Pothik Ghosh

“…a free multitude is guided more by hope than fear; a conquered one, more by fear than hope: inasmuch as the former aims at making use of life, the latter but at escaping death.”
– Spinoza (2004, p.315)

“…you Chartists must not simply express pious wishes for the liberation of nations. Defeat your own internal enemies and you will then be able to pride yourselves on having defeated the entire old society.”
– Marx (2001, p.118)

Kashmir is free and how

Kashmir is no longer a nation of oppressed individuals. It is an impersonal war machine of unremitting resistance and collective courage. The pronounced mass-insurrectionary turn that its 70-year-old national liberation movement has taken since the emergence of the everyman stone-pelter in 2010 is proof of that. The cyclical return of militant mass upsurges every summer with unerring frequency, and their steadily rising intensity, has revealed that Kashmiri society has, over the past seven years, become almost entirely insurgent.

However, last year’s mass uprising, which followed Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani’s assassination by the Indian forces, marked an even more decisive shift in this mass-insurrectionary character of the tehreek. It demonstrated that the Kashmiri war machine was now on an unstoppable roll. And whatever little doubt there might have been on that score ought to be set at rest by the ongoing Valley-wide students’ revolts. These revolts have been triggered by a surge in coercive operations by the Indian security forces after an abysmally low voter turnout was recorded during a recent bypoll in the occupied territory.

The current revolts, not unlike the mass uprising last year, demonstrate that the security forces are in a situation of retreat. The way things played out between the insurrectionary Kashmiri mass and the Indian paramilitary contingents during the 2016 uprising showed the Kashmiri people had, through their fierce resistance, chased the forces back into their bunkers and barracks. In such circumstances, the rise in sub-human forms of coercion by the security forces was, contrary to established common sense, a measure of weakening of the occupation, not its strength. And that is also pretty much the case insofar as the response of the forces to the current revolts in the Valley is concerned.

The hitherto unparalleled levels of barbaric coercion perpetrated on the Kashmiri people by the Indian Army and paramilitary forces do not in any way demonstrate the tightening of India’s control on occupied territory. Such savagery is, instead, an indication of the anxiety of an occupation that is fast losing its grip. It is an expression of fear and desperation of the occupation forces confronted with the death-defying valour of an advancing multitude.

Kashmir is, indisputably, an insurgent society. It is, therefore, a free society! The occupation, and its apparatus of venial local collaboration, enjoys not even a shred of consent among the Kashmiri population – now more than ever. This is revealed, among other things, by how the occupation has of late been going about its business. The threats issued by a frustrated Indian army chief to the stone-pelting masses of Kashmir for coming to the aid of armed freedom fighters, every time the latter are engaged in skirmishes with the Indian forces, is a case in point. General Bipin Rawat’s threats, which have subsequently been made good on the ground by the Indian forces, underscore how armed struggle in Kashmir is, contrary to Indian propaganda, an organic extension of the mass movement: the two have more and more come to work in complementary tandem with one another. (This has ensured the Kashmiri movement is not militarised even as armed struggle remains one of its indispensable aspects.) General Rawat has admitted, in almost as many words, that Kashmiri people are hostile towards the army and the Indian nation-state it represents. His frothing-at-the-mouth statement is clear evidence of that.

And if that is not good enough one only needs to turn one’s attention to how some videos of abuse of Kashmiri youth by the footsoldiers of repressive state apparatuses have gone viral on the internet. Considering that such videos serve no other purpose than demonstrate the capacity of the occupation to humiliate the Kashmiri people and strike the fear of god in their hearts, their production and circulation is most likely the work of some or the other agency – official or otherwise – of the Indian state.

However, that has not, in any way, served to break the morale of the resistance. The current mass upsurges in the Valley continue undeterred. Clearly, the Indian state, and the occupation it helms, can now do little else than purvey and openly champion such savagery, even as such savagery continues to be rendered less and less effective.

A case of the missing counter-power

Kashmir is, for all practical purposes, free. However, it is this freedom wrested by the Kashmiri tehreek for itself that is also its greatest predicament. One that confronts the movement as a question it can no longer afford to either ignore or defer: how can the force that is this freedom break through the obstructive power of occupation, and in the process organise itself into a counter-power? For, until and unless that happens, the advancing multitude of Kashmiri resistance is bound to keep running into a wall of overt repressiveness. This is the only thing that now constitutes the power of occupation in the face of an insurgent everydayness, which is well-nigh unmanageable.

The seemingly unending cycle of ever-intensifying multitudinous resistance and its obstruction by increasing levels of coercive state power demonstrates the stalemate the Kashmiri national liberation movement is caught in. The Manichean form imposed on the movement by the occupation will have to be decimated if the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination is to break out of this stalemate, and fully realise itself.

In other words, what is unavoidable is the unraveling of the Indian nation-state, which imposes this Manichean form on the Kashmiri national liberation struggle by virtue of being the centre and source of the occupation. No serious strategic attempt has been made so far to effect such unraveling. As a result, the resistance stands condemned to be part of an ever-intensifying vicious circle of mass action and its suppression by the repressive apparatuses of the Indian state. In fact, the Indian state ‘legitimises’ and steps up the coercive might that animates such suppression precisely by imposing this Manichean form on the Kashmiri resistance. It accomplishes this imposition because by its very existence as a nation-state that occupies Kashmir it ensures the mass-insurrectionary resistance against it is eventually mediated, and thus captured, by the Hurriyat parties.

As the institutionalised leadership of the Kashmiri tehreek, the Hurriyat is, by default, the nascent Kashmiri state. It exists only to articulate the insurgent Kashmiri people by tending to represent them. The existence of such an institutionalised leadership is not a matter of choice, though. This has little, if anything, to do with whether or not – and to what extent – the Hurriyat leaders are personally incorruptible. It is ineluctable because, as we have observed, it is something that is necessitated by the fact that the geo-political entity, which is the centre and source of the occupation of Kashmir is invariably a nation-state – the Indian nation-state.

Be that as it may, the existence of this institutionalised leadership ensures the movement is etatised in form while it is still a movement. Not surprisingly, this enables the Indian state to step up its military might vis-à-vis the tehreek, and produce justifications for repressive manoeuvres against it. Worse, it shackles and undermines the multitudinous form the movement has assumed, and thus thwarts the generalisability of the non-Manichean politics of self-organisation and self-emancipation that is clearly, albeit incipiently, posited by this multitudinous form.

In an overall sense, all of this is tantamount to the appropriation of the Kashmiri war machine by the Indian state. It is precisely such appropriation that Deleuze and Guattari caution us against when they write (2004, p. 461):

“When the State appropriates the war machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is afterward directed against…all State destroyers, or else expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State undertakes exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon it.”

Internalised occupation, multitudinality and the proletariat-to-come

At this point, we would do well to grasp the precise sense in which the character of the Kashmiri resistance in its current insurrectionary expression is multitudinous. The various politico-ideological forms through which mass action organises itself on the ground in Kashmir are in a state of constant flux and mutation. Their discursive signification is also continually shifting. That is so because those forms are almost entirely a function of self-activity of the Kashmiri masses – a self-activity that has become nearly unharnessable.

This is the reason why the leaders thrown up in the process of mobilisation, activation and/or generation of those politico-ideological forms manage to acquire very little stability or institutional fixity. They are, obviously, as transient as the discursive forms they are concomitant with.

In other words, the mass-insurrectionary specificity of the current moment of the Kashmiri resistance lies in the fact that masses accept historically given politico-ideological forms of organising action only to constantly master and overcome those forms, and generate new ones. It is the structuring of the masses into such a movement – which, in turn, is the outcome of their own unrelenting self-activity – that has rendered them multitudinous. This multitudinality is nothing but the capacity of the masses to articulate the insurgency of their everyday existence in its ontological primacy.

Multitudinality is the sociality of segmentation and its constitutively Manichean political form existing in a state of unprecedented precarity and crisis respectively. The multitude, then, is a socio-political form that is an intimation of what it seeks to be but is not yet: sociality as a politics qua process of abolition of segmentation and its constitutively Manichean political form, precisely by working through that form. In that context, the proletariat as a political subject is, for us, nothing save the concrete articulation of this process – together with the struggle constitutive of it in it being in and against the systemically imposed Manichean form.

The way Hardt and Negri distinguish the “traditional modern conception” of insurrection from the one that is of a more recent vintage – arguably the type the Kashmiri resistance now incarnates – is instructive for our purposes here (2005, p. 69):

“The traditional modern conception of insurrection, for example, which was defined primarily in the numerous episodes from the Paris Commune to the October Revolution, was characterized by a movement from the insurrectional activity of the masses to the creation of political vanguards, from civil war to the building of a revolutionary government, from the construction of organizations of counterpower to the conquest of state power, and from opening the constituent process to establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Such sequences of revolutionary activity are unimaginable today, and instead the experience of insurrection is being rediscovered, so to speak, in the flesh of the multitude. It may be that insurrectional activity is no longer divided into such stages but develops simultaneously.”

The multitudinous war machine anticipates its own transformation into a proletarian political subject in this precise sense. In the absence of such transformation, it is condemned to be constantly captured by the state to be transformed into a cog in its repressive apparatus.

Now, to the extent that Kashmiri society is multitudinous in being insurgent, it reveals itself to be segmented precisely in demonstrating the hitherto unprecedented precarity of the segments that constitute it, and the chronic instability of the hierarchical relations among them. In other words, the Kashmiri movement in demonstrating its multitudinality reveals how the occupation of Kashmir has been much more than what it is in its immediate historical appearance – the workings of an externalised power of domination, and a Manichean struggle between this power and the force of resistance against it.

Historically speaking, the occupation, of course, began as an external imposition. But it then went on to become internal to Kashmiri society. It has, for a while now, been embedded in the very fabric of the occupied society. That is evident not only in the divide between the collaborator class and the rest of the Kashmiri population, but also in the differentiated ways in which the occupation has so far been experienced and resisted by different non-collaborating sections of Kashmiri society. That, needless to say, has been a function of the economic relations and attendant vectors of social power constitutive of that society. This shows the Indian occupation of Kashmir has reproduced itself precisely because it has functioned as a power that internally regulates the hierarchical intercourse among segments constitutive of Kashmiri society by virtue of residing in each and every transaction among those segments.

The multitudinous character of the resistance is a clear indication that this is precisely what is now breaking down in Kashmir. In being an expression of the instability of segmentation and hierarchy in Kashmiri society, this multitudinality demonstrates the crisis of occupation as a regulative power internal to that society.

It shows the dismantling of the occupation is now inseparable from the transformation of Kashmiri society into a non-segmental sociality. For that, the only thing anti-occupation politics now needs to do is fully realise its own pronounced tendency of becoming a rigorously articulated dynamic of de-segmentation. The current multitudinous character of the Kashmiri tehreek has been posing the necessity of generalising this tendency by virtue of being an expression of precariousness, and thus crisis, of segmentation.

That is quite possibly why the tehreek’s institutionalised leadership – as in the Hurriyat – manifestly has very little say now on how anti-occupation militancy gets organised on the ground. The transience of politico-ideological forms – and the concomitant ephemerality of leadership – through which the Kashmiri masses have lately been organising their various actions against the occupation shows exactly why and how the larger movement is now beyond any significant control of a stable or institutionalised leadership. The only function that Hurriyat parties now evidently have is to put their seal of formal legitimacy on what is happening on the ground, or what has already been decided by the multitudinous resistance. This they do by periodically issuing official statements and/or making public announcements.

