on the ubiquity of racism, the salience of ‘race’ as the ever-present, or most present, subjective feelings and consciousness among most in BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) groups in Britain (people of color, in the USA) concerning their daily awareness of personal and institutional discrimination and oppression. His latest book, Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy? (2008) extends this to education policy, showing the racist nature and effects of New Labour government education policy in England and Wales, in particular regarding assessment and exclusion from schools. But the pre-eminent focus of this book, and his recent articles setting out Critical Race Theory, is the pre-eminence of ‘race’ rather than social class as a form of structural oppression. Accompanying it is an (little developed) attack on class analysis.

Gillborn (2008) is right about underachievement by Blacks (Black Caribbean and Black African school students) in England and Wales. However, to repeat the points made above in relation to Dehal’s data and analysis, most of this underachievement is related to class location – Black Caribbeans are, with Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Traveller/Roma, the most heavily working class of any ethnic group. When class location – as measured by those claiming and in receipt of Free School Meal (FSM) – is accounted, the all minority ethnic groups other than Gypsy Roma/travellers perform better than whites.

Regarding more privileged groups in society, Strand (2008b) points out that (at age 16)  “White British pupils from high SEC” (Socio-Economic Class) “homes are one of the highest attaining ethnic groups, while White British pupils living in disadvantaged circumstances are the lowest attaining group” (p. 2). Gillborn (e.g. pp 54-56), too, draws attention to this, showing that with regard to non-FSM students (for example at age 16 in their national GCSE assessments) that white students perform better than (most) other ethnic groups.

To repeat, and, as shown by the final Dehal table above, the poor white working class (as measured by FSM – being in receipt of free school meals, performs less well than the working class of nearly all other ethnic groups. Most BME groups do better than whites, once allowance has been made/controlled for class location as measured by FSM.

It seems that Gillborn’s own statistics (in Gillborn and Mirza, 2000) and other empirical data I present or refer to in this paper (see also Independent Working Class Association, 2005) lend compelling support to a Marxist critique of ‘race’ salience theories in general (such as, currently, Critical Race Theory) offered, for example, by Cole, Maisuria, Miles and Sivanandan, and the Institute of Race Relations that he founded, in Britain (10), and in the USA by the Red Critique journal, for example, Young, 2006. In his work on Critical Race Theory, Gillborn in most cases ignores and in other cases belittles the class dimension, a class dimension that, ironically, his own statistics of 2000 (Gillborn and Mirza, 2000) draw attention to.

Gillborn (in his chapter 3, 2008, p.45) does refer to the relative importance of and intersections between, inequalities based on ‘race’, class and gender. He does, as have I, following Strand and Dehal’s (Dehal, 2006; Strand, 2007, 2008a, b) above, note that “economic background is not equally important for all students”. On p.46 he criticises an “exclusive focus on class”.  On p.69 Gillborn notes that “the data certainly confirms that social class background is associated with gross inequalities of achievement at the extremes of the class spectrum.” He repeats: “However, class does not appear to be equally significant for all groups”. He than adds, importantly for his argument (i.e., an argument that seeks to avoid concentrating on data concerning the poorest strata in society), “the growing emphasis on FSM students projects a view of failing Whites that ignores 5 out of 6 students who do not receive FSM”.

But contemporary and recent Marxist work, including my own work, does not have an exclusive focus on class. As this article, I hope makes clear, we adhere to a notion of ‘raced’ and gendered class, in which some (but not all) minority ethnic groups are racialised or xeno-racialised (explained below) and suffer a ‘race penalty’ in, for example, teacher labelling and expectation, treatment by agencies of the state, such as the police, housing, judiciary, health services and in employment. Gillborn gives specific recognition to the analysis that social class is ‘raced’ and gendered (e.g. p. 46), but gives relatively little – in fact very substantially less – explicit (other than implicit) recognition that ‘race’ is classed (and gendered). While his work is not silent on social class disadvantage and social class based oppression in, his treatment of social class analysis is dismissive and his treatment of social class underachievement in education and society, extraordinarily subdued.

The Marxist Concept of Racialisation 

A number of critiques of CRT appear very convincing. These critiques and their concepts draw attention to CRTS’s empirical, theoretical and political failings. These critiques (in Britain) include: Miles’ thesis of racialisation (Miles, 1987, 1989, 1993), Sivanandan’s theory of xeno-racism (2001, and, in Fekete, 2001), Cole’s thesis of xeno-racialisation (e.g. Cole 2008a, b, 2009), and Cole’s critique of dangers of aspects of Critical Whiteness Studies (Cole, 2008a, p.124; Cole, 2008b, 2009).

Cole (2007, p.124) continues his discussion of racialisation, referring to Miles (1987, p. 75), (Miles) “makes it clear that, like racism, racialization is not limited to skin colour: the characteristics signified vary historically and, although there have usually been visible somatic features, other non-visible (alleged and real) biological features have also been identified”. Cole (2007, p.124) adds to Miles ‘cultural’ to ‘biological’ (features) and includes culturally specific appurtanences, for example recognizing that “people are sometimes racialised on grounds of clothing (e.g. the hijab)”.

Cole (2004a, b, also see Cole 2006, 2007a, b, 2008a, b, 2009) has introduced the concept of xenoracialization (developing on from Sivanandan’s discussion of xenoracism) to describe the process whereby refugees, economic migrants and asylum-seekers (often white) become racialized. Sivanandan defines xenoracism as follows:

“It is a racism that is not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted … It is a racism, that is, that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and is therefore passed off as xenophobia, a ‘natural’ fear of strangers. But in the way it denigrates and reifies people before segregating and/or expelling them, it is a xenophobia that bears all the marks of the old racism. It is racism in substance, but ‘xeno’ in form. It is a racism that is meted out to impoverished strangers even if they are white. It is xeno-racism” (Sivanandan, 2001; also cited in Fekete, 2001 p. 26).

Critical Race Theory and White Supremacy

One of two major tenets of CRT that Cole (2008a, b, 2009; see also Cole and Maisuria (2007, 2009)) critically examine is CRT’s “idea that the concept of white supremacy better expresses oppression in contemporary societies based on ‘race’ than does the concept of racism“.  Cole and Maisuria (and Cole) argue that Critical Race Theory “homogenises all white people together in positions of class power and privilege, which, of course, is factually incorrect, both with respect to social class inequality in general, and, as will be shown in later in this paper, with reference to xenoracialization”. Cole and Maisuria (2007) continue, “it is certainly not white people as a whole who are in this hegemonic position, nor white people as a whole who benefit from current education policy, or any other legislation. Indeed the white working class, as part of the working class in general, consistently fares badly in the education system”.

Cole (2008a) notes that, in focusing on issues of color and being divorced from matters related to capitalist requirements with respect to the labour market, CRT is ill–equipped to analyse the discourse of xenoracism and processes of xenoracialization.

McGary (1999:91) points out that “Black people have been used in ways that white people have not. Young’s (2001) comment (with which I and Cole and Maisuria would concur) is that McGary’s observation may be true, but it does not mean that whites have not also been “used”. Young continues, “yes, whites may be “used” differently, but they are still “used” because that is the logic of exploitative regimes—people are “used”, that is to say, their labor is commodified and exchanged for profit”.

Young continues, in his critique of McGary, that such a view

“disconnects black alienation from other social relations; hence, it ultimately reifies race, and, in doing so, suppresses materialist inquiries into the class logic of race. That is to say, the meaning of race is not to be found within its own internal dynamics but rather in dialectical relation to and as an ideological     justification of the exploitative wage-labor economy”.

Critical Race Theory, and other similar theories of ‘race’ salience, such as (Molefi Kete Asante, and of Paul Gilroy (2001), critiqued in Young, 2006) are understandable, as Leonardo (2004) notes, in the USA, as a salient subjective lens and understanding/analysis of felt (and indeed, of course, actual and widespread) oppression. As Leonardo (2004), Young (2006), Cole and Maisuria (2007) and Cole (2008b) note, Critical Race Theory, just as earlier theories such as that of Fanon and Negritude, do draw into the limelight, do expose and represent black experience, humiliation, oppression, racism. But they collude, just as much as race equivalence theorists such as Michael W. Apple, in super-elevating subjective consciousness of one aspect of identity and thereby occluding the (‘raced’ and gendered) class essential nature of capitalism and the labour-capital relation. As such it seeks social democratic reformism, the winning of equal rights and opportunities- within a capitalist (albeit reformed) economy and society. As Young (2006) puts it,

“unlike many commentators who engage race matters, I do not isolate these social sites and view race as a local problem, which would lead to reformist measures along the lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the existing socio-economic arrangements intact…. the eradication of race oppression also requires a totalizing political project: the transformation of existing capitalism—a system which produces difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that justify the resulting social inequality. Hence, my project articulates a transformative theory of race—a theory that reclaims revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing toward a post-racist society”.

Critical Race Theory seems analytically flawed, to be based on the category error of assigning ‘race’ as the primary form of oppression in capitalist society, and to be substantially situationally specific to the USA, with its horrific experience and legacy of slavery. It also seems to me to be a form of left radical United States imperialist hegemonising, that is, of USA based academics projecting on to other countries those experiences and analyses and policy perspectives that derive most specifically from the USA experience of slavery and its contemporary effects. While taking full cognizance of the existence and horrors of racism in, for example, Britain and Europe in general, such an analysis would appear to have less significance and applicability in, for example, Western and Eastern Europe, or, for example, India, Pakistan and Nepal.

The Equivalence or Parallelist Theory of ‘Race’ Class and Gender

Many of the points I make above in Critical Race Theory seem to me to be of equal value in relation to ‘Equivalence’ or ‘Parallelist’ theory (e.g. of Michael W. Apple).  Apple criticises class analysts for ignoring ‘race’, gender and sexuality. He suggests that we need a much more nuanced and complex picture of class relations and class projects to understand what is happening in relation to ‘racial dynamics’ as well as those involving gender (11). Like Leonardo (2004) he sees shortcomings in classical Marxist analysis of class, ‘race’, gender. Leonardo sees strengths in both class analysis with its emphasis on objective analysis, and CRT (and, presumably, other theories and analyses that prioritise ‘race’ experience and awareness and oppression). Apple doesn’t.

Apple’s accusation is that Classical Marxists ‘privilege’ class and marginalise ‘race’, gender and sexuality. But the concept of class, the existence of class, the awareness of class, is itself sometimes buried beneath, hidden by, suffocated, displaced, in the recent (though not the early) work of Michael W. Apple. 

As Kelsh and Hill (2006) critique,

“What is masked from workers, because the capitalist class and its agents work to augment ideology in place of knowledge, is that some workers are poor not because other workers are wealthy, but because the capitalist class exploits all workers, and then divides and hierarchizes them, according capitalist class needs for extracting ever more surplus value (profit)”.

Kelsh and Hill argue that “the Marxist concept of class, because it connects inequitable social relations and explains them as both connected and rooted in the social relations of production, enables class consciousness and the knowledges necessary to replace capitalism with socialism”. They continue, “the Marxist concept of class, however, has been emptied of its explanatory power by theorists in the field of education as elsewhere who have converted it into a term that simply describes, and cannot explain the root causes of, strata of the population and the inequities among them”.

The African—American scholar of the 1940s, Oliver Cromwell Cox argued that  “making sense of the meaning of race and the character of race relations in American life requires an understanding of the dynamics of capitalism as a social system and its specific history in this country” (Reed, 2001). Cox’s main book, Caste, Class, and Race (1948, reprinted in 2001) argued against the “caste school of race relations”. He did this on the grounds that “it abstracted racial stratification in the United States from its origins and foundation in the evolution of American capitalism”. He criticized those who compared racial stratification in the USA with the caste system in India for treating “racial hierarchy as if it were a timeless, natural form of social organization”. As Reed (2001) notes, “the caste approach to the study of American race relations has not been in vogue for several decades; other equally misleading metaphors have long since supplanted it”.

As Reed (2001) further elaborates,

“Cox’s critique of the caste school was linked to his broader view of the inadequacy and wrong-headedness of attitudinal or other idealist approaches to the discussion of racial inequality. He emphatically rejected primordialist notions of racial antipathy or ethnocentrism as explanations of racial stratification. He insisted that racism and race prejudice emerged from the class dynamics of capitalism and its colonial and imperial programs…, race was most fundamentally an artifact of capitalist labor dynamics, a relation that originated in slavery. “Sometimes, probably because of its very obviousness,” he observed, “it is not realized that the slave trade was simply a way of recruiting labor for the purpose of exploiting the great natural resources of America.” This perspective led to one of Cox’s most interesting and provocative insights, that “racial exploitation is merely one aspect of the problem of the proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color of the laborer. Hence racial antagonism is essentially political-class conflict.” We should not make too much of the adverbs “simply” and “merely.” Seeing race as a category that emerges from capitalist labor relations does not necessarily deny or minimize the importance of racial oppression and injustice or the need to fight against racism directly.

“Cox did not dismiss racism among working-class whites. He argued that “the observed overt competitive antagonism is produced and carefully maintained by the exploiters of both the poor whites and the Negroes.” He recognized that elite whites defined the matrix within which non-elite whites crafted their political agency, and he emphasized the ruling-class foundations of racism as part of his critique of the liberal scholars of race relations who theorized race relations without regard to capitalist political economy and class dynamics”. (Reed, 2001)

More recently Young (2006) has also criticised scholars who theorise race relations without regard to capitalist political economy and class dynamics, arguing “social alienation is an historical effect and its explanation does not reside in the experience itself; therefore, it needs explanation and such an explanation emerges from the transpersonal space of concepts”.

And, Young criticizes views such as that of McGary (1999) that “it is possible for African-Americans to combat or overcome… alienation… without overthrowing capitalism”. Young criticizes this as a ‘pro-capitalist’ position: Here, we see the ideological connection between the superstructure (philosophy) and the base (capitalism). Philosophy provides ideological support for capitalism, and, in this instance, we can also see how philosophy carries out class politics at the level of theory (Althusser, 1971, p.18). (12). Similar criticism, of pro-capitalism (albeit of a radical reformist, social democratic variety), of failing to locate racism within the labour-capital relation, within capitalist political economy and class dynamics, can be leveled at the work of Michael W. Apple. (13)

Caste Analysis

I would wish to advance a similar critique of the hegemony and the caste system in India, and among Indian-heritage people in Britain. There is no denying the material reality and form, the murderous and tragic consequences of the caste system currently and historically, primarily for Dalits, the Untouchables, who are regarded as impure by higher caste Brahmins and others. Whole libraries have been written on caste oppression, lakes of tears have been shed and blood flown. (14)

In the British context, particularly worth noting is, Borbas, Haslam and Sampla’s 2006 report for the Dalit Solidarity Network, No Escape: Caste Discrimination in the UK. This draws similar attention to caste discrimination that exists in the Indian Diaspora, with over 300 million people worldwide suffering from caste-based discrimination and caste-like practices linked to untouchability (p.4). Their report on caste discrimination in England, with an estimated 50,000 Dalits, gives evidence of in job discrimination against Dalits and lower castes (for example with higher castes rejecting or resenting taking orders from, being managed by Dalits or lower caste Indians, and with the different castes and the Dalits all having different temples/gurudwaras/places of worship. In addition, inter-caste marriages are unusual. The authors (p.7) note that “the rules of endogamy (marrying within the caste group) are still strictly followed”.

When I raise the issue of caste discrimination in Britain or India, I often get the retort, “caste is a pre-capitalist social formation”. And so it is, but caste lives today, in capitalism, with the emergence of economic elites, a capitalist class and class stratification in the Scheduled Castes, The Backward Castes, the Backward Tribes, and the Dalits. (15)

Indeed, it is these elites who benefit disproportionately from caste based access to education. This is played out with the quota system for entry to universities. A quota of places is reserved for various groups within higher education and also within state employment. This is termed ‘reservation’ in India and is protected/enforced as part of the Indian constitution.

