Author: Radical Notes

Pothik Ghosh

“What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautiful worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

– C.P. Cavafy, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’

I

The barbarians have finally chosen their king. And this they have accomplished not despite the relentless squabbling they have been indulging in among themselves for the past couple of decades, but precisely because of it. Narendra Modi’s ascendancy as the fifteenth prime minister of India, let there be no doubt on this score, is not the emergence of some fascist political regime. It is something far more insidious, intractable and perhaps even unique in the political history of global capitalism. Modi’s electorally-driven rise as the leader of the executive branch of the government of India is the coming of age of neoliberal capitalism in this country. His ascension to the prime ministerial throne seals the neoliberal social process — which began unfolding in all its competitively anarchic and thus barbaric glory since the early 1990s – into a political dictatorship of neoliberal capital. Modi today stands for the institutionalisation of generalised barbarism.

And if there is anything more disturbing than this unprecedented victory for the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) then it is the unwillingness among its opponents in the various left, liberal and left-liberal camps to recognise this fact. Almost all of them continue to designate Modi’s electoral success — in the pragmatics of their practice, if not always in the overt claims of their theory – as a victory of fascism and a defeat for (liberal) democracy. Such reluctance on their part to recognise Modi’s rise for what it really is stems from their continued refusal to acknowledge the insolvency of the theoretical and conceptual presuppositions – conscious or not – that have been the orientating strategic core of their diverse political practices.

Such theoretical presuppositions have always tended to veer around to the strategic view that the constitutional tenets of the liberal-democratic Indian polity can be made into an effective bulwark against what they have always seen as the BJP’s fascist machinations. For instance, the insistence of many progressives across the board that the current model of development ought to become more inclusive by being based on the constitutionally-ordained principles of ‘secularism’ and ‘socialism’ reflects that. That, they believe, will save such development by cleansing it of the external impurities of communal and casteist violence and prejudice, thus enabling it to become the ecumenical dispenser of modernity and progress it is essentially supposed to be.

What such ways of seeing miss is that communal and casteist prejudice and violence are not mere externalities to the political economy of development. Rather, such political economy, in its current historical level and state of late advancement, can reproduce itself solely through multiple forms of social oppression. There can really be no question of inclusive development because capital, of which development is currently a euphemism, is not at all exclusionary. The problem with capital precisely is that it constitutes and reproduces itself by including all and sundry; but differentially. More accurately, capital is a structure of productive inclusion through hierarchical exclusion. That is to say, it can include only by excluding. In such circumstances, there can be no inclusion beyond such inclusion, or equality beyond such equality, unless that structure of capital itself is decimated. Inclusion beyond inclusion, or equality beyond equality, is, as Marx would say, not the equality of classes but their abolition.

It would, therefore, do our struggles against the Modi brand of politics a world of good, if we begin to recognise and register – not merely in the tenor of our rhetoric but in the programmatic orientation of our political practices as well – that the constitutionally-enshrined principles of ‘socialism’ and liberal-democratic secularism were ideological and formal expressions of capital in a certain moment of its historical development. This moment was the conjuncture of embedded liberalism when fascism and other illiberal politico-ideological forms that operationalised accumulation by extra-economic means were a constitutive fracture in liberal-democracy. The latter being the form of economic accumulation that operationalised itself purportedly through free competition, efficient markets, functional civil society and democratic polity.

But thanks to its relentless forward march, capital today is in a historical moment – has been there since, at least, the 1990s in India – when primitive accumulation (and the illiberal politico-ideological forms that operationalise it) is no longer the constitutive fracture in liberal-democracy that it had been earlier. Instead, the liberal-democratic form in the immediacy of its operation is substantively illiberal (fascistic, authoritarian and so on). As a result, liberal-democracy is not only not a temporarily effective barrier any longer against what is being perceived by both the leftists and the left-liberals as fascism but is, in real terms, the immediate formal actuality of various kinds of illiberal (including fascistic) substance.

In such a situation, it would be unforgivable to battle the ascendant rightwing politics of the sangh parivar from the vantage-point of liberal-democracy and constitutionalism. Unfortunately, that is exactly what all those who designate Modi’s rise as the emergence of fascism are guilty of; one way or another. Their ‘anti-sangh parivar’ politics continues to be integral to the reproduction of neoliberalism at a socio-economically substantive level, which is the vital condition of possibility for the legitimised emergence of the political form that will be the BJP-led NDA government. And this, may we also add, makes the practitioners and purveyors of such anti-Modi politics – whether radical, leftist or liberal — complicit in the strengthening of precisely the phenomenon they ostensibly seek to resist, combat and fell.

II

All those who are really serious about finishing Modi off in order to comprehensively destroy the political project his electoral victory both embodies and enshrines, need to understand that neoliberal dictatorship is the institutionalisation of the barbarism of neoliberalism. That basically amounts to liberal-democracy as oppression and the discourse of rights as negative determination being consensually accepted and legitimated as a settled juridico-legal regime, with the state as its institutional embodiment. In such an instance of the dictatorship of neoliberal capital, the institutionally crystallised form of the state becomes a mutually constitutive enabler and reinforcement of barbarism as a juridical-legal regime or state-formation. A neoliberal dictatorship is, therefore, the structural-functionality of a neoliberalised social formation congealing into a consensually accepted regime. The institutionality of the capitalist state is an adjudicatory/regulatory effect of social power as differential inclusion. In the case of neoliberal dictatorship, it becomes an institutionalised enshrining of the consensus of the neoliberal social formation that logically precedes it. Hence, it is a superordinate entity vis-à-vis the neoliberal society and is there solely to play a coercive role on the side of the more powerful in any given social relation of domination/oppression.

What we have, therefore, is a distinction of degree between neoliberalism as a phenomenon of generalised socio-economic barbarism, and neoliberal dictatorship as the legitimation of this generalised phenomenon of socio-economic barbarism into a settled juridical-legal fact. It is this difference of degree that might well turn out to be what sets the current Union government marginally but crucially apart from its predecessors of the past two decades.

The BJP’s decision to name Modi as its prime ministerial candidate, right at the very beginning of the electoral campaign, was a considered decision. This decision stemmed from its near-perfect reading of the social situation in the country as one that was eminently conducive, an ideal condition of possibility if one will, for the triumphant emergence of a figure such as Modi, and the utterly retrograde politics he personifies.

This condition of possibility was without doubt the tendency of social polarisation that more than lurked in much of north Indian society. But to merely describe it as that will yield not only a partial but also an erroneous picture of the social reality that has made this decisive victory of the BJP-led NDA possible. It will also mean that the concrete possibilities for building an effective resistance against this political institutionalisation of the Indian variant of neoliberalism remain unidentified, and beyond our grasp.

From such a standpoint, what is more important about this tendency of social polarisation is that it is has enabled a new nationalist reinforcement of the Indian identity through its redefinition and internal reconfiguration. Had that not been so, this tendency would not have been that effective, electorally speaking, for the BJP.

To understand this process of (re)production or renewal of the idea and reality of the new modern liberal Indian national identity, one will have to be attentive to the class/identity dialectic in the dynamic constitutive of the post-Independence Indian polity, particularly since the late 1980s and the early 1990s. That is, one will have to be attentive to the class/identity dialectic in terms of the intersection of the identitarianised politics of social justice, and economic liberalisation.

The politics of social justice, beginning in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, based itself on the competitive assertion of socio-economically and culturally subordinate identities against the dominant modern liberal identity by seeking to expose the latter for what it really was and still is to a large extent. The challenge that such politics articulated was based on the entirely valid claim that the modern liberal identity is a marker of a level of material development and ideological hegemony that some identity groups had achieved in the modern social formation of post-Independence India by leveraging their traditionally dominant positions in the pre-national social formation. Such achievement had, not surprisingly, also meant that certain subordinate socio-economically and socio-culturally identified groups had been denied this achievement of liberal modernity both in terms of material wealth and ideological hegemony.

The upward mobility of certain sections among the subordinate socio-economic and socio-cultural groups that resulted on account of this ambience of social justice politics, together with the explosion of new social, economic and cultural wealth, lifestyles and ways of social being that economic liberalisation unleashed for the bearers of modern liberal identity, have impacted that identity in two significant ways. They have led to a quantitative burgeoning of the demographic that ideologically subscribes and belongs to this identity, and have qualitatively redefined and internally reconfigured it both in material and ideological terms.