The Occupation’s Manichean trap

Yet, it is undeniable the Kashmiri resistance, its current multitudinous character notwithstanding, still needs such an institutionalised leadership, if only to confer formal legitimacy on its activities. This shows the function of the Hurriyat is purely statal, even if such statal functionality is for now nascent. Such mediation of the resistance by an institutionalised leadership ensures the former remains trapped in the Manichean political form, which makes it relatively easy, both logistically and strategically, for the occupation to target it coercively, militarily.

The statal form in which the movement comes to be articulated, thanks to it being represented by the Hurriyat, also ensures that the loosening segmentation of the sociality is once again tightly regimented. As a result, the multitude tends to lapse back into a cohesive order of social segmentation, instead of realising the non-segmented processual existence it so clearly posits. And tends towards. That, in turn, also tends to restore the occupation as the regulating power internal to the segmented society of Kashmir.

This then is exactly what Kashmir is now: a situation of constantly accelerating oscillation between the loosening and tightening of social segmentation, and thus the constantly intensifying precariousness of occupation.

But let us now be more accurate about all of this. It is not the existence of institutionalised leadership of the Hurriyat parties that makes it easy for the Indian state to unleash coercion on the Kashmiri resistance, albeit that is how it appears to be. It is, actually, the other way around.

The existence of the occupation now as a purely irrational and naked power of coercion, thanks to the multitudinous character of the Kashmiri resistance, compels this mass-insurrectionary movement to eventually seek representation through an institutionalised form such as the Hurriyat. In the process, the multitudinality of the resistance is captured and repressed.

Therefore, the Hurriyat, precisely in being the institutional leadership of Kashmir’s national liberation struggle, is, in the latter’s multitudinal moment, doomed to be mobilised by the Indian state as an instrument to better target its coercive and military manoeuvres against the resistance. Hence, it will not be incorrect to insist that this is, in fact, the reason why the state ‘allows’ for the existence of – and even reproduces – the Hurriyat as an institutionalised leadership of the Kashmiri national liberation movement.

The way out of this then is really quite simple. The military and coercive might, which is all that is left of the power of occupation, will have to be decimated for the Kashmiri resistance to realise the non-segmental sociality its current multitudinous character posits. And that, in turn, shall be achieved only through the unravelling of the Indian nation-state, and the power of political economy that necessitates its existence as also that of the geo-political configuration of South Asia constitutive of it as this nation-state. Only that would accomplish the end of occupation, both in form and substance, and simultaneously amount to Kashmir attaining its goal of full self-determination.

Kashmiri self-determination and unravelling of the Indian nation-state

In fact, so crucial is the unravelling of the Indian nation-state for Kashmir that were the latter to gain national independence formally without the former unravelling, such independence would amount to nothing save the perpetuation of Indian occupation by other means. Therefore, as long as the Indian nation-state exists, formal separation of Kashmir from its forced incorporation into the so-called Indian Union will not automatically translate into decolonisation.

Decolonisation, after all, is not merely the end of formal colonisation. It must also be the end of occupation in substance – that is, it must amount to thwarting all possibility of post-colonial neo-colonisation. The Indian nation-state will, without doubt, resort to such neo-colonisation of Kashmir if it gains its national independence without extinguishing India.

This it will do by instrumentalising the ruling classes of the formally free Kashmiri nation in much the same way it now instrumentalises the institutionalised leadership of its national liberation movement. Its very existence as the kind of nation-state it is, destines India to do nothing else but this in a scenario where Kashmir is formally free.

That such a scenario is now not entirely implausible is something the Kashmiri resistance, and all those who claim to be in solidarity with it, must seriously reckon with. In the face of uncontrollable multitudinalisation of the Kashmiri national liberation struggle, which reveals the social-revolutionary orientation it has almost nearly acquired, the Indian state could well employ the strategic ruse of formally granting Kashmir national independence in order to regiment this multitudinality and, thereby, nip the impending social revolution in the bud.

After all, the sovereign state of the new Kashmiri nation would, by virtue of coming into existence, necessarily tend towards containing this multitudinousness by structuring it into a national society. And that would be crucial for the continued survival of India. The social-revolutionary upheaval that the increasing multitudinisation of the Kashmiri movement portends for the entire subcontinent, threatens the Indian nation-state with inevitable extinction.

The unravelling of the Indian nation-state is, clearly, the destiny of the Kashmiri national liberation movement. Its multitudinous character indicates that with great acuity and accuracy. That is the only way for the Kashmiri people to really end the occupation, and achieve their goal of national independence and self-determination in any substantive and meaningful sense.

Settling for formal national independence in the absence of such unravelling of India would mean, as we have already observed, that Kashmir is trapped by the Indian nation-state in a renewed bout of occupation in the form of neo-colonisation.

Is Kashmir a case of classical colonialism?

To properly understand why that is so, one needs to rigorously inquire into the substance of the Indian occupation of Kashmir. It has historically been a colonial occupation. And even now that is the discursive form in which the relationship between India and Kashmir manifests itself. Yet, if we were to look through this discursive appearance to grasp how it is articulated within the larger structure of hierarchised socio-economic relations that are concretely indexed by this entity called the Indian Union, we will realise the Indian occupation of Kashmir is far from classical colonialism.

The main purpose of this occupation, unlike classical colonialism, is not extraction of Kashmiri resources for Indian industry. Nor is it about opening up markets for absorbing commodities overproduced by industry in the Indian mainland. Of course, both do, in some measure, still happen – actually quite a bit when it comes to something like hydroelectricity. But that is not the central point of the occupation.

The whole purpose of Kashmir’s occupation is the securing of geo-political hegemony of India in South Asia. In this context, the de-development Indian occupation wreaks in Kashmir is neither for extraction of indigenous resources nor is it for opening up consumption markets for commodities overproduced by industry in the Indian mainland. It is, instead, a necessary part of an attempt to ensure the perennial subservience of the occupied population while guaranteeing the effective operation of various patronage networks run by the occupation in order to make the subservient population even more dependent on the Indian state so that it is completely at its mercy. That is the occupation’s way of ensuring its own longevity.

India’s geo-political hegemony, which its occupation of Kashmir asserts and maintains, is absolutely crucial for the nation. For, it is precisely through such regional hegemony that the Indian nation-state is able to produce and shore up nationalist consensus in its mainland. That is important because only by producing and reinforcing such consensus can the Indian nation-state – which is nothing but a concrete historical index of social labour organised into a systemic regime of differentiated or segmented necessity – maintain and reproduce itself.

The Indian nation-state is like every other nation-state, which is constitutive of the capitalist world-system as the basic unit of organising international division of labour. It, therefore, concretely indexes the organisation of social labour into a regime of differential dis-privilege and differentiated necessity. In other words, it is a concretely-indexed system of transfer and extraction of surplus labour-time.

Nationalist consensus, in such a situation, is the ideological form constitutive of this materiality of segmented organisation of social labour in its different and differentiated, but mutually combined historical contexts. It is a form that is constitutive of different segments of social labour representing their everyday struggles in terms of rights. Consequently, this form, in being bolstered, reinforces such juridical representation (and distortion) of the everyday struggles of social labour. As a result, the strengthening of this form enables the reproduction of the capitalist system and the nation-state that is its concrete index.

Now, as far as India’s socio-historical specificity is concerned, it can bolster this nationalist consensus – its register preponderantly Islamophobic and brahminical – only by asserting its hegemony in South Asia, primarily through the occupation of Kashmir. In fact, this is the specificity of India occupied Kashmir (IoK), wherein it serves to preserve capital by reinforcing the power of political economy in its concrete South Asian regionality and, thereby, in its particular global conjuncturality. It is in this precise sense that India is an imperialist entity. Here, once again, is evidence – this time perhaps even more conclusive – that there can be no real freedom for Kashmir without the unravelling of the Indian nation-state.

India’s mediatic solidarity-givers and the missing proletarian revolution

Of course, it is very important that this is registered by the Kashmiri resistance at the level of its collective intelligence. But it is even more important the solidarity-givers of Indian mainland grasp this. For, it is in the Indian mainland that the final battle for the liberation of Kashmir will have to be fought and won.

It is here the unravelling of the Indian nation-state will have to be ultimately effected by shattering the nationalist consensus. And this will only be brought about through militant interventions that foreground the counter-tendency of rupture inherent in the quotidian nature of the struggles of different segments of ‘Indian’ social labour vis-à-vis their default tendency of juridical representation and systemic subsumption.

But for that, solidarity-giving Indian mainlanders need to realise the question that has been driving their enterprise is thoroughly misplaced. In giving such solidarity to the Kashmiri tehreek, they have always asked: ‘What can we do for Kashmir and its struggle against occupation?’ But solidarity is not a sentiment to be abstractly expressed and extended. It is a politics that has to be produced as a concrete strategy and materiality.

In order to produce such a strategy mainland solidarity-givers would do well to invert their question. What they need to ask, instead, is the following: What is the Kashmiri movement against Indian occupation doing for the everyday struggles of the working people of mainland India?

The answer to that is something they need to build on. Only then will their sympathy for the suffering people of IoK cease to be the abstract charity it currently is, and become a concretely-grounded empathy for the sufferings of comrades with whom they share a concrete horizon of internationalism of struggles.

In other words, one cannot produce such a politics of solidarity unless one recognises that the challenge the Kashmiri movement poses to India’s geo-political hegemony in South Asia favours and advances the everyday struggles of working masses in the Indian mainland. Such a challenge, needless to say, tends to concomitantly weaken the Indian nation-state as a concrete historical index of organising labour into a sociality of capital.

In such circumstances, unravelling of the Indian nation and its constitutive state is absolutely indispensable for the emancipation of mainland India’s social labour from the regime of differentiated necessity it is imprisoned in. Once this is recognised, all the confusion, equivocation and bad faith, which have recently come to the fore, thanks to some Indian leftists distinguishing between “azadi in India” and “azadi from India” so that they can comfortably ride both horses, will vanish like camphor.

The everyday struggles of the masses inhabiting the Indian mainland are nothing but struggles of various segments of social labour to emancipate themselves from the necessity constitutive of their differentiated quotidian existence. However, the systemic regime within which such struggles emerge to challenge that regime in its concrete specifications tends to register, articulate and situate those struggles as demands for rights placed on the system. That amounts to the fetishisation or mystification of those struggles and their everydayness into juridicality. And this is precisely the reason why disaffection with the system often adopts nationalism and other related reactionary ideological forms to represent itself as an everyday experience. This is how different segments of social labour come to be organised into a hierarchy of biopolitical identities.

For this reason, mainland Indians committed to forging an effective politics of solidarity with the Kashmiri national liberation struggle must necessarily double up as militants of proletarian-revolutionary politics. They need to intervene in the various everyday struggles of different segments of social labour – including their own – to demonstrate through militant inquiry and self-inquiry how those struggles are actually system-unravelling, and are rendered juridical only on account of being counted and placed by the system. Only through such interventionist demonstrations can those everyday struggles be impelled to generalise what they ontologically are: basic units of a movement that will negate the Indian nation-state as a historically indexed regime of capital.

Such a movement in the mainland will significantly undermine the hegemony of the Indian nation-state. That will, in turn, enable the Kashmiri national liberation struggle to advance further. What we shall have, in such circumstances, is the dialectical unfolding of the Kashmiri resistance enabling the everyday struggles of the working masses in the Indian mainland, even as the latter enable the former’s advance by being the generalisation of their own revolutionary ontology.

