Pothik Ghosh
New Delhi’s support for, and solidarity, with the Palestinian liberation struggle stands all but abandoned. That the Indian foreign policy has shifted decisively away from Palestine towards the Yankee-Zionist-led imperialist axis to become its integral part is no longer even a badly concealed mystery. It is an indisputably evident fact that the Indian state and polity, propped up by the neoliberal social consensus in the country, wears on its sleeve with shameless élan. One of the key erstwhile drivers of the pro-Palestine global liberal consensus, New Delhi now blames the erosion of that consensus on the emergence of Hamas as the principal political agency of the Palestinian resistance, and its ‘radical Islamist’ character. That, in its reckoning, is completely indefensible at a time when the ‘terroristic depredations’ of ‘pan-Islamism’ have sought to put the very existence of secular modernity in jeopardy all across the world. Clearly, this liberal position, permeated and informed as it is by the current international climate of anti-Islamist (even anti-Islamic) opinion, finds nothing wrong in projecting the Palestinian national liberation struggle as a local manifestation of the so-called internationalist project of Pan-Islamist conservatism.
That New Delhi today is no longer merely a junior client in this imperialist hegemony of globalised neoliberal capital, but is one of its principal proponents is borne out by, among other things, the fact that Israel today is by all accounts the largest exporter of defence hardware to India. Some even claim, not at all without basis or reason, that New Delhi and Tel Aviv are equal partners in intelligence sharing and cooperation at the level of military software and strategy. Much of this Israeli assistance with regard to both military hardware and software is used and deployed by the Indian state to not only maintain and reinforce its politico-economic hegemony as an imperialist power in its south Asian backyard, but to also perpetuate and deepen its brutal military occupations in Kashmir and India’s north-east, but especially in Kashmir.
Such assistance from, and cooperation with, Israel, among other key constituents of the global capitalist chain of imperialism, has added to the overall coercive might of the Indian state. It banks on this coercive might to prop up the crisis-ridden capitalist hegemony it represents and incarnates in its specificity. It is on account of this increase in its coercive might that the Indian state has been able to simultaneously intensify its oppression of religious and cultural minorities (mainly Muslims), socio-economically marginal groups such as the lower castes, indigenous tribes inhabiting the jungles and the hilly tracts in its central, eastern and northeastern parts, and the new utterly precarious and casualised proletariat and sub-proletariat in revolt in the industrialised belts in the northern, western and southern parts of the country. Such intensification of oppression is integral to the process of keeping the structure of neoliberal capital – which is the structure of capital as its own crisis – firmly embedded in the Indian socio-economic formation.
However, what is now unambiguously visible as the turn away of Indian foreign policy from the Palestinian cause towards building and deepening a cosy partnership and alliance between New Delhi and Tel Aviv had already been foretold as a direction during what was then considered to be the glory days of Third Worldist solidarity with Palestine, under the aegis of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), of which India was a key protagonist. Palestine, together with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, was the central concern for NAM as an alliance of decolonised nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. But, as leftist historian Vijay Prashad tells us in his book, The Darker Nations: “By 1983 (the New Delhi NAM meet), it was de rigueur, almost depressingly predictable, to demand rights for the Palestinians and the South Africans. The genuflection toward the Palestinians and the South Africans came, however, without any word on the support given by the Atlantic powers (particularly the United States) for both the Likud regime in Israel and the Afrikaner apartheid state in South Africa.”
This was clearly on account of the internal contradictions that had developed, and were sharpening, within the NAM. Contradictions that were, to speak dialectically, both the cause and consequence of the shift in the balance of forces in the sphere of international relations that had been effected due to the consolidation of the counter-revolutionary turn in the then USSR, which had long ceased to be the ever-expanding boundary of revolutionary proletarian internationalism to become the leader of a power bloc that in the name of world revolution competed with the Atlantic powers for global politico-economic supremacy. In such circumstances, it mattered very little, especially from the standpoint of revolutionary anti-capitalism, which of the two power blocs would be triumphant. For, regardless of who won the battle of global politico-economic dominance and supremacy, the hegemony of capital as the structure and logic of competition was bound to be reinforced and strengthened. In fact, if the stake willy-nilly was the reinforcement of the hegemony or structure of capital at the global level, it was more than likely that the less powerful among the two would be vanquished. And that, as we now know, is precisely what happened.