The quantitative burgeoning of the demographic of this identity has served to significantly reinforce the nationalist ideology of Indianness as the reinforcement and regimentation of an ever-increasing diversity of forms of embourgeoisement. Concomitantly, the neoliberal phase of ‘nation building’ — which has been shaped and determined by material and ideological/cultural demands of the socio-economic processes unleashed by economic liberalisation since the 1990s — has tended to create and deepen a new polarisation. There is, arguably, a growing schism between the modern-liberal Indian identity and those social groups, whose integration into that identity has been impeded by the dynamic of competition among traditionally unequal subject-positions. As a result, the latter continue to be materially less developed, leading them to ideologically and culturally self-characterise themselves in traditional identitarian terms.

This process of burgeoning of the demographic that subscribes to the ideology of the modern-national Indian identity, thanks to the upward mobility effected by social justice politics, is evident in the phenomenon of the huge and still growing middle classes and urban petty bourgeoisie. For, this social justice-fuelled upward mobility has primarily been about conversion of rural assets and rural socio-cultural capacities into urban economic assets and urban socio-cultural capacities by the upwardly mobile sections from among the various socio-economically subordinate and socio-culturally oppressed groups.

Now this has not wiped out social justice politics but it has most certainly served to decisively shift the stress from it to a new developmentalist discourse and practice of politics. It is this discourse of developmentalism that perpetuates, and articulates, the increasing diversity of socio-cultural forms as their underlying structural coherence or unity. Something that unites those diverse forms into a mutually competitive aspiration for and hierarchy of development. (Anti-corruption politics is an integral component of precisely such a discursive lay of the land.)

The upward mobility, constitutive of the modality of social justice politics, has deepened and accelerated class polarisation within socio-economically backward and socio-culturally marginalised identities that had, till the beginning of the 1990s, been relatively more cohesive and homogeneous.

Not surprisingly, such upwardly mobile segments of those identity-groups have increasingly been coming around to the necessity of tactically making common cause with their caste Hindu competitors (the traditional bearers of the modern, liberal-national identity) against the subalternised segments within their own identity-groups. This is probably one of the axes of social consolidation against those sections and segments, which by their very position and situation outside the idea and materiality of modern liberal Indianness pose a challenge to it. A challenge that continues to gather its political ballast and ideological force, thanks particularly to the paradigm of social justice politics that promised empowerment to all members of socio-economically backward and socio-culturally oppressed identity-groups but has, in the reality of its identitarianised operation, inevitably left significant number of them in the lurch.

It is this renewed dialectic of reinforcement of modern-liberal Indianness and the socio-economic/socio-cultural polarisation against it that has, in all probability, electorally crystallised into a decisive pro-Modi vote. That has, for sure, been the case, at least, in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. For, the more this modern liberal identity of Indiannness is reinforced, the more class division is deepened and accelerated, leading to enhanced social polarisation that threatens and challenges the configuration of social power constitutive of such reinforcement. Something that would, therefore, inevitably lead the social configuration yielded by the reinforcement of the identity of liberal modern Indianness, to engage in a political manoeuvre to fob off that challenge in order to preserve and reinforce its power. It is such a move that has possibly contributed significantly to the ascendancy of Modi as a figure of politically institutionalised neoliberalism.

It must be understood here that the political offensive of this growing demographic of the modern national identity is constitutive of the reproduction of its social being that continues to be shaped and determined by the material and ideological-cultural demands unleashed by the process of economic liberalisation. Predictably, such offensive has been constant policy-bound, legal and illegal assaults on modes of social being that are ‘outside’ the demographic of the reconfigured modern national identity, precisely in order to subsume them. Such modes of social being, by virtue of their situation and position, are a barrier to the continuous reproduction of the mode of social being of the modern-liberal identity.

There is, however, an important detail about the outcome of the sixteenth Lok Sabha elections that must be taken into account here. The BJP voteshare is reportedly a little above 31 per cent. This is important not because one can then comfortably day-dream, in the manner of some deluded left-liberals, that had India followed the electoral system of proportional representation, the BJP, given its voteshare, would have been way below the half-way mark in Parliament.

Even if that were so, the intensified social differentiation wrought by a combination of identity-based social justice politics and economic liberalisation, ever since the 1990s, would have meant the continuance of unstable coalition politics. Now the problem with such politics, which would have continued to mirror the competitive anarchy characteristic of the neoliberal social formation, is not that it is unstable. The problem with it is that it is not unstable enough.

It is precisely the intensification of instability, which capital generates to then harness it before such intensification can push itself to its capital-unravelling limit, which is the source of all-round increase in precarity of social labour. It is this that makes such anarchy barbaric. The only way out of such ever-increasing precarity is not reversion to a previous less precarious mode of social being – something that is not only impossible but is fantastic nostalgia that fans the flames of precisely the kind of reactionary politics we are currently confronted with. The way out of such precarity lies, instead, in accentuating social divisions to an extent that they refuse to settle down to be harnessed, articulated and commanded by capital, leading to its collapse and overcoming.

In that context, it must be said that the kind of social instability that such coalition politics has hitherto mirrored is a kind of structured instability. It is instability at the phenomenal level through which capital as a structure of social power has continued to concentrate itself. And its continuance would have only meant the perpetuation of controlled anarchy that is decadent late capitalism as barbarism. But it is precisely such continuance that those deluded left-liberals suggest when they publicly exhibit their ridiculous dream of how the electoral system of proportional representation could have blocked Modi’s ascent this time around.

Given that almost all the opponents of rightwing politics of the sangh parivar have proved incapable, so far, of envisaging resistance in strategic terms that are beyond the coordinates of an electorally overdetermined socio-political system, it is very unlikely that they would have seized the capital-unravelling opportunity provided by such intensified, though controlled, social division, to push such division to its limit while simultaneously suppressing its structural articulation. In such a situation, the continuance of unstable coalition governments, which would have both reflected and reinforced the intensified generalisation of such structured anarchy would ultimately and inevitably have culminated in institutionalising such barbaric late capitalist decadence into a consensually acceptable and settled juridical-legal regime. Precisely the thing that stares us in the face now. Clearly, the dream of the deluded left-liberals, had it come true, would have brought us to where we currently stand through a detour that would not have, in any way, mitigated the pain of arriving at and living in the abode of neoliberal dictatorship.

The suffering inflicted by the barbarism of neoliberal capital, which its political dictatorship accentuates only by institutionalising it, would be no less now than if we came to it through the route dreamt of by those left-liberals. So, one is hard put to understand how such dreams and fantasies can be ingredients of an effective strategy to overcome neoliberalism and its politically institutionalised dictatorship.

In fact, it is precisely such misplaced dreams that have repeatedly facilitated, if not directly fuelled, passive revolutions ceaselessly accomplishing themselves in the garb of defending society against the politics of social domination. In other words, such dreams have enabled capital to keep expanding its remit as a dynamic of differential inclusion – or combined and uneven development – by breaking down existing forms of social cohesion to re-regiment society through the differentiation that such breakdowns inevitably yield.

In such circumstances, one can ill-afford to emphasise the importance of this detail by insisting, in a self-deluded, passive manner full of empty optimism, that it demonstrates that almost 70 per cent of the country’s electorate did not vote for the BJP. The point is that does not really matter. And this is not merely because India follows first-past-the-post electoral system.

Yet, this detail does posit hope. But its realisation lies beyond the remit of the system and its politics of electoral representation. In fact, one can begin to realise such hope precisely by destroying the system and its politics of electoral representation in the process of subtracting from it. For, as long as this system and its underlying structure is intact, they will always distort the facts in which such hopes reside by articulating and mobilising them into a continuous process of passive revolutionary regimentation. Something that has driven capital to this late decadent moment of historical development where the ceaselessness of such passive revolutionary regimentation has qualitatively transformed itself into neoliberalism that is a conjuncture characterised by the barbaric acceleration of extended reproduction of capital.