The Indian solidarity-givers – most of them ‘radicals’ of some sort or the other – have made no serious attempt to envision their politics of solidarity in those concrete terms. Theirs has mostly been a ‘solidarity’ of self-aggrandising display of bravado and social-mediatic spectacles of abstract heroism. In this context, the criticism Fanon levelled against those “French intellectuals and democrats” who sought to be in solidarity with the Algerian national liberation struggle becomes quite pertinent (1988, p.80):

“…French intellectuals and democrats have periodically addressed themselves to the FLN. Most of the time they have proffered either political advice or criticisms concerning this or that aspect of the war of liberation. This attitude of the French intelligentsia must not be interpreted as the consequence of an inner solidarity with the Algerian people. This advice and these criticisms are to be explained by the ill-repressed desire to guide, to direct the very liberation movement of the oppressed.

“Thus can be understood the constant oscillation of the French democrats between a manifest or latent hostility and the wholly unreal aspiration to militate ‘actively to the end.’ Such a confusion indicates a lack of preparation for the facing of concrete problems and a failure on the part of French democrats to immerse themselves in the political life of their own country.”

‘Political equality of nations’: the burden of an abstract schema

This failure of our solidarity-giving mainland ‘radicals’ – leftists or otherwise – to envisage their solidarity with the Kashmiri national liberation movement by way of “immers(ing) themselves in the political life of their own country” stems from the strategically flawed manner in which they approach and champion the cause of Kashmir’s national independence. So far they have, to all intents and purposes, been guided in this by the abstract schema of political equality of nations. A hoary Leninist dogma now, it was meant to do no more than fulfil the specific revolutionary-tactical requirements of Lenin’s own conjuncture.

As a Naxalite/Maoist articulation in the Indian context, political equality of nations implied federal equality of nationalities. It was meant to be a tactical manoeuvre to democratise the Indian Union by way of deepening its federalisation. Now it must be clarified here that separation of a nationality/nation from the Indian Union is not necessarily a break with this process of federalisation. In fact, it can very well spell its continuity. That is because one can quite legitimately raise and articulate the question of formal separation and national independence from the Indian Union by employing this federalising approach. All one needs to do in such a situation is change one’s articulation of the territorial form of federalism from the national to the regional/subcontinental. India’s politico-economic relations with Nepal and Bhutan – or, for that matter, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar –, or even Pakistan, arguably testify to that.

Such a federalising approach to the question of national independence of Kashmir – or other occupied territories in the so-called Indian Northeast – is bound to continue placing the Indian Union at the geo-political centre of things, implicitly or otherwise. That is because such an approach to the question of separation and national independence necessarily presupposes the continued existence of the Indian nation-state.

Not surprisingly, the politics of solidarity-giving, which is either deliberately or unreflexively informed by this bourgeois republican conception of political equality of nations, contributes to both reinforcing India’s position as a regional hegemon and its continued Manichean domination of Kashmir.

In fact, it is on account of this approach that Indian radicals, who support the Kashmiri national liberation struggle, have proved to be, in effect, no different from those sections of the Indian left, which pose the question of Kashmir as nothing more than a human rights issue. Arguably, the former, just like the latter, have no real socio-political programme for unravelling the Indian nation-state through a praxis of concretely-grounded post-national revolutionary internationalism. Hence, their support for Kashmir’s azadi has meant no more than placing it as a demand on the Indian state. Such an abstract politics of demand, not unlike the left-liberal politics of human rights, confers legitimacy on the Indian state and is, in essence, both reformist and nationalist.

Of course, some among those solidarity-givers are participants in, or ideological supporters of, the armed struggle being waged by the Indian Maoists in the geographic heart of this nation. But to the extent that the Indian Maoists’ ‘revolutionary’ programme is that of democratising the Indian nation in the process of seizing its state apparatus, and not of effecting its unravelling, they are, at best, reformists with guns.

The short point here being almost all our solidarity-giving mainlanders have proved incapable of envisaging their solidarity with the Kashmiri tehreek in terms of a concrete, mainland-based praxis for unravelling the Indian nation-state. This incapability stems from their failure to accurately grasp and concretely analyse the political-economic specificity of the Indian occupation of Kashmir.

Relative surplus population: the political economy and biopolitics of occupation

We have already seen how the main purpose of occupation of Kashmir is to bolster nationalist consensus in the Indian mainland by asserting India’s subcontinental hegemony. But in the process of accomplishing that the occupation has also rendered Kashmir a reserve of “relative surplus population” (Marx, 1986, pp. 589-599).

That part of the population, which does not directly participate in industrial production at any given moment of development of capital, is relative surplus population. This population, it must also be clarified, keeps burgeoning as increasing levels of automation – or organic composition of capital (c/v) – tend to expel more and more living labour from the circuit of industrial production.

That does not, however, mean this surplus population is dispensable for capital, and is its absolute outside. The productive internality of relative surplus population to capital lies in the fact that capital must necessarily produce it in order to raise the productivity of its industrial economy. It is also productively internal to capital because precisely in being outside the latter’s circuit of industrial production it is systemically functionalised to both subsidise and regiment the labour that is productively employed.

This shows capital is a system that productively includes precisely through hierarchical exclusion. It also reveals that capital as a system – political economy to be precise – is much more than industrial production and wage-labour, albeit the latter is undoubtedly its organising centre. In such circumstances, the existence of relative surplus population itself constitutes a segmented economy of its own reproduction, which is an economy of production of surplus labour-power.

But what of the population of Kashmir? How exactly does it qualify as an economy of relative surplus population? How does its military occupation by India, which marks it as an outside of the Indian mainland and the nationalist consensus constitutive of it, at once also internalise it into the capitalist economy and sociality that is concretely indexed by this Indian nation-state?

For one, the living human bodies that comprise this population exist, and are reproduced, only to be tortured and/or killed. In this they are typically “homo sacer” (Agamben, 1998, p. 82): “Life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed….” This is integral to securing, as we have earlier observed, the power of political economy in its regionality by enabling India to assert its geo-political hegemony. For another, the occupied territory with its population is one of the many laboratories of capital qua the Indian state where the latter sharpens various modalities of command and coercion for them to be subsequently deployed at different controlled levels of intensity in the Indian mainland in order to enhance extraction and/or transfer of surplus labour-time. This is the biopolitical crux of the Indian occupation of Kashmir.

But the thing with relative surplus population is that it is internal to capital by virtue of being outside its productive circuit. This renders it the immanent crisis of capital. One that always threatens to run amok and unravel the system, and yet something that capital cannot do without.

For this reason, capital as a system is, in Marx’s words, a “moving contradiction” that always tends to allay and manage, and even productivise, the experience of alienation constitutive of the process of subjectivation concomitant with the production of relative surplus population. But in doing that it invariably tends to intensify the crisis embodied in the surplus population, which it once again seeks to manage, etc. And thus unfolds this centrifugalising dialectic till the crisis becomes so completely unmanageable that it unravels capital and tends towards instituting a new, post-capitalist duration.

Clearly, once we begin to see the people of occupied Kashmir as relative surplus population we become theoretically capable of knocking the bottom out of the specious argument – articulated by a section of Indian left-liberals – that the unrest in Kashmir is due to lack of employment opportunities. The relative surplus population, and its economy, is always linked to provisioning of productive employment insofar as the latter is constitutive of the industrial economy that necessarily produces and mobilises this surplus population in the course of its development or expanded reproduction.

In such circumstances, the suggestion that requisite employment opportunities could address the concerns and anger of the insurgent Kashmiri masses, which constitute a reserve of surplus labouring population, is fallacious. The process through which a certain mass of people is rendered relative surplus population is that of progressive increase in the organic composition of capital. And that, contrary to liberal apologetics, leads to “no corresponding rise in the general demand for labour” (Marx, 1986, p.599). Marx writes (1986, pp.598-599):

“…if through the introduction of new, or the extension of old, machinery, a portion of variable capital is transformed into constant, the economic apologist interprets this operation which “fixes” capital and by that very act sets labourers “free,” in exactly the opposite way, pretending that it sets free capital for the labourers. Only now can one fully understand the effrontery of these apologists. What are set free are not only the labourers immediately turned out by the machines, but also their future substitutes in the rising generation, and the additional contingent, that with the usual extension of trade on the old basis would be regularly absorbed. They are now all “set free,” and every new bit of capital looking out for employment can dispose of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect on the general labour demand will be nil, if this capital is just sufficient to take out of the market as many labourers as the machines threw upon it. If it employs a smaller number, that of the supernumeraries increases; if it employs a greater, the general demand for labour only increases to the extent of the excess of the employed over those “set free.” The impulse that additional capital, seeking an outlet, would otherwise have given to the general demand for labour, is therefore in every case neutralised to the extent of the labourers thrown out of employment by the machine. That is to say, the mechanism of capitalistic production so manages matters that the absolute increase of capital is accompanied by no corresponding rise in the general demand for labour. And this the apologist calls a compensation for the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced labourers during the transition period that banishes them into the industrial reserve army! The demand for labour is not identical with increase of capital, nor supply of labour with increase of the working class. It is not a case of two independent forces working on one another. Les dés sont pipés.”

In this context, the left-liberal contention that lack of proper employment is the source of mass unrest in Kashmir is, of course, theoretically erroneous. It is politically disingenuous too. This suggestion, implied or otherwise, of creating requisite employment opportunities for the Kashmiri population is meant to enable further segmentation of the economy of the surplus population in Kashmir so that its current multitudinality is dissipated and its mass-insurrectionary character rendered diffuse. This shows how such a liberal argument is steeped in nationalism and ensures liberalism remains the obverse of reactionary nationalism.

Now the surplus population is structurally internal to the productive-industrial economy of capital on account of its experience of being outside the latter. It is, therefore, a contradiction at the heart of capital the latter needs to manage, and leverage as a regimenting and thus productivising force vis-à-vis productively employed labour. Surplus population is, therefore, also the force that can unravel the economy of capital.

Such a situation arises when the capitalist social system can no longer manage the surplus population it is compelled to produce in order to reproduce itself by increasing productivity. Then the subjective experience of being alienated from capital tends to institute its own duration and become its own material ground. This is the tendency of subtraction from capital that is also simultaneously the tendency of its negation. Any intervention that strives to be radical should seek to sharpen this tendency of subtraction qua negation, which is inherent in the subjective experience of alienation constitutive of the production and mobilisation of relative surplus population. ‘Bifo’ Berardi helps us theorise such politics when he writes (2009. pp. 45-46):

“Labor is an activity estranged from the existence of the workers that is imposed on everyday life by the construction of disciplinary structures created over the course of the entire history of modern civilization. Only the estrangement from labor makes liberatory dynamics possible, shifting the flow of desire from (industrial) repetition towards (cognitive) difference. The concept of estrangement implies an intentionality that is determined by an estranged behavior.

“Estranged from what? From all forms of labor dependent on capital.

“Workers do not suffer from their alienation when they can transform it into active estrangement, that is to say, into refusal.”

Kashmiri migrants, financialisation and the economy of surplus(ed) population

On this count, things are turning out to be no different with regard to Kashmir. The subjective experience of alienation produced by the military-coercive power of the occupation among the population in the Valley is what has always threatened the existence of the Indian nation-state, and the capitalist social power it has indexed. This is best exemplified by the multitudinous, mass-insurrectionary form the Kashmiri resistance has come to assume of late.