For now, let us attempt to grasp the shift in Indian foreign policy – from solidarity for the cause of Palestinian national self-determination towards political, economic and military partnership with Israel – in terms of the objective contradictions within NAM, and their progressive sharpening. Considering this foreign policy shift is a manifestation of India becoming an integral part of the global hegemony of neoliberal capital, it would not be inaccurate to insist that the contradictions within the Third Worldist solidarity of NAM, and their progressive sharpening, is constitutive of the global ascendancy of neoliberal capitalism. We will, therefore, examine here what those contradictions were and how they panned out, thereby rendering the shift in Indian foreign policy from Palestine to Israel and its Zionist ideology inevitable. In the same movement, we will also try to comprehend the new paradigm of globalised anti-capitalist politics and anti-imperialist solidarity that those contradictions and their sharpening posited, and which continues to be posited by the resultant global hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. In the process, we will hopefully be able to discern how the inevitability of the shift in Indian foreign policy vis-à-vis the Palestinian national liberation movement has, not least, been on account of the failure of all of us on the Indian left, across the board, to grasp, leverage and actualise that new paradigm of internationalised resistance and transformative politics.
NAM, albeit Mao’s China did not finally become its part, was, in a sense, an embodiment of Mao’s idea of Third Worldism. This Maoist idea of the Third World was, to begin with, a class-based conception of dual power in the realm of international relations by way of “struggle in unity, unity in struggle” with the Second World of the USSR-led Warsaw Pact against the First World of the Atlantic powers. It, however, gradually degenerated into a more Fanonian formation of unity of struggles against the common enemy of First World imperialism. Such a model of unity of struggles against a common adversary suggested that imperialism was, in the main, domination of some nation-states by others and that it had nothing to do with the generalisation of the structure of capitalist social relations of competition and domination into a world-system.
Such an approach meant that imperialism, which is actually the generalisation of capital as a logic of competitive social relations into a world system, came to be seen as being equal to only its historical moment of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Such hypostasis and reduction of imperialism to colonial and neo-colonial occupation and domination meant that one ignored or failed to see how capital as the logic of competitive social relations and uneven development was, in an objective sense, as much internal to and embedded in the newly decolonised nation-states of the Third World as it was embodied by the more powerful nation-states of the Second and First Worlds. As a result, what was almost entirely missed was the fact that the quest for national sovereignty of those newly decolonised nation-states of the Third World against the threat of neo-colonial domination posed by the First and/or the Second Worlds (in their mutual competition for global politico-economic supremacy) was as much underpinned by the capitalist structural logic of competitive social relations and uneven development as the mutual competition of the First and Second Worlds that yielded the politics of neo-colonial occupation and/or domination. Consequently, Third World unity, epitomised, for instance, by the NAM, became an embodiment of the principle of unity of all the oppressed for struggle against common oppressors.
What such unity of struggles against imperialist oppression tended to paper over was how that Third Worldist unity itself was the structuring of an internally segmented totality that ran through not only across its various constituent nation-states but within each of those nation-states as well. Hence, Third World as an anti-imperialist solidarity itself became – on account of imperialism being grasped by it merely as colonial and neo-colonial domination – an expanded reproduction of capital as the structural logic of uneven development.
We would do well to understand here how the anti-imperialism of the newly decolonised nations of the Third World, which articulated itself in terms of preservation and strengthening of economic sovereignty of those nation-states against the neo-colonial depredations of the First World Atlantic powers and the so-called social imperialism of the Second World, produced its own set of contradictions, ran into its limit and thereby undermined itself. If one were to encounter this paradigm of Third Worldist, anti-imperialist struggle and solidarity dialectically one would see how the failure of such politics – doubtless quite an effective and relevant form of anti-capitalism in its temporally determinate tactical specificity – to grasp its own limit eventually rendered it its very opposite. The NAM’s failure to wholeheartedly embrace Fidel Castro’s line of bolstering the solidaristic anti-imperialist politics of debt strike against the Atlantic powers at its 1983 New Delhi meet ensured that Castro’s Singaporean antagonist, Rajaratnam’s line of steering clear of both communism (read the USSR-led Second World) and capitalism (read the US-led Atlantic powers) would eventually seize the day.
But this eventual defeat of Castro’s line of globalised anti-capitalism as anti-imperialism by the Rajaratnam line of national sovereignty as an argument for capitalism was merely the effect of something deeper that had been happening in most of those decolonised Third World nation-states. National liberation is no more than an historically objective moment of anti-capitalist struggle tending towards internationalised proletarian revolution. The failure of such struggles to see their success as precisely the moment to move beyond themselves to refound their anti-capitalism in more evidently proletarian-internationalist terms transforms them into reproducers and perpetuators of precisely capital as the logic of competition and thus domination. That is exactly what happened with almost all the decolonised nations of the Third World. Their struggles against their respective First-World colonialist oppressors failed to transform those anti-colonial struggles as unity with the exploited and oppressed working masses of those colonising nations for newer levels of historically-specified struggles for the abolition of capital as the structural logic of competitive social relations in its various socio-historically concrete levels of expression. The consolidation of the counter-revolutionary turn in Soviet Union, which had set in due to the objective situation of retreat for the world revolution by the late 1920s itself, did not help matters.