Capitalism has benefited from this caste politics/policy/legislation. Social class and the idea of class conflict have been put on backburner in India. Economic and social justice are no longer the justice achieved through class struggle but rather through the government reforms for certain castes. Kumar (2008a) notes that “such measures have been continuing for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes for decades and it came for the Backward Castes (BCs) in jobs with Mandal Commission (with the National Front Government during 1989) and in Higher education institutions with the government passing a law and Supreme Court upholding it”.

There is no denying that caste repression has been there in Indian society throughout (and, of course, before) capitalism in India. However its ‘social’ content and ‘economic’ content have often been seen in disjunction, which leads to flawed analysis. Rather than struggling specifically for ‘caste rights’, the rights of Dalits and of Scheduled Castes, a Marxist approach and analysis is that the political struggle should be for Dalit rights or poor Backward Caste rights by virtue, not of their caste position, but by virtue of their social class position, as landless workers or as (part of a multi-caste) working class (Kumar, 2008a, d).

Emphasis on the ‘social’, the subjective identity of caste, just as, with the pre-eminence accorded by some writers to the subjective identity of ‘race’ in the USA, for example, is perpetuated through the ideological apparatuses used by the dominant and entrenched hegemonic interests to perpetuate the economic (and resultant social) inequalities that exists.

A class divided by caste, or divided by ‘race’ – whether such divisions are inflamed by ‘saffron fascists’ in India or by racists in the USA (or Britain), or whether they are perpetuated by reformist ‘reservation’/huge scale quota systems (valuable though, in part they might be), serve to divide and perpetuate capitalist class rule. ‘The workers united, will never be defeated’, a phrase thundered out of a million voices on demonstrations and struggles in countries such as France, Portugal, Spain, Britain at various times, is a phrase and concept and organizational aim understood well by those opposed to the development of working class consciousness.

As Ravi Kumar (2008c) notes,

“And now because of the host of measures/reforms a elite has emerged within the Dalits as well as the BCs (as indicated starkly in North India by political formations led by Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh and Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar). They are now very much part of the plan of capitalist expansion. Nobody is talking about land reforms, minimum wages, gender equality (in fact the Women’s Reservation Bill has been stuck in Parliament for ages because of objections made by the Backward Caste lobby), unemployment and growing disparity. And their support as well as close relationship with big industrial houses shows how much they care for the uplifting of even their own caste-people, people from the same caste”.

Ashwani Kumar (2008) gives the example from Rajasthan: “there are many lower caste people who have economically reached the upper class but do not want to give up the benefits associated with having a Scheduled Caste or Tribe certificate”, and he cites the case of the Meena tribe, many of whose members are top government officials, but whose offspring continue to reap the benefits of ‘reservation’. Similarly, Ravi Kumar 2008c (chapter 9) analyses the enormous inequity within the jatis (sub-castes) with an elite emerging among them which manipulates the caste identity and consolidates it for its own gains, as part of the class stratification of castes.

Ravi Kumar (2008b) notes that in India “[T]he discourse on caste as located within the realm of capitalism is almost negligible” and that “[O]ne of the much frequently visited debates in Indian context has been that of non-significance of ‘class’ and significance of ‘caste’ as the most significant category of social division or form of social relation”. Kumar (2008b, developed in depth in Kumar 2008c) suggests that

“The emergence of elite among all castes (which could very well be identified with parallel class positions), especially among the so-called Backward Castes and Dalits (literally meaning ‘oppressed’), has shown how capital uses the existing identities to sustain and expand itself. The direction in which Dalit politics has moved recently has been that of co-optation into the larger system of capitalism. In terms of ‘inclusion’ of hitherto unrepresented social categories into the dominant forms of capital accumulation it can be said that there has been a democratisation of opportunities to access the realm of competition” (italics in the original).

As Brosio (2008) notes, such co-option weakens the anti-capitalist struggle. To repeat, there is no denying the material reality, the daily living conditions, the deaths, arising from caste discrimination in India, or, indeed, from the 2008 ethnic strife/cleansing in Kenya, or the ethnocratic Zionist oppression and landgrabbing of Israeli Arab and Palestinian Arab land. Non-class ideologies can and do assume material reality, sometimes with lethal force. However, below, I advance a Marxist analysis of these ethnic, caste, and other forms of oppression.

PART 4.  MARXIST ANALYSIS OF CLASS, ‘RACE’, CASTE AND GENDER

Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism

Neoliberal capitalist policies of marketisation, commodification, and privatisation of public services, together with fiscal and other policy changes, comprise an intensification of ‘class war from above’ (Harvey, 2005) by the capitalist class against the working class. It is worth noting that ‘class war from above’ is a permanent feature of the labour-capital relation, more observable during crises of capital accumulation/major threats to the rate of profit, less observable during periods of class compromise, of ‘truce’, but permanent, nevertheless.

These neo-liberal policy changes in the education sector result, inter alia, in (1) widening social class educational inequalities, for example in wealth, income and educational attainment; (2) attacks on the key working class organisations, such as trade unions; and (3) worsening pay and conditions of education workers. These can be seen as three “fronts” in the current class war from above. (16)

The introduction and extension of neoliberal social policies in Britain, the USA after the New Right reactionary movements of the 1980s, and more globally (notably in Chile under Pinochet, elsewhere in Latin America under an assortment of generals and “big business” control) offers fertile ground for Marxist analysis since economic inequality and class division has sharpened markedly, within countries and internationally. (17)

Social Class and Marxist Critique of Identitarian Politics 

Young (2006) notes that in terms of race, an Althusserian account is presented in Stuart Hall’s 1980 article, ‘Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance’:

“by the 1990s, Hall shifts to a semiotic notion of race, and sees race as a “floating signifier”. In many ways, Hall’s intellectual trajectory on race mirrors the larger shift from the “material” to the “semiotic” in social theory” (from Young, 2006).

In Hill (2001, 2005a), in a similar associated critique of Hall’s ‘New Times’ analysis, I also trace the Stuart Hall’s (and other post-Marxist and postmodernist) progression from materialist analyses to semiotic/culturalist analyses) (Hill, 2001, 2005a). So does Jenny Bourne, in her discussion of the rise of cultural studies, the ‘Hokum of New Times’, and her critique of Hall over his post-Marxist position on ‘race’, ‘identity’ and difference. She writes,

“The politics of identity and difference were now being clearly used to justify the break with class politics and, indeed, with the concept of Left politics altogether.” (idem)

“The ‘personal is the political’ also helped to shift the center of gravity of struggle from the community and society to the individual. ‘What has to be done?’ was replaced by ‘who am I?’ as the blacks, feminists and gays, previously part of the pressure groups in Left parties or in social movements campaigning for rights, turned to Identity Politics. Articulating one’s identity changed from being a path to political action to being the political action itself” (2002:200).

Bourne, continues,

“Sivanandan critiques postmodernism not so much in terms of the inward-looking self-referencing type of debate, beloved of academics, as in terms of the danger it spells to anti-racist practice. First, he takes issue with those     intellectuals who, at a time when racism against the black working class is getting worse, ‘have retreated into culturalism and ethnicity or, worse, fled into discourse and deconstruction and representation – as though to interpret the world is more important than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do to change the world’.”

And in an acerbic aside Sivanandan adds: “Marxists interpret the world in order to change it, postmodernists change the interpretation.” (cited in Bourne, 2002, p.203)

Class is absolutely central to Marxist ontology and epistemology. Ultimately, it is economically induced and it conditions and permeates all social reality in capitalist systems. Marxists therefore critique postmodern and post-structural arguments that class is, or ever can be, “constructed extra-economically,” or equally that it can be “deconstructed politically” – an epistemic position which has underwritten in the previous two decades numerous so-called “death of class” theories—arguably the most significant of which are Laclau & Mouffe (1985) and Laclau (1996).

I am not arguing against the complexities of subjective identities. People have different subjectivities. Some individual coalminers in Britain were gay, black, Betty Page or Madonna fetishists, heavily influenced by Biggles or Punk, their male gym teacher or their female History teacher, by Robert Tressell or by Daily Porn masturbation, by Radical Socialists or by Fascist ideology. But the coal mining industry has virtually ceased to exist in Britain, and the police occupation of mining villages such as Orgreave during the Great Coalminers’ Strike (in Britain) of 1984-85 and the privatisation of British Coal and virtual wiping out of the Coalmining industry was motivated by class warfare of the ruling Capitalist fraction. It was class warfare from above. Whatever individuals in mining families like to do in bed, their dreams, and in their transmutation of television images, they suffered because of their particular class fraction position – they were miners – and historically the political shock troops of the British manual working class.

Postmodernism’s rejection of metanarratives can be seen as symptomatic of the theoretical inability to construct a mass solidaristic oppositional transformatory political project, and that it is based on the refusal to recognise the validity or existence of solidaristic social class. More importantly, this general theoretical shortcoming is politically disabling because the effect of eschewing mass solidaristic policy is, in effect, supporting a reactionary status quo. Both as an analysis and as a vision, post-modernism has its dangers – but more so as a vision. It fragments and denies economic, social, political and cultural relations. In particular, it rejects the solidaristic metanarratives of neo-Marxism and socialism. It thereby serves to disempower the oppressed and to uphold the hegemonic Radical Right in their privileging of individualism and in their stress on patterns and relations of consumption as opposed to relations of production. Postmodernism analysis, in effect if not in intention, justifies ideologically the current Radical Right economic, political and educational project.

Marxism and Class 

At this point it might be useful to discuss briefly, Marxist analysis of social class. There are significant issues concerning intra-class differentiation and about class consciousness. It is important to recognize that class, for Marx, is neither simply monolithic nor static. Marx conceived of classes as internally differentiated entities. Under capitalist economic laws of motion, the working class in particular is constantly decomposed and reconstituted due to changes in the forces of production— forces of which members of the working class are themselves a part.(6) Furthermore, Marx had taken great pains to stress that social class as distinct from economic class necessarily includes a political dimension, which is in the broadest sense of the term ‘culturally’ rather than ‘economically’ determined.

And, class-consciousness does not follow automatically or inevitably from the fact of class position. The Poverty of Philosophy [1847] distinguishes between a ‘class-in-itself’ (class position) and a ‘class-for itself’ (class-consciousness);The Communist Manifesto [1848] explicitly identifies the “formation of the proletariat into a class” as the key political task facing the communists. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon [1852] Marx observes,

“In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their cultural formation from those of the other classes and bring them into conflict with those classes, they form a class. In so far as these small peasant proprietors are merely connected on a local basis, and the identity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a political organisation, they do not form a class”. (Marx, 1999 [1852])

Thus social class exists in a contingent rather than a necessary relation to economic class. The process (and conceptual category) which links economic and social class is that of ‘class consciousness’. This is arguably the most contentious and problematic term in the debate over class.

Marxism, Class and Capitalist Education and Economy

Classical Marxian scholarship with respect to education theorises the relationship between education and the inequality in society as an inevitable feature of capitalist society/economy. Glenn Rikowski, focuses on the relationship between social class and the process of capitalization of education (e.g. Rikowski, 2005) in the USA and UK, where neo-liberal drivers are working to condition the education sector more tightly to the needs of capital. A global study I carried out in 2005 for the International Labour Organisation (Hill, 2005b; Hill et al, 2006) shows clearly the similarity of these drivers, the similarity of policy developments, and the similarity of impacts across many countries. Empirical evidence (e.g. Greaves, Hill, Maisuria, 2006; Hill, Greaves and Maisuria, 2008) shows how capital accumulation is the principal objective of national and international government policy, and of global capitalist organizations, ‘capitalist clubs’, such as the World Trade Organization.

To repeat from above the key ontological claim of Marxist education theorists is that education serves to complement, regiment and replicate the dominant-subordinate nature of class relations upon which capitalism depends, the labor-capital relation. Education services the capitalist economy, though this servicing is not unproblematic or uncontested. Education (schools, universities) help reproduce the necessary social, political, ideological and economic conditions for capitalism, and therefore, helps reflect and reproduce the organic inequalities of capitalism originating in the relations of production.

But education is also a site of cultural contestation and resistance, a key site of ‘the culture wars’ between neo-conservative and neoliberal, liberal, social democratic and socialist visions of and articulations of culture, correctness and common-sense.

Education reflects and supports and reproduces the social inequalities of capitalist culture.  The “education industry” is a significant state apparatus (Althusser, 1971) in the reproduction and replication of the capitalist social form necessary for the continuation of “surplus value” extraction and economic inequality. Hence, Marxists argue that there are material linkages between educational inequality, exploitation and capitalist inequalities in general.

In contrast to both Critical Race Theorists and revisionist socialists/left liberals/equivalence theorists, and those who see caste as the primary form of oppression, Marxists would agree that objectively, whatever our ‘race’ or gender or sexuality or current level of academic attainment, or religious identity, whatever the individual and group history and fear of oppression and attack, the fundamental objective and material form of oppression in capitalism is class oppression.

Black and Women capitalists, or Jewish and Arab capitalists, or Dalit capitalists in India, exploit the labour power of their multi-ethnic, men and women workers, essentially (in terms of the exploitation of labour power and the appropriation of surplus value) in just the same way as do white male capitalists, or upper caste capitalists. But thesubjective consciousness of identity, while seared into the souls of its victims, this subjective affirmation of one particular subjective identity, should not mask the objective nature of contemporary oppression under capitalism- class oppression that, of course, hits some ‘raced’ and gendered and caste and occupational sections of the working class harder than others.

Martha Gimenez (2001:24) succinctly explains that ‘class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression.’ Rather, class denotes ‘exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of production.’ Apple’s ‘parallellist’, or equivalence model of exploitation (equivalence of exploitation based on ‘race’, class and gender, his ‘tryptarchic’ model of inequality) produces valuable data and insights into aspects of and the extent and manifestations of gender oppression and ‘race’ oppression in capitalist USA. However, such analyses serve to occlude the class-capital relation, the class struggle, to obscure an essential and defining nature of capitalism, class conflict.

Objectively, whatever our ‘race’ or gender or caste or sexual orientation or scholastic attainment, whatever the individual and group history and fear of oppression and attack, the fundamental form of oppression in capitalism is class oppression. While the capitalist class is predominantly white and male, capital in theory and in practice can be blind to colour and gender and caste – even if that does not happen very often. African Marxist-Leninists such as Ngugi Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, (e.g Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii, 1985) know very well that when the white colonialist oppressors were ejected from direct rule over African states in the 1950s and 60s, that the white bourgeoisie in some African states such as Kenya was replaced by a black bourgeoisie, acting in concert with transnational capital and/or capital(ists) of the former colonial power. Similarly in India, capitalism is no longer

As Bellamy observes, the diminution of class analysis ‘denies immanent critique of any critical bite’, effectively disarming a meaningful opposition to the capitalist thesis. (Bellamy, 1997:25). And as Harvey notes,

“neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of justice through the conquest of state power”.(Harvey, 2005:41).

To return to the broader relationship between ‘race’, gender and social class, and to turn to the USA, are there many who would deny that Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell have more in common with the Bushes and the rest of the Unites States capitalist class, be it white, black or Latina/o, than they do with the workers whose individual ownership of wealth and power is an infinitesimal fraction of those individual members of the ruling and capitalist class.

The various oppressions, of caste, gender, ‘race’, religion, for example, are functional in dividing the working class and securing the reproduction of capital; constructing social conflict between men and women, or black and white, or different castes, or tribes, or religious groups, or skilled and unskilled, thereby tending to dissolve the conflict between capital and labor, thus occluding the class-capital relation, the class struggle, and to obscure the essential and defining nature of capitalism, the labor-capital relation and its attendant class conflict.

Class is clearly not the only form of oppression in contemporary society. People get demeaned, discriminated against, labeled, attacked, raped, murdered and massacred because of a variety of presenting characteristics and identities, such as gender, race, caste, sexuality, religion. And because of the weight of history. As Marx (1852/1969) notes,

“Men (sic) make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”.