It is, therefore, not surprising at all that identitarianised social justice politics, as a paradigm and discourse of radical democratisation, has been steadily running into its limit. In the context of post-liberalisation India, all it has done for a while now is accelerate the extended reproduction of neoliberal capital by quickening its dynamic of actual subsumption. And that, as we have seen earlier, is exactly what has happened. The scale of Modi’s electoral victory is perhaps no more than a symptomatic expression and reinforcement of the rapidly growing redundancy of such politics as a paradigm of radical democratisation.

Unfortunately, that is lost as much on the electorally invested social democratic leftists and left-liberals as various non-electoral leftists, who claim to uphold authentic revolutionary working-class politics. Their near passive and complacent reliance — programmatically stated or otherwise — on the configuration of socio-economic and socio-cultural groups, generated by the discourse of social justice politics, as a bulwark against the rise of the Modi-led BJP demonstrates that. They have so far imagined that the fragmentation of a homogeneous national identity wrought by the politics of social justice would continue to effectively block the ascent of the sangh parivar’s rightwing politics of socio-cultural homogenisation and socio-economic regimentation. But it is time they accepted what they have failed to recognise so far.

The paradigm and discourse of social justice politics presented a radical possibility only because its operation effected class polarisations within backward and subordinate identities that had, till the advent of such politics, been relatively more cohesive. This possibility could, however, have come into its actualised own only if the class polarisations and the attendant fragmentation of the identities were leveraged by way of a radical-proletarian subjective intervention. It is precisely the failure of all varieties of the Indian Left on that score that has turned social justice politics, which was to begin with a great paradigm of radical democratisation, in a restorative and reactionary direction. The missed opportunity of further radicalising that paradigm by transforming it into a concretely articulated political discourse of open class anatagonism can, however, still be reclaimed, albeit under the condition of its growing irrelevance. In fact, it is precisely on account of such irrelevance that the faultlines opened up in society by the discourse of identity-based social justice politics need to be leveraged in overtly class-antagonistic terms.

III

The left and the left-liberal responses to the advance of rightwing politics have, so far, been the affirmation and defence of socio-cultural diversity without any understanding of how such diversity is orientated in its articulation. Thus the structural iron-cage within which such diversity is inscribed, and of which each of its constituent moments is an instantiation in cell-form, has largely been missed by the proponents and protagonists of such politics against rightwing homogenisation.

In such circumstances, if that structural iron-cage, thanks to its instantiation by every difference that is asserted, is today sufficiently reinforced to generate a consensus for it to be an institutionalised regime that maintains difference and diversity in an excessively regimented form, there should be no cause for surprise. The real question is whether difference is differential segmentation, which is exactly what the so-called radical politics of difference and diversity has so far unwittingly strengthened. Or, whether assertion of difference is an affirmation of the mutual partaking of such difference as singularities that is constitutive of the process of unraveling of the segmental structuring of difference? This is what revolutionary working-class politics is. Contrary to many of its proponents and all its difference-thinking leftist detractors, it is not a politics in which the proletariat, or the working class, functions as a sociologically closed category of a struggling subject-object that seeks to subsume all other struggles against different forms of social domination/oppression.

Difference-thinking, it must be admitted here, seeks to counter the tendency of closure that identity-thinking, which is also at the root of sociologised working-class politics, tends towards. Yet, difference-thinking, in failing to envisage the complete suppression and destruction of the tendency of valorisation and its horizon of identity-thinking, ends up buttressing the barbaric anarchy of neoliberal diversity. That is the horizon of value and identity as its own crisis-ridden accelerated reproduction that eventually culminates in its institutionalisation as a juridical-legal regime.

Capital is essentially socio-culturally-indexed differences as a mutual articulation of structured differentiality. The point is to work towards not merely defending those differences against homogenisation. Rather, the point is how those differences can come to coordinate with one another in their difference to emerge as a concrete social subject that is an affirmation and actualisation of the truth of non-differential, non-segmental operation of difference. That would be social reality as the real movement. But unless the former is acknowledged and rigorously worked through to be grasped in its socio-historical concreteness (Marx’s “real abstraction”), the latter will remain only an abstract ethicality (Marx’s “thought-concrete”) that awaits its transformation into politics by way of its concrete realisation (Alhtusser’s “real concrete”).

When Antonio Negri stresses on the utmost importance of figuring out the concrete dialectic of the technical and political compositions of the working class through determinate class analysis he is pointing exactly in that direction. In that context, the Popular Front model of cross-class alliance against fascism — which under various guises and labels is still the dominant model of left and left-liberal response to the advance of rightwing politics in this part of the world – is irrelevant.

IV

Anti-fascist Popular Front politics can now no longer be on the agenda of any desirable or even feasible project of radical social transformation. And that is regardless of whether it is articulated in the new-fangled, non-communist idiom of intersectionality and multiculturalist aggregation, or in the traditional communist idiom of alliance of historical blocs against big capital. Given the neoliberal conjunctural character of capital in its current historical moment, such politics is, as we have seen, ineffective. What we are, however, yet to recognise is that such politics is also outright counter-productive. It serves now to only reinforce and reproduce this late capitalist conjuncture and its concomitant political project of neoliberalism. Such politics is, therefore, a contradiction in terms. It seeks to counter Modi’s politics even as the modality of such struggle, which is integral to the reproduction of capital, now more than ever, consolidates precisely the neoliberal political project. Modi is merely its monstrous embodiment, and logical culmination. Such ‘anti-fascist’ politics of social cohesion, one can assert with hardly any risk of overstatement, has made its so-called progressive practitioners and purveyors complicit in the emergence of the dictatorship of neoliberal capital with a figure like Modi at its helm.

The Popular Front model is a politics of forging an aggregative coalition of socio-cultural difference or diversity in order to defend and champion such difference against the homogenising onslaught of a dominant social group. It is, therefore, a modality of politics that seeks to preserve difference without, at once, challenging the structure of differential inclusion and segmentation that difference in being difference instantiates, and which thus once again amounts to the reproduction of relationship of dominance and subordination as the condition of possibility for the regimented reinforcement of the structural principle that underlies such relationship.

Those committed to the project of radical social transformation in general, and working-class politics in particular, must, without further ado, come to terms with the irrelevance of the model of anti-fascist politics of Popular Front that tradition has bequeathed them. The Popular Front model, which had once proved to be an effective weapon against fascism, has now become like a gun that backfires on the one who wields it. And that is because now no struggle against a specific instantiation of capital (capital as the Hegelian concrete-universal) has any chance of success as long as it is not simultaneously also a prefigurative struggle for destruction of capital as the generalising mode of production and/or social organisation. If anything, struggles envisaged merely against specific forms of social domination in their immediacy — even as one defers the struggle against capital as a generalising mode of production/socialisation that such forms actualise through their specifying mediations – render the phenomenon of social oppression more unrelenting and widespread than ever. This is the neoliberal conjunctural salience of late capitalism as “totally administered society” (Adorno).

In other words, the Popular Front model of cross-class alliance against the bourgeoisie as a defined and dominant social group can now no longer be either an adequate or an effective moment of radical politics that finally seeks to destroy the law of value (or capital) by subtracting from it. For, it is this law of value – or identitarianisation as the structuring principle — that is the condition of possibility of social oppression. That has always been so since the beginning of the history of capital. What is different now is that unless the destruction of the law of value is envisaged simultaneously with the immediate struggles against various forms of social oppression that this law makes possible as its specific phenomenal instantiations, the latter will fail to get rid of the respective forms of oppression they are ranged against. Worse, they will only serve to further proliferate and intensify social oppression as ever-new phenomena.

V

To figure why that is so, we need to recognise the current level of historical development of capital, particularly with regard to its Indian (and south Asian) specificity, in terms of the structuring principle of its general dynamic.

The dialectic between primitive accumulation, which is often what is articulated by various orders of fascist and/or authoritarian regimes, and economic accumulation apparently based on free competition, a functional civil society and a democratic polity has run into a crisis. This crisis is about the dialectic becoming, in a tendential sense, less and less dialectical and more and more tautological (Negri). What this means is that the fascistic substance is constitutive of the liberal-democratic politico-ideological form less and less in a mediated, spatio-temporally displaced and/or cyclical kind of way, as was the case in the early capitalist conjuncture of embedded liberalism. Instead, this mutual constitutivity now occurs, more and more, in an immediate and spatio-temporally collapsed kind of way. As a result, the liberal-democratic form, as has been observed even earlier, is substantively illiberal and even fascistic in the immediacy of its operation. This is neoliberalism, which is neither fascism nor liberal-democracy, but a uniquely new socio-political reality.