This meant the consolidation of the leadership of those national-liberation struggles into a new ruling class that began intermediating between the leading powers of world capitalism and their own respective working populations. The result: a situation of unity in and for competition, the radical inverse of the Maoist revolutionary principle of “struggle in unity, unity in struggle” that had been the cornerstone of Third Worldism at its inception. This unity in and for competition meant that while national sovereignty was invoked by the ruling classes of the newly decolonised nation-states to compete against and bargain with the leading powers of the First and Second Worlds, they would come together in all sorts of permutations and combinations whenever this horizon of mutual competition was even potentially threatened with decimation by their respective working masses and oppressed peoples.
Nevertheless, a distinction must be made here. While the struggles against colonialism and/or neo-colonialism in countries such as Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola and so on preponderantly had a national-popular character, decolonisation in countries such as India, the so-called East Asian Tigers and some West Asian countries/Sheikhdoms had the character of passive revolutions that meant national independence was nothing more than transfer of power. The national-popular character of the anti-colonial struggles in question was on account of the leadership of those movements having arisen from the oppressed sections and working masses of those societies. This meant that even while those movements evidently failed, at a subjective level, to grasp themselves as a historically specific moment of globalised anti-capitalist struggle that tended towards proletarian internationalism, objectively they were more inclined to move in that direction as compared to countries such as India, Indonesia, Singapore and so on where the leadership of the anti-colonial movement was vested in a well-developed local bourgeoisie. That India’s Independence began, for instance, with its military occupation of Kashmir and its so-called north-eastern states serves to underscore the passive revolutionary character of its national independence. Also, the different trajectory of political-economic development that countries such as Cuba and Vietnam, on one hand, had initially taken with regard to that adopted by countries such as India and Singapore on the other, demonstrated this radical difference in the objective character of their anti-colonial movements.
However, the fact remains that eventually both sets of decolonised countries came to share, at an objective level, the same problem of their respective national liberation leaderships solidifying into ruling classes. The political-economic reasons that underpinned this phenomenon, which albeit proceeded at different rates in different countries depending on how passive revolutionary or national popular the character of their respective anti-colonial struggles had been, was what we have earlier indicated: the preservation and reinforcement of economic sovereignty of newly decolonised nation-states producing a situation that undermined precisely such sovereignty. Rajaratnam’s line at the 1983 NAM meet in New Delhi was nothing but a reflection of such a paradoxically changed situation. As Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations reveals, “The national interest invoked by Rajaratnam (against both the dominant power blocs) was actually the class interest of a section (of agrarian, industrial and financial bourgeoisie) created by import-substitution industrialization.”
Import-substitution industrialisation, which was politically enabled by the states of the newly decolonised nations of the Third World, was meant to protect and reinforce the economic sovereignty of those nation-states against the threat of neo-colonial domination posed by the nations of the First and Second Worlds, especially the First. What this really meant was import-substitution industrialisation served to strengthen the ‘local’ bourgeoisie, which was already well-developed much before decolonisation, and that was now rearing to fully and openly come into its own as an integral segment of the capitalist world-system by entering the global arena of completely liberalised free-market competition against the so-called traditional players of world capitalism. They now found the protection they had till then enjoyed, and which had enabled them to accumulate capital, as fetters that prevented them from entering the global arena of capitalist competition. For, without the freedom to enter that arena they realised they would not be able to invest the capital they had accumulated – precisely because of the domestic protection that had now turned into fetters – for even more intensified accumulation.
As a result, sovereignty of Third World nations became the sovereignty of its ‘local’ bourgeoisie marshalling their respective national status to make an impressive entry on the stage of international social relations of competition. In such circumstances, Third-World solidarity entailed the formation of a new power bloc of the newly emerged, postcolonial bourgeoisie against the power blocs of the traditional bourgeoisie of the First and Second Worlds within the global arena of capitalist competition and bargaining. The dismantling of the domestic regimes of economic protection that this new bloc of postcolonial bourgeoisie demanded in order to be able to compete in a globalised free market with the traditional players of world capitalism included easy access to loans from international financial institutions, including the IMF and World Bank. The reforms that were required, amounted to easy access to such loans for this bloc of newly ascendant global bourgeoisie in return for anti-labour and anti-poor structural changes in the domestic economy that those international financial institutions demanded in order to ensure that their loans were protected through the bolstered capacity of their debtors for unbridled accumulation that such structural adjustment programs would facilitate. This clearly meant the death of economic sovereignty of Third World nations on account of conditions created precisely by the pursuit of such economic sovereignty.