That, however, is only one part of the story. The other part is how de-development being wreaked by the occupation has been compelling sections of the occupied population – mainly cognitarians such as higher education-seeking students and young professionals of various kinds – to come to the mainland in search of better livelihood opportunities. That has provided the Indian executives of capital –the various governments that have manned the Indian state from time to time – with the opportunity to integrate this section of the occupied population, and through them produce and strengthen consensus in its favour in the occupied territory. Programmes such as Operation Sadbhavana are only the most blatant and overt attempts by the executives of Indian state to leverage this opportunity.

They have, however, failed to achieve anything of significance. In fact, the presence of Kashmiris – cognitarians but also some non-cognitarian working people – in the Indian mainland has only served to worsen the occupation’s crisis of legitimacy in the Valley. The Indian occupation of Kashmir is, without doubt, a politico-military fact insofar as the occupied territory is concerned. But for that very reason, it also functions as an ethno-nationalist, and/or ethno-religious and Islmaophobic ideology in the mainland.

This ideology – embodied by significant sections of non-Kashmiri and/or non-Muslim working people in the course of their everyday social operations – serves to regiment the migrants from the occupied territory into yet another category of relative surplus population.

In fact, it is by regimenting this section of Kashmiri migrants through the agency of other, more ‘mainstreamed’ non-Kashmiri and/or non-Muslim Indian working people that capital seeks to manage the overall increase in precarity of Indian social labour due to an unprecedented level of same-skilling having been effected by a qualitative leap in productive forces.

In this situation, migrants from IoK are no longer the only people who constitute relative surplus population. Considering that the overall increase in precarity of social labour on the Indian subcontinent, together with the world at large, has resulted in near complete disappearance of permanent productive employment, what we have now is a situation, wherein almost the entire working population has become surplus.

In such a scenario, productive employment is almost entirely temporary in nature, and is a constantly revolving door of entry and exit that serves to manage and regiment this surplus population by enabling its hierarchical, though precarious, economy of reproduction. Therefore, what we arguably have here is no longer simply an economy that produces surplus population and serves to manage and reproduce it. Rather, it is now an economy constitutive of surplus(ing) of the entire population. This is a qualitative shift in the economy of relative surplus population – a change that is characteristic of our late-capitalist, or neoliberal, conjuncture.

What such an economy of surplus(ing) does is it steps up the tendency of capital accumulation to entirely financialise itself. As a result, the process of capital accumulation becomes more and more speculative (M-M’) while the centrality of industrial production (valorisation through creation of use-values or M-C-M’) is progressively diminished. This shift has, in turn, obviously further entrenched the economy of surplus(ing) of the entire population. As far as mainland India is concerned, this has been evident in the increasing casualisation and contractualisation of so-called productive employment in almost all sectors of the economy.

In such circumstances, the ‘mainstreamed’ sections of non-Kashmiri and/or non-Muslim Indian working people seek to cope with this intensifying precarisation, which is imposed by the system, by socially regimenting the Kashmiri Muslim migrants. They become the systemic agency of such regimentation because by actively inflicting such regimentation on the Kashmiri migrants at the system’s behest they seek to somewhat assuage the subalternisation they experience on account of increasing socio-economic precarity. The ethno-nationalist/ethno-religious ideological register in which the Indian occupation of Kashmir operates as a form of socialisation in the Indian mainland ensures that.

This demonstrates, as we have insisted, that the Kashmiri migrants are now a segment of the almost entirely surplus(ed) population of working masses in the Indian mainland. The implication being that they are differentially integrated into the economy of capital – which in its objective existence is concretely indexed by the Indian nation-state – precisely on account of their subjective experience of being alienated from both that geo-political entity called the Indian Union, and the sociality of mainland India.

It also shows that the privilege enjoyed by the ‘mainstreamed’ sections of surplus(ed) population of mainland India vis-à-vis the segment of migrant Kashmiri Muslims is nothing but a socially embedded ideological form that serves to entrench them further in the system. It enables those who articulate it, to do no more than merely cope with the effects of their precarity and subalternisation by way of socially oppressing and regimenting others, and, thereby, acceding to their own continued precarisation and domination by the system.

Such ‘privilege’ then is a mechanism constitutive of the politics and economy of segmentation of the entire surplus(ed) population through which capital manages and controls this population, and thus ensures its own continued survival as a process of exploitation and deepening precarity.

Barbaric fascisation and a militant inquiry of hope

Of course, the progressive deepening of such precarity will enhance the probability of weakening the grip this ‘privilege’ has on the ‘mainstreamed’ sections of Indian working people. But that is only a probability and there is nothing predetermined about it. What is, at this point, certain is that such deepening of socio-economic precarity will be politically reflected in an even greater intensification of the barbaric fascisation we currently confront in this part of the world.

What is needed, in such circumstances, are interventions that demonstrate through a ceaseless process of militant inquiry and self-inquiry how the Indian occupation of Kashmir, among other such apparently archaic forms of socio-economic domination, functions as a socially-embedded ideology that enables capital to perpetuate itself as the exploitative and precarity-inducing system it is.

Such investigations will have to continuously demonstrate to the ‘mainstreamed’ sections of Indian working people how their ‘privilege’ vis-à-vis the Kashmiri migrants is something that concretely renders them complicit in their own systemic domination, exploitation and precarisation too. That is crucial if those ‘mainstreamed’ sections of the working population in mainland India are to turn away from their ‘privilege’ – qua socialised regimentation of Kashmiri migrants – and focus on negating the Indian nation-state as the concrete regional index of capital in this part of the world. This, as we have seen over and over again, is both the source of occupation of Kashmir and regimentation of the surplus(ed) population of mainland India.

Such inquiry and self-inquiry-driven militant interventions is exactly what mainland Indians claiming to be in solidarity with the Kashmiri resistance need to engage in, particularly with regard to their own more ‘mainstreamed’ locations. Only then will they come to practise solidarity as a politics of concrete heroism.

Those interventions on their part will make it easier for the Kashmiri migrants to compel the ‘mainstreamed’ sections of Indian working people to grasp how Indian occupation of Kashmir is the system’s instrument to regiment not only Kashmiris but the ‘Indian’ working people as a whole. The migrant Kashmiri cognitarian is likely to accomplish that by way of militating against concrete forms of social regimentation imposed on him/her in mainland India through operationalisation of the occupation as a socially-embedded ideology. That is important if his/her subjective experience of alienation is to really become its own material ground. Something that can only be achieved in the process of abolishing the objectivity of the economy, which integrates him/her precisely by producing this experience of alienation.

This is how the struggle against Indian occupation of Kashmir also becomes a working-class question internal to the everydayness of social labour in its different moments in mainland India. A necessary moment, therefore, in the constellation of struggles that will negate the Indian nation-state, and in the process tend towards transforming South Asia into a post-national geo-polity.

Let us try and illustrate this empirically. One of the more serious and chronic problems the migrant Kashmiri Muslims – particularly the cognitarians among them – face in mainland India is the accessing of liveable rented accommodation. The functioning of the occupation as an ethno-nationalist/ethno-religious, Islamophobic ideology in mainland India ensures that. As an ideological register embedded in the form of everyday socialisation, it is embodied and animated by the ‘mainstreamed’ sections of working people of mainland India. It is they who hugely contribute to this difficulty of the Kashmiri Muslim migrant in the process of compounding the precarity of his/her livelihood and life.

And yet, it is this same occupation as a politico-military fact that serves to regiment those ‘mainstreamed’ sections of Indian population. The migration from the Valley to mainland India has obviously made it easier for rent-seeking landlords to push up house rents, particularly in those urban areas that are inhabited by not-too-insignificant chunks of Kashmiri migrants. This is due to the additional demand for housing in such areas. Such rent hikes obviously affects all, Kashmiris and non-Kashmiris alike, even while there is a social differential at work in terms of ease of access to rented accommodation. Such rent hikes imply an across-the-board cut in social wages – and intensification of work both in the reproductive and the so-called productive realms.

The occupation of Kashmir stands revealed here as something that clearly enables rent-seeking sections of capital to extract more rent from all house-tenants in mainland India. It, therefore, also reveals itself as a mechanism by which capital as a socio-economic system regiments all the working people – or the entire surplus(ed) population – in the Indian mainland by compelling them as a collectivity to do more labour – both unproductive and productive.

Here then is a concrete instance of how the occupation of Kashmir is an instrument through which capital seeks to regiment Kashmiri masses in the Valley, and migrant Kashmiri cognitarians and non-Kashmiri working people in mainland India as various segments of a constantly surplus(ed) population.

Interventions in the form of militant inquiry in mainland India can go a long way in uncovering more such concrete examples. And only through such uncovering can a concretely internationalist politics of solidarity be forged between the Kashmiri resistance against Indian occupation and the everyday struggles of social labour in mainland India.

Let us then hope a concrete-utopian hope for a perpetual machine of insurgency, which will not rest until it has radically re-ordered all of South Asia into an ever-expanding, post-national and non-statal horizon of revolution. That is what the Kashmiri tehreek is fated to achieve. And so are we, if we care to take note of things.

References

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998]

Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’, The Soul At Work, trs. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia [Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, California, 2009]

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Brian Massumi [Continuum, London, New York, 2004]

Fanon, Frantz, Toward the African Revolution, tr. Haakon Chevalier [Grove Press, New York, 1988]

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Multitude [Penguin Books, New York, 2006]

Marx, Karl, ‘Speech at the International Meeting held in London on November 29, 1847 to mark the 17th anniversary of the Polish Uprising of 1830’. In On the National and Colonial Questions: Selected Writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ed. Aijaz Ahmad [LeftWord, Delhi, 2001]

Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume I, tr. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels [Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1986]

Spinoza, Benedict de, A Political Treatise in A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, tr. R.H.M. Elwes [Dover Publications, New York, 2004]

Pratyush Chandra

“…it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” – Karl Marx (1)

“We do not think or plan in piecemeal, but in full-scale design. It is just that we are revealing our cards gradually…” – Narendra Modi (2)

The left-liberal intelligentsia in India is clearly in a quite precarious state, if it finds ex-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s criticism of demonetisation as the most competent response to the Modi Government’s move. The daily peddling by left social media activists of the criticisms that mainstream economists are making of demonetisation is a symptom of the Indian left’s lost confidence (if it ever had any). Even those who have come up with more erudite responses are lost in the grammar of the move — its immediate performance and effects — and have concluded that demonetisation is poor, bad and ignorant economics. Coming from a chaiwala, what else can it be!!!

In our view, Modinomics is a legitimate successor to Manmohanomics — it is a continuity entrenched in the dynamic needs of capitalist accumulation. Post 1990, India has seen governments of all colours, but the coherence of the Indian state has rarely faltered on the economic front. The rulers with all their electoral compulsions have succeeded in maintaining, if not accelerating, the neoliberal regime. However, this does not mean the political shade is merely external and cosmetic — politics in an electoral democracy is all about reshuffling social anxieties and interests in a manner that allows the state system to self-reproduce.(3)

Financial Expropriation and the Emergence of a Debtfare State

Demonetisation is a misnomer. It is not an attack on money by demonetising economies. Rather, it is a spectacular yet momentary unravelling and strengthening of the adamantine chain around so-called economic independence and growth in capitalism. In fact, it is a heightened expansion of money as financial and political-economic control. It is an effort to assess and consolidate the expanse of economic activities and transactions and thwart any possibility of parallel economic regimes. Delegitimising particular denominations of currency becomes a means to reclaim those activities, and reassert money as a universal measure of value, not as a means to autonomise particular levels of economy, by treating it as a mere facilitator of exchange or a means of hoarding. Money creates boundaries only to expand and cross them. Money measures the immeasurable, it equalises the most unequal. It institutes hidden connections between phenomena quite remote from one another — the vertical control however is revealed only at particular junctures of economic development through the action of state. In our opinion, demonetisation is an assertion of the universality of “universal equivalence”, i.e., money. This means consolidation of the linkages between layers of social relationships in the economy — strengthening of the neoliberal concentration and centralisation of capital.