Non-reductionist class analysis

I now refer to a non-reductionist analysis of the role of ideology, knowledge workers, and the material practices of racism and Dalit discrimination. As Motala and Vally (writing about South Africa, but with global analytical relevance) analyse,

“Simply rejecting these deeply embedded social norms, practices and histories, often developed over many centuries preceding the advent of capitalist accumulation, as “hypocrisy” is disarming and does not provide a basis for understanding them. In other words, the idea that “race” (or other such conceptions and practices) is a social construct does not automatically imply that it has no explanatory value (especially about how power is constituted through racist categories and/or gender to reinforce the structural attributes and impediments of working class lives). The explanatory value of “race” and gender lies in the power to reveal the relationship between these social constructs and class without suggesting that they provide a better explanation of “exploitation”.”(2009, n.p) (italics added)

They recognise that,

“Understanding the role of ideology fully and its construction of forms of subjectivity that reinforces class domination are essential. Ideology allows capitalist relations to be concealed, blocked from being grasped conceptually, by the empirico-experiential actuality of racist practices”.(idem)

This comment, I might interject, is also relevant to the empirico-experientialist actuality of Caste oppression in India and the Indian diaspora.

Motala and Vally continue,

“And because the empirio-experiential trumps the theoretical, the root cause of inequity is accepted as and ascribed to the empirical – to “race”, in this case – rather than to capitalist relations. Ideology is rooted in and impacts on the material and cannot be reduced to falsehood”.

Thus the analysis in this paper does not ignore the material reality of ‘race’ oppression, caste oppression or gender oppression. The analysis I am putting forward is a Marxist argument located within Marxist reproduction theory, the theory that education systems, together with other ideological and repressive state apparatuses, work to reproduce existing patterns of economic, social and political life. While not subscribing to an Althusserian relative autonomy analysis (one developed, inter alias, by Michael W. Apple), this analysis is not an iron chain of command – from capital to government to state apparatuses to effective impact. The analysis offered here, while it will, no doubt be criticised as ‘vulgar Marxism’ and as deterministic, reductionist and essentialist (for such critiques, see Apple, 2005, 2006), does recognizes developments within neo-Marxist theory, especially state theory, that this cultural, economic and ideological reproduction is mediated and resisted. (See Hill, 2001, 2005a).  However, such an analysis is more deterministic, reductionist and essentialist than those of relative autonomy ‘culturalist (neo-) Marxists’ and most certainly than postmodernists. But not in terms of the ‘vulgar Marxism’ attributed by its critics.

Such an analysis sees class as central to the social relations of production and essential for producing and reproducing the cultural and economic activities of humans under a capitalist mode of production. Whereas the abolition of racism and sexism or caste does not guarantee the abolition of capitalist social relations of production, the abolition of class inequalities, or the abolition of class itself, by definition, denotes the abolition of capitalism.

As Motala and Vally (2009, n.p.) argue,

“the absence of class analysis leads to a debilitating failure to appreciate the deeper characteristics of society; de-links poverty and inequality from the political, economic and social system-capitalism-which underpins them; obscures the class nature of the post-apartheid state; renders ineffective social and educational reforms and denies the importance of class struggle and the agency of working communities in the struggle for social transformation”.

PART 5: SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, REFORMS, AND THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM

Social democratic reforms, and social democratic, or ‘revisionist left’ analyses and theorists and the policies related to those theories and class/political mobilisitations/struggle are immensely valuable. Clean water, free schooling, social welfare benefits are, the creating of Welfare States, are, of course, life enhancing/life-changing/life lengthening for billions, in Rich countries like Britain and the USA as well as in developing countries such as India, and are therefore intrinsically valuable. Thus, in India, for example, or in Britain or the USA, a common school system, (known in Britain as a comprehensive school system) -with no private purchase of educational privilege via the existence of private, or semi-private school systems- would, if properly funded, be an immensely valuable, ‘welfarist’ social reform (18).

And in India, the caste based system of quotas, for entry into universities and into government jobs (termed ‘reservation’) has indeed been invaluable in millions of individual cases of advancing repressed and poor sections of the people. Ravi Kumar points out that,

“There is a great deal of debate on the issue of reservation in India. The Left has been in forefront of supporting it. However, if one looks at the reservation policy it has, at a certain plane, democratized     access of the lower class/caste population to education/jobs”.

So that is the value of a social democratic reform. But R. Kumar goes on to look at the class impact of such a policy:

“However, it has also, as an analysis of the past decades demonstrate, led to the emergence of an elite. Reservation demand for the backward castes, for instance, since 1990 has clearly indicated this, as the majority of the BC population remains landless workers, or poor peasantry. The reservations democratize the access but only for those who have reached such a position to access it. For example, when the majority of children are not able to cross Class V in schools. Would reservation in Higher Education mean democracy in access for majority? Rather, it will only increase access for those who could     afford to go beyond schools. In other words, those who can afford to purchase education”.

Thus, within a social democratic welfarist framework, involving, in various countires, quota/reservation systems, assistance for poor students, other measures of positive discrimination, education continues to play a key role in the perpetuation of the labour-capital relation, of capitalism itself. Referring to social democratic, left-liberal and ‘revisionist left’ theorists, Kelsh and Hill (2006) explain,

“By “revisionist left”, we mean, following Rosa Luxemburg (1899/1970), those theorists who consider themselves to be “left” but who believe there is no alternative to capitalism, and thus do “not expect to see the contradictions of capitalism mature.” Their theories consequently aim “to lessen, to attenuate, the capitalist contradictions” – in short, to “adjust” “the antagonism between capital and labor.” As Luxemburg explained, the core aim of the revisionist left is the “bettering of the situation of the workers and …the conservation of the middle classes”.”

In contrast, egalitarian, socialist, reforms, affecting the lives, life chances material conditions of, for example South Asian and other school students and communities in Britain, as elsewhere, require an end not only to neoliberal/neoconservative globalising capitalism, but to capitalism itself, and through a localising and globalising of resistance, a transition to a socialist society, economy and polity.

As Marx and Engels (1977a [1847], p. 62) put it:

“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of the movement”.

In this, socialist and Marxist teachers and other cultural workers, community and political activists have a dual role: to act as critical transformative socialist public intellectuals, and to act with others in wider arenas of anti-capitalist struggle.

Dave Hill is Professor of Education Policy at the University of Northampton, UK and is Chief Editor ofJournal for Critical Education Policy Studies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is to thank Richard Brosio, Mike Cole, Ashwani Kumar, Ravi Kumar, Alpesh Maisuria, and Radhika Menon for their comments on this chapter. Any inadequacies remain mine.

Notes

1. For Marxist arguments against postmodernism, see Eagleton, 1996; Cole, Hill and Rikowski, 1997; Callinicos, 1989; Cole et al, 2001, Hill et al., 2002; Cole, 2008a.  Elsewhere in this paper I refer to Bourne, 2002.

2. This is not an argument against separate ethnic or religious language/culture/religion schooling for indigenous, migrant groups in schooling/education that is supplementary to, or complementary to a common (or comprehensive) publicly funded, secular state school system with a common core curriculum.

3. See Miles, 1987, 19898, 1993; Abbass, 2007; Cole, 2008. I am using the Marxist concept of racialisation here. There are others, such as in Murji and Solomos, 2005.

4. Cole, 2004b, 2008a, b, 2009.

5. In Britain 1.8 percent of the population are Indian heritage (more than one million), 1.3% of Pakistani heritage (three quarters of a million, with over half of Pakistanis live in the West Midlands, Yorkshire and the North West), 0.5 percent of Bangladeshi heritage (280,000). London has the highest proportion of minority ethnic communities. Almost 50% of Londoners describe themselves other than white British. (National Statistics, 2001). (See also Commission for Racial Equality, 2007).

6. For ethnographic and empirical and theoretical/analytical work on South Asian minority ethnic groups’ identity and educational achievement, see, for example, Runneymede Trust, 2000; Sivanandan, 2001; Abbas, 2004a, b.

7. See Mills, 1987, 1989, 1993, 1997, 2003; Bell, 1992, 2004; Delgado, 1995; Delgado and Stefanic, 2000, 2001; Gillborn, 2005, 20061, b, 2008; Preston, 2007a, b; Chakrabarty and Preston, 2007.

8. See, for example, Apple, 2001, 2005, 2006.

9. For critiques of the effects of caste in India, see Iliah, 2005; Kumar and Kumar, 2005, Murali Krishna, 2007, Quadri and Kumar, 2003. For critiques of caste in Britain, see Borbas et al, 2006.

10. See Sivanandan, 2001; Cole, 2007a, 2007b, 2008a, b, 2009 forthcoming; Cole and Maisuria, 2007, 2009, and with respect to ‘race’ salience theories-theories analyzing ‘race’ as the primary form of structural oppression, see Miles 1987, 1989, 1993; and Young, 2001.

11. See, for example, Apple, 2005:392; 2006:116.

12. See the section below on Identity and Identitarian Politics

13. For critiques of Apple’s analysis see, in addition to Kelsh and Hill, 2006, Farahmandpur, 2004 and Rikowski, 2006, Hill 2007a; This, my, critique is not an ad hominem critique. Apple has, in a whole series of books, articles and doctoral supervisions over three decades been a powerful figure in critiquing and analyzing capitalist education from a left perspective- a reformist left perspective.

14. The writings in India of, for example, Murali Krishnai (2007), Kancha Ilaiah (2005) regarding Hindu Dalits, and of Quadri and Kumar (2003) on oppression of Muslim Dalits are very powerful testimonies to the oppression of Dalits in India.

15. Dalits are not a separate caste, but it is considered a politically correct term to be used for the Scheduled Casstes, as it literally means ‘repressed’. The Scheduled Castes comprise 16.2% of India’s total population, and the Scheduled Tribes comprise 8.2% of the population as per the 2001 census.

16. Hill et al, 2005a, 2007a, c, d.

17. See Dumenil and Levy, 2002; Harvey, 2005; Hill and Kumar, 2008.

18. For some suggestions concerning the development of an eco-socialist education policy, see Hill and Boxley, 2007. See Glenn Rikowski’s, ‘Marx and the Education of the Future’, 2004, where Rikowski, with close reference to Karl Marx’s writings on education, outlines the education of the future as anti-capitalist education. In starting out from a conception of communism as the ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx), Rikowski argues that the anti-capitalist education of the future consists of three moments: critique, addressing human needs and realms of freedom. He also argues that that all three moments are essential for an anti-capitalist education of the future, but the emphasis on particular moments changes (a movement from moment one to three) as capitalist society and education are left behind through social transformation. In the light of this framework, Rikowski critically examines Marx’s views on the relation between labour and education, and his views on education run by the state He concludes with a consideration of two trends that are gaining strength in contemporary education in England: the social production of labour-power and the business takeover of education. These trends, and this analysis, clearly have global resonance.

References

Abbas, T. (2004a) The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism: Philosophical Considerations. Centre for research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism. University of Surrey.

Abbass, T. (2004b) The Education of British South Asians: Ethnicity, Capital and Class Structure. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Abbass, T. (2007) British South Asians and pathways into selective schooling: social class, culture and ethnicity.British Education Research Journal, 33 (1) pp.75-90.

Althusser, L. (1971) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation . In L. Althusser,Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.

Apple, M. W. (1988) Facing the Complexity of Power: For a Parallelist Position in Critical Educational Studies. In M. Cole (ed.) Bowles and Gintis Revisited. Lewes, UK: Falmer Press.

Apple, M. W. (1993) Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Apple, M. W. (1996) Education and cultural politics. New York: Teachers College Press.

Apple, M. W. (1999) Power, meaning, and identity: essays in critical educational studies. New York: Peter Lang.

Apple, M. W. (2001) Educating the “right” way: Markets, standards, God, and inequality. New York and London: Routledge/Falmer.

Apple, M.W.  (2005) Audit cultures, commodification, and class and race strategies in education. Policy Futures in Education, 3 (4), pp. 379-399.

Apple, M. W. (2006) Review Essay: Rhetoric and reality in critical educational studies in the United States. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27 (5) (November), pp.679-687.

Apple, M. W. and Weiss, L. (1983) Ideology and Practice in Schooling. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Asante, M. (1987) The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.

Bell, D. (1992) Faces at the Bottom of the Well: the permanence of racism. New York: Basic Books

Bell, D. (2004) Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform. New York: Oxford University Press

Bellamy, R. (1997) The Intellectual as Social Critic, Antonio Gramsci and Michael Walzer. In A. Kemp-Welsh and J. Jennings (eds.) Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Rushdie Affair. London: Routledge.

Bhatti, G. (1999) Asian Children at Home and School: an Ethnographic Study. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Borbas, G., Haslam, D. and Sampla, B. (2006) No Escape: Caste Discrimination in the UK. Dalit Solidarity Network UK Report, London: Institute for Race Relations.

Bourne, J. (2002) Racism, Postmodernism and the Flight from Class. In D.Hill, P. McLaren, M. Cole, and G. Rikowski (eds.) Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory. Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books.

Brosio, R. (1994) A Radical Democratic Critique of Capitalist Education. New York: Peter Lang.

Brosio, R. (2008) Comments on this chapter. Unpublished.

Callinicos, A. (1989) Against Postmodernism: a Marxist Critique. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Chakrabarty, N. and Preston, P. (2007) Putnam’s pink umbrella? Transgressing melancholic social capital. In H. Helve and J. Bynner (eds.), J (2007) Capitals, Cultures and Identities. London: Tufnell Press.

Cole, M (2004a). ‘Brutal and Stinking’ and ‘difficult to handle’: the historical and contemporary manifestations of racialisation, institutional racism, and schooling in Britain. Race, Ethnicity and Education, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 35-56

Cole, M (2004b). F*** you – human sewage: contemporary global capitalism and the xeno-racialization of asylum seekers. Contemporary Politics, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 159-165

Cole, M. (2006). Marxism and Educational Theory: An E-Interview with Mike Cole. Interviewed by Glenn RikowskiInformation for Social Change, 23.

Cole, M. (2007). ‘Racism’ is about more than colour , Times Higher Education Supplement, 23 November.

Cole, M. (2008a). Marxism and Educational Theory: Origins and Issues. London: Routledge.

Cole, M. (forthcoming) (2008b). Critical race theory comes to the UK: a Marxist response, Ethnicities.

Cole, M. (forthcoming) (2009) Critical Race Theory and Education: a Marxist Response. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Cole, M. and Maisuria, A. (2007) ‘Shut the f*** up’, ‘you have no rights here’: Critical Race Theory and Racialisation in post-7/7 racist Britain . Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 5(1).

Cole, M., Hill, D., McLaren, P. and Rikowski, G. (2001) Red Chalk: On Schooling, Capitalism and Politics . Brighton: Institute for Education Policy Studies.

Commisssion for Racial Equality (2007). Diversity and Integration. London: CRE.

Cox, O. Cromwell  [1948] (1959) Caste, Class, and Race. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Cox, O. Cromwell [1948] (2000) Race: a Study in Social Dynamics. (50th anniversary edition of Caste, Class and Race). New York: Monthly Review Press.

Dehal, I. (2006) Still Aiming High .

Delgado, R. (1995) The Rodrigo Chronicles: Conversations about America and Race. New York: New York University Press.

Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (Eds.). (2000) Critical race theory: The cutting edge. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. (2nd Edition).

Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (2001) Critical Race Theory: an Introduction. New York: New York University Press

Demie, F. Lewis, K. and McLean, C. (2007) Raising the Achievement of Somali Pupils: Challenges and School Responses. London: Lambeth Research and Statistics Unit.

Demie, F. and Tong, R. (2007) Education Statistics. London: Lambeth Research and Statistics Unit.

DfES (2007) National Curriculum assessments, GCSE and equivalent attainment and post-16 attainment by pupil characteristics in England 2005/06 (Revised). SFR04/2007. London: DfES.

Dumenil, G. and Levy, D. (2004) Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. London: Harvard University Press.

Eaglerton, T. (1996) The Illusions of Postmodernism. Malden: MASS: Blackwell.

Farahmandpur, R. (2004) Essay Review: a Marxist critique of Michael Apple’s neo-Marxist approach to education reform , Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies, 2 (1).

Fekete, L (2001) The Emergence of Xeno-racism . Institute of Race Relations.