In such self-contradictory circumstances, the national sovereignty the technocratic political executive of this postcolonial glocal bourgeoisie – irrespective of whichever political formation is in power – have touted and asserted is essentially the sovereignty of this class. National interest meant that the national was effectively a consensus to serve the interests of this class by way of enabling it to compete effectively and without any domestic or local hindrance in the global free market. In other words, patriotism is the consensus that enables this class at the level of their respective nation-states to organise production so as to be able to effectively compete at the global level, and thereby efficiently intensify accumulation. Given that such consensus now clearly amounts to the undermining of the traditional economic sovereignty enjoyed by the citizens of the Third World nation-states, nationalism and patriotism could only mean the defence and assertion of an abstract and idealised form of nationhood that was, therefore, bound to be thoroughly culturalist founded on such premises as nationalised and culturalised blood-and-soil type of fascistic ethnicity.
Such culturalised, mythicised and idealised conceptions of nationhood, nationalism and national sovereignty have meant uniting people on an abstract basis to serve the concrete material interests of their postcolonial glocal capital that in the national specification of its global operation symbolizes sovereignty. Such culturalised form of nationhood, and the attendant conception of cultural nationalism, has, not surprisingly, proved to be a double whammy for the oppressed and the exploited. On the one hand, it tends to be the mechanism for the enforcement of social corporatism that enables capital, either through sheer ideology or through ideologically legitimised coercion, to compel labour to collaborate with it to serve interests that seem ecumenical but are, in material terms, restrictively those of this postcolonial glocal capital. On the other, this has meant, tendentially speaking, an attempt to shatter the collectivity of the working class as a revolutionary force by serving to accentuate the identitarianised segmentations and divisions within it and, in the process, neutralise the challenge such revolutionary solidarity would have otherwise tended to pose to the intensified accumulation drive of global neoliberal capital embodied in that local moment by this postcolonial segment of global capital.
Clearly, the unwillingness and/or inability of national liberation struggles of the Third World to grasp themselves as determinate moments of proletarian internationalism has been both the cause and consequence of their quest for economic sovereignty collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions to intensify and expand the scope of capitalist accumulation and capitalist class power (the structural logic of competitive socialisation). Consequently, the politics of resistance unleashed by various oppressed religious, socio-cultural, socio-economic and nationality groups – for, instance Muslims, Dalits, indigenous tribes, various sections of the newly proletarianised precariat, Kashmiris, etc. – has been quite concerted. But unfortunately they have so far been in the idiom of sovereignty and thus competitive identity politics, and not in class terms that is their sedimental reality. Therefore, all these movements continue to be articulated by precisely that which they tend to fight against in its various local manifestations.
Meanwhile, the failure of the working-class left in India in all its multiple varieties and shades has been quite galling on that score. It has, notwithstanding some degrees of difference among its various tendencies, failed on the whole to enable those resistance movements from grasping the reality of revolutionary class politics sedimented in their respective specificities, and generalise that sedimental reality beyond their respective identitarian niches towards forging a larger revolutionary solidarity of unity in struggle and struggle in unity. Instead, the various tendencies of the Indian left seek, on one hand, to convince the movements of different oppressed groups to accept to fight their battles under the leadership of working class as a sociologically identified and closed group, as if class is an identity and not the principle that aligns the particular struggles of various oppressed groups into a movement to overcome, break with and destroy the hegemony of the identity principle that is the condition of possibility of oppression actualised in and by the different specificities of domination. In the process, the Indian Left tends to reinforce the structure and principle of identity that is the condition of possibility of oppression.
On the other hand, the so-called working-class left in India, irrespective of the differences in the respective programmatic positions of its various sects, posits more or less a common praxis of fighting the cultural nationalism and economic liberalisation of the right (the BJP and the Congress respectively) by seeking to revive the principle of economic sovereignty that informed and determined our Third Worldist conception of nationalism at the moment of India’s decolonisation. Little does it realise that it was precisely the success of such quest for economic sovereignty that led to its collapse, and the rise of both cultural nationalism and economic liberalisation. That the two are mutually constitutive is not something we on the left are able to clearly see because our paradigm still remains, not unlike the current movements of various oppressed groups, an identitarian one.
The so-called working-class left in India, with very few and minor exceptions, still thinks of its politics of struggle in terms of achieving ‘true’ national independence as opposed to the ‘false’ one we currently suffer. Clearly, its politics continues to be inscribed within and articulated by a national-liberationist paradigm of sovereignty. As a result, its politics remains an eclectic combination of two different struggles: one against cultural nationalism and another against economic liberalisation. Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations is an apposite case in point. Even as it describes quite accurately the crisis of the Third Worldist project of nationalism based on economic sovereignty, it is unable to see what the facts it has at its disposal so clearly say. It fails to dialectically grasp the shift of India and other similar ex-colonial nation-states towards neoliberalism – the mutual constitutivity of economic liberalisation and cultural nationalism – in terms of the inner contradictions of their quest for economic sovereignty. For Prashad, but not just the tendency of the Indian left he represents, the subversion of economic sovereignty remains merely a matter of conspiracy subjectively willed by the ruling classes of these ex-colonies and not something structural that was produced because of the national-liberationist, third worldist project of economic sovereignty as anti-imperialism running into its limit. As a result, such intellectuals and militants – and there are legions of them on the Indian working-class left in all its variety – totally miss the fact that the Third Worldist nationalist economic sovereignty is now an anachronism.