There are two chief processes that define the neoliberal regime of capitalist accumulation, and demonetisation is remarkably connected with both of them. These processes are financialisation and informalisation, which in the present heat of the demonetisation debate, have been popularly dubbed as cashlessness and black/parallel economy respectively.

Financialisation has three main features. First, non-financial corporations increasingly financialise themselves, relying on retained profits and open financial markets for investments, rather than on banks. Even their wage bill “is frequently financed through the issuing of commercial paper in open markets.” Second, there is a restructuring of the banking operations by re-orienting them towards mediating “in open markets to earn fees, commissions and profits from trading”, on the one hand, and towards individuals/households “to obtain profits from lending but also from handling savings and financial assets”, on the other. With the active help of state through legislative measures and encouragement, the banks mobilise personal savings for peddling in stock markets.(4)

Lastly, and most importantly, in recent years “the personal revenue of workers and households across social classes” has been increasingly financialised. On the one hand, this specifically signifies that there has been a substantial increase in personal and household debts for various life needs – consumption, housing, health, education, etc. On the other hand, it shows there has been an expansion in the range of financial asset holdings — for medical and life insurance, pension and old-age benefits, various short- and long-term money market investments, etc. This relates obviously to a withdrawal of state-supported public provisions in the form of subsidies and direct benefits, and hence their privatisation. So, we find a tremendous increase in the involvement of banking and other financial institutions in mediating household consumption, while they have obtained a full freedom to channel “household savings to financial markets, thus extracting financial profits”.

Profiteering through financial transactions between banks and households has a predatory character. Profit here is not raised in the sphere of production, but through “the systematic extraction of financial profits out of the revenue of workers and other social layers”. This is what has been termed as “financial expropriation”. (5)

The current demonetisation move is nothing less than a full-scale financial expropriation in operation. The move has in one go forced small and big cash hoarders run to line up in the queue to reveal and officialise their savings. The government is not allowing these savers to exchange and repossess the whole amount of their savings in cash. This is not simply due to any unpreparedness or erratic behaviour on the part of the Indian state and Reserve Bank of India, as many have alleged. In fact, it is a remarkable move to institutionalise a financialised relationship between the banks and households. Of course, it is too early to judge if demonetisation has really succeeded in altering “nation’s conduct”. But its motive is pretty clear, as finance minister Arun Jaitley has time and again pronounced: “This one decision that has ensured that a lot of money has come into the banking system, a lot of informal savings have become formal now, and therefore, the tendency to invest these more formal savings in instruments that you keep an eye on is also increasing.” Demonetisation is a kind of encouragement to “ordinary citizens to channelise their savings into the market which indirectly would then contribute to the process of national development rather than be blocked only in dead assets”.(6)

Demonetisation is clearing the ground for a systematisation of “cannibalistic capitalism” in India by proliferating secondary forms of exploitation which are not directly linked to production but are financial mechanisms to expropriate. The Indian economy is massively based upon underemployed and under-waged surplus population that constitute the unorganised and informal labour relations. This makes it a very fertile ground for cannibalism that marked the US economy, which was based on the proliferation of various financial mechanisms of expropriation — nay, a financial inclusion of the hitherto excluded. In fact, we see in this move of demonetising specific denominations of the currency an emergence of the debtfare state.

Susan Soederberg defines a debtfare state as one that “legitimates, normalizes, depoliticizes and mediates the tensions emerging from cannibalistic capitalism”. It deregulates finance and provides legal machinery to protect and strengthen banks, thus facilitating an intensification and expansion of “forms of predatory practices.” The debtfare state enhances “the social power of money by legally and morally permitting credit card issuers (banks) to generate enormous amounts of income from uncapped interest rates and by continually extending plastic money to those who fall within Marx’s category of the surplus population: the partially employed (underemployed) or wholly unemployed”. The impact on the labour regime is also significant as “surplus workers” are subjected “to the disciplinary requirements of the market, such as compelling them to find and accept any form of work to continue to be “trustworthy” creditors”.(7)

Demonetisation in 2016 might mark a drastic emergence of a full-scale debtfare state by financially including the massive community of unbanked individuals and households through mobile, e-payment and plastic money. However, this has not happened suddenly. The insistence of the subsequent governments to profile Indian citizens through a unique identification system called AADHAAR and linking it with their everyday economic activities, despite the Indian judiciary pronouncing such moves illegitimate, was already an indication towards building a panopticon, which will make everybody useful and watched under the system. The banking and tax institutions had already started utilising this data. With demonetisation, now that the banks have acquired a full command over the finance of Indian households, a grand system of financial discipline and punishment can be effectively generated. With the proliferation of plastic and mobile/e-connections, our consumption and activities will be regulated, and we will pay for our own regulation.

This connects to the second aspect of neoliberalism, i.e. the process of informalisation, or the generalisation of informality destroying its sectoral and transitional character.

Informalisation and Consolidation

“With the junking of the old high-value currency, the parallel economy has become part of the formal system” – Arun Jaitley (8)

Everybody is talking about the impact of demonetisation on the informal sector, which is heavily dependent on cash transactions. But there is scarcely any analysis that shows how it is shaping the location of informality in the whole economy. Is it an end of informality — of the exploitation of cheap labour? Certainly not. It is an increase in the real subsumption of informality — it is a revelation that sectoral dualism sustained through segmented economies, if not fully illusory, is merely at the levels of appearance and form. The indirect exploitation of surplus population as cheap labour by capitalist firms by accepting the relative autonomy or sectoralisation of informality perhaps needs regimentation today to further expand capital accumulation. Through the so-called demonetization move, capital is arguably seeking to consolidate itself by vertically integrating the horizontalised relationship between formal and informal. It exposes the vulnerabilities of particular capitals seeking to hide their localised parallel levels accounted for in the official bookkeeping only as leakages in the system.

Managing money circulation is about networking and facilitating economic activities and transactions — production and circulation. The left-liberal intelligentsia, including many “Marxists”, are only talking about the impact of demonetisation as immediately experienced. At best, they are prognosticating a dampening of activities and demands, which will have adverse effects on growth. They are only remotely touching on the policy’s essential connection with the changing contours of the regime of accumulation. Leftists are right in noting the impact of demonetisation on the informal sector, but they have been unable to account for how it is shaping the regime in which informalisation is central.

It has been frequently noted, and quite rightly, that under neoliberalism the economy moves towards informalisation. The formal sector and employment are not growing, while informality is increasingly being embedded in the supply chains of the economy. That is why the informalisation of work processes is considered among the chief characteristics of the neoliberal economy.

As the informal sector has always thrived on surplus population exploited as cheap labour, “hiring-and-firing” is the norm there. What the pre-neoliberal phase had done was to secure an organised labour force that through its demand stability could sustain the domestic market. In many regions, however, a vast rural and urban informal sector was allowed to develop to reproduce surplus population. But the economic planning was avowedly geared towards formalisation. This vast surplus of labour and an increase in the organic composition of capital led to a crisis of the prolonged interregnum of planned capitalism, and a decline in the profitability rate. Technological transformations found the stable workforce in the so-called formal sector over-skilled and a hindrance to further accumulation. The formal sector was increasingly considered to be exclusionary unable to accommodate the growing surplus population allowing over-exploitative hidden economies to flourish. This led to an ascendancy of neoliberal market fundamentalism, which essentially attacked the formal-informal duality by legitimising informality. The aim was to take advantage of overpopulated living labour and utilise technological innovations that made skills redundant and required equi-skilled cogs in the wheel. Through initial structural adjustment programmes these surplus population-based informal sectors were linked with the formal corporate structures in the supply chain. In this scenario, instruments like the time-tested putting-out system, which capitalised and destroyed the old guild system, started becoming handy once again. It was through these instruments that cheap labour arrangements and regimes that existed locally were subsumed to avoid costlier and inflexible labour regimes that pre-neoliberal planning had generated.

However, despite the obvious hierarchical relationship between transnational corporate structures and local industrial set-ups that mobilised surplus labour, this relationship remained externalised becoming barriers to capitalist consolidation — concentration and centralisation of capital. Local laws that were promulgated to stabilise the labour force in the earlier regime became hurdles for capital mobility and accumulation in labour surplus economies. It was to avoid these hurdles that smaller and informal units were networked, but informalisation now has to be internalised and these units must be incorporated to survive intense competition. The parcellised production and distribution is not permanently beneficial. Also needed is “the concentration of already formed capitals, the destruction of their individual independence, the expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, the transformation of many small capitals into a few large ones”.(9)

Banking and finance that institutionalise the power of money facilitate the concentration and centralisation of capital today by regimenting individual capitals — big and small — and compel them to submit to the general needs of capitalist accumulation. The multiple layers of industrial forms — formal and informal — generate clogs in the real-time mobility of financialised capital. The informal set-up provides many smaller units with legal and trans-legal comparative advantages allowing them a kind of relative autonomy from legitimate competition. Being based on cash transactions they become autonomous from the institutionalised finance and public credit, while fully utilising the currency issued by these institutions. It was only through monetary and banking reforms that these economies could be contained within the structure.

We would do well to remember that one of the major battles capital has had to wage time and again is that of labour reforms. At the present juncture, especially in countries like India, numerous legal “number filters” have been imposed that grant smaller industrial units a freedom to disregard minimal labour standards, which bigger units have to at least legally maintain. Only by coordinating with these smaller units and utilising a labour contractual system the corporate sector could evade the imposition and draw the benefits. There has been a continuous demand to remove these filters, so that the benefits that the informal sector has — to openly exploit surplus population as cheap labour — could be generalised. Only through such generalisation can the processes of concentration and centralisation become effective.

Of course, the formal sector incorporated informal entities and relationships to evade the hazards of regulation. The way cheap labour-power was bought and exploited in the informal sector was an object of envy and is the benchmark for the formal sector entities to model the labour regime and demand for deregulation from the state. The state and the formal industrial regime have been long trying to achieve this. Despite being able to utilise informality to their advantage, the formal sector has been subject to humiliating bargaining tactics of smaller entities in the informal sector. The diverse local industrial regimes in which these entities function create difficulties for formal and bigger players in the value chains. Moreover, the ancillary interests are able to effectively compete with the corporate interests on the basis of their lower technical capabilities and cheap labour, thus leading to difficulties in the consolidation and centralisation of capital.

As labour reforms become more conflictual, with increasing defensive struggles of workers in the formal sector, monetary policies like demonetisation go a long way in regimenting “informal” and “small” capitalist interests. The wages of the unbanked population whom these entities have over exploited are all paid in cash. Demonetisation attempts to mobilise the advantages of these entities, which will now be totally subservient to formal processes. It is self-evident that any monetary tactic that affects cash flows would have an immediate effect on the cash-based informal economy. Amartya Sen is correct when he says, “At one stroke the move declares all Indians — indeed all holders of Indian currency — as possibly crooks, unless they can establish they are not.” (10) However, it is not totally wrong to say that a large section of this economy is always black as transactions and contracts there are not formally accounted for, and a substantial portion of income generated remains untaxed. But does this mean demonetisation will lead towards formality?