That the post-Ram Mandir sangh parivar, for instance, slowly but steadily began shifting the terms of its majoritarian friend-enemy discourse from Muslims as enemies of Hindus, to ‘Islamic terrorism’ as the enemy of the secular Indian nation is arguably a crucial symptomatic elucidation of that. Tie it up with the new pattern of majoritarian pogroms that was inaugurated by the anti-Sikh carnage of 1984, and which found its ultimate expression in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, and it will become even clearer. For, what we see in those massacres is class struggle as class oppression becoming more and more openly socio-economic than earlier when it was virtually exhausted by its ideological-cultural mediations. For, what we had in those massacres, which was qualitatively different from what characterised earlier incidents and instances of majoritarian violence against religious minorities, was ethnic/communal cleansing expressing its capitalist materiality far more openly by being utterly unconcealed as economic cleansing.

That said, it must be added that capital as a system of social power constitutive of uneven development or differential inclusion cannot afford to cease being the dialectic it structurally is. As a result, the differentiated or segmented zones of formal subsumption and actual subsumption are maintained in their formal hierarchy even as this distinction is substantively collapsed precisely through the reinforcement and maintenance of that formal hierarchy. This is precisely capital (or the structural dialectic it is) as its own terminal crisis. A crisis that has rendered it an openly irrational force, or command, which maintains and reproduces the economic/extra-economic duality more as a tautology than a dialectic now.

The neoliberal reality (or project) is, therefore, much more than the phenomenal manifestation (Modi) it has currently congealed into. It cuts across the entire political landscape as a continuum of social corporatist, ‘strong messianic’ politics: it extends from the BJP’s majoritarian-nationalist developmentalism and the anti-corruption formations, including the AAP, to Modi’s holier-than-thou left-liberal adversaries and radical politics in all its shades of economism, militant reformism and politicism. The fight against neoliberalism — which must now, without doubt, focus its attack on the Modi regime as the principal institutional embodiment of such politics — will be truly effective only if it recognises, first of all, that in Modi it is targeting neoliberalism, not fascism. And, second, it concomitantly bases its strategy on rigorously and dispassionately working through the institutionalised emergence of this neoliberal project as the outcome of capital tending to completely realise itself as the dynamic of actual subsumption of living labour by dead labour.

Now, primitive accumulation was no less in the period between 1950 and 1990 on the Indian subcontinent. It was at work, quite ruthlessly and unsparingly, in the spatio-temporal zones (of formal subsumption) that were shaped, characterised and geographically demarcated as peripheries by it. Why, even those geographically delineated peripheral zones of ruthless primitive accumulation would also keep changing and expanding. But what remained unchanged at the qualitative level, in spite of such quantitative changes, is that the spatio-temporal zones of primitive accumulation and economic accumulation remained, more or less, both discursively and logically distinguishable. However, the qualitative change between then and now is that the zones of (extra-economic) primitive accumulation and economic accumulation are, tendentially speaking, less and less spatio-temporally displaced and separated from one another, and are becoming more and more (substantively) indistinguishable even as their hierarchised distinction is maintained and reinforced at the formal level precisely to enable this growing indistinction at the substantive level. Hence, the earlier insistence, pace Negri, on tautology: the dialectic as its own evident crisis.

This is clearly the reason why the world – the capitalist world-system to be precise – has as a whole moved, of course in a tendential sense, from the era of ‘localised’ states of exception (fascism, colonialism, totalitarianism and various other forms of authoritarian political regimes) then to what Giorgio Agamben calls “the generalised state of exception” (neoliberalism) now. One could even say that it is precisely the movement away from the earlier ‘localised’ states of exception that has yielded the current generalised state of exception, insofar as the successful movement away from the former failed to be constitutive of the overcoming of capital as their condition of possibility.

That the zones of primitive accumulation and economic accumulation are becoming more and more logically indistinguishable from one another, not despite but precisely because of their distinction at the level of discursive appearances, is borne out by the fact that the rate at which the organic composition of capital (c/v) – and/or regimes of accumulation – change now has become far more rapid than ever. Not just that, this rapid rate of change continues to accelerate ever more, and exponentially. In other words, the conjuncture now is distinguishable from the conjuncture then by the fact of economic cycles – the interregnum between one form of organic composition of capital and another – becoming progressively shorter, and the concomitant regimes of accumulation becoming less and less stable. This increasing rapidity of change in the organic composition of capital, which can also be described in terms of the ever-shortening duration of economic cycles, means that primitive accumulation and economic accumulation are virtually co-incident. So much so that the extra-economic operation of capital as sheer force has become almost permanent in all its discursively distinguishable moments.

The qualitative change in technology regimes — signalled by the entry and rapid generalisation of electronics, microelectronics, robotics and informatics — has led not only to an unimaginable increase in the rate of relative surplus-value extraction but also to a situation, wherein relative surplus-value extraction amounts, almost at once, to an enhanced rate of absolute surplus-value extraction as well. If we look at the changes in the labour process in terms of the “technical composition” of the working class (social labour) across various constituent sectors of our entire social-industrial life, we will see that even where there has been no lengthening of the average workday, albeit such instances are rare, the new qualitative changes in technologisation have wrought productivity increase through incredible levels of intensification of work and drudge than earlier for the same duration of the average workday. So much so that one’s entire cognitive life and significant parts of one’s affective life have got fully integrated into the production process. In fact, in some traditional sectors of immaterial or intellectual production, the length of the average workday might even have declined a little compared to earlier but that has been much more than neutralised by the increased intensity of work that wage-labourers in those sectors have to contend with now.

And how else is this increased and increasing intensification of work enforced, than through a more intensive disciplinary operationalisation of the everyday work-ethic? That includes both traditional forms of ideologico-repressive mechanisms of peer pressure and mutual surveillance, and new forms of intrusive surveillance to measure output and watch out on everyday subversion through devices fixed to workstations and so on. What else would this be other than the increasing pervasiveness, through intensification, of extra-economic disciplining and its near permanence in almost every moment of lived time rendering virtually all of social life both productive and coercive at the same time?

What must also be mentioned here is that this qualitative shift in technology regime is a dialectical feedback loop of both cause and consequence with regard to the current conjunctural salience of neoliberalism. This shift has been on account of the gradual accumulation of quantitative changes in the organic composition of capital through the past several centuries due to the conflict between living labour and dead labour. Something that is registered and recognised as competition within the politico-economic horizon of capital. That is precisely the reason why we ought to describe both quantitative and qualitative changes in the organic composition of capital also as quantitative and qualitative shifts in productive forces. Such continual quantitative changes in the organic composition of capital have progressively accentuated the conflict between living labour and dead labour. This, in turn, has necessitated more quantitative changes in the productive forces that have finally yielded a qualitative leap in productive forces, and a concomitant qualitative shift in the regime of accumulation. What this qualitative shift in the twinned regimes of technology and accumulation has yielded (and continues to yield with ever-increasing ferocity) in various sectors of the economy is a crisis that is about the declining capacity of capital as a social relation of production to further diminish socially necessary labour time and extract more surplus labour time.

Capital now seeks to resolve this crisis by tending more and more towards rendering the spatio-temporal zones constitutive of realisation of value – circulation, consumption and social reproduction — into zones of value-creation and surplus value-extraction in their own right. This has meant the substantive transformation of non-work socialisation and life — precisely by maintaining and reinforcing such non-work socialisation and life as the forms they have traditionally been – into productive work. This has led to the emergence of biocapitalism, wherein life itself is production and production life.