What, therefore, continues to elude them is the fact that the success of the project of economic sovereignty, from the standpoint of revolutionary anti-capitalism, lay not simply in what it was able to deliver to the working masses, but precisely in the new class contradictions it generated. For, it is precisely by recognising those historically new contradictions, but more importantly the new paradigm of transformative politics that such contradictions posit, that revolutionary anti-capitalism can advance beyond its determinate moment of national liberation and not be hypostatised or conflated with it. This new paradigm of revolutionary anti-capitalism – which was posited by the contradictions generated by the success of economic sovereignty, and which continues to be posited even today by neoliberalism that has been generated as a new conjuncture of global capital in and through the collapse of that project of Third Worldist economic sovereignty – is more evidently proletarian internationalist that clearly envisages the simultaneity of struggle and unity as its modality.
Unfortunately, we on the Indian left, by and large, still refuse to recognise that, fixated as our practice is on an identitarian, if not a national-liberationist, paradigm. As a consequence, we have miserably failed to intervene productively in the struggles of various oppressed groups by not revealing the sedimental class reality of their respective politics of resistance to them so that they can on their own generalise that sedimental reality beyond the particularity of the identitarian niches their respective struggles are caught in. On the contrary, the uncritical and misplaced politico-ideological support we often seek to them has only served to reinforce the capitalist paradigm of competitive identity politics. This has ensured that those particular struggles do not realise the generic potential immanent precisely in the specific conditions of their respective struggles to shift that capitalist paradigm.
The strengthening of this paradigm of sovereignty (read competitive identity politics) – which such repeatedly misplaced and/or unsuccessful interventions on our part has yielded – has ensured the oppressed and the subordinated always remain at the receiving end. For, if the paradigm of the politics of resistance of the oppressed continues to be that of competitive identity politics then they as the disempowered group vis-à-vis the powerful group of oppressors will always be at a disadvantage. As a result, they have, not in spite but precisely because of the modality of their otherwise objectively legitimate struggles, continued to fail in advancing their movements. Worse, the failure of the politics of resistance of the oppressed to break out of the paradigm of sovereignty has further led to their internal segmentation and division and has thus further deepened the project of passive revolution.
It would be germane to examine the shift in Indian foreign policy with regard to the Palestinian movement for national self-determination in terms of the politics of Muslims as the most significant oppressed minority group – both in the Indian mainland and as the majority religious group that constitutes the oppressed nationality of Kashmir. The politics of Muslims in India suffers most intensely from the affliction that bedevils, as we have seen, the politics of resistance of the oppressed in this part of the world. This affliction, it must be reiterated yet again, is the failure of such politics to actualise the reality of revolutionary class politics sedimented in the specificity of its politics of resistance and in the process break with the paradigm of competitive identity politics within which it is currently inscribed.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that objectively the struggle of Kashmiris, and the Muslims of the Indian mainland, regardless of the many divergences in their specific conditions of oppression and resistance, is a class struggle insofar as identity is segmentation of the working class and thus constitutive of hierarchised distribution of social and political power. And precisely for that reason such struggles of the Muslims in India – particularly its more militant and extra-parliamentary forms, and despite the religious, petty-bourgeois character of its politico-ideological leadership – posits a serious challenge to the Indian moment of imperialism as the capitalist world-system of mutually competing capitals united only by the larger systemic logic of competition and its preservation. In such a scenario, Indian foreign policy tilting more and more towards the Yankee-Zionist politico-military configuration can be made sense of as a bulwark against the revolutionary working-class potential of various Muslim struggles being unleashed to form larger national- and international-level solidarity networks against global capital and its reign of exploitation realised in and as differential temporalities of oppression. And right now the Indian state-formation, as an integral part of imperialism as the globalised network of many different kinds and forms of capitals that is capitalism as world-system, seeks to keep the working-class potential posited by various struggles of the oppressed in check by quelling those struggles in the name of quelling ‘Islamic jehad’, ‘political Islam’ and so on.
It, therefore, gravitates, at the level of foreign policy, towards the Atlantic powers, and particularly towards Israel in the particular context of Asia and Muslim politics as politics of the oppressed, in order to align itself better with the global capitalist project of fighting ‘pan-Islamism’. This, needless to say, aids and bolsters Israel’s Zionist project of occupation of Palestine as a local West Asian moment constitutive of the globalised conjuncture of neoliberal imperialism.