Gillborn, D. (2005) Education policy as an act of white supremacy; whiteness, critical race theory and education reform. Journal of Education Policy, 20 4, pp.485-505.

Gillborn, D.  (2006a) Critical Race  Theory  and  Education:  Racism  and  Antiracism  in Educational Theory and Praxis,Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27 (1), pp. 11-32.

Gillborn, D. (2006b) Rethinking white supremacy: who counts in ‘WhiteWorld’, Ethnicities, 6 (3), pp. 318-340

Gillborn, D. (2008) Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy? London: Routledge.

Gillborn, D and Mirza, H. (2000) Educational Inequality; Mapping race, class and gender- a synthesis of research evidence. London: Ofsted.

Gilroy, P. (2000) Against Race. Cambridge, Masschusetts: Harvard University Press

Gimenez, M. (2001) Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the trilogy, Race, Gender and Class, 8, 2, pp. 23-33.

Greaves, N. M., Hill, D. and Maisuria, A. (2006) Embourgeoisment, Immiseration, Commodification – Marxism Revisited: a Critique of Education in Capitalist Systems, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 5 (1).

Hall, S. (1980/1996) Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance. In H. A. Baker Jr, M. Diawara and Lindeberg (eds.) Black British Cultural Studies Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Hill, D. (2001) State theory and the Neo-Liberal reconstruction of schooling and teacher education: a structuralist Neo-Marxist critique of Postmodernist, Quasi-Postmodernist, and Culturalist Neo-Marxist theory. The British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22, (1) pp.137-157.

Hill, D. (2005a) State Theory and the Neoliberal Reconstruction of Schooling and Teacher Education.  In G. Fischman, P. McLaren, H. Sünker and C. Lankshear, (eds.) Critical theories, Radical Pedagogies and Global Conflicts. Boulder, CO, Rowman and Littlefield.

Hill, D. (2005b) Globalisation and its educational discontents: Neoliberalisation and its impacts on education workers’ rights, pay, and conditions. International Studies in the Sociology of Education 15 (3) pp.257-288

Hill, D. (2007a). Education, Class and Capital in the Epoch of Neo-liberal Globalisation. In A. Green and G. Rikowski (eds). Marxism and Education: renewing dialogues. Vol. 1, Opening the Dialogue. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Hill, D.. (2007b) Critical Teacher Education, New Labour in Britain, and the Global Project of Neoliberal Capital, Policy Futures, 5 (2).

Hill, D. (2007c). Socialist Educators and Capitalist Education, Socialist Outlook, 13.

Hill, D. (2007d). Education: Their Agenda and Ours, Socialist Resistance, 49, p.9. November.

Hill, D. with Anijar, K., Brown, C., Carroll, E., Davidson-Harden, A., Gabbard, D., Gindin, J., Kuehn, et al (2006) Education Services Liberalization. In E. Rosskam (ed.). Winners or Losers? Liberalizing public services. Geneva: International Labour Organisation.

Hill, D; McLaren, P., Cole, M., and Rikowski, G. (eds.) (2002) Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, Lanham, MD, USA: Lexington Books.

Hill, D., Greaves, N., and Maisuria, A. (2009) Education, Inequality and Neoliberal Capitalism: a Classical Marxist Analysis. In Hill, D. and Kumar, R. (eds.) Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences. New York: Routledge

Hill, D. and Kumar, R. (eds.) (2008) Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences. New York: Routledge.

Ilaiah, K. (2005) Why I am not a Hindu: a Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy. Calcutta, India: Samya.

Independent Working Class Association 2005. Cheering News to celebrate?

Kelsh, D. (2001) (D)evolutionary socialism and the containment of class: For a red theory of class , The Red Critique:  Marxist Theory and Critique of the Contemporary 1(1), 9-13.

Kelsh, D. and Hill, D. (2006) The Culturalization of Class and the Occluding of Class Consciousness: The Knowledge Industry in/of Education. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 4 (1).

Kumar, Ashwani (2008) Personal comments on a draft of this paper following the Canadian Society for the Study of Education Annual Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. May 31- June 3.

Kumar, Arun and Kumar, Sanjay. (eds.) (2005). Dalit Studies in Higher Education. Delhi: Deshkal Publication.

Kumar, Ravi (2008a) Unpublished comments on a draft of this chapter.

Kumar, Ravi (2008b) State, Class and Critical Framework of Praxis:  The Missing Link of Indian Educational Debates. In Kelsh, D., Hill, D. and Macrine, S. (eds.), Teaching Class: Knowledge, Pedagogy, Subjectivity. Routledge: New York

Kumar, Ravi. (2008c) Dynamics of Identity Formation: Political Economy of Backward Castes in Bihar, PHD Thesis. Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. Unpublished.

Kumar, Ravi (2008d) Against Neoliberal Assault on education in India: a Counternarrative of Resistance. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 6 (1).

Laclau, E. (1996) Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony, in Mouffe, C. (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism. London: Routledge, pp. 47-67.

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: NLB.

Leonardo, Z. (2004). The Unhappy Marriage between Marxism and Race Critique: political economy and the production of racialized knowledge. Policy Futures in Education, 2, 3-4.

Luxemburg, R. (1899/1900/1970)  Reform or revolution.  Rosa Luxemburg speaks.  NY: Pathfinder.

Marx, K. [1852] (1969) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, K. [1867] (1996) Capital, Vol.1 . In Collected Works 5. New York: International publishers.

Marx, K. (1977) Selected Writings. (ed. D. McLellan). (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press).

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848/1985) The communist manifesto. (New York: Penguin Books).

McLaren, P. and Farahmandpur, R. (2005) Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism. Lanham, MD, USA: Rowman and Littlefield.

McLaren, P. and Jaramillo, N. (2007) Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

McLaren, P. and Rikowski, G. (2006) Critical Pedagogy Reloaded: An Interview with Peter McLaren (interviewed by Glenn Rikowski), Information for Social Change, 23.

Miles, R. (1987) Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity? London: Tavistock

Miles, R. (1989) Racism London: Routledge.

Miles, R. (1993) Racism after ‘Race Relations’ . London: Routledge.

Mills, C (1997) The Racial Contract. New York: Cornell University Press

Mills, C. (2003) From Class To Race: Essays In White Marxism And Black Radicalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Motala, E. and Vally, S. (2009) Class, “Race” and State in Post-Apartheid Education. In Kelsh, D., Hill, D. and Macrine, S. (eds.) (2009) Teaching Class: Knowledge, Pedagogy, Subjectivity. London: Routledge

Murali Krishna, M. (2007) Marginalization of Dalits: Role of Oppressive Pedagogic Practices in Indian Schools: A Dalit Perspective, Paper presented to the Deshkal Society International Conference: School Education, Pluralism and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives, 14-16th Dec, 2007, New Delhi.

Murji, K. and Solomos, J. (2005) Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

National Statistics (2001) Census 2001 – Ethnicity and identity .

Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii (1985). I Will Marry When I Want. London: Heinemann.

Preston, J.  (2007) Whiteness and class in  education. Dordrecht: Springer

Preston, J. (2007) All shades of a wide white world. Times Higher Education, 27 October.

Quadri, S. I. and Kumar, S. (eds.) (2003) Marginalisation of Dalit Muslims in Indian Democracy. Delhi: Deshkal Publication.

Reed, A. (Jnr.) (2001) Race and Class in the Work of Oliver Cromwell Cox. Monthly Review, Feb.

Rikowski, G. (2004)  Marx and the Education of the Future. Policy Futures in Education, 2 (3 and 4), pp. 565-577.

Rikowski, G. (2005) The Education White Paper and the Marketisation and Capitalisation of the Secondary Schools System in England, 24 October. Part I . The Volumizer.

Rikowski, G. (2006) In Retro Glide. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 5 (1).

Runneymede Trust (2000) The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report. London:  The Runnymede Trust.

Simpson, L., Purdam, K., Tajar, A., Feildhouse, E., Gavalas, V., Tramer, M., Pritchard, J., and Dorling, D. (2002)Ethnic minority populations and the labour market: an analysis of the 1991 and 2001 Census. London: Department for Work and Pensions.

Sivanandan, A. (2001) Poverty is the New Black, Race and Class, 43 (2), pp. 2-5. Edited version online at Guardian.

Strand, S. (2007) Minority Ethnic Pupils in the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England. DfES Research Report RR-002 . London: Department for Children Families and Schools (DCFS).

Strand, S. (2008a) Minority Ethnic Pupils in the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England . Warwick: Warwick Institute of Education.

Strand, S. (2008b) Minority Ethnic Pupils in the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England Extension Report on Performance in Public Examinations at Age 16. Research Report DCSF-RR029 . London: Department for Children Families and Schools (DCFS).

Tudor, H. and Tudor, J. .M. (eds.) (1988) Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896-1898. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Young, R. (2006) Putting materialism back into Race Theory: Towards a Transformative Theory of Race . The Red Critique, 11.

Zavarzadeh, M. (2002) On “Class” and Related Concepts in Classical Marxism, and Why is the Post-Al Left Saying Such Terrible Things About Them, The Alternative Orange, Vol 3.

Pothik Ghosh

And to say now that you are no longer here is to say only that you have entered a different order of things, in that the one we move in here, we latecomers, as insane as it is, seems to our way of thinking the only one in which “god” can spread out all of his possibilities, become known and recognized within the framework of an assumption whose significance we do not understand. –  From Eugenio Montale’s ‘Visit to Fadin’

Introduction

If there is a time for everything, there must be a time for revolution, too. But revolutionary time can often become its own time warp. It can freeze one moment, among many, of revolutionary politics into its eternalized truth and thus prevent such politics from recognising the new moments of revolutionary reality that lie beyond the moment it has mystified as its be-all. Concomittantly, such mystification also prevents it from realizing its own potential. This potential can be sensed and expressed only when revolutionary politics is driven by the will to relentlessly transcend its various moments to constantly encounter itself within different possible historical temporalities. Alas, it is the South Asian Left more than any other, either in the ‘Third’ or ‘First’ World, that has been the worst victim of this historical time freeze. A self-containing, even psychotic, numbness, which goes by the name of national anti-colonial resistance, has held South Asian ‘revolutionary’ praxis in its tightly malignant grip for the past five decades. The upshot: it still articulates its politics in terms of nation —preponderantly, in the idiom of national sovereignty and independence.

Clearly, its understanding of revolutionary politics continues to be haunted by the specters of its origins, which lie in a ‘third world’ conjunctural complex of national-liberation struggles against direct colonialism on one hand and ‘socialist’ struggles against neo-colonialism on the other. The failure of the South Asian Left, particularly its Indian strand, to posit its politics shorn of all idioms of national independence, and in classical Marxist terms of class struggle per se, must be ascribed to its cussed refusal to acknowledge the fact that imperialism as a phenomenon has long outgrown its colonial (or neo-colonial) moment of oppressive politico-economic occupation of foreign lands.

It’s in this context that Bangladeshi writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s politico-aesthetic framework, especially the way he expounded it through his novels Khowabnama (Dream Chronicle) and Chilekotar Sepai (The Soldier in the Attic), acquires immense importance. The praxis of cultural politics that this framework adumbrates would, if adopted by the South Asian Left, open up new pathways of resistance and revolution beyond the confines of its stale and stifling national-liberation paradigm. The attempt here is to envisage the politico-aesthetic vision of the Bangladeshi author, together with that of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s, as an integral part of an exiguous though crucial ideological strain within what may provisionally be called the Bengali Left. The fundamental politico-aesthetic impulse of Elias and Ghatak’s art, and their stance on the political in general, could be constitutive of a new politics of resistance that is free from the vicissitudes of the national-liberation paradigm.

Paradigms of Revolution or Prisons of Reaction

We will truly appreciate the pressing need for such a praxis when we fully reckon with the incalculable damage the South Asian Left’s near complete dependence on idioms of national independence/sovereignty has done to its struggle against imperialism. Its reliance on this outdated paradigm to understand, critique and intervene in the current politico-economic situation has prevented it from coming to grips with the new moment of “imperialism without colonies”.

That has not only rendered the Left here incapable of formulating its anti-imperialist struggle — now more a shibboleth than a critical vision of politics — as anti-capitalism, it has also sapped our comrades of all capacity to accurately diagnose the reason behind the degeneration of the originally progressive national-liberation projects of their respective societies into jingoistic authoritarianisms and/or reactionary fascisms. It would do its purported politics of anti-imperialism a whole load of good if the Left were to accept the fact that we are now part of a decentred empire of various nationally deterritorialised capitals competing with one another. Its inadequate and ineffectual response to the rising tide of fascisms and various other forms of reactionary identity politics in this part of the world must, to complete the dialectic of haplessness, be blamed on its stubborn persistence with the timeworn frameworks and categories of national liberation.

Much of their supposed critique of fascism, as a result, is embedded in and imbued by categories of bourgeois ethics and liberal modernity, which prove ineffective precisely because they fail to zero in on the political-economic essence or logic of fascism. Fascism has to be located as a problem of the larger socio-economic structure, of which liberal modernity, bourgeois ethics of secularism and imperialism are constitutive elements. For instance, the Indian Left’s programmatic attempt to pose ‘secular’ and ‘economic’ nationalism against, simultaneously, the ‘cultural nationalism’ of RSS-BJP-type fascist forces and ‘western’ imperialism shows they are completely oblivious of the political economy of the nation-state.  Such nationalistic anti-imperialism not only weakens its struggle against the national component of global-imperialist capital, it does not in any essential sense enable the Left to critique fascism because it shares with the fascists, particularly of the Hindutva variety, the same structural and logical premises (nation, nationalism, national pride etc) of politics. All that the various strains of the Indian Left have done so far by way of resisting the Hindutva forces is load those categories with a superficially different ethical or normative charge. Not surprisingly, all those leftist strains have without exception been condemned to fight fascism on the latter’s terms and turf. They have, we have, failed grievously to posit any structural alternative to the current political-economic order that fosters fascism and imperialism as dialectical halves of one single phenomenon: “globalisation”.

Elias and Ghatak: New And Different Pathways

It’s in the backdrop of globalisation that the significance of Elias and Ghatak’s conceptions of art, aesthetics and politics must be fully unraveled and grasped. Both the writer and the filmmaker, separated by almost a generation and national boundaries, were critical of the national-liberation paradigm, particularly in the context of Bangladesh’s struggle for independence.

They both recognized, and depicted through their art, the obfuscatory and obstructionist nature of that paradigm, vis-à-vis the essential project of social revolution. Yet more important and interesting than this similarity of their critiques is the difference in their politico-aesthetic register and orientation. Elias’s critique of the national liberation/nationhood paradigm is, thanks to this difference, more fundamentally anti-systemic. There is absolutely no doubt that the social revolutionary aspirations of the urban underclass, poor peasantry and radical intelligentsia of Bengali East Pakistan — against the expropriative and exploitative machinations of the West Pakistani elite, its Rawalpindi-based military executive and their local agents — was the trigger of the national liberation struggle that erupted in with the “Bhasha Andolan” (language movement) of 1952. Elias has shown as much in Sepai.  But what is equally true is that linguistic-cultural (Bengali) nationalism was, in terms of this elemental social revolutionary impulse, a unifying local ideological idiom of resistance. Especially since West Pakistani colonialism played itself out in East Pakistan in Punjabi racist and anti-Bengali terms. Considering that this colonialism — a local extractive moment of the global political economy of imperialist capital — was held together in the name of a Muslim national brotherhood by a ruling class consisting of West Pakistanis and a sizeable chunk of East Bengalis, this idiom of Bengali nationalism was, to begin with, useful. Ultimately, however, Bengali chauvinism subsumed and subverted the fundamental social revolutionary impulse of the national-liberation struggle of Bangladesh. A fact noted and critically depicted by both Ghatak and Elias in their cinema and literature respectively.

In Ghatak’s last film, Jukti Takko Gappo (Logic Argument Story), protagonist Neelkantha, Ghatak’s alter ego, deliberately severs himself off from the general sense of nostalgia for a united Bengal rampant among the petty-bourgeois intellectuals of Calcutta-centric Indian West Bengal. What may seem surprising is that Ghatak/Neelkantha —– despite his exilic yearning for a lost idyll and the concomitant dream of a West Bengal reconciled with east —- does not share the petty-bourgeois optimism rampant in contemporary West Bengal about the power of the linguistic-nationalist liberation struggle to achieve that.