In such circumstances, when the entire social formation, and life itself, has been transformed into an industrial complex (social factory) — a process that continues to intensify and accelerate — society cannot be defended by merely fighting against the dominant and elite social groups, and the oppression they threaten society with. Of course, such struggles against corporate-capitalist marauding and/or the oppression wrought by dominant and elite social groups will probably still continue to constitute many of the tactical moments of the larger battle against capitalism. But what those struggles must absolutely ensure if they are to fulfil their destiny as tactical moments of the larger battle to unravel and overcome capital is that they in their various specificities are immediately co-terminus with the actuality of the larger battle. Such a situation will emerge when struggles against various forms of social oppression and domination envisage themselves, and their mutual coordination, in terms of working-class solidarity. This is not merely a matter of semantics, though. The modality of working-class solidarity is the continuously uninterrupted process of “struggle in unity, unity in struggle” (Mao Zedong). A process that is constitutive of labour in self-abolition through subtraction from capital as the mode that structures the entire social formation as a system of differential inclusion.

Clearly, an aggregative alliance of oppressed social groups against the institutionalised embodiment of that mode of social organisation is by no means an insurrectionary configuration of working-class solidarity. Such a configuration, in being the continuously uninterrupted process of struggle in unity, unity in struggle, will be constellational.

So, let us join our voices to the poet’s and say, “there are no barbarians any longer”. That is not because we have vanquished barbarism, but precisely because we all have, in fighting the barbarians, become barbaric. That is something we must recognise and acknowledge if we are to behead the monster — which has risen over our heads as a concentration of our very own barbaric energy. And find redemption.

Paresh Chandra

If there is one thing that no self-respecting Marxist will question it is the idea of revolution – a complete rupture from the past. Complete in two senses: rupture in fundamentals – it is the essence that changes – and a rupture that includes everything; in other words, the essence of everything changes. No part of given reality, no entity, insofar as it is based in this structure, can be preserved. Even if the working class leads the revolution, in destroying the bourgeoisie it also destroys itself; neither the working class, nor the bourgeoisie survive.

Over the course of his long journey Raymond Williams went through a number phases. But even at those moments where politico-pragmatic engagements took him into an engagement – undeniably critical – with the structures of bourgeois democracy, with policy-making etc., he cannot, without a degree of injustice be called “reformist”. An implicit recognition that true transformation is systemic always inflected his arguments. When the social democratic Labour Party is charged of not having done enough, he is arguing that they could have empowered the working class more, and facilitated the development of class-consciousness, and not that social democracy could have brought fundamental change.

And yet it is not hard to espy another strand in Williams’ thought, a strand that does not sit easy with the notion of revolution as total rejection of the current. Owing to his dependence on categories like “community” and “culture” (terms that have had a long history of anti-Marxist use and make Williams’ work very liable to being rallied for all sorts of non/anti-Marxists purposes) it is not hard to make him seem a believer/defender of the “autotelic”. Williams’ younger contemporary, Terry Eagleton, for instance, has lately been bent upon securing a domain of intersubjectivity and Love within the Symbolic Order, as a space where the Imaginary, or that which precedes language and its fallen logic (capitalism, presumably), continues to exist. The category of things that are “(good-)in-themselves” includes art, community, love, friendship etc. For this sort of thinking Raymond Williams is easy fodder. Does he not himself reify the experience of the Welsh village, celebrating the experience of neighbourliness as some sort of atemporal good, a sign of a society not fallen into sin? Does not the notion of a “culture of the working class” also allow for a similar sort of reification? It will be my attempt in this paper to explore how Williams manages to preserve in his work the place of these notions that seem to go against the grain of all that the Marxist idea of revolution entails, generating a sort of productive tension in which instead of necessarily undermining the attempt to bring fundamental change, they come across as possible catalysts.

I

In his short essay on the idea of Welsh culture (Resources of Hope, 99-105), Williams asserts the uselessness of holding on to the idea of an unchanging culture. Welsh culture is neither a well-preserved “resort” to be visited, nor is it the ever present essence of Welsh existence. Culture is something intrinsically contested; it is, in fact, constituted by contestation, not given, but produced at each moment. Similarly, community too is rooted not only in relations that are given, for instance those of the Welsh village community, but is also reborn in moments of open antagonism and struggle, like during the 1926 General Strike. Williams is aware of the problem of holding on to something as intrinsically good in a world where power defines all relations, even those of love and friendship. It would imply the denial of the structural nature of problems, and hence solutions, while implicitly celebrating a privilege that most do not possess. The antagonistic moment at which we challenge the entire given order, with intent to transform it is essential, and any moment of “goodness” can exist only in struggle. In an essay called “Social significance of 1926” in Resources of Hope (105-122), Williams qualifies his seeming celebration of the Welsh community by drawing attention to the manner in which relations of community got re-activated due to the energy of the strike.

The problem of seeing the Welsh community, or any already existing set of relationships as lying outside the domain of capitalist hegemony resembles another predicament that revolutionary politics faces (in theory and in practice). We know that the initial moment at which the status quo is challenged is always localised; it involves local actors, facing the brunt of power at a local level. Understandably, any possible resolution that emerges directly out of this moment of struggle is also local. Assuming that transformation is always a systemic phenomenon, the moment of local resolution has to be negotiated in such a manner that it does not freeze the movement in its tracks. The only positive result to be gained from this negotiation is the generalisation of the question asked. If one increases the ambit of a question, a localised resolution becomes impossible; this entails the posing of the idea of global transformation in opposition to localised recognition/representation.

Williams discusses these two difficulties faced in the struggle for socialism when he theorises the residual and the emergent in his late work, Marxism and Literature. The Welsh community is what he calls the residual: that which belongs to a bygone era and does not completely kowtow to the logic of the current system. In not fully conforming it generates friction which can then be deployed to question the system. On the other hand, the emergent refers to ideas, values, institutions etc. that emerge when a class struggles against hegemony, when the working class struggles against the hegemony of capital, for instance. Both the residual and the emergent are oppositional at a certain moment of their relation with the dominant, or the hegemonic, but their antagonistic status is always under threat of the possibility of immediate recognition and co-option. As was said earlier, it is the abstract ideal of systemic/global transformation that saves, or tries to save, and has the potential to save the antagonistic nature of the residual and the emergent.

At the same time, the abstract ideal of systemic transformation, inadequate in itself to sustain the energies of a movement, needs the support of local struggles, and a basis in already existing matrices of human relations. In other words, the truly oppositional, or that which seeks to transform the totality of things, does not exist outside of the various moments of the emergent and the residual. This is where “community” in the way Williams uses the term, while speaking of the Welsh countryside, becomes important. Communities are necessarily local, but in this vision, never ends in themselves; moments, rather, that appear and disappear, and offer sustenance to the movement at large (this was more or less the role of the Welsh village community in the general strike, as represented in Williams’ Border Country).

II

But how does one reach from sustenance of a movement at a local level, to its generalisation? The term that makes itself available immediately is, of course, solidarity. Movements sustained locally, needed to be united to transform society, are truly brought together by bonds of solidarity; these bonds, furthermore, are facilitated and represented by actual, material bodies and organisations. It is through solidarity that localised segments of the working class move beyond localised interests and end the segmentation that divides them. Solidarity is a special feeling of community that, not existing in given reality, is formed between struggling groups and communities. What sustains a movement then, in addition to local relations of community, and the struggle for localised and immediate demands, is this new sense of community. The 1926 General Strike was great precisely because it demonstrated to those who witnessed it that the community that forms between different segments of the working people is indeed capable of keeping a struggle going.

Williams’ father and other working members of the Welsh village community responded to the struggle of the coal miners almost out of impulse. But what makes this response different from an individualised, empathetic response, is 1) its collective nature, and 2) instead of thinking themselves internal to their condition, the so-called ‘empathisers’ felt themselves internal to the struggle of the miners. Moreover, the Welsh village community, with its spontaneous response to the struggle of the miners did not make the 1926 Strike a general strike. More than anything, this happened because of the extended collaboration and camaraderie between trade union bodies representing various sectors of the working class. If local communities sustain movements at a local level, trade unions are bodies for the building of solidarity at a large scale. If at the end the movement collapsed because of the betrayal of the trade union leadership, it only goes to show the significance of the networks that the trade unions created and utilised. Furthermore, this betrayal is nothing but the willingness to accept local resolutions to general issues, and in that the cutting of the roots of solidarity.