Such a radically new conjunctural context imposes on ongoing national liberation struggles, particularly the ones in Palestine and Kashmir, a radically new task. Which is to come to terms with the fact that while the discursive appearance of their respective (colonial) occupations remain similar to what they were in the beginning, the difference between then and now is in terms of the structural-functionality of such occupations. Those occupations, when they were established as constitutive spatio-temporal units of the previous conjuncture, were mainly about politico-military domination to ensure the maintenance and reinforcement of politico-economic hegemony in South Asia and the Perso-Arabic world by India and Israel respectively as the vanguard of American imperialistic machinations in the region. Today, that hegemony-bolstering function of occupations has, on account of changes in the structure of global capital, got coupled with the management of cheap labour reserves in the occupied areas in order to maintain labour and wage arbitrage of domestic labour markets of the occupying powers.
This change has been on account of the change in the modality of operation of nation-states as the basic units of international division of labour. The earlier conjuncture was characterised by the internationalisation of only the moment of circulation in the circuit of capital. This meant nation-states managed locally self-contained production and globalised circulation, consumption and exchange. The current conjuncture, on the other hand, is characterised by the internationalisation of the circuit of capital in its entirety. This means nation-states now manage the localised moments of a globally integrated value chain to maintain and reinforce labour and wage arbitrage in order to reinforce the value chain and keep it going.
In such a situation, it would not be misplaced or inaccurate to contend that the days of Third Worldist solidarity with the Palestinian cause, as far as an ex-colonial nation-state such as India is concerned, are well and truly over. The Palestinian resistance should have no illusions on that score. And the least that the left in India must do, if it has any desire to live up to its name, is to try its utmost to disabuse the Palestinian movement that any kind of concerted support is forthcoming from the Indian people as a nation united. For, the national consensus the Indian state seeks to reinforce, and which in turn informs its foreign policy establishment, is thoroughly neoliberal. That India, together with Israel, is firmly ensconced in globalised neoliberalism as one of its key proponents and purveyors is an unmistakable fact. Even more unmistakable is the changed national consensus that bolsters this global situation of the Indian nation-state and is, in turn, bolstered by it.
More pertinently, the left in India must work towards shattering precisely this national and nationalist consensus if it wants its solidarity with the Palestinian people to be effective. Unfortunately, its paradigmatic reliance on sovereignty continues to get in the way. It will have to abandon this paradigm. And it can make a beginning in that direction now, in the context of Palestine, by thinking of how it can constellate the movements of the exploited and dominated groups (in particular, national liberation struggles of oppressed nationalities such as the Kashmiris) on the Indian subcontinent and the Palestinian resistance in order to develop a new anti-capitalist internationalism for our times. Only such a manoeuvre would transform the internationalism of the Palestinian movement, which has become abstract due to the collapse of the Third Worldist project, into a new historically concrete reality, even as it sets free radical politics in this part of the world from the iron-cage of sovereignty and identity politics, enabling it to fully actualise its emancipatory potential.
Historical Materialism, Delhi: Legal Marxism Redux
The HM conference in New Delhi, India, is the arch-example of sanitising Marxism and academicising it. The purported promotion of the “new cultures of the left” is nothing but an attempt to sanitise Marxism of its dirty old history in India and elsewhere, and present it to the liberal conscience of western academic tourists in Marxism in the manner that suits their taste. Initially, it proposed to base itself on a virulently anti-communist group of postmodern journo-academics in India. The danger of de-legitimation (of course, who would like to lose their brand name and business) and to provide space to radical international tourists and NRIMs (Non-resident Indian Marxists) forced it to tone down such alignment. As a result, we have an eclectic assortment of non-serious social democrats, NGO-secular-civil liberty activists, poor academics and perpetually passive learners ready to line up to welcome international Historical Materialists.
The recent vocalisation of an open dissociation with the Socialist Workers Party of Britain by the organisers of HM, Delhi, further reveals their desperation to satisfy and bridge liberal consensuses of the West and India. And the last straw in this regard was the withdrawal of their invitation to Alex Callinicos, perhaps the only Trotskyist in whom genuine Marxist activists in India find some ‘cultural’ affinity. This was obviously done to appease the disgruntled pocos, who were lately alienated from the organising committee. As they are on the lookout to find opportunity to vent their frustration of not having been included in this gala event, this was done to preclude any disturbance from their side.
If Marxism or historical materialism is able today to find an important place in academia, it means two things – one, that the capitalist apparatuses have conceded to the pressures from below, and two, in this concession they have been able to sanitise it of its anti-systemic roots and have found tools that would help them in reproducing capitalist ideologies and social relations. The ideological Marxism that academia produces is a form of Marxism that is entrenched within the disciplinary divides that help capitalism to control and regulate knowledge production.