The notion of (in)formality is loaded with all kinds of connotations. And it is pretty confusing when we dichotomise formal and informal. In the production and distribution networks that define today’s economy we find this dichotomy resolved very efficiently. If legal systems tend to dampen flexible transactional and contractual relationships, informality (beyond the regulated formal relationships) seeps in to transcend rigidity. As a system, the formal-informal relationships constitute enormous value chains. However, if we discretise these relationships, it is not difficult to find clear examples of dichotomies in them, which actually define an intense competitive regime within the value chains — intra- and inter-sectoral competition. The entities in the informal zones of the value chain compete among themselves and also with entities in the formal zone.

Through demonetisation a process of verticalisation has been effectuated and the formal nodes would now act as concentration and centralisation of informal advantages. The state acting on behalf of capital in general is disciplining the devious and particularising nature of informality. Neoliberalism is a project to look after the general needs of capital in today’s conjuncture. Demonetisation is a decisive step in that direction.

Conclusion: Vulnerabilities

“…the magnitude of the global economic crisis at times is not felt in India because of strong (parallel) economy of black money.” – Akhilesh Yadav (11)

Post-2007-08, countries throughout the globe have been struggling to set their respective houses in order. That the so-called parallel cash-based economies in India cushioned the impact of the global crisis at the national level, acting as clogs that minimised the strains of the impact, is a strange truth. However, in order to sustain a higher growth these economies with their particularities will have to be incorporated into the formal system, and their comparative advantages annulled through their generalisation. What we see today is the neoliberal urge to mainstream and generalise informality and make it a ground for systematic capital accumulation, with concentration and centralisation as its vehicle. Hence, it is in this regard that the moves like demonetisation become effective instruments. But this would destroy the clogging effects of local and parallel economies. Hence, it would eventually minimise their ability to cushion against global vulnerabilities.

Notes and References

(1) Karl Marx, “Preface to the First German Edition,” Capital I, Collected Works, Volume 35, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p. 9.

(2) “Indira Gandhi lacked courage to demonetise, we are paying for it: Modi to his party MPs”, Indian Express (Dec 17, 2016).

(3) The political institutional ascendancy of rightwing jingoistic assertions is not any return to protectionism, rather it mobilises and productivises the general precarity to restrengthen neoliberalisation. By a reactionary generalisation of fear and terror that the mobility of capital and its crisis creates, it helps the system to reconsolidate its base against any radical statism and revolutionary anti-statism. The phenomena of Modi, Brexit, Le Pen and Trump will actually help in the final dismantling of the vestiges of older protectionist labour regimes in the name of making local economies and labour markets competitive, so that capital finds the locality docile for investment.

(4) Costas Lapavitsas (2013), “The financialization of capitalism: ‘Profiting without producing’”, City, Vol. 17 No. 6, pp 792–805.

(5) Ibid.

(6) “Demonetisation is changing nation’s conduct: Jaitley“, The Hindu (Dec 24, 2016).

(7) Susan Soederberg (2013)The US Debtfare State and the Credit Card Industry: Forging Spaces of Dispossession, Antipode Vol. 45 No. 2, pp 493–512.

(8) “Digital payments will help lower fiscal deficit: Arun Jaitley”, LiveMint (Dec 25, 2016).

(9) Karl Marx, op cit, p. 621.

(10) “Interview: Demonetisation move declares all Indians as possible crooks, unless they can establish otherwise, says Amartya Sen”, Indian Express (Nov 26 2016).

(11) “Black money helped Indian economy during global recession: Akhilesh Yadav”, Indian Express (Nov 15 2016).

Pothik Ghosh

“While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.” Karl Marx, ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’, London, 1850

Undeclared emergency and other dangers of post-fascist neoliberal dictatorship

We are late, perhaps terribly so. Yet, insofar as the revolution always lags behind itself, we ought to emphatically state that the time is upon us when a correct characterisation of the political regime we are witnessing now, in this benighted geo-political entity called the Indian nation-state, has acquired life-and-death stakes. Let us not be mistaken, this political regime is not Fascism. It is something much worse and far more intractable. This regime, as we have maintained for a while now, is characterised by a hitherto unprecedented level of generalisation of the state of exception. Much more than what was seen in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan – to say nothing of Francoist Spain or Salazarian Portugal. This unprecedented level of generalisation, and thus normalisation, of the state of exception is on account of the neoliberal conjunctural specificity of post-Fordism-induced uncontrollable all-round precarity; and India’s historically unique location within it. That is exactly why we at Radical Notes will continue to characterise this political regime – which has now emerged as an agency of full-blown counter-revolution – as the dictatorship of neoliberal capital.

There is, however, no doubt that continual politico-ideological mass mobilisation is as crucial an aspect of this neoliberal dictatorship as it was of Fascist political regimes of yore. That is what distinguishes both from plain-vanilla authoritarianism – something this country experienced, for instance, during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency years. At the mass-mobilisational level, there is a striking resemblance of discursive forms, styles, techniques and tactics between the dictatorship of neoliberal capital and a classically Fascist political regime. Nevertheless, there is also a crucial distinction between the two on this count. And that difference is at the level of the modality of operation of those mass-mobilisational discursive forms, styles, techniques and tactics. As far as this political regime of dictatorship of neoliberal capital is concerned, its discursively fascist paraphernalia of mass mobilisation does not function by deploying and articulating the politico-ideological language of blood-and-soil nationalism to the complete exclusion of the liberal language of rights. The mass movement constitutive of it is, of course, characterised by a pronounced articulation and deployment of that idiom and form of blood-and-soil nationalism. But this language, in its mass-mobilisational deployment, does not seek to suspend the (nationalist)-liberal discourse of rights. Rather, the former in its deployment and articulation tends to derive its legitimacy from the latter precisely through its internally re-orientated mobilisation. It is this that distinguishes the modality of operation of fascist mass-mobilisational politics in the dictatorship of neoliberal capital from the modality of operation of similar forms of mass-mobilisational politics in Fascism as a political regime.

There is a telling symptom that indicates the current political dispensation in India is not classical Fascism but something far more insidious. Many people have correctly pointed out that we are in a state of undeclared emergency. But what does that mean and how does it symptomatise the fact that the current political regime here is not classical Fascism but something different and more dangerous? Fascist political regimes in the past have — in being constituted by Fascistic mass mobilisation and in further facilitating such mobilisation – invoked provisions of general Emergency given in liberal constitutionality to suspend both the latter, and the normalcy its functioning is meant to characterise and enable. What we, however, see now is the state of exception – which the current political regime and its constitutive Fascist mass mobilisation have been enabling – is being realised without the official declaration of such a general Emergency; and thus without invoking the exceptional constitutional provisions to suspend the Constitution in its normal-liberal functioning. That is so because normal constitutionality and liberals rights, in their everyday practice at all levels, are now objectively conditioned to inexorably activate and draw upon various draconian legal provisions of exception, and thus become registers of the latter’s normalised legitimation.

In such circumstances, it would perhaps not be entirely incorrect to characterise this political regime of dictatorship of neoliberal capital as “post-fascist” a la Hungarian philosopher G.M. Tamas. In an article titled, ‘On Post-Fascism’, which was published in Boston Review in 2000, Tamas characterises the phenomenon thus: “Post-fascism finds its niche easily in the new world of global capitalism without upsetting the dominant political forms of electoral democracy and representative government. It does what I consider to be central to all varieties of fascism, including the post-totalitarian version. Sans Führer, sans one-party rule, sans SA or SS, post-fascism reverses the Enlightenment tendency to assimilate citizenship to the human condition.”

Fascist mass mobilisation under the condition of unprecedented precarity

Now, the mass movement that institutes and animates Fascism as a political regime is, to speak a little simplistically, always in the register of disaffection wrought by subalternisation, and attendant experiences of marginalisation, even as the content that animates this register of its mass-movemental political form is actually all about some subalternised social locations and subject-positions seeking to overcome their subalternity by further oppressing other social locations and subject-positions that are even more subalternised in relation to them. That is precisely why such a political form of mass movementality renders the state an agency and active enabler of its oppressive manoeuvres (manifest in frequently violent eruptions of the lynch-mob), precisely in the process of emphatically envisaging itself in terms of opposition to the state, and especially its constitutionally-ordained liberal-institutional architecture.

Clearly, Fascism as a political regime is constitutive of the mobilisation of objective revolutionary possibilities, which inhere in increasing subalternisation of the masses, against the liberal form of the capitalist state precisely in order to reproduce that state by recomposing the political form of its embodiment. (The state, we would do well to realise here, is nothing but the institutionalised congealment of the value-relational grammar of social relations.) In this process, it cannibalises the earlier liberal-institutional form of the state. This unambiguously reveals why Fascism is a mystification of revolution and is, therefore, a counter-revolution.

Now all of this is equally true for the dictatorship of neoliberal capital – arguably the character of the current political regime in India. There is, however, one very important difference between it and a political regime that is classically Fascist. And the difference is this: both the (less) subalternised group of oppressors and the (more) subalternised group of the oppressed are, in this phase of the dictatorship of neoliberal capital, far less internally homogeneous and socially cohesive than they were in those moments of history when we had Fascism as a political regime. That is to say, the level and intensity of subalternisation of the masses as a whole is far greater now than in the conjuncture that gave us Fascism as a political regime. And this, as we have earlier observed, is on account of unprecedented increase in the level and intensity of overall precarity. Something that has been effected by a qualitative leap in productive forces, and which is conjuncturally characterised by the accelerating generalisation of Post-Fordism as the dispersal and fragmentation of the production process, intensified fragmentation of social labour, functional simplification of the labour process leading to a hitherto unprecedented increase in same-skilling, and direct productivisation of affective and emotional life.

What this has resulted in is not only a marked decline in the overall value of labour-power due to the diminishing of socially necessary labour time, but also a marked decline in the price of labour-power due to significant diminution of living labour employed directly in the creation of value. In simpler terms, what the latter amounts to is the following: increasing levels of automation (increase in organic composition of capital) has led to an unparalleled surge in supply in the labour market, thereby depressing the overall price of labour-power. This is reflected not only in wage-cuts – and/or decline in real wages – but also in the significant fall in various kinds of social wages as well. In fact, the systemic regimentation accomplished through increasing mutual competition among different segments and sections of productive and so-called unproductive social labour – something that is registered by the bloodthirsty politico-ideological forms of such competition – is nothing but an index of appropriation of social wages of some by others under the condition of overall decline in social wages.

That the level and intensity of subalternisation of the masses as a whole is far greater now than in the conjuncture that gave us Fascism as a political regime shows up as a significant difference between the two at the level of their respective political effects. While discussing the difference between Fascism and the dictatorship of neoliberal capital in terms of internal homogeneity and coherence of social groups of both the oppressor and the oppressed, the key word to be borne in mind is “less”. Only then can one clearly grasp the significant difference in political effects produced through the deployment of similar kinds of Fascist mass-mobilisational political forms and tactics in two conjuncturally distinct instances.