Trade unions are bodies, which though they emerge from local experiences of struggle, are actually not limited to the specificity one particular struggle. If transformation has to be systemic, and has to be brought about by a united working class, then the task of forming a fully conscious, united working class is the first true goal to be sought. Trade unions, and like bodies, that synthesise the wisdom of various local working class experiences are essential to the formation of this class (for-itself). Insofar as trade unions contribute to the construction of socialism, by facilitating the transformation of the working-class-in-itself to a working-class-for-itself, they go against the shallow economism that is associated with trade unionism. The 1926 General Strike demonstrated that trade unions could become bodies to facilitate generalisation. Solidarity was built at a national level through the action of these unions. Betrayal took place when the same trade unions accepted a local resolution, and in that sold out the working-class for the interests for a group of workers. Fittingly, one of the main clauses that the “Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927,” which was a response to the 1926 General Strike, introduced, forbade “sympathetic strikes”.

III

The local moment of a struggle is not always supported by the residual, should there be a residual. Very often the residual is a functional part of the dominant, and has no oppositional value. Despite the problems of his larger thesis, in Rethinking Working Class History, Dipesh Chakrabarty makes an important observation about the Calcutta Jute Mills: individuals belonging to the middle class provided leadership in many struggles of the workers. Because of the lack of bourgeois-democratic structures the symbolic horizon of the workers did not allow for them to take the role of leaders. The oppositional structures that were formed, strangely, were modelled on feudal hierarchies, now formally subsumed by capitalism in order to reproduce itself. In its articulation with the residual, the oppositional took a form that was already co-opted.

Alternatively, it could happen that the oppositional could get accommodated without deriving its form from (as was the case with the Calcutta workers) a co-opted residual. To take an example closer home (in space and in time), workers’ struggles in the industrial belt in Haryana (Gurgaon, Manesar, Dharuhera, Kapashera) often culminate in, and falter at the demand for a union. Evidently, a recognised union is needed for the workers to be able to articulate their real demands; the union, and the demand for it, comes across as a necessary moment of mediation. The problem with this demand, as some have so competently argued (e.g., Maya John), is that this demand forces the movement into a form that systematically destroys internal democracy and channels of communication between leaders and the rank-and-file, which then usually causes the movement to collapse. The demand for a union is obviously not a co-opted piece of residue. It is an institutionalised form of working class wisdom, gained from past experience, and yet its institutionalisation implies that it too is actually co-opted. Of course, even if the demand for a union were met, it would still mean a defeat for the working-class movement, insofar as a local resolution has been achieved and the process of generalisation cut short.

Not only the residual, but even formations that are produced by experiences of the working class, can be accommodated and can lead to the co-option of new moments of oppositional experience. Nothing can be celebrated as a strong, stable bulwark for resistance. At one moment of working-class experience the residual becomes the basis for opposition, and on another leads to co-option. The institutions and tactics that have emerged from the experience of struggle can at a later moment become the cause of accommodation. This should make us think of why Williams’ belaboured the point about seeing society for the process it is, instead of understanding it in terms of reified images.

The usual mistake that one makes in using categories that Williams had constructed so carefully is that we reify them even as we assert that they are meant to ward off reification. In a sense, categories, in being synchronic, make such reification inevitable. Despite this, the point of Williams’ repeated warnings, and his constant quibbling with names, seems to derive from this discomfort with bourgeois forms of knowledge, which rely on categories (formal logic being the model for all such forms), and are hence unable to account for flux. The dominant, the emergent, the residual and the oppositional, are all processual categories (if one can allow for the existence of a such a paradoxical entity). There is no such thing as the emergent. Or rather there is no such thing as the emergent. The moment a thing is a thing, it is no longer emergent, but has emerged. What Williams is trying to get at with the concept of the emergent is what is hidden behind that which has emerged. The only thing he can positively assert is that there is something hidden. That the process exists is the only thing one can say about the process, one can never really represent or know the process itself.

IV

It is at times hard to tell whether Williams’ concern is with how things are, or with how we see them; with the thing-in-itself in a phenomenological sense, or our representations of it. Is he trying to argue that society, as culture, is a process, or is he trying to make sure that we reject our reified categories and understand/represent it as the process it is. As a Marxist, his interests lie not in establishing the nature of reality, as an epistemological exercise, but in transforming it. Understanding reality is part of his project, but only insofar as it is a part of the process of transforming reality. The subject, the object, and importantly the manner in which the subject relates to object, are all important for him.

Reification is not merely a problem of thought. As has been demonstrated, past moments of experience tend to get reified as institutionalized wisdom only to block the path of working-class struggle. Reification in thought, our inability to get beyond concepts to understand the process, accompanies reification in the unfolding of history; capitalism is one such block in the unfolding of this process. History cannot unfold without the destruction of capitalism, and without its destruction the process that we speak of unfolds like the belt of a treadmill, seeming to have moved, only to return after having gathered a bit more dust. Of course movements have happened, and the working class has attacked capitalism, but these barriers to capital have, so far, been accommodated by newer, more generalized forms of capitalism, newer ways of appropriating surplus; despite the resurgence of non-identity, identity has managed to sustain itself.

Representation and recognition lie, as does transformation, in the domain of the subject. So, in confronting these questions, Williams confronts the question of the subject. Reification, as was said above, is a concrete contradiction. The aporia of thought that every recognition is a misrecognition etc., is constituted by and is constitutive of this contradiction. Williams, in asking us to recognize the process, is asking us to recognize what, in effect, does not exist; the process of de-reification, because reification is a fact, not an illusion, cannot be completed in thought. The never-ending search for adequate concepts can never come to a close, because the search for concepts, philosophy itself, begins with the problem of reification. To resolve the problem of philosophy inside philosophy is to leave unquestioned reification as an actually existent fact, which ensures that each philosophical resolution, as each concrete resolution that is partial, becomes reified. Unable to find adequate concepts, or always being conscious of, and made uncomfortable by the inevitable inadequacy of concepts, Williams is invariably pushed into questions of policy and pragmatic engagement.

What Williams is asking us to do is to “struggle on two fronts”, as Mao said in the “Red Book”. Reification in thought is, in the final instant, a produce of reification as an aspect of history. We must battle reification in thought; we must realise that society, as history, is a process, and as we do this, we must also fight reification as a material fact. Figuratively, to fight reification in reality is to fight it outside oneself, to fight it in thought, is to fight reification inside oneself. The working class must struggle against capital as capital, but it must also struggle against labor as capital, because capitalism accommodates working class assertions; it continuously transforms the emergent into the emerged.

V

Fighting labor as capital, means fighting the embourgeoisment of the working class. This embourgeoisment takes the form of institutionalised wisdom (from past experiences) that often fetters movements. Otherwise, the most obvious case of the embourgeoisment of the working class is social democracy (in English politics, the Labor Party) – the politics of compromise. In Border Country, and in all his accounts of British socialist politics, Williams has always kept a critical stance towards social democracy. The betrayal of the trade unions, their acceptance of compromise when the movement could have gone on, was symptomatic of the politics of social democracy.

Social democracy, though it may take various forms, and may use various vocabularies, is typically the institutionalisation of a moment of working class assertion. The working class fights, and capitalism accommodates the assertion by accepting some localised demands (localised in that they do not transform the system in its fundamentals) – in the English case, this is what Perry Anderson (in English Questions) had called the working class’s incorporation. Over a period of time this corporatism gives birth to the belief that with continuous reform the current system will better itself. Williams seems to have the problems of social democracy in mind when he says,

“Straight incorporation is most directly attempted against the visibly alternative and oppositional class elements: trade unions, working-class political parties, working-class life styles…The process of emergence, in such conditions, is then a constantly repeated, an always renewable move beyond a phase of practical incorporation: usually made much more difficult by the fact that much incorporation looks like recognition, acknowledgement, and thus a form of acceptance.” (Marxism and Literature, 124-25)

Incorporation, more concretely, social democracy, blocks the continuous unfolding of the process. The working-class’s perpetual struggle to destroy capitalism comes to a halt with the belief that the current system is good enough, insofar as it has been able to take into account the needs of the emergent working-class. The feeling that the current system, which was being challenged till now, is good enough, is related to the feeling that it is total (in fact, this too follows from repeated accommodation, i.e. repeated failure of movements to bring fundamental change): there is no possible outside to it, and if any change has to come it has to come through a process of continuous modification from within. Williams’ response to this is:

“…No mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention.” (Emphasis author’s, Marxism and Literature, 125)

The belief that the current moment is the only possible comes from blindness to flux, blindness to the fact that the past was different, and that difference is possible even in the present. This blindness is the product, furthermore, of concrete, identifiable processes of struggle and incorporation. Williams’ call to be aware of the processual logic of history, and to flux, is on the one hand a critical realist call to recognise reality for what it is, and not give in to the amnesia of the incorporated moment – reality is moving, do not let yourself get fooled by the stillness of what you see. On the other, it comes from the recognition that it is necessary to realise that change is possible, and that no matter how all-encompassing the system may seem, it has its blind-spots, its exclusions, for subjects to struggle for change, and not be cowed down into passive acceptance of the given. The struggle against reification in thought accompanies and empowers the struggle against reification in action. And the necessity of this struggle returns us to our earlier discussion of localised resolutions, which really, has been the underlying theme of this essay. It is necessary to fight reification because it is the biggest barrier in the process of generalisation, which is to say, in the process of the formation of a united working-class.