The endeavour the HM conference in Delhi signifies has nothing to do with revolutionary politics insofar as theory in revolutionary politics is about being implicated in thinking the strategic orientation of movements in their socio-historical concreteness. This is precisely the modality of operation of theory in revolutionary working-class politics. Even theory in its bare philosophical abstraction, when its practice is internal to such politics, is meant to be in a dialectical articulation with the concrete political methods (tactics if you will) of socio-historically determinate movements, and are thus meant to clarify the strategy of praxis in seeking to be reconstituted with programmatic accuracy in the concrete tactical specificities of those movements. All this, in order to actualise the generality of the principle of revolutionary-proletarian politics.
Practitioners of radical, actually revolutionary, theory should always remember that their kind of theory cannot be a discursive articulation of tactics or the epistemology that frames the programmatic articulation of such tactics. And yet, revolutionary theory is not outside methods whose open constellation is the enactment and expression of that theory. Clearly, only when theory grasps itself as being internal to its constitutive methods does it become revolutionary. Methods that actualise theory while simultaneously interrupting this actualisation, thereby clearing the way for its refoundation. And this exercise in its continuously unfolding entirety is praxis.
This dialectical continuity between theory and practice – or philosophy and epistemology, or strategy and tactics, or concept and subject – if and when it becomes uninterrupted (by sublating its various inevitable punctuations) in practical materiality amounts to the actuality of praxis or actuality of revolution/communism. “Communism as the real movement” (Marx and Engels in The German Ideology) or “revolution in permanence” (Marx in The Class Struggles in France). In Marxism, theory is not – like Kant’s “categorical imperative”– a norm for the governing of practice. Rather, it is, or should be at any rate, the herald of practice to come. One which will abolish theory by realising it and thereby become praxis, which is a higher and radically different ontological level of actuality, positivity and the concrete than the finite empiricism (and positivism) of mere practice. This is what is often referred to as the “future-anteriority” of Marx’s historical-materialist approach to praxis.
That is, however, not to contend academically-turned Marxism has no analytical connect whatsoever with really-existing movements in their historical concreteness, and is consumed solely by the ethics of theory or, which is pretty much the same thing, conceptual abstractions pertaining only to the internal architecture of discursive formations. Of course, that has, more or less, been the orientation, if not the methodological protocol, of Critical Theory founded almost as a disciplinary paradigm. Nevertheless, there is a sizeable and ever-growing section of critical theorists who are equally exercised by the question of historically concrete movements. But even for them such historically concrete social and political movements as objects of analysis are meant, at best, to be occasions of inquiring into and demonstrating how those movements constitute the determinate actualisation and thus the limit of proletarian revolutionary praxis. The next step of how that praxis, as an excess of such historical limits, can be reconstituted as a constellation of specific socio-historical subjects — which can be posed only in the shape and register of a concrete programme of action and guidelines for the enforcement of that programme – is clearly beyond the remit of their theoretical practice. And it’s precisely this academicised Marxist modality of reflection and analysis of movements that would arguably be on display at the various panels meant to discuss Kashmir, Nepal, the Maoist-led tribal movements in central and eastern India, the recent workers’ upsurge in the industrial belt of National Capital Region and the like at the Historical Materialism conference here. For, even the best and the most well-intentioned among the panelists — their numbers are few and far between — engage with their objects of analysis as no more than sympathetic ethnographers. Their outside support for such movements eventually shirks the ultimate responsibility of plunging into the practical materiality of movements. A move, which if made through the immersion of their analytical engagement with those movements into the practicality of the latter, would render their analyses and the approach that underpins them to become the sublated constitutivity of programmes of those movements in question. That would not only rid their theory of its academicism but also simultaneously enrich the movements in question with the spirit of revolutionary generalisation, thereby enabling the revolutionary praxis constitutive of those movements to tend towards overcoming the historical limits imposed on them. Limits that inevitably tend to hypostatise the movemental materiality of revolutionary praxis into overgeneralising sectarianism at the level of practice and pragmatic epistemological fetishism at the level of theory.
The remit of critical theory that prevents it from straying beyond its own prettified gardens into the dank and malodorous world of really-existing politics that lie beyond them is, needless to say, imposed on practitioners of such theory by the position that is constitutive of the way they envisage their theoretical practice as an untainted and untaintable outside to the historically concrete social and political movements. Such a conception of theoretical practice and its actual operation – which is constitutive of the academicisation of radical theory in general and Marxism in particular – stems from the purist and puritanical yearning of its practitioners to evade in advance the vagaries, exigencies, impurities, ugliness and errors, which engaging with such really existing movements by being integral to their respective agencies of practice inevitably brings. Clearly, they know, or care to know, nothing about the revolutionary virtue of risking all that taint by going through those vagaries, exigencies, impurities, ugliness and errors of practicality in order to extenuate them in practice. Nor do they remember, drunk as they are on their ephemeral status of being philosopher-kings, that the foundational logic of their academicised theoretical practice is precisely a restoration of the effete Young Hegelian legacy of “critical criticism” or “critical philosophy” that Marx systematically demolished to establish the rigorous scientificity of critique of political economy as practical critique.