Anti-fascist united fronts: From instrumentalisation to oppression

Even in regimes that are classically Fascist, the (less) subalternised group of oppressors engaged in forging and articulating Fascist mass-mobilisational discursive forms and tactics, to further oppress the more subalternised oppressed, are by no means fully internally homogeneous and cohesive. There are way too many mutual contradictions among the various sections and segments supposedly constituting the Fascist social corporatist unity for them to actually be “fasces” (a bundle of sticks). In fact, the Fascist politico-ideological project is, in the first place, necessitated by the system– of course, in the absence of an effective and viable capital-unravelling politics – to preserve itself by regimenting and controlling the anarchy that it has itself produced. So, while Franco-Greek philosopher and militant Nicos Poulantzas showed us how Fascism is constitutive of a coherent articulation of different, and mutually contradictory, socio-historical locations; some Marxist and Functionalist historians of Nazi Germany have demonstrated the obverse of that phenomenon – how this united articulation is continually marred by the objective contradictions among its different constituents. The historiographic work done by Tim Mason is, in this regard, particularly important. In order to devise a strategy to effectively fight a counter-revolutionary, mass-mobilisational advance – whether it is articulated within a Fascist political regime or that of a post-Fascist neoliberal dictatorship – a dialectically inflected reading of both Poulantzas and the Functionalist-Marxist historians such as Mason is likely to be immensely helpful. In fact, such a dialectically articulated reading of Poulantzas and the Marxist-Functionalist historians is almost indispensable for those trying to devise an accurate line and an effective strategy to defeat and destroy the political regime of the dictatorship of neoliberal capital. The context provided by our concrete situation, it must be said once again at the risk of ad nauseam repetition, is one that is integral to just such a political regime.

Let us now focus on the struggles of the more subalternised oppressed against the Fascist mass-mobilisational forms and tactics of the relatively and relationally less subalternised oppressors. It turns out that such struggles, left to themselves, are prone to be instrumentalist. The internal differentiation of the oppressed social groups in Fascist political regimes often resulted in the dominant segments within those groups instrumentalising the particular concerns and discontent of the subordinate segments, by way of building a larger anti-Fascist unity, to envisage a politics that sought to merely accomplish the interests specific to the former. That, as we now know, turned out, in the final analysis, to be the bane of United Front/Popular Front anti-Fascism. Something that not only ensured that anti-Fascism did not become anti-capitalism, which would have destroyed both Fascism and its necessary condition of possibility at one go, but also led to incomplete de-fascisation of societies that had been under Fascist political rule.

The objective basis for such instrumentalist politics now stands further compounded due to conjunctural reasons of both intensified segmentation and heightened precarity of the segments thus produced. And such has been its accentuation that this instrumentalist politics has undergone a mutation to be transfigured into something qualitatively new. Whereas earlier movements based on the United Front/Popular Front principle of anti-Fascist unity led merely to instrumentalisation of subordinate segments by the dominant ones within that larger anti-Fascist unity of historical blocs, now such kinds of anti-Fascist unity ensure the movement itself ends up doing the work of not only ideological state apparatuses but of repressive state apparatuses as well.

Such anti-Fascist unity usually tends to articulate its struggle against Fascist mass-mobilisational politics, and the political regime that is its constitutive enabler, by internalising the discursive terms set by the reactionary politico-ideological project it is battling. As a result, such an anti-Fascist unity finds itself articulating and conducting its struggle in discursive-ideological terms generated by its political adversary. Now this has often been the case even with united-frontist anti-Fascist movements of the past. However, what makes this strategy even more troublesome now in this neoliberal conjuncture is that in articulating the politics of anti-Fascist unity in discursive-ideological terms set by Fascist forms and tactics of mass-mobilisational politics, it starts acting as a kind of extension of the repressive state apparatuses.

It is a situation, wherein a movement against reactionary-Fascist forms of mass-mobilisational politics not only polices its own ideological boundaries but, in the process, finds itself objectively (and eventually also subjectively) helping the state and its political regime to physically police certain sections and elements within itself even as it exists as an ongoing movement. Clearly, what we have here, as a consequence, is a manifold accentuation and intensification of the ‘kapo’ syndrome that is, thereby, rendered into something qualitatively new on account of it being much more pervasive and generalised than that kapo phenomenon originally was in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Fascist Europe. So, while the trouble with movements based on such a conception of anti-Fascist unity, in the conjunctural phase of classical Fascism, was one of instrumentalism; in this conjunctural phase the problem with such united-frontist anti-Fascist movements is that their constitutive instrumentalism is now condemned to be almost immediately oppressive in its functioning. As a result, what was ethically undesirable and, in the final analysis, politically ineffective, about such anti-Fascist unity in the phase of classical Fascism, is now also rendered entirely unfeasible in this neoliberal phase. The resultant trust-deficit among diverse sections and segments, which are supposed to constitute such an anti-Fascist unity, tends to assume such gargantuan proportions that the actualisation of such unity either fails to take off, or, collapses after a very short and unhappy life. In fact, this kind of anti-Fascist unity, thanks to its current conjunctural situation, is not only condemned to be a form of subalternisation of some sections of the movement by other sections within it, but simultaneously also verges on the oppression of the former by the latter. In this, such anti-Fascist unity, as the movement-form it is, becomes an almost perfect mirror-image of the Fascist mass-mobilisational form of the reactionary political regime it is ostensibly up against. Not just that. This almost perfect mirroring of the Fascist mass-mobilisational form by the anti-Fascist movement-form renders the latter, just like the former, an extension of the political regime that is the conjuncturally-specific form articulating the epochal logic of the capitalist state. It is precisely on this count that the current political regime in India, which we have characterised as a post-Fascist neoliberal dictatorship, is fundamentally distinct from classically Fascist political regimes.

‘Progressive’ nationalism, the bad faith of JNU’s ‘anti-fascism’

The ongoing JNU movement is a perfect demonstration of such a united-frontist anti-Fascist strategy and its problems. It is, therefore, also a demonstration of the post-Fascist nature of both the current political regime of neoliberal dictatorship, and the discursively fascist forms of mass mobilisation such a regime is necessarily constitutive of. The JNU movement was evidently sparked off by state repression let loose on the left and left-liberal student community of the university after anti-India slogans were raised on campus by those aligned to the Kashmiri national-liberation struggle. And yet the movement began, right from the word go, by posing itself in defensive terms of ‘our’ progressive and democratic nationalism against ‘their’ reactionary and Fascist nationalism. That has, ever since the movement began, been the principal ideological basis of its larger, so-called anti-Fascist unity. That this ideological basis of JNU’s ‘anti-Fascist’ struggle has emerged from various kinds of ‘progressive’ nationalist positions that different Indian left organisations – of both the parliamentary and self-proclaimed radical kind – hold on to makes the situation even more despairing. It is this that has impelled the JNU movement to dispute the validity of the specific charges of anti-nationalism and sedition levelled by the current political dispensation (in tandem with its reactionary goon-squads) without, in any way, questioning the very validity of the draconian legal provisions on which those charges are based. In other words, the movement has consistently refused to adopt the tactics of directly challenging the democratic, and jurisprudential, validity of draconian laws of sedition.

Such tactics, had they been adopted and operationalised, would have revealed constitutionality for what it essentially is: a force-field of differentially inclusive social relations, and thus concomitantly a terrain constitutive of the determinate antagonism between the tendency of preservation/making of nationhood as an historical index of capitalist sociality, and the counter-tendency of its unraveling. This would have been accomplished because the adoption and operationalisation of those tactics would have served to disrupt the uneasy balance between constitutionality and draconian legality, which is its constitutive exception, by pitting them against one another.

What the JNU movement has done, instead, is insist that the levelling of charges of sedition and anti-nationalism at some members of its community of progressive students is baseless, and that the state should find the “miscreants” who really raised those anti-India (and Kashmiri national-liberationist) slogans and slap those charges on them. This it has done, as we have observed above, by strongly asserting the ‘progressive’ nationalism of the leftist and left-liberal students and teachers of the university against the reactionary and fascist nationalism of the current political regime and its mass-mobilised goon-squads. Apart from revealing that these leftists and left-liberals refuse to see how nationalism is the necessary ideological condition of possibility for Fascist mass-mobilisational politics, this ‘anti-Fascist’ movement has separated out both the Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri anti-nationalist sections of the university from its nationalist leftists and left-liberals.

The voice in which the movement continues to articulate this separation has, of course, not been homogeneous. There are various registers in this voice that range from despicable ambivalence on the question of the right to raise slogans in favour of national self-determination of Kashmir and other areas under Indian occupation to an unambiguous nationalist assertion that raising of such slogans is wrong, seditious and criminally anti-national. What, however, does bring all these registers — which ought to be ascribed to a wide variety of left and left-liberal positions – into the coherence of a single voice is the ineluctability of nationalism as the either the default, or the conscious, ideological position as far as all those groups and individuals are concerned. That their respective articulations of ‘progressive’ Indian nationalism varies from one another does not change the fact that there has been absolutely no practical questioning by any of them of the abstract idea of nation-state, which is basically a conception that in its concrete operation always amounts to one or the other form of social relations of differential subalternisation and oppression. As a consequence, these nationalist Leftists and Left-liberals have shown themselves to be incapable of interrogating each and every form of concrete politics, including their own, based on that idea. It is precisely this that has prevented all these sections of Indian Leftists, to say nothing of the individual Left-liberals, from adopting the tactics of directly questioning the democratic and jurisprudential validity of draconian and nationalistic legal provisions of sedition.

Not surprisingly, this ‘anti-Fascist’ movement has, as a result, clearly marked out the anti-nationalist radicals and/or “miscreants” from the nationalist ‘progressives’. By separating out the former from the latter, JNU’s glorious ‘anti-Fascism’ has ensured that it marks out and isolates the anti-nationalist radicals and/or “miscreants”– which includes in its ranks supporters of Kashmiri national self-determination among others – both ideologically and physically. By doing this it has clearly, and may we say, quite deliberately, served to legitimise, bolster, and even enable, the dogged pursuit of the anti-nationalist radicals by the repressive state apparatuses, and the Fascist lynch-mobs mobilised by the current political regime. That members of some of the self-proclaimed radical Left organisations – particularly, a rather media-savvy woman leader of one such ‘party’ – have at last begun talking about upholding the right to life and liberty of some of those anti-nationalist radicals is no cause for cheer.

Considering those so-called radical Leftists have come out with such declarations only after they have done their bit to conclusively forge the larger ‘anti-Fascist’ unity on a nationalist basis, it reveals the absolute bad faith that underpins those noble declarations. That they continue, as always, to hedge their bets on taking an unambiguously affirmative position on the question of Kashmiri national self-determination serves to further underscore this bad faith of theirs. Unfortunately, such declarations in favour of the anti-nationalist radicals by these so-called radical Leftists, given the timing and tenor of those declarations, amount to no more than cynically pragmatic manoeuvres to either further the cause of mechanical organisation-building or, worse; identity-management to bolster the student vote for the next JNSU elections.

In such circumstances, those declarations by some nationalist Leftists in favour of the anti-nationalist radicals would serve, at best, to objectively enable the disciplining of the latter by the former on behalf of the Indian nation-state. This would be exactly like the family, or civil-societal institutions, seeking to discipline their subversive members on behalf of the state while apparently protecting those members from the direct coercive disciplining by the repressive state apparatuses. At worst, and which is as likely as the best, it would result in those self-proclaimed radical Leftists facilitating the ‘surrender’ of those anti-nationalist radicals to the repressive state apparatuses without those apparatuses having to do much on that score. And not a thing stands changed by the fact that one of the prominent anti-nationalist radical students, who has returned to JNU after having remained ‘untraceable’ for almost a week, was apparently accorded a warm reception by the ‘#StandwithJNU’ movement, and was able to address the assembled university community from its platform.