In fact, he violently rejects such optimism. His rejection embodies not only the impossibility of the fulfilment of this fantasy, but also its undesirability. This sensibility is, in a certain sense, classically Marxian as its expression is at one and the same time ethical and political. For Neelkantha (and Ghatak), the unity of Bengal is not merely about the overcoming of a superficial religious (Hindu-Muslim) divide to reconcile a linguistically-culturally ‘similar’ people. It is also about accentuating the various inflection points between reified ‘conventional’ and elitist (bhadralok) Bengali culture and various ‘little’ cultures dotting the Bengal-Bihar-Orissa continuum.

It is Ghatak’s conception of a more dialogic, organic and composite Bengaliness that drives him, through Neelkantha, to accentuate those inflection points. But such Bengaliness is only a cultural epiphenomenon of something much more essential. The premise of Ghatak’s vision, in contrast to the petty-bourgeois culturalist perspective of ‘one Bengal’, is political-economic. Ghatak seeks to underscore the reification of modern Bengaliness and, in the process, points out the political-economic logic of production of territorialised and stratified cultural differences. It must, however, be mentioned that Ghatak’s vision is informed as much by his encounter with a Marxist critique of capitalist political economy as it is rooted in the non-Renaissance cultural sensibility of Bengal. This sensibility of Atish Dipankar (a 10th-11th century Buddhist monk from Bengal) and Chaitanya, who pre-date the so-called Bengal Renaissance, was borne forward by figures such as Ramakrishna Paramahansa and even partially Rabindranath Tagore during the Renaissance. (It must be stated as an aside that Tagore, contrary to his conventional image, was not a full-fledged Renaissance hat. He was split between the romantic individualism and realism of Renaissance and a self-effacing classicism specific to various communitarianisms in pre-modern Bengal.) Renaissance privileged the modern, knowing subject situated within a telelogically fraught romantic gaze and thus privileged knowledge as objectified, captured and represented by this gaze. In so doing, it created the fundamental terrritorialised hierarchy between the knowing culture (on top) and the known culture (below it) and served to destroy the composite organicity of pre-Renaissance communities, what with genteel ‘Bengaliness’ emerging as an alienated, superordinate, and determining centre, vis-à-vis the various ‘little’ and ‘demotic’ cultures around it.

The grounding of Ghatak’s critical political-economic prism in a communitarian cultural sensibility leads, not surprisingly, to its contamination. As a result, communitarian organicity does not function merely as logic of negative dialectical critique of alienation, and the political economy of capitalism. Instead, it is envisaged as a lost, and simultaneously, a transcendental Arcadia. As a result, Ghatak’s rejection of culturalist euphoria over the “impending” reconciliation of Bengal ends up denying the sedimented class reality immanent in the Bangladeshi war of national-liberation.

And this is exactly where Elias’s political, and aesthetic, approach becomes distinguishable from Ghatak’s. Growing up in East Pakistan, the writer has to confront the question national liberation much more directly. So, while he shares Ghatak’s critique of the obfuscatory idiom of national-liberation, once it became the predominant ideological form of articulating resistance in East Pakistan, he does not stop looking for possibilities of social revolution immanent in this form. In Chilekotar Sepai, he dwells at length on how the children and grand-children of elite Muslim Leaguers among the local, Bengali-speaking East Pakistani population gradually seized the leadership of the liberation struggle as they saw the tide turn. It also shows how this seizure of leadership was accompanied by an excessive emphasis on Bengali linguistic unity, against the Urdu-speaking colonialists of Pakistan, even as the fundamental socio-economic question of the peasantry and working class was first relegated to the background and subsequently suppressed. Such precedence of nationalist Bengali unity over socio-economic transformation served to conceal and repress a very crucial aspect of Pakistani colonialism in East Bengal: the exploitation and oppression of the East Bengali working class and peasantry by the local elite, patronized and protected by Rawalpindi. But the most insightful aspect of the novel, as far as we are concerned, is the legitimacy the Communist Left of East Bengal conferred on this turn of events by slowing down and then withdrawing from the peasant struggles against landlordism in countryside. But this understanding of Elias, which accurately highlights the perils of confronting colonialism as a cultural-linguistic phenomenon, does not lead him to reject the Bangladeshi national liberation struggle in its entirety. Unlike Ghatak, he seeks to foreground the possibilities of social revolution immanent in and repressed by a struggle that has come to be seen as a pure cultural-linguistic movement. The character of underclass Haddi Khijir, which Elias creates as a counterpoint to Marxist intellectual Anwar and other more cynical upholders of Bengali nationhood — like Khijir’s employer Allaudin, nephew and son-in-law of loyal Muslim Leaguer Rahmatullah — is meant to simultaneously emphasise this possibility and its repression.

What foregrounds Elias’s search for immanent possibilities of social revolution in the Bangladeshi national-liberation struggle is the last section of Sepai, where protagonist Osman Gani, till then an inert inhabitant of the oppressive status quo, locates through his delirious visions the drive, strength and truth of the national-liberation movement in the upsurge of the urban underclass and lumpen-proletariat of East Bengal. That Khijir, shot dead by the Pakistani army, should come to life in Osman’s dreams and hallucinations to become a beacon of the national-liberation movement precisely at the moment when the crucial social revolutionary impetus of the liberation struggle is being contained in the name of Bengali linguistic-national unity bears Elias’s concerns out. The moment when Osman’s delusions force him to deny and withdraw from existential reality and its rationality is as much the moment of his insanity as the point where he acquires a different historical individuality than the one he had till then embodied. This transformation happens through his realignment, albeit delusively, with a new political practice and formation that resists the socially exploitative and politically oppressive reality of existential time. Madness becomes the science of revolution.

Frantz Fanon’s assertion that a national-liberation struggle is nothing if it does not become a struggle for social emancipation is, it seems, also Elias’s credo. Anti-colonialism is a cry against forcible extraction of surplus value before it’s a demand for national-political self-determination. In fact, the search for such self-determination is simultaneously political and socio-economic. Clearly, the question of political power cannot be dealt with in isolation from the question of socio-economic relations. The logic that underlies the creation of a differential hierarchy of identities, whereby the colonizing identity determines the destiny (and identity) of the colonized, is the logic of the exchange value-driven political economy of capitalism. It’s a logic, which through competition and/or coercion, introduces alienation into a horizontal, non-identitarian flow to produce a differential of political power and/or socio-economic entitlements and thus creates a vertical stratification ofdifferent identities.

Such focus on the socio-economic logic of both colonialism and anti-colonialism is important because representative democracies, particularly in ex-colonies such as ours, have a way of obscuring this essence by projecting liberation from foreign rule as the end of the search for self-determination. It seems to suggest that colonialist abominations consist entirely of how colonizers go about their business, and not what that business is. They have, in their representation of colonialism, falsely privileged the use of coercive force by our former colonizers over what that force was actually meant to achieve: transfer of value from a certain section of people, who were compelled to give up control over their means of production, to those who took possession of those means either directly or by setting the rules of the market. Such obfuscation, largely structural, is also sometimes wrought through voluntaristic and deliberate propaganda. It’s meant to conceal the fact that a change in the form of government does not change the essential political-economic logic or the class character of the state, which continues to play its crucial role of aiding value transfer for capital accumulation. Liberal representative democracy is, therefore, hardly a viable structural alternative to colonialism, or various forms of totalitarianisms.

Bourgeois representative democracy, which talks of political equality among voter-individuals even as it leaves the hierarchical socio-economic relations intact, precludes participatory democracy. Democracy, in such a situation, is chimerical and formal because the anti-dialogic (political-economic) logic of representation, which is constitutive of socio-economic stratification, means that people occupying lower stations of the hierarchy would always be re-presented by people above them. In other words, their destinies would be determined by people and institutions that stand apart and above them. Structures and institutions will always determine and re-present human beings, never the other way round. The only freedom people have is the freedom to choose who will represent them in those institutions. Representative democracy offers them no freedom to change the structural anti-dialogic logic of re-presentation that is manifest through in the institutions of liberal democracy. There can clearly be no true political equality (of liberties) among individuals without an equality of socio-economic entitlements, and vice-versa. The current system, where egalite and liberte are notionally on a par but where the latter actually has primacy over the former, has to give way to another order. One that is constituted by a collapse of the two attributes into a singularity that Balibar calls egaliberte.

Such obfuscation of the social logic of colonialism and, more importantly, national liberation in post-colonial representative democracies should make us even more attentive to the subtleties of Elias’s stance on the issue — a national-liberation movement is no more and no less than a moment of social revolution and class struggle. To that extent, the ‘nationalist’ struggle of East Bengal against its Pakistani colonizers is for him part of a constellation of various such moments in Bengal’s temporal history. Those moments may precede or follow each other in lived time, they may also differ from one another in the idioms in which they express themselves or the authorities they confront. But all of them articulate, either unconsciously or self-consciously, a singular, synchronic tendency: transformation of relations of oppression, exploitation and domination to accomplish autonomy and free association. The manner in which Haddi Khijir views an anti-Pakistan procession he also participates in is revealing.

People have started pouring out from the alleys. From the shanty behind the Nabadwip-Basak Lane, a group of 10-15 men in rags and faded jackets come out. Workers from Shamsuddin’s bread factory on Panchbhaighat Lane have left behind the comforting warmth of the tandoor to hit the streets. A group of rickshawpullers has emerged from the Hrishikesh Das Road garage…. The procession of human beings keeps growing in the yellowish-black glow of streetlights and a shiver runs down Khijir’s spine. He’s certain the old residents of the locality have joined them. But he’s unafraid. Call them djinns or specters, today everybody has become one with men…. Residents of Ishwar Das Lane come, accompanied by the students of Bani Bhavan College. Lots of boys from the shoemakers’ ghetto next to the municipality office are also here…. Khijir’s procession is now opposite Victoria Park. The trees in the park nod their heads affirmatively in response to the slogans. Some sepoys of yore descend from the tall palm trees after freeing themselves from the noose. They too will turn right with the procession.”  (My translation)

In Khijir’s eyes, the procession, a ‘real-life’ occurrence in the novel, acquires a dream-like texture with various small collectivities from different spatial and occupational locations of 1969 East Pakistan merging into it. As if this weaving together of spatial and occupational differences into a single fabric of the procession were not enough to establish his conception of ‘synchronic’ history, Elias ties into it a phenomenon which is separated from the immediate anti-Pakistani upsurge by more than a century. The ghosts of sepoys hanged by the British for their participation in the “mutiny” of 1857 descend from the palm trees of Dhaka to join in. The trope of the procession tells us that Elias does not envisage the continuity of all these struggles as various successive stages of a single ascending history with an idyllic telos. The procession is actually a constellation of struggles bound together by the logic of a single social revolution, albeit manifest through different idioms and political forms in different historical times. This logic of class struggle, it must be pointed out, is not foundational in any phenomenological sense but is only so in the sense of a relational logic intrinsic to capitalism.

The social revolutionary essence of national liberation is Elias’s constant preoccupation and it figures inKhowabnama as well. In this novel he constructs an account of the Partition (in the east), which does not quite square up with the mainstream historical accounts — whether Bangladeshi, Pakistani or Indian — of the event. He shows that even Muslim League’s communal nationalism, which was reactionary to begin with, thrived only by drawing sustenance from the radical politics of the Tebhaga movement. The advances made by League’s communal nationalist politics of Pakistan is, as Elias’s Khowabnama shows, in large measure due to the adoption of Tebhaga’s rhetoric by the League. It’s no surprise that such rhetoric, given that Tebhaga was a communist-led movement of sharecroppers for firm tenurial security and transformation of the oppressive and exploitative land relations of rural Bengal, had an overt social revolutionary tenor. That was, however, not the only thing the Muslim League of the late 1940s borrowed from Tebhaga. After the retreat of the communists from the movement, the League also got to capitalize on the social disaffection and political anger among the largely poor Muslim peasantry of the region. It, not surprisingly, gave that anger a communal-nationalist turn. We should not forget that the predominantly Muslim landless labourers and sharecroppers in East Bengal gave the movement for Pakistan in that area its crucial mass and strength.

Thus for Elias, national liberation is a dialectic of two moments — a moment of politically expressing social disaffection and class discontent on one hand; and a moment of institutionalization of nation, reification of national identity and the concomitant repression of the moment of social struggle on the other.

Such a dialectical understanding of national liberation a la Elias leaves us with no option but to critically engage with it and other similar identity struggles — neither embrace them fully nor reject them lock, stock and barrel. This engagement should be such that we are able to discern how the idiom (or form) of an identity movement mediates its essence. In other words, when and how does such a movement best express the singular social revolutionary logic embedded in it, and when and how exactly does a movement’s identitarian idiom brush it against its essential grain of social revolution by repressing it and distorting its singular expression. For Elias, the idiom of national liberation is important enough not to be rejected. But it is, at the same time, not so significant as to be fully embraced. National liberation is an identitarian moment in the process of social revolution or class struggle. It must, therefore, be recognized as such and then also be dissolved into the process so that the struggle can find its new moment of most accurate expression. In the absence of such awareness, revolutionary politics either risks mistaking such moments for their essential, singular logic (if and when identity politics is fully embraced), or the essential social revolutionary logic itself becomes a particular moment and thereby loses its singular universality (if and when identity politics is completely rejected). In either case, we are left with the triumph of identity, and its logic of congealment through alienation, over the non-identitarian and non-alienated logic of pure becoming. While social revolutionaries will have to pose the logic of pure becoming against the alienating logic of identity formation, this revolutionary operation must be self-reflexively conscious of the fact that identities are as much the various points of appearance of the singular social revolutionary process in its movement through various spatio-temporalities as they are its equally numerous prisons.

The national-liberationist form of the 1969-71 movement in East Pakistan is, in Sepai, important to the extent that it’s only through this form the basic social revolutionary content of the movement is expressed. The national-liberationist idiom is, however, equally important when it represses and confines its social revolutionary content because that content can be accessed and foregrounded only when we recognize its repressed (absent or unconscious) presence in the conscious form. Such a constellational/’synchronic’ conception, which is strictly theoretical and logical, should not be a pretext to paper over the empirical and formal historicity of various struggles, though. We cannot afford to conflate movements that are unconsciously social revolutionary with those that are self-consciously so. A constellational/’structural’ view of history is merely meant to foreground the sedimented class reality of non-class, identitarian movements so that the fundamental impulse or aspiration of politics and movements can be underscored, if only to grasp their subsumption, distortion or betrayal. That is vital if the impulse is to be yet again foregrounded on the terrain of critical politics by setting the social revolutionary process free from its various momentary prisons. The essence must appear, not disguised as something else, but as its fully conscious self sans all mediatory distortions. It must, however, be borne in mind that the unconscious essence of politics can constitute itself only in relation to the conscious appearance of metapolitics. Its in-itself existence is notional, not real. For, the real is always defined and formed vis-à-vis the symbolic. The point then is that such appearance of the real as real can only be a provisional, moment that indicates the actual non-alienated, dialectical and dialogic logic of relationship between the two. Its critical revolutionary function, therefore, is to disabuse us of our understanding, till that moment, that the logic of this relationship is one of separateness, competition and domination.

It’s this constellational formation of political resistance that compels Elias in Sepai to keep pulling the phenomenon of the Bangladeshi national-liberation struggle towards himself and pushing it away, obsessively doing both at one and the same instant. Such neurotic restlessness is not unusual. For what is constellational history if not an impossible representation of constant dialectical movement — of the singularity of a universal logic splitting into a plurality of particular forms, which once again dissolve into the singularity of the universal, which once again splits, ad infinitum. This is multiplicity, which presents differences (particular forms) as same (the singular logic embedded in them) even as it sees and shows the same (the singular logic) manifest by those differences. In such an order of things, the sameness of differences and the differences of the same appear all together and simultaneously.