However, to explain away academicisation of Marxist theory merely in terms of such motivations of a group or section of intellectuals would be sheer psychologism unbecoming of a complete and rigorous Marxist analysis of the same. We need to understand the structural condition of possibility – structural causality if you will – of such psychological motivations to turn Marxism from a revolutionary theory for revolutionary practice into an accommodated, and impotent ideology. To effectively combat such academicisation, of which HM, Delhi, not unlike Legal Marxism in late 19th century Russia, is a typical exemplar, we must recognise it for what it really is: a symptom of the conjunctural crisis of both Marxist theory and revolutionary working-class movements. This crisis, which is currently manifest as movements without theory and theory without movements, has arisen from the shifting of the conjunctural regime from that of embedded liberalism to that of neoliberalism. Due to this shift, the theoretical recognition of the revolutionary subject lags behind its recomposition, which has devastated the forms of organisation – both political and conceptual. In such circumstances, we are confronted with, to paraphrase Gramsci, a monstrosity: a conceptually elevated theory that has emerged, in lieu of the yet-to-be-born revolutionary subject, by making the cognitive abstraction of negativity and critique into an autonomous ground from where it preaches to the impotent revolutionary subject of the earlier conjuncture and berates it for its expected lapses as if that ground were a transhistorical tribune of revolutionary reason.
So, what we have today by way of Marxism as revolutionary praxis is not a dialectical unity but a duality of two mutually competing ideologies – pragmatism (of movements under the leadership of various shades and sects of the party-left) and subjective-idealism (that goes under the name of critical theory). In such a situation, we have the party-left tendencies rejecting the academicised style of theoretical practice of academic Marxists as a psychological impulse of some individual intellectuals and the groups they comprise while engaging with the theoretical products of those academic Marxists by seeking to instrumentalise them. The party-leftists believe this to be their critical stance vis-à-vis academicised radical theory. But this attitude, in reality, amounts to no more than the playing out of the objective logic of competition and split between the theoretical subjectivity of analysis and the practical objectivity of movement, one in which the domination of the latter by the former is implicitly an established fact. Something that has reinforced and reproduced the capitalist logic of social relations within the twinned-domain of Marxist theory and working-class movements, thereby significantly undermining the radical tenor and orientation of revolutionary proletarian praxis. This hierarchical split between theory and movements has also meant that such academicised Marxism is no longer a constitutive theoretical moment of revolutionary praxis but is a reified analytic that, therefore, is destined to do no more than engage in a competitive war of one-upmanship with other non-Marxist and even anti-Marxist radical-theoretical analytics. That is clearly revealed by the liberal eclecticism that has gone as much into the making of the organisational core of the Delhi edition of the Historical Materialism conference as the conference itself. And the unsavoury controversy that has dogged the organising of the conference, what with a few pocos and semi-pocos, who had initially been part of that eclectically composed core of conference organisers, reportedly walking out of it in a huff, and threatening to boycott and even disrupt the proceedings further substantiates our charge on that score. That a good number of such pocos, semi-pocos, and non- and anti-Marxists are still very much part of both the conference and its organisational core, even as some of their friends who have abandoned it are now attacking the conference from the outside, reveals that the logic of competitive one-upmanship constitutes a marketplace of ideas which commodified academic trends share with each other in order to be part of the process of outcompeting one another. In that sense, the eclectically organised core of the conference, the conference itself and its so-called detractors on the outside are one extended continuum of academic capitalism. So much so that it would not be inaccurate to title this soap opera of a conference the ‘Extended Family of Histo-Mat and its Inner Feuds’.
This competitive co-habitation of academicised Marxism with other non- and anti-Marxist academic trends under the aegis of Historical Materialism, Delhi, is a travesty of critical dialogue the former claims to be engaged in with the latter. The only stake such Marxism has in its engagement with those other theoretical tendencies (read analytics/ideologies) is accommodation in the marketplace of ideas in competitive co-existence with all other kinds of discursive commodities. Need we tell these Marxist industrialists and their non-Marxist academic compatriots that their unctuous and self-important claims of a holding ‘critical dialogue’ among themselves can delude none for long save such sell-outs and hustlers as themselves? Critical dialogue, they ought to be reminded, is polemical communication, not competition. One that constitutes radical antagonism between the horizons of commodification and the politics of decommodification, effecting radical separation between them.