Kashmir’s National Liberation and the Blindness of the Indian Left

The ‘progressively’ nationalist ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement demonstrates that its various nationalist Leftist and Left-liberal constituents have absolutely no understanding of how central the Kashmiri struggle against Indian occupation is to the revolutionary organisation of various working-class struggles in the Indian mainland. This also underscores their failure, actually unwillingness, to grasp how the movements of various nationalities against their occupation-induced integration into Indian nationhood is precisely what tends to integrate those movements with various mainland working-class struggles, which are also incipiently nation- and state-unravelling in their orientation.

It must be stated here that such a politico-theoretical understanding with regard to Kashmir, and other nationality struggles against Indian occupation, is lacking even among those ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist student-radicals of JNU, who, consistently and with immense courage, publicly assert Kashmir’s right to national self-determination, and secession from India. This is borne out by the fact that the courageous declarative vigour with which such anti-nationalist radicals have consistently upheld the cause of Kashmiri national liberation has not been matched by any practice on their part to organise working-class struggles in the mainland in a manner that would serve to concretely weaken the nationalist consensus here, thereby enabling the Kashmiri national-liberation struggle to significantly improve its position vis-à-vis the Indian occupation. In fact, it is the absence of such strategy and concrete practice on the part of ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radicals in the Indian mainland that has rendered their courageous affirmation of Kashmiri national liberation vulnerable to coercive assaults by the current political regime of neoliberal dictatorship, and its Fascist mass mobilisation.

Not unlike the lilly-livered nationalist Indian Leftists and Left-liberals, these ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radicals too do not clearly see how the Indian occupation of Kashmir (or for that matter its so-called Northeast) also functions in the Indian mainland as a racist ideology that serves to systemically regiment both various sections and segments of the Kashmiri (and the north-eastern) migrant-workers, and the non-Kashmiri working people by dividing them from one another along an axis of segmentation and mutual competition in terms of access to social wages such as rented accommodation and so on. Therefore, they have been unable to grasp, their unqualified support for nationality struggles against Indian occupation notwithstanding, that such occupation in functioning as a racist ideology in the mainland is constitutive of axes of segmented socio-economic relations among and within various sections of migrant-workers from the occupied territories, and the so-called local working populace. It is this that has prevented these ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radicals from figuring out the concrete points of molecular convergence between the everyday concerns and anxieties of migrant-workers and the local working-people that surface precisely amid and through the concrete contradictions within and among them. And that has prevented these otherwise courageous anti-nationalist radicals from devising a strategy to forge an effective and concrete unity among those different, and mutually contradictory, segments of social labour by working through their mutual contradictions.

Such a strategy and concrete practice of organising the everyday concerns of various segments of social labour in the Indian mainland into a new revolutionary social subject would have, needless to say, rendered the virtuous anti-nationalism of our ‘Maoism’-inspired radicals into an effective and concrete form of nation-state-unravelling revolutionary-proletarian internationalism. (We would do well to observe here that most mainland radical Leftists, both nationalist and anti-nationalist, are faced with a similar kind of failure when it comes to grasping and practically articulating the strategic import of how reactionary and oppressive ideologies and cultures of Islamophobia and Brahminical casteism also similarly function as axes of hierarchical and mutually competitive economic relations both between and within Muslim and non-Muslim – and/or lower-caste and upper-caste – segments of social labour in their quotidian existence.)

This theoretical, and thus strategic, failure of the ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radicals has, needless to say, enabled the ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the nationalist Left and Left-liberals of JNU to be more effective than usual in articulating its constitutively vicious instrumentalism. In other words, this theoretical and strategic failure on part of the former, in spite of their admirable ethical courage, has made it extremely easy for the ‘anti-Fascist’ movement of the nationalist Indian Leftists and Left-liberals to act as an agency of subalternisation, and even oppression, with regard to Kashmiri national-liberationists and other non-Kashmiri anti-nationalist radicals. That, in turn, has obviously furthered the counter-revolutionary cause of the current regime of neoliberal dictatorship, and its Fascist mass mobilisation, by politico-ideologically yoking the ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the nationalist Leftists and Left-liberals to its reactionary political project. It is the triumph of such “post-Fascism”, and the concomitant failure of united-frontist/popular-frontist anti-Fascist unity, that the nationalist ‘anti-Fascism’ of the ongoing JNU movement has thrown into sharp relief.

JNU’s Leftish ‘Anti-fascism’ and the Subalternisation of Dalit Radicalism

On a slightly different plane, the nationalist ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement has equally viciously instrumentalised and subalternised the radical Dalit movement, which had been sparked by Rohit Vemula’s revolutionary suicide at the Hyderabad Central University earlier this month. Impelled by the radical republican project of annihilation of caste, the movement for justice for Rohit Vemula seeks radical democratisation of universities and the system of higher education. In doing that, it tends to lay bare the cultural and economic hierarchies and culturally-articulated economic segmentations – both caste-based and otherwise – within universities. As a consequence, it also ends up problematising the segmented separation of universities from the world outside along the hierarchical axis of mental/intellectual labour over manual labour. Such radical republicanism, given its current conjunctural location, is objectively orientated to call into question the system of socio-technical division of labour – both caste-based and otherwise – and the value-relational logic of capital that this system of social division of labour now mediates and realises. As a result, such a movement objectively tends towards being a determinate affirmation of revolutionary-proletarian politics precisely by virtue of operationalising itself through its radical-republican ideological self-representation. We would do well to state here that revolutionary-proletarian politics is the ceaseless process of complete functionalisation of division of labour as the struggle that tends towards negating its hierarchised socio-technical division.

The nationalist ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the JNU movement, on the other hand, has been all about saving JNU as a university-island of democracy and critical thinking from the assault of the current political regime and its Fascist mass-mobilisational politics. As a result, this movement has tended to close and paper over the concrete segmentations and contradictions internal to the university space. It has, in the same movement, served to reinforce the hierarchised separation of the university from the world outside. Clearly the two movements for university democracy – #JusticeforRohitVemula and #StandwithJNU – are entirely at odds with one another when it comes to defining such democracy. That the ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the #StandwithJNU movement has been paying unending lip-service to Rohit Vemula’s politics – and has sought to mobilise the discontent unleashed by his death to strengthen itself as that ‘anti-Fascist unity – demonstrates its intrumentalising and subalternising orientation even more. Once again we are witness to how the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement renders itself an extension of the state apparatuses in their current political articulation, and Fascist mass-movemental animation. Once again we see how such ‘anti-Fascist’ unity is programmed to be fully integrated with the ideological and repressive workings of a counter-revolutionary political regime like the one we are currently confronted with, and how such a regime is, therefore, not classically Fascist but a post-Fascist dictatorship of neoliberal capital.

Other subalterns of JNU’s ‘anti-fascist’ front

The instrumentalising, subalternising and oppressive functionality of nationalist-democratic ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement is, however, not limited to Kashmiri national-liberationists, the ‘Maoism’-inspired anti-nationalist radical students of the university, or Dalit radicals. Insofar as it has sought to separate the world outside from the university by emphasising the preservation of the latter’s ‘progressively’ nationalist democratic space, it has served to subalternise many other elements among the working people, who, on account of their social locations, are likely to be opposed to the current post-Fascist regime and its Fascist mass mobilisation. That the movement has sought to accomplish this by seeking to separate out anti-national “miscreants” and “outsiders” from the ‘progressively’ nationalist university community in order to protect the ‘progressive’ nationalist’s right to life and liberty from attacks on it by the current political regime and its mass-mobilised Fascist nationalists, clearly indicates that.

For instance, the national-democratic ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement has, thanks to its emphasis on saving the ‘progressively’ nationalist democratic space of the university, left many of its former students, now living as tenants in the surrounding villages of Munirka, Ber Sarai and Kishangarh, to the vagaries of coercive disciplining – and thus cut-backs in social wages – by rent-seeking landlords in those neighbourhoods. The latter have been integral to the Fascist mass mobilisation of the current regime. In view of the JNU incident, this mobilisation has been visibly stepped up to organise those rent-seeking reactionary landlords into lynch-mobs, which are quite likely to unleash their fatal fury on some former JNU students and other working-class elements suspected of being in solidarity or sympathy with the attacked students of JNU.

The ‘anti-Fascism’ of the JNU movement has virtually ensured that even within JNU various excesses of its nationalist-democratic institutional canonicity will be regimented and disciplined much more than earlier. And this will likely be ensured by its Leftist and Left-liberal students and teachers themselves. One can, for instance, safely assume that from now on there will inevitably be a marked piping-down of certain kinds of radical activism – not least, students’ activism in support of various struggles against Indian occupation – within the university. For, in seeking to preserve the ‘democratic’ space the university has purportedly been, the ‘anti-Fascist’ unity of the JNU movement has ensured that all kinds of hierarchical social relations – officially legitimate and otherwise – through which the university is constituted are preserved. This means the movement has, for now, accepted that the university will legitimately continue as an ideological apparatus of the Indian state, and has, thereby, implicitly agreed to heed the commands of the counter-revolutionary political regime that currently animates this state. The way the students participating in the JNU movement quietly agreed to call off the indefinite strike at the behest of their Leftist and Left-liberal teachers should be read as a foreboding of the long winter of normalised emergency that is descending on the university.

The Question of Correct Strategy and Marx’s “Revolution in Permanence”

The question now is, if the strategy of such popular-frontist anti-Fascist unity is unfeasible, and doubly undesirable, in the face of a post-Fascist dictatorship of neoliberal capital, what would an effective strategy look like? Our contention, in the light of recent developments, would be that an effective unity against this post-Fascist political regime of neoliberal dictatorship, and the Fascist mass mobilisation integral to it, ought to be envisaged in terms of a perpetual dynamic of the simultaneity of struggle in unity and unity in struggle. The unity posed against the current political regime through the strategic articulation of this perpetually processual dynamic will be far more politically effective because it will be extremely cohesive in its internationalist anti-statism and anti-systemicness. That will be so because the unity posed by the strategic articulation of the dynamic of struggle in unity and unity in struggle will be a unity that is forged through synchronisation of various determinate struggles against oppression and the segmentation of social labour such oppression secures.

It must be clarified here that such synchronisation of different determinate struggles against oppression and segmentation will not simply be an aggregation of struggles. The latter is precisely the salient feature of the constitutively instrumentalist strategy of anti-Fascist unity that we have here sought to criticise and reject. However, such an anti-systemic unity accomplished through synchronisation of different determinate struggles against segmentation and oppression is not supposed to be the actualisation of some kind of Deleuzian strategy of coordinated accelerationism of difference either. Rather, the unity posed by the strategic articulation of the dynamic of struggle in unity, unity in struggle is supposed to be a constellational unity, which is radically distinct from the simple aggregative unity of different struggles. This constellational unity of different determinate struggles against segmentation of social labour and oppression qualitatively transforms those determinate struggles in constellationally synchronising them with one another. What that amounts to is the following: each of those determinate struggles against segmentation seeks to generalise what it incipiently is by synchronising among themselves in a manner that each of them ceases to be the competitive struggle it is destined be in its isolated operation by being a mutually coordinated manoeuvre that strives to abolish segmentation of social labour at all levels by completely functionalising division of labour.

Clearly, the strategy we seek to affirm here is one that is constituted in, as and through the dialectically articulated simultaneity of political, social and cultural revolutions. In other words, the anti-systemic strategy that will arguably be most feasible and effective against the current political regime of post-fascist neoliberal dictatorship is one that does not envision itself in terms of a temporal lag between revolution and communism. For us the only effective way to fight this insidious political regime, and the barbaric moment of capital it secures is to envisage communism as “revolution in permanence” (Marx).