Note: This essay was written in April-May 2012.

References:

Anderson, Perry. English Questions. London: NLB, 1980.

John, Maya. “Workers’ Discontent and Form of Trade Union Politics”. Economic and Political Weekly, (January 7, 2012).

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: OUP, 1977.

Williams, Raymond. Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy and Socialism. London: Verso, 1989.

Bagchi, Amiya. “Working Class Consciousness”. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 25, No. 30 (Jul. 28, 1990), PE54-PE60.

 

In our October (2013) meeting at Sevagram, we sought to comprehend the lag between the evolving nature of capital-labour conflicts and the institutionalised political language that most of us spoke – how latter was becoming a hurdle not just in not allowing us to make any meaningful contribution in workers’ politics, but many times by forcing us to play unknowingly reactionary role by thwarting the full realisation of politico-organisational potential of workers’ spontaneity and self-activism. It was this task of understanding and overcoming the lag that led us to demand from ourselves for our January meeting an attempt to engage in “workers’ inquiry” (the concept that we discussed in October) and deconstruct our politico-organisational programmatic abstractions in terms of reflections upon our engagement in concrete processes of class conflicts in our areas of work.

There were presentations from Nagpur that dealt with the history of workers’ struggles under a competitive regime of multiple trade unionism in particular industries. They showed how, on the one hand, these trade unions complemented the managerial techniques to produce and reproduce divisions among workers. On the other hand, various segments of workers indulged in ‘opportunistic’ manoeuvrings of the agencies of these unions to confront capital. During the discussions it came out that in recent years more and more workers in these industries are employed through contractors and on casual basis, and are thus generally not part of any union. The comrades from Nagpur stressed on bad unionism that simply instrumentalised workers for political gains and pointed at the lack of political consciousness among workers as a reason for their instrumentalisation. They do not consider workers’ said “opportunism” as a possible self-activity under specific conditions of entrenched unionist competition. However, it was pointed out during the discussion that ‘self-activity’ and ‘self-organisation’ are not to be glorified, rather they must be taken as something that necessarily happen in conflictual relationships between labour and capital.

A report presented from Dhanbad dealt with changes in industrial relations in collieries – with more and more workers being employed through contractors. The problem of multiple unionism on the basis of political lines does nothing but divide the strength and class consciousness of workers – they give a ready mechanism for the management to divide and rule. But the experience of collieries demonstrates that many a times workers, through their own initiatives and spontaneous coordination, confront managements. These initiatives force unions to come together, especially not to allow the competitors to take advantage. It was pointed out during the discussions that the unionist competition complementing the managerial strategies tend to clog out spaces for workers self-initiatives. It takes the suddenness of spontaneity to flush out blockages to workers’ coordination.

There was a report on the activities of Revolutionary Bolshevik Circle (RBC) and Union Research Group (URG) in 1970s -1980s that also touched upon independent cooperative experiments like that of Kamani Tubes in Mumbai. A worker-activist, who worked in RBC and later on was very closely associated with URG, presented the report. While the RBC was an attempt to move beyond traditional mass bureaucratic political formation within the working class, the leadership soon realised the gap between its programme and workers themselves – a gap between what they were targeting and what workers were up to. In their efforts to transcend this ‘communication gap’, the circle effectively dissipated itself in eclectic concerns of social importance – thus, reducing the working class to the sociologies of stratification and to mere one of those concerns.

The URG was a product of this dissipation, but was a unique recognition of the complexity of industrial relations beyond just the street rhetoric and muscle flexing that traditional unionism entailed. It did some very interesting studies on hi-tech industries and sought to develop the self-capacity of workers in organising themselves beyond the pecuniary logic of traditional unionism. It sought to arm the workers’ leadership in a factory with its research so that they negotiate with capital as equals and with an advantage – a knowledge of the opponents’ possible moves – changes in technology and managerial strategies. However, as it came out during the discussions, in the process URG seemed to idealise employees’ unions against traditional unions where ‘outsiders’ held the leadership, and sanctified the institutions of collective bargaining. It was noted that the stress on employees unions went well with the upcoming multi-national industries at the time that were wary of India’s traditional ‘political’ trade unionism and its erratic nature, and preferred either no unions or unions which would have interest in companies’ growth.

A contingent of University Workers, which mostly consist of students and adhoc teachers from various universities in Delhi, discussed their project of bringing out a newspaper, The University Worker (the draft of its first issue was circulated at the meeting). They discussed the crisis of the traditional left student movement, which conceived universities and education as sites of privileges. The political tasks for this movement were envisaged in a dual manner. On the one hand, the ‘workplace’ struggle was reformist and limited to making education inclusive, so that the underprivileged could share the privileges. Inclusion here implied both – an accommodation of more and more students from the underprivileged communities and a change in the curriculum design that can build an environment to facilitate such accommodation. On the other, the ‘revolutionary’ task was to mobilise martyrs who could sacrifice some of their privileges or utilise them to support the masses struggling somewhere else. Students’ movements too reflected the programmatic divide between the economic and the political – instrumentalising the former to prioritise the latter. Left students’ organisations like other left mass organisations engaged in “economic” struggles to mobilise cadres for “political” struggles which were supposedly happening at different sites or planes. During the Naxalbari phase, when we find a heightening of the discourse of sacrifices among students, it was mainly a symptom of a tremendous existential crisis among them. They were unable and unwilling to face the truth of their proletarianisation, in the wake of a massive increase in educated unemployment in the 1960s-70s. The political was an escape from the economic.

However, what we see now is ever more realisation that education is another work-site – it is integral to the social factory. It too is driven by the same logic of capitalist productivity and work discipline that is imposed through hierarchies and relationships that constitute the university system. Further, the hierarchisation of disciplines, schools, colleges, universities etc reproduces the same segmentation that characterises the labour market and the division among workers. The recent course restructuring and conflicts over it, especially in Delhi University, remarkably reflect all these processes. This has really changed the level of discourse in university politics – students and their organisations talking about the segmented labour market that the university system perpetuates and about the workerisation of the student life, while teachers reflecting upon intensity, productivity and the devaluation of their work to the level of instructors’ – the fading of their autonomy. There is a tremendous increase in ‘flexible’ employment in education – ad hocs, guest lecturers etc., are generally taken up by research students and new graduates. All this has virtually made the old understanding of solidarity redundant and even reactionary – because it leads to escapism and refuses to think education as a site of open class struggle. What is required is an inquiry-based coordination of concrete questions, and struggles around them, among various segments of workers divided across work-sites, including the sphere of education.

It was this presentation of university and schooling as sites of class struggle that opened up debates regarding the conceptualisation of class as a process continually posed and composed against and through proletarianisation and conflicts over the mobilisation and subsumption of living labour.

We also discussed the politics of common man (aam aadmi) as a statist response to the legitimation crisis that the capitalist state has been facing – and how its prime motivation is to organise and coopt the “street rage”, which is an expression of socially widespread precarities that manifests the mass character of intensive proletarianisation happening today. We discussed how in the centre of the recent anti-corruption and anti-rape movements were the anxieties and precarities of various proletarianised segments. We also tried to understand in the present conjuncture the meaning of spectacular gestures in terms of which traditional radicalism judged its successes, when they necessarily tended to blunt the critical edge of the centrality of the working class in the name of overcoming economism and socialising the unrest.