Ghatak, in sharp contrast to Elias in Sepai, is not an obsessive ‘multiplicist’. He is, much as he would want to be otherwise, a ‘rejectionist’ and ‘chooser’. His politics  and art, in the way they embody his concerns, seem to presume a world of heterogeneous forms that are all complete in themselves. Here pre-national ‘organic’ community is envisaged as a self-contained thing-in-itself, prior to and existentially independent of the nation-state. It’s, therefore, seen to be completely separate from and outside the realm of alienating civil society of different individuals. Such a socio-political imagination compels Ghatak to view the preponderance of the nation-state as merely the result of competitive domination of the ‘non-alienated’ pre-capitalist communitarianform by the alienation-fostering bourgeois national form. Jukti — which we analyze here because it is characteristically representative of Ghatak’s political and aesthetic personality imbued as it was with the trauma of Partition — is an accurate expression of that imaginary. The film shows Neelkantha articulating his criticism of the Bangladeshi national-liberation war; not by engaging with it but by rejecting it for the lost idyll of an organic pre-national community.

For Ghatak, obtaining to an organic, non-alienated state of being is a matter of choosing one form of social organization (pre-capitalist communitarianism) by rejecting another (the liberal nation of citizens), not of critical engagement with bourgeois nationhood, and its logic of alienation, to access the inverse logic of non-alienation immanent in them. So, while Elias sees in the national liberation project possibilities of a social revolution and their simultaneous cooption, for Ghatak all such possibilities exist outside and independent of this struggle which for him is devoid of all revolutionary impulse. That is quite evident in Neelkantha’s complete refusal to engage with the movement. He rejects the petty-bourgeois euphoria evoked by the liberation war in West Bengal. He presciently believes that the attendant nationalist fervour would, in the name of erasing religious differences to unite a divided Bengal, do no more than enable the petty-bourgeois elite from both sides to further close ranks against the subalterns.

Yet that belief is born, not through a process of critical engagement with the concrete conjunctural reality of national liberation, but from nostalgia for a non-alienated communitarian idyll that supposedly existed as a tangible material form prior to the advent of nationhood. Neelkantha does not even wish to account for how exactly the Bangladeshi national liberation struggle represses and betrays its social revolutionary impulse. For him a mere declaration of the problem would do. He is shown ranting against the “bourgeoisie” of two Bengals (Indian west and Pakistani/Bangladeshi east) for having lunged the “dagger” of national-liberationist betrayal into the back of the toiling masses. This illustrates quite well how Marxism can become an alibi for romantic communitarianism. And all of Ghatak’s films, but particularly Subarnarekha, Komal Gandhar (C-Minor) and Badi Theke Paliye (Escaping Home), are replete with such examples.

The right statement made, the quest for possibilities of a non-alienated society unfolds — irrespective of the ongoing national liberation war — through a picaresque journey across the rural hinterland of Indian West Bengal. Neelkantha and his itinerant group of three encounter the possibilities of an organic Bengali community in folk art forms (Chau dance and its masks), tribal ways of life, demotic customs, and, last but not least, the unifying principle of the Mother cult and Naxal insurgency. All those experiences are significant in that they confront the modern and genteel linguistic-cultural Bengali ‘nationhood’ as its gothic, ugly, inchoate and self-destructive instincts, which it has purged itself of. The confrontation is staged to shock the ‘nationalist’ Bengali out of his culturally smug and complacent being and renew his ontological perception so that they are encountered, not as marginalized externalities of its social present, but as reminders of what Bengaliness was before its destructive and alienating national fate. The confrontation is, by that same turn of logic, equally an intimation of what Bengaliness can be once such a fate is shunned. Ghatak’s approach, in his quest for a non-alienated world, is both a priori and transcendental. Pre-capitalist communitarianism is, for him, evidently both a prelapsarian world of organicity lost through the ‘original sin’ of nationalism, and the redemptive telos, which can be reached by subordinating the ‘sinful’ world of nationalism and nation-state to its divine dominion.

Yet, Ghatak’s Neelkantha is unable to successfully reclaim that pre-national communitarian organicity, where Bengali ‘genteelness’ was integrated with and inflected by what it has expelled as common and vulgar in its ‘period’ of modern nationhood. He finds those common folks — his keepers of a happy and non-alienated communitarian conscience — driven by the alienating logic of competition and hierarchy in their struggle to preserve, ironically enough, their ‘organic’ identities. They are, therefore, condemned to conduct their struggle in terms of triumph or defeat for their identity. The stubborn refusal of a drunk Santhal, Neelkantha’s violent fury notwithstanding, to admit that the local liquor they had been drinking was as much Bengali in provenance as Santhali bears that out.

Ghatak seems oblivious of the fact that the obverse of heterogeneity is homogenization. While the former is the manifest reality, the latter is its impulse. In a world of heterogeneous forms, constituted by the logic of alienation and competition, the tendency of each of those forms is to always outcompete and dominate the rest in order to establish its homogenizing hegemony. And that would be true in all cases, irrespective of whether one form dominates or the other.

The political struggle that Ghatak appears to conceive is merely about inverting the order of domination — pre-capitalist communitarianism over nationhood — not the erasure of the logic of competitive domination itself. The victory that such a struggle would yield is bound to be pyrrhic and a contradiction in terms. For, the moment the form of ‘non-alienated’ pre-capitalist community seeks to outcompete and dominate the form of bourgeois nationhood, it accepts its articulation by the logic of capitalist alienation. A pre-capitalist community does not defeat and displace nationhood; it becomes a nation itself.

Clearly, bourgeois nationhood and society have rendered the existence of organic and non-alienated communities logically impossible. And the only way to get around this impossibility is to self-consciously deploy the ‘memories’ of non-alienated pre-capitalism as a provisional ground, within the modern bourgeois social formation, for launching a critique of that logic of alienation. Pier Paolo Pasolini has deployed such politico-aesthetic tactics quite effectively in the films that comprise his Trilogy of Life. The cinematic adaptations ofThe Decameron (1971), Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974) — all carefully chosen mediaeval tracts of fables and parables on love and eroticism — are meant to be not so much depictions of communitarian manners of real love as an allusion through those depictions to the impossibility of love in an alienated and alienating capitalist society. Given that Italy of the early ’70s was still largely in the cusp of transition from rural pre-modernity to modern urban-centric capitalism, the relevance of such tactics need not be overstated.

But that was not Ghatak’s way. His politics, dogged by the self-contradictions of its aprioristic/transcendental and parahistorical premises, left him with no choice but to fail, romanticize ‘revolutionary’ failure and unabashedly depict it. Such failure to reach the telos of an organic community arises from the impossibility of posing non-alienation as an end-in-itself. To envisage an end would be to signal the triumph of one moment over the rest. It would, by the same token, be an eternalized congealment of pure, unalienated and infinite becoming in that one moment. That would spell both alienation and competitive domination. Impossibility and failure on that score must, therefore, be read as alluding to the logical-critical functionality of ‘pre-capitalist’ communitarianism, vis-à-vis the logic of capitalist alienation. That, however, would be our “catastrophic” (Adorno; 2005, pp 42) reading of Jukti. The film itself, thanks to its reification of failure, precludes such critical self-reflexivity. It’s this self-consciousness that distinguishes Elias’s politics and art from Ghatak’s. The difference is most telling in the way they approach and deploy myths in their artistic creations. But to comprehend this difference, and particularly Elias’s approach to myth, it is necessary that we unravel its politico-theoretical armature.

Historicising Myth: A Theoretical Detour

To appreciate the place of myths in Elias’s politico-aesthetic paradigm, we need to understand the idea of myth as a kind of ‘synchronic’ or ‘structural’ history, which “has nothing to do with a present, eternal or otherwise, and is not to be grasped in terms of lived or existential time”. (Jameson; 2007, pp 89.) This understanding would, among other things, also help us distinguish Elias’s approach to myth and its ‘pre-modern’ order from that of Ghatak’s. It would also serve to ground their respective political positions on nation, national-liberation and communitarianism — especially with regard to Partition of Bengal and the Bangladeshi national-liberation struggle — in the realm of theory.

In Elias, myth is imagined as a reality, which is absent in lived or existential time. The historiography, constitutive of such a vision, no longer envisages History as the unfolding of a narrative of occurrences in a temporal continuum. Instead, it renders History into a structure where everything is present all together: as much the manifest empirical reality of existence, as what this reality absents or represses and which therefore lies immanent in it. History becomes a kaleidoscope with all patterns inherent in it, even as the visibility (or not) of each of those patterns is contingent on how the kaleidoscope turns. It is like the (Japanese) fan of Benjamin’s (1986, pp 6) memory, which keeps opening endlessly because no image can be entirely satisfactory as each image can be unfolded. For instance, here the historical image of existential reality can unfold into the image of what this reality has repressed, which in turn can once again unfold into its negative reality ad infinitum. Conversely, the fan in its folded moment holds all those infinite possibilities and is, therefore, simultaneously an expression of the image that is visible in its folded state and those that it can unfold into. In such circumstances, a myth can become its own critical-negative ground and, by extension, also that of the system that has constructed it as a myth. Myth can clearly cease to be myth. That should not, however, be confused with the affirmation of a myth’s literal meaning.

To simply claim that a myth is true would be to accept the determinate mode — constitutive of existential time — that has designated it thus. Never mind that such designation is meant to denigrate its ontology as an impossible fable, and deny its epistemology as false. Such belief in the literalness of a myth would, then, be as much of a non-critical acceptance of existential time as when the truth and/or possibility of that myth is emphatically rejected. Clearly, all knowledge and experience in lived time, whether they exist in the form of dematerialized ideas or are instituted as sensory-empirical materiality, are theoretical objects of the prevailing determinate mode within which they have been produced. Clearly then, critical-theoretical reality of a myth should not only be distinguished from its literal reality, it should be seen as inverting the latter’s order in its entirety.

More accurately, reconstitution of myth as knowledge of its own theoretical-critical negativity should be seen as the production of a new theoretical object within a determinate mode that is different and discrete from the determinate mode that designates it as myth and is constitutive of our lived time.

To talk either of myths or the critical-theoretical knowledge immanent in them without first seeing them as specific theoretical objects constituted within their respective determinate modes would, if we were to follow in Balibar’s (1999, pp 203) footsteps, be akin to Marx writing the first line of The Communist Manifesto — “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”  It would, to paraphrase the French Marxist for our purposes, not be the first statement of our theory of the critical knowledge of myths, it would only “summarize the raw material of (our) work of transformation” of myths. The inspiration for this work of transformation can be drawn from Althusser and Balibar’s (1997, pp 225) Marx for whom “the definition of every mode of production” is “a combination of (always the same) elements which are only notional elements unless they are put into relation with each other according to a determinate mode…”.  This also affords the possibility of “periodizing the modes of production according to a principle of variation of these combinations…”.

And what are these different determinate modes if not various language-systems with their own singular rules of syntax and metaphor. Those different rules become manifest when apparently the same syntax, turn of phrase and/or vocabulary come to connote different orders of relationships among the same (notionally) constitutive elements in different discursive or determinate modes. And such discursive differences in connotation for what appears to be the same form of language must be ascribed to unique and singular sets of social practices that underpin and animate the language-form within their respective constitutive determinate modes. In short, each one of those language-systems (determinate modes) envisages a pattern of connections among elements unique and specific to it.

A myth should, then, be defined as a certain specific combination of notional elements, brought together in a certain relationship by the determinate mode of existential time. And its transformation into what can be defined as critical-theoretical knowledge can be understood, according to the principle of variation, as a change in connections and relations among the same elements within a different determinate mode. Balibar’s (1997, pp 226) contention that Marx’s analysis of a ‘combination’ (mode of production) was the analysis of “a system of ‘synchronic’ connexions obtained by variation” implies “the possibility of an a priori science of the modes of production, a science of possible modes of production, whose realization in real-concrete history would depend on the result of a throw of the dice or the action of an optimum principle”. Considering that we are concerned here with understanding both myth and the critical real function it plays in Elias’s novels, should we not extend the horizons of Balibar’s “a priori science” to also include actual and possible modes of reality, knowledge and experience?

If myth is no more than a theoretical object produced within and by the determinate mode of bourgeois science, rationality and, most importantly, modern secular-democracy, it follows that outside such a mode its status as myth would be completely notional. It also follows, therefore, that within another determinate mode the connections among notional elements — which had in the preceding mode been constituted as myth — would get reorganized differently (according to the principle of variation) to produce a specific theoretical object which is assigned a different ontological-epistemological status of, say, non-myth. Once this theoretical possibility is established, the constitution, or signification, of the critical-negative ontology of myth as it were can be grasped better. The question now is, what would the motive force of this shift — from one determinate mode (of bourgeois rationality and secularism) to another (that of its critique) — be. Or, what impels the envisioning of this critical determinate mode? Unless that question is raised and an attempt is made to meaningfully answer it, we would remain blind, allegedly like Althusser and Althusserians, to the booby-trap of ‘theoreticism’. Balibar’s “throw of the dice or the action of an optimum principle” clearly needs to be grounded more rigorously.

Integral to such a line of inquiry is the question of agency. For, something has to impel someone. Put more simply, there has to be an agent, who is propelled by some force, to ‘found’ a determinate mode, in this case the critical determinate mode. Let us understand this interaction between the agent and his motive force more clearly. The agent in the process of embodying and practising the consciousness of myth, and all other forms of knowledge constituted by the established determinate mode, could come to a point where he realizes that some or all forms of knowledge constituted by that mode militate against his ‘true’ self. This ‘trueness’ of self — which simultaneously and naturally ‘falsifies’ existential time, its realities and their determinate mode — is nothing but a function of resistance against the domination and determination of lived time. Clearly then, truths and falsehoods are no more and no less than representations of domination and struggle. Better still, they are conceptualisations of political practice of oppression and/or resistance. In a fundamental sense therefore, all questions are questions of politics and power struggle, albeit disguised in the ‘true-false’ and/or ‘right-wrong’ idioms of ethics and knowledge respectively. Foucault — whose theory of discursive regimes of discourse has a strong methodological affinity with Althusser’s philosophy of determinate modes — sought to indicate precisely this masking or articulation of power by knowledge and ethics when he self-reflexively proclaimed, “I have never written anything but fictions.” This statement, contrary to what our postmodern friends might want to claim, is not a clarion call to political and ethical relativism. Why else would Foucault’s intellectual peer, Deluze (2007, pp 98), have responded thus: “But never has fiction produced such truth and reality.”

Foucault’s theory clearly needs to be grasped in all its complexity. His contention that “a statement has a ‘discursive object’ which does not derive in any sense from a particular state of things, but stems from the statement itself” (Deluze; 2007, pp 8) does not imply that different knowledge-systems and experiences in lived time can have equal validity. Instead, he seems to suggest, through an implied dialectical logic, that an object of discourse, precisely because it has no reality outside the discursive field of that discourse, must have the freedom (power) to be reconstituted/resignified within a new discursive field as a completely different object with different meanings, uses and a new ontological reality.

Foucault’s theory of discursive fields — if seen as a critical intervention in the domain of knowledge and its production at a concrete socio-historical moment — is a problematising rap on the knuckles of the modern Hegelian hierarchy of disciplines. In such a disciplinary scheme, a knowledge-system or discipline constitutes and defines itself only through a differential turn vis-à-vis all other disciplines, both lower and higher than it on the knowledge ladder. It’s hardly surprising that such a situation should have institutionalised the violation of autonomous discursiveness of knowledge fields. This means that discourses do not appear as their own essence. Equally, objects of one discursive field have no power to move into another field, of which they can become the founding event even as they are reconstituted within it as new theoretical objects. In Foucauldian terms, the tendency of knowledge to become its own surface so that it can reside nowhere else but on it is curbed. Modern surfaces have, by becoming repressive lids, created their own depths which they then deign to express and distort.

Foucault’s formulation is then a critique of an order of discourse integral to the capitalist political economy of exchange values, which engenders competition, alienation, hierarchy and dominance, and thus quells the constant becoming of an autonomous subject. His theory of discursive discourses must, in that context, be read as an ethics for an yet-to-emerge moment of socialized knowledge production, where the political economy of use value would come into its own. It would be a world, not of static and differential heterogeneities, but of dynamic and organic multiplicity.

This attempt to discover, or shall we say invent, a ‘Marxian’ Foucault was doubtless a digression. But it is a productive one in that it enables us to foreground the essential relationship between knowledge/ethics and political power. In so doing we get the key to open the agency-motive force deadlock, vis-à-vis the emergence of a new determinate mode of critical knowledge. The political domination that individual/s from certain strata (or class) in an empirically existing social formation are likely to experience while embodying the knowledge-objects of its determinate mode can push them to resist such domination, and eventually the selfhood and knowledge that such domination imposes on them to strengthen its sway. Such resistance confers on them an evanescently autonomous subjectivity that impels them to imagine a new determinate mode of critical knowledge and being. This mode of reflection and practice rearranges the connections between the elements to simultaneously produce new theoretical objects, and a knowledge that can be said to be in concert with, indeed emerges organically from, their ‘true’ being. Even as it does that, the new mode breaks with the established determinate mode of existential time, which through and because of that break is critically designated as ‘false’. But this account, its explanatory usefulness notwithstanding, is both mechanical and dialectically provisional. Worse, it does not pass muster with the Althusserian framework of structural causality. Such an explanation, whereby the emergence of a new determinate mode is made contingent on an autonomous agency completely precluded by the idea of determinate modes, becomes the deus ex machina of the Althusserian tangle. And it is condemned to play that role as long as Althusser’s framework is not clarified in its conjunctural context.

Let us begin with Balibar’s (1997, pp 252) tellingly limiting declaration on that score: “For each practice and for each transformation of that practice, they are the different forms of individuality which can be defined on the basis of its combination structure.” His statement clearly precludes the possibility that a subject’s revolutionary critical practice would induce it to imagine a new determinate mode of critical knowledge. For, the philosopher has subordinated subjectivity to the “combination structure” (or determinate mode) it was meant to found. Yet the problem remains: Althusser and Balibar’s theory of combination structure does not ostensibly explain why or how a determinate mode of critical knowledge comes into being by breaking with the determinate mode of lived bourgeois knowledge. To say that revolutionary practice gives rise to the critical determinate mode that makes revolutionary practice possible amounts to no more than an absurdly un-self-conscious expression of the problem of infinite regress. That would, however, be an inevitable pitfall so long as problems of knowledge are posed only in conceptual terms. For, human language, in which all concepts are necessarily formulated, conceals metaphysics of linear temporality and causality. The problem can be overcome only if we see the two apparently irreconcilable and thus undialectical formulations of the relationship between structure (or theory) and agency (or practice) — where either structure can give rise to practice or practice can found structure — as conceptually frozen halves of a dynamic dialectical whole. That whole is more than the sum of its two halves as in motion each half is both itself and the other at the same time. Ilyenkov’s (2008, pp 37) understanding of the abstract and the concrete, and the dialectic between them, could in this instance be illuminating.

“The concrete in thinking also appears, according to Marx’s definition, in the form of combination (synthesis) of numerous definitions. A logically coherent system of definitions is precisely that ‘natural’ form in which concrete truth is realised in thought. Each of the definitions forming part of the system naturally reflects only a part, a fragment, an element, an aspect of the concrete reality — and that is why it is abstract if taken by itself, separately from other definitions. In other words, the concrete is realised in thinking through the abstract through its own opposite, and is impossible without it. But that is, in general, the rule rather than an exception in dialectics. Necessity is in just the same kind of relation with chance essence with appearance, and so on.”

To that list we ought to add ‘theory with practice’ and ‘structure with agency’. We need to follow Ilyenkov (and Marx) to realise the concrete by thinking through the  abstract of structure (or theory) through its own opposite of agency (or practice). The concrete, dialectical and dynamic whole would, in this case, be praxis, where its two fragments of theory and practice are themselves and each other simultaneously. It could be argued in a similar vein, that Althusser and Balibar’s determinate mode of knowledge is both the product and producer of its own practice. And that this practice is as much its theoretical object as it is its singular founding event.

In any case, we should not overlook the fact that Balibar and Althusser’s intervention was at an ‘anthropomorphic’ conjuncture within Marxist politics and theory. To that extent, their revolutionary intent to effectively confront the threat this conjuncture posed to Marxism in terms of evacuating it of all its historical materialist content and class struggle itself cannot surely be faulted. The anthropomorphism of a certain preponderant strain of “humanistic Marxism” had emphasized the problem of alienation of the individual by reifying and eternalizing the historical individuality of bourgeois civil society and liberal-democracy. This amounted to wiping off, both deliberately and otherwise, the traces of historical production or constitution of individuality. Althusser and Balibar’s response, not incorrectly, was to render the production of the Individual and various other historical individualities visible. And that led them to stress heavily, perhaps excessively, on the virtually de-emphasised objectivist aspect (determinate mode or combination structure) of Marxism. Their tactical attempt to give precedence to structural causality over practice and human subjectivity, if only to respond to the pressing revolutionary needs of their moment, did not blind them to the larger dialectical strategy, though. And that becomes evident when we contrast Althusser and Balibar’s ‘structuralism’ with that of the structuralists.

In the latter, the basic units or elements (mytheme, phoneme, episteme, etc) are positive determinants of various combinatories. They have a meaning a priori to the various systems they constitute. In Althusser’s ‘structuralism’, however, elements outside their determinate mode have merely a notional existence. They become real, or acquire any meaning, only in relation to each other in a determinate mode of knowledge, politics or practice. The privileging of connections between elements and their variations over the elements themselves, shows that Althusser’s determinate mode is only a pseudo-structure. Considering that relations, connections and their variations are, unlike the a priori elements of the structuralists, not conceptual fixities, it would be safe to claim that Althusser’s structure formed and framed by such mobilities is no more than a conceptual-linguistic schema that mimics the dialectic of historical motion.

A couple of examples, which show how myths and ‘true historical’ knowledge can both be displaced from the determinate mode of instrumentalised bourgeois rationality into its critical mode where they are reconstituted as different theoretical objects, would be in order. Let’s first train our sights on what is known as pre-capitalist communitarianism.

The determinate mode of existential time — which is the time of representative democracy, civil society, nation-states and capitalism — has constituted and signified ‘pre-capitalism’ as a thoroughly stratified and oppressive theoretical object. That does not, however, mean that this object, which can also be called ‘pre-capitalist communitarianism’ inhabits existential time only as a dematerialized idea. Its constitution as a stratified and oppressive object is also evident in sensory-empirical terms. The articulation of pre-capitalist communities within and by the determinate mode of capitalism is manifest in how various traditional, ‘pre-capitalist’ identities such as castes and religious communities have actually been put into relations of mutual hostility and domination by the logic of competition that arises from that determinate mode. In such circumstances, a critical determinate mode, constitutive of a possible time outside the one that we inhabit, can reconstitute pre-capitalism as a non-alienated and organic social formation. That is exactly what many of Pasolini’s films, especially the ones cited above, do.

At the risk of doing some violence to our cardinal framework of determinate modes and theoretical objects, let us provisionally adopt the methods of empirical history to better understand the stratification-organicity binary in pre-capitalist communities. That would, if anything, only help us shore up the validity of our framework. Pre-capitalist communities have, in temporal-empirical history, been both stratified and organic. This strange paradox arises from the fact that while in economic terms those societies were stratified as surplus would be extracted by force, in psycho-cultural terms their ordinary denizens felt much less alienated than the average individual-citizen of modern civil society. After all, caste or religious community, which can be extremely coercive and totalitarian at functional level, also does give people, even now, a sense of familial closeness and social security. The competitive logic of capitalism has, in articulating the remnants of pre-capitalist communities, de-emphasised their psycho-cultural aspects even while accentuating their oppressive and hierarchical socio-economic dimensions.

Now for myth. Ernst Cassirer (1953, pp 4-5), one of the key movers of the Neo-Kantian current in philosophy, employs the methods of comparative philology (or linguistics) to show how the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo was, for the ancient Greeks, not a fictional myth at all but lived reality.

“Daphne, who is saved from Apollo’s embraces by the fact that her mother, the Earth, transforms her into a laurel tree. … it is only the history of language that can make this myth “comprehensible,” and give it any sort of sense. Who was Daphne? In order to answer this question we must resort to etymology, that is to say we must investigate the history of the word. “Daphne” can be traced back to the Sanskrit Ahana, and Ahana means in Sanskrit the redness of dawn. As soon as we know this, the whole matter becomes clear. The story of Phoebus (Apollo) and Daphne is nothing but a description of what one may observe everyday: first, the appearance of the dawnlight in the eastern sky, then the rising of the sun-god who hastens after his bride, then the gradual fading of the red dawn at the touch of the fiery rays, and finally its death or disappearance in the bosom of Mother Earth. So the decisive condition for the development of the myth was not the natural phenomenon itself, but rather the circumstance that the Greek word for the laurel and the Sanskrit word for the dawn are related; this entails with a sort of logical necessity the identification of the beings they denote.”

That an ancient Greek account of an observable natural phenomenon becomes for us, modern human beings, a myth is because the same set of linguistic statements are loaded with two completely different kinds of connotative charge within their respectively distinct discursive-linguistic modes. Cassirer (1953, pp 5) himself suggests as much when he approvingly quotes Max Mueller: “Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is an inherent necessity of language, if we recognize in language the outward form and manifestation of thought; it is in fact the dark shadow which language throws upon thought and which can never disappear till language becomes entirely commensurate with thought, which it never will.” This implies, dialectically, that reality will always be apprehended through its symbolization in language (discourse and/or practice) even as it will slip through its grasp like sand to necessitate its constant resignification. We can in terms of the discussion here, also take it to be an account of the perpetual shifting of determinate modes, which will constantly vary the pattern of relationship among their elements to resignify and reconstitute them as new objects.

Zizek (2003, pp 6) intends to emphasize precisely that when he summons Robert Pfaller’s authority to argue that “the direct belief in a truth that is subjectively fully assumed (“Here I stand!”) is a modern phenomenon, in contrast to traditional beliefs-through-distance, like politeness or rituals. Pre-modern societies did not believe directly, but through distance, and this explains, for instance, why Enlightenment critics misread “primitive” myths — they first took the notion that a tribe originated from a fish or a bird as a literal direct belief, then rejected it as stupid, “fetishist,” naïve.” But it is not Zizek’s to merely prove how myths can be displaced from the determinate mode of bourgeois Enlightenment to be reconstituted as another possible existential reality. He is also implying the political necessity of that shift and displacement, if only to effect a critical resistance against the domination of the determinate mode of instrumentalised rationality and its constitutive bourgeois political economy.

The examples above indicate that there can be times and historical worlds, parallel to and outside the history of existential time, to which we, its inhabitants, can escape even as our ontologies are transfigured in the process. It is, however, equally evident that we can discern such possible realities — which are supposed to be constitutive of critical histories vis-à-vis the historical reality of existential time — only in their representations. We are constrained to access their possible existence only through the representational resources of language, discourse and practice available within lived time. Possible realities, as a result, come to inhabit the existential time of which they are presumed to be alternatives of. They thus end up articulating their logic of non-alienation and non-competition, paradoxically enough, through the theories, discourses and practices of alienation and competition constitutive of existential time. In such circumstances, we must learn to look through how they are being articulated (by the existential logic of alienation and competition) to seewhat they intend to articulate (the possible logic of non-alienation and non-competition).

All ideologies, including those that seek to critique the alienated/commodified reality (or ideology) of existential time of capitalism, are discernible only as commodities. Their representation within this time of capitalism, constituted by its regime of differential exchange values, renders them thus. This clearly means the relative importance of critical ideologies in capitalist society would be completely contingent on their valorization through competition. In such circumstances, it would be unlikely that a critical ideology, which embodies the logic of non-alienation, would have many takers. The market would simply not ascribe as much value to an ideological commodity that threatens its survival, as it imputes to one (of alienation and competition) that constitutes and reinforces it.

And yet because the existential significance of such ideologies is contingent on the hope that they will overcome this logic of alienated and hierarchical valorization, they need to create a demand for themselves. A demand that outstrips the demand for the alienating logic constitutive of lived time. This demand has to be for, not what the critical ideological commodity can immediately offer, but what it promises to deliver. It has to create a demand, not for possession but for hope. Hope, however, cannot in this instance be based on blind faith or superstition. It must produce proof. A critical ideology can deliver that proof by generating, what Alain Badiou  (2006, pp x) terms, “reality effect” within existential time and its structure of reality. This effect of its non-alienated, non-competitive historical reality can be produced only if the ideology — irrespective of whether it is a conceptual/aesthetic formulation or a mode of practice — self-reflexively includes within itself the historical location and process of its real emergence. It would thereby allude to the trans-representational, non-alienated logic implicit in it. A logic that effects complete and perfect consonance between essence and appearance, or reality and its representation. Such self-reflexivity, needless to say, would have to be a function of the style and/or technique of practice and/or conceptual formulation. The need for a ‘theory of allusion to the implicit’, to account for and measure the radical capacity of various seemingly disparate revolutionary practices and/or concepts, can hardly be overstated.

The Return: Ghatak’s Failure And Elias’s Deferred Success

It’s on this terrain of reality effects and ‘allusion to the implicit’ that Elias’s politico-aesthetic endeavour to reconstitute myths as critical-negative knowledge of our existential history must be comprehended and distinguished from Ghatak’s ‘mythic’ vision of lived reality. Elias’s narrative strategy or representational technique in Khowabnama, for instance, enables him to extract from certain traditional and syncretic folklore and fables of rural East Bengal the effect of a reality they critically and negatively posit. His use of thekhowab (dream) trope to depict myths is meant to accomplish exactly that. He show Tamijer Baap, a key character in the novel, encounter those fables in his dreams, thereby transforming those fictions into a reality of their own. After all, the dreamer experiences dreams as if they were real occurrences in a world he can only enter through sleep by leaving the world of wakeful, existential reality behind. There is then a world where dreams can cease being dreams to become reality. For, people know they had been dreaming only when the dream is over and they have woken up. The world of dreams, when a person is encountering it in his sleep, is absolutely real. It’s, however, equally true that dream is not a thing-in-itself. Its existence, contingent on sleep, is bound to wakefulness in an inverse relationship. In short, dream and wakefulness are not separate realms-in-themselves, but are inflected by one another.

The reality-myth relationship, posed by Elias as one between wakefulness and dream, is rendered through this dialectic into a relationship between two realities — one existential while the other absent but possible. It also means that existential reality can travel down the strand of its inverse relationship with dream — which is simultaneously rendered into yet another, possible reality — to become that. The distinction between ‘myth’ (as fiction or transcendental faith) and ‘reality’ (as existential fact) is, as a result, obliterated. Such obliteration is for, example, evident in the way the ghost of a local Muslim ascetic — apparently killed in the anti-British Fakir-Sanyasi rebellions of late 18th-early 19th century — and other associated fabulistic events keep irrupting into and transfiguring the existential reality of Tamijer Baap in his sleepwalking reveries and activities. Those fables are, in the process, transformed from being fantastic, awe- and faith-inspiring tales into stirring memories of glorious resistance against oppression. Needless to say, the extractive oppression of the British East India Company of 18th-19th century and the exploitative ways of the local landlords and rich peasants of the 1940s are, their separation in time notwithstanding, integrated into the same historical-logical constellation. It’s, however, through mendicant Cherag Ali, Tamijer Baap’s spiritual mentor, that Elias is able to establish this logic of dissolution on firmer foundations. A dream-reader, Cherag Ali interprets dreams through the prism of doggerels and limericks of his mystic tradition as intimations of things to come in the existential-temporal continuum. His reading of dreams grounds them — together with the incantatory magic of his “authorless”, mystic rhymes — in lived reality. Once again dreams and fables, thanks to such interpretation, are deemed real possibilities. They lose their mysterious depths, because of this interpretative turn, to become their own real, comprehensible surfaces.

What changes, therefore, are not merely the ontologies of myth and existential reality but, more importantly, the relationship between the two. In fact, the two different ontological situations — of myth-reality on one hand, and possible reality-existential reality on the other — are functions of two different orders of relationship. In the first case, it’s a relationship of alienation, domination and one-way determination. Existential reality dominates over myth (or dream), as if the latter were a realm separate from and outside it, and determines its meaning by denying it the possibility of expressing any reality other than the one it has been framed in. In the second instance, the relationship is between two different moments of the same process. Here, lived reality and what it has designated as myth are not separate from each other but are like two points in a flowing stream. Different points that flow into each other to become one.

Ghatak’s idea that lived reality conceals mythic sub-structures, which determine it, is in sharp contrast to this dialectical-logical approach towards myths. If we were to follow Ghatak’s aesthetic-philosophical logic and realize, not merely in ideas but in our existence, the mythic archetype of our lived reality, it would mean that myths become existential reality. But do we then stop there as if the hidden truth of our existence has become apparent and our ‘true’ selves have, in the process, been rendered free? The answer, as far as Ghatak is concerned, is a resounding yes. In Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-capped Star), the crushed and exploited existence of protagonist Nita, a typical representative of Bengali womanhood, is sought to be shown and explained fully in terms of the figure of Mother goddess, a mythic image of the self-sacrificing provider in Bengali culture and imagination. Someone could, of course, claim through a dialectical reading of the film that Ghatak has historicized the myth of the Mother Goddess in terms of the exploitative reality of the post-Partition refugee Bengali woman. And that would, without doubt, be an honourable revolutionary intention to ascribe to the text of the film. It’s, however, equally our task to know whether, and how far, does this intention of the text coincide with the intention of the author.

The absolute pessimism in which the filmmaker steeps the possibility of Nita’s emancipation, by evoking a melodramatic ambience of despair towards the end of the film, clearly suggests that there is no escape for her from her myth-ordained fate. It, therefore, also shows that for Ghatak, the historicisation of lived reality is merely its reduction to a mythic archetype. The filmmaker’s aesthetic imaginary anticipates, arguably, his impossible, failure-ridden political project of establishing the domination of ‘organic’ communitarianism over alienating nationhood, paradoxically to end the domination and exploitation of modern bourgeois nations. Even revolution becomes, in Nagarik (Citizen), a matter of fate. The film, true to Ghatak’s philosophical-aesthetic programme of unearthing mythic sub-structures of lived reality, appears to suggest that the exploitation, progressive immiserisation of the refugees from East Bengal, and the consequent socio-political unrest on the streets of Calcutta, is no more than the playing out of the mythic yugic cycle.

Ghatak’s (2000, pp 36) mythic a priorism is starkly evident in this theorization of his cinematic aesthetics:

“Since Depth Psychology and Comparative Mythology have laid bare certain fundamental workings of the human psyche as ever recurring constellations of primordial archetypes, our task today has become easier.

“We now know, all that creates art in the human psyche also creates religion; a medicine man, a ‘shaman’, a ‘rishi’ a ‘poet’, and a ‘village woman possessed by seizure’ are, fundamentally, set in motion by the same or similar kinds of unconscious forces.

“And these forces are the very ones which are continually nourishing the subjective psychic bond, giving an inner subjective correspondence to the objective creation around us.

“It follows that all art is subjective. Any work of art is the artist’s subjective approximation of the reality around him. It is a sort of reaction set in motion by the creative impulse of the human unconscious.”

This theorization is complete if it’s seen merely as an attempt by an artist to explain his art as an expression of his moment. But read as a politico-aesthetic programme it is, at best, partial and at worst, undialectically mysterian. None can dispute the fact that “any work of art is the artist’s subjective approximation of the reality around him”. Yet, that statement can sum up a revolutionary philosophical aesthetic programme in its completeness only if it manages to yet again collapse that subjectivity into its constitutive objective reality and, most importantly, its political praxis. In Ghatak’s (2000, pp 37) imagination, “dialectics is born: the interplay of the subjective and the objective” “in the objectivization of this essentially subjective element”. (Emphasis mine.)

This understanding of dialectics as merely the primacy of subjective over objective robs it of its processual logic by rendering it into a phenomenon and an ontology: an eternalized closure of the process of infinite becoming in one of its moments. That amounts to the un-self-conscious triumph of phenomenology and its logic of alienation over the idea of subtracted ontology and its logic of pure becoming. Ghatak’s art, and his aesthetic programme, do not radiate self-awareness. They do not seem to express the idea that mythic sub-structures of lived historical time are useful only to the extent that they indicate, through their negative-critical and possible reality, the transformation of the logic of alienation, opposition and oppression into an unalienated logic of horizontal process.

Myth, as Elias has shown, can seek to free itself of its falsified ontology, imposed on it by the repressive workings of existential reality, not by being existential reality, but by allusively critiquing the logic of alienation that is constitutive of beings and the idea of ontology. The critical power of myths, vis-à-vis existential reality, lies not so much in their having become empirical reality of existence from the absent negative reality they were, but in the logic of processual becoming that this transformation alludes to.

This lack of self-awareness and self-reflexivity in Ghatak’s cinema and his politics could be located in his theoretical dependence on psychologist Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. For Jung, unlike Freud, the unconscious is not existentially constituted by the conscious mind and in inverse relation to it; it is a kind of a collection of man’s animal instincts that exists as a thing-in-itself and prior to the advent of the consciousness of rational human being. The unconscious in Jung is a misnomer. To call it pre-conscious would actually make it more theoretically consistent.

But it’s not as if the awareness of a non-alienated relational logic between myth and existential reality as two moments of the same process of constant becoming is discernible in Elias’s novel (Khowabnama) as the self-consciousness of characters who embody it. The sleepwalking reveries of Tamijer Baap, or the Delphic reading of dreams by Cherag Ali are, without doubt, moments when myths irrupt into lived history obliterating itself and that history in the process. But those moments, considering that they happen to them as individuals, do no more than allude to the possibility of such obliteration for their entire community. The two personas in question are characterologically constrained to merely experience that possibility as individuals, not access and foreground the revolutionary transformative impulse that resides in the sediments of their ecstasy and intoxication. Those characters and their ‘obliterative’ aptitudes are, as a result, condemned to be included on the margins of oppressive existential time as suspect, despicable, frightening, irrational and even false. Such differential inclusion also involves repression of the possible realities their aptitudes and personas posit and, as a consequence, pre-empts all efforts towards the collective realisation of those possibilities. Those characters, notwithstanding the critical-obliterative potential inherent in their mystic-hallucinatory energies of intoxication, are condemned to be oppressed and dominated by the lived time of rich peasants such as Sharafat Mandal and the power-hungry and effete politicians of the Muslim League and the undivided Communist Party of India respectively. This is in large measure due to their historical lack of awareness about the revolutionary potential of their aptitude for ‘intoxication’, which by itself is never good enough. For, as Benjamin (1986, pp 190) says, “…to place the accent exclusively on it would be to subordinate the methodical and disciplinary preparation for revolution entirely to a praxis oscillating between fitness exercises and celebration in advance. Added to this is an inadequate, undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication…. Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.”

The knowledge of a non-alienated, dialectical relationship between myth and existential reality is, therefore, expressed in the novel through the narrativising voice of its author. This authorial voice does not, however, come across as an expression a priori to and independent of the happenings in the novel. It is, instead, their constitutive narrative glue. Elias’s representational strategy, which depicts myth as dream to indicate the non-alienated relationship between existential reality and myth, emanates from his politics of engaging with existential time without either fully embracing or rejecting it. To that extent, his determinate/discursive mode, within which the discourse of myth is reordered, and articulated as a critique of the alienating logic of existential time, is constituted by the author’s affirmative identification with the militant praxis of classical revolutionary politics. And to this Elias alludes, self-reflexively, through the character of Keramat Ali, a poor peasant who attempts to takes mystic Cherag Ali’s poetic tradition forward. Keramat, purportedly inspired by Cherag Ali, becomes a wandering minstrel in a Tebhaga-struck swathe of East Bengal. There is, however, one very crucial difference between the “student” and his “master”. The former does not, like the latter, recite poetry bestowed on him by a depersonalized mystic and mythic tradition. He is a singer of new, self-composed songs whose authorship he unabashedly claims. His songs are obviously not interpretations of dreams and myths. They are an expression of his community’s new existential reality: the uprising of poor sharecroppers and landless labourers against an exploitative and oppressive landed gentry, and subsequently the Muslim League’s demand for an “egalitarian” Pakistan. Keramat’s continuity and break with Cherag Ali, at one and the same time, portrays the transformation of the mystic-mendicant historical individuality of Cherag Ali into a different historical individuality, that of a revolutionary poet. The latter is both a doer (militant) and a thinker (poet), and is thus part and parcel of a praxis, which engenders the reality and logic of pure, unalienated becoming against the dominant existential reality of alienation and exploitation. This praxis, and the militant/poetic historical individuality constitutive of its revolutionary mode, is born out of a community’s urge to emancipate itself from oppression and render its repressed ontology and epistemology valid. It’s, simultaneously, the event that triggers the awareness of such oppression and alienation. Here we have a tangible example of something we dealt with in the abstract above: the dialectic of how a new determinate mode is founded by an evental/revolutionary subject, which is simultaneously constituted as an individuality of this revolutionary mode of doing and reflection. But what is perhaps most important is that the two characters of Cherag Ali and Keramat Ali, united by a troubadour’s tradition but separated by the break that Keramat has introduced into it, constitute a narrative device that Elias employs to show how an oppressed and exploited individual, when he becomes a militant against such depredations, breaks with existential history to inhabit a different historical reality and time. The determinate mode constitutive of this new reality and time puts him (an element) in a new relationship with all others (remaining elements) of his society and, in the process, assigns him with a new ontological self. Militant-poet Keramat Ali is, therefore, none other than Late Cherag Ali, who has broken with his earlier mystic-mendicant self to become a revolutionary bard. And this break happens because Cherag Ali’s dream-reading vocation had made him into an inflection point between existential reality and its critical-negative knowledge in myths. Thus mystic poet Cherag Ali has, in the process of becoming militant poet Keramat, merely turned his face away from the oppressive reality of existential wakefulness to travel down the strand of inverse relationship that links this wakefulness to mythic mystic dreams, if only to realize in empirical-material terms the critique of the alienating logic of existential time that those myths had negatively posed in his ‘mystic’ interpretations.

The Althusserian homology of the break between Early Cherag Ali and Late Cherag Ali a la Keramat, can be extended to show that Elias — whose Khowabnama posits a new determinate mode within which myths are reconstituted as critical-negative knowledge of the existential reality of 1940s’ Bengal — is none other than Late Keramat Ali. He could perhaps, by that same logic, also be called Very Late Cherag Ali. Khowabnama‘s critical determinate mode is not possible without the revolutionary praxis of Tebhaga, whose legacy Elias inherited. It’s only in and through its evental praxis — which presented a lived, material, empirical critique and alternative to the alienating and exploitative logic of 1940s’ Bengal — that mythic ‘fictions’ could be re-imagined as realities repressed by an oppressive and alienating existential reality. They could, therefore, also be posed as the negative-critical knowledge of such reality. There is, however, a small problem. A struggle like Tebhaga is bound to be articulated by the existential-historical logic of alienation, competition and domination. The oppositional stance of all such struggles, vis-à-vis oppression and/or exploitation indicates that. We, who live and do politics in the shadow of Soviet collapse and the Chinese perversion, should always remember that such oppositional struggles are not meant to end in the triumph of labour over capital.

Labour does not dominate capital it becomes capital itself. Such working class movements, in spite of being posed and articulated in oppositional terms, must exude the awareness that they are part of a larger continuous struggle that constantly seeks to decimate both capitalism and the ontology of ‘working people’ within it. The struggle is actually about obliterating the difference between dominator and dominated, not the triumph of the latter over the former. Elias alludes to that implicit logic of revolutionary politics throughKhowabnama when he depicts myths as dreams.

Tamijer Baap and Cherag Ali, by virtue of being members of the poor rural underclass of 1940s’ East Bengal, are compelled to confront the oppressive existential reality with their ‘dreamy’ myths of rebellion and emancipation. Yet, in being posed as dreams, myths become as much a negation of the alienating logic of existential reality as the confrontational stance that such logic compels them to strike against that reality. In Elias, myths and their oppressed bearers confront existential reality and its oppressive purveyors not to defeat or dominate them, but to dissolve the boundaries that separate them and in the process transfigure their own existential ontology. Myth and reality, in his scheme, are related to each other, not through what appears to be a logic of absolute separation and opposition, but through a logic of inflection and perpetual process.

Such a historical relationship can, as we have seen above, also be conceived and represented as a ‘synchronic’ constellation of existential and possible (mythic) realities. Elias’s ‘structural’ constellation of realities has the oppressive pre-Tebhaga existential reality of 1940s’ East Bengal ‘synchronically’ integrated with the equally lived reality of the Tebhaga movement through a relationship of resistance against the former’s logic of alienation and exploitation. The Tebhaga movement, in turn, is bound by the logic of anti-exploitative struggle with the 18th-19th century Sanyasi and Fakir rebellions, which in turn inflect the oppressive pre-Tebhaga existential reality as its inverted-critical knowledge in the form of myths. Those myths, especially in the critique they negatively pose to the alienating and exploitative logic of pre-Tebhaga Bengal, are integrated with the Tebhaga struggle as an alternative possible reality that the struggle seeks to accomplish. Elias constructs this kaleidoscopic world of infinite historical inflections in Khowabnama to allude to the possibility that this fiction on Tebhaga within his, and subsequently our, existential time of alienation is seen as inflecting that lived reality as its critical-negative possibility. The fabulistic texture that Elias gives to slain militant Tamij, who with his bullet-riddled neck climbs into the moon, echoes the local myth of the dead Muslim ascetic, who after he had been killed by the East India Company had made his home on a local tree. His deliberate mythification of the reality of Tebhaga as depicted in his novel is supposed to negatively imply the possible reality of his fiction and thus open, not close, the dialectic. It’s a possibility that waits to be actualized through collective political action. Much like Keramat and Tamij’s rebellion actualized the reality immanent in the fables and dreams of their oppressed community.

Ghatak sees a beginning that has been lost and an end that cannot be reached. So, there is failure. For Elias, however, there is neither beginning nor end. There is only a never-ending journey with halting stations along the way. Success exists only in deferment and failure there is none. There is, however, only a small problem: we stop at one of those halting stations for far too long.

Note: The germ of the idea that is this essay is the result of a critical — and may I say unconscious — engagement with ‘History’s creative counterpart’, a paper on Akhtaruzzaman Elias by critic Shubhoranjan Dasgupta.

Bibliography:

Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Viva-Continuum, London, 2005)

Badiou, Alain, Metapolitics (from Jason Barker’s introduction to it), tr. Jason Barker (Verso, London, 2006)

Balibar, Etienne, ‘The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism’. In Reading Capital by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, tr. Ben Brewster (Verso, London, 1999)

—–‘The Elements of the Structure and their History’. In Reading Capital by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, tr. Ben Brewster (Verso, London, 1999)

Benjamin, Walter, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’. In Reflections, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Schocken Books, New York, 1986)

—–‘Surrealism’. In Reflections, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Schocken Books, New York, 1986)

Cassier, Ernst, Language and Myth, tr. Susanne K. Langer (Dover Publications, New York, 1953)

Deluze, Giles, Foucault, tr. Sean Hand (Viva-Continuum, London, 2007)

Ghatak, Ritwik, ‘Cinema and the Subjective Factor’. In Rows and Rows of Fences (Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2000)

Elias, Akhtaruzzaman, Chilekotar Sepai (The University Press Limited, Dhaka, 2000)

—- Khowabnama (Naya Udyog, Kolkata)

Ilyenkov, Evald V., The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, tr. Sergei Syrovatkin (Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2008)

Jameson, Fredric, Archaeologies of the Future (Verso, London, 2007)

Zizek, Slavoj, The Puppet And The Dwarf (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003)