Faridabad Majdoor Samachar (FMS) presented their note on electronics – how its introduction has made many conceptualisations and organisational forms irrelevant for the contemporary working-class movement. There is a general consensus among managements about loyalty and commitment that permanent workers display – this consensus never dies as it revives every time some or other incident of defiance involving temporary workers occurs. But the unpredictability to which the introduction of electronics has exposed companies and governments by decomposing and intensifying production, along with the services transformation does not leave any scope for them to settle with permanent workforce. An increase in the temporary workforce is not a mark of strength and success for these companies and governments, as generally presented by experts and labour activists, but rather it exposes their fragility. They are eventually exposed to more precarities – mercurial and indifferent youthful workforce, having worked in geographically and industrially diverse environments at the age of 20-25 years. They can buy their labour-power, but not loyalty and commitment. The new spirit of the labour movement is embodied by these workers. It came out during the discussion that institutionalised organisational forms and languages are unable to capture this spirit. They are not only incapable of organising these workers, they are even unable to recognise the simmering unrest until and unless some grave incident happens. Therefore, the unpredictable behaviour of these workers is not only a problem for the human resource managements of companies, but also for the big and small managers of the labour movement.

The discussion on the organisational question was informed by debates around these reportings. The two notes that were circulated prior to the discussion were read in the light of diverse experiences. The note from a Kolkata comrade was, in fact, a response to the invitation letter that was circulated before the October Sevagram meeting, in which he raised apprehensions on any attempt to write off the utility of trade unions and party-forms for the contemporary workers’ movement. Trade union continues to play a defensive role in class struggle, however its bureaucratisation and conservatism must be challenged from below. While history has seen various forms of workers’ organisations, “no form can either nullify or guarantee self-activities of the working class.” Further, one can definitely question the substitutionist tendency, but that should not become the ground to reject the role of theory, individual and party as a network of communists.

The second note written by a comrade from Nagpur was a response to the first note. It questioned the radical utility of preconceived organisational forms – trade unions and party – outside the labour and capital conflict. Trade unions because of their permanent legal nature have become institutions that cannot question capitalist legality – seeking to reproduce capital as social power, which is established through the wage system. They become complicit in this reproduction. Therefore, independent workers organisations are necessary. The role of communists is to aid workers in developing and sustaining the class capacity to self-emancipate themselves. But in order to undertake this role, they must be inseparable from the working class and fully grounded in class praxis.

During the course of discussion it was pointed out that it is not sufficient to present a critique of forms only in their own terms – forms are historically specific, contextual. Workers’ organisational forms relate to specific junctures and purpose in class struggle. The resilience of forms must motivate us to examine how the same forms might have changed their functionality and purpose in accordance to their appropriateness in the structure of new reality. In the case of TUs, their legalisation per se is not a problem – because it was also a demand of the movement to decriminalise them. Instead, the issue is whether they are capable of comprehending the exigencies of the political recomposition of today’s working class, whether they are capable of resisting or have become complicit in its normalisation as technical class composition – in the management of class conflicts.

It was generally accepted during the discussions that the radical character of class conflicts is already evident in the self-activities of workers in their daily encounter with capital and each other since here they confront the root of the capitalist system – the capitalist imposition of work. This recognition exposes the impotence and irrelevance of preconceived organisational forms and vanguardist manoeuvrings, except in dealing with the after-effects of immediate confrontations – the political displacement of class conflicts in representative articulation of demands, rights, claims etc that necessarily must present the effects in understandable (political) language.

To keep apace with the time, the need to meet every three months was reiterated and it was decided to have the next meeting in Delhi on April 19-20, 2014.

Pratyush Chandra

On the eve of India’s Republic Day, President Pranab Mukherjee made some strong statements about the political scenario prevailing in the country. He talked about democracy as “a sacred trust” for those in power and those who violate it as “committing sacrilege against the nation”; about “democratic institutions being weakened by complacency and incompetence”; about corruption “as a cancer that erodes democracy, and weakens the foundations of our state”. He also talked about “hypocrisy in public life”, about making “false promises”, warning against taking elections as “the licence to flirt with illusions”, government as “a charity shop”, etc. But the most striking aspect of the speech was of course the recognition of street anger, of hearing “an anthem of despair from the street”, of Indians being “enraged”, of “rage”, which “has one legitimate target: those in power”, of “the aspirational young Indian”, who “will not forgive a betrayal of her future.” (Mukherjee 2014)

The speech recognises “the trust deficit between them [those in office] and the people.” It hints at the crisis of legitimation – the crisis of reproducing the liberal state, and the need to rebuild the trust. It also reflects a conservative institutional anxiety towards the populist attempts to overcome this crisis. When the speech attacks “populist anarchy”, the emphasis is on rage turning to proper anarchy because of the erratic nature of populist politics that derives from attempts to synchronise with the tenor of popular apathy and rage, and harness it in the service of the state. Populism that emerges as a resolution to the crisis might in fact deepen it further by “flirting with illusions,” thus augmenting expectations and despair. Therefore, the President stresses on the sacredness of this trust – on identity between the people and the democratic state, and in the process of this identification bringing sanity to the streets, sanitising them of any difference. People can change governments, but they are one with the state. Of course, for any eventuality, the security and armed forces are always ready – “they can crush an enemy within; with as much felicity as they guard our frontiers. Mavericks who question the integrity of our armed services are irresponsible and should find no place in public life”.

I

Much debate around the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is mainly about the personal acts of leaders and activists, how much they are fulfilling their promises and are true to liberal (left or right) political ideals (norms and ideologies), how much they themselves are embodiments of public values that they seek to institutionalise. You can see left-liberals swinging with the erratic moves of the AAP’s street gymnastics. They are frequently outraged by the AAP’s politically ‘incorrect’ stances that are organic to the common sense of the “common man”. More serious voices too are concerned about the AAP’s discursive and behavioural makeup, which they comprehend through generalisations that were perhaps effective in characterising historical forms of political behaviours. They indulge in analogical exercises which are generally useful, but at times, they can be arrogant, nauseating and sterile apologia for conservative wisdom, inaction and conformism, especially when they refuse to see the now-timeness of these hard times and the breach that characterises them – their non-homogeneity and non-emptiness pregnant with contradictions. Of course, the AAP can be, and perhaps is, as I try to demonstrate here, both a systematic and systemic attempt to transcend this breach, but it is also a symptom of this breach.

It is the recognition of the breach or crisis that is crucial to comprehend the present – not as “a mass of facts”, but something that constellates with the past to remake history as a trajectory that is filled with possibilities and actions, “jumps” and “leaps”, roadmines and explosions.

What is interesting about the AAP is not its promises and its exception-al way of profaning the sacred, which is in continuum with the federalising project of the “average bourgeois” – the rural, mercantile, local, petty and emergent bourgeoisie – that India has witnessed over the last three decades. We must remember we have gone through a whole series of crises marked by eruption of federal demands and have witnessed the resilience of the Indian state in overcoming them through accommodation and expansion. One such major crisis was inaugurated by massive educated unemployment in the late 1960s, an increased assertion of backward caste rural bourgeoisie and of the communally-charged petty bourgeoisie, which significantly transformed the political taxonomy in India based on identitarian conflicts and alliances. That was a crisis which Lohia socialism, JP’s “total revolution” and Naxal Maoism spiced up. It is not surprising if in the AAP we see anti-reservationists, firebrand Lohiaites and retired social democrats (tired of preaching sterile welfarist militancy) coming together in a post-ideological political formation.

In fact, it will not be too much to say that the project of promoting competitive federalism has succeeded with the AAP entering the last citadel of exclusionary centralism of the past. True to Delhi’s prime location, the incident that finally exploded the continuum was characterised by its inter-national composure – racism. The AAP chose to assert its claim or share in the coercive apparatus of the Indian state by abiding to the racist common sense of Delhi’s common man. Those who are outraged by the ‘exceptional’ nature of the incident are those who refuse to see that the exceptional is general and their politically correct spectacular gestures signify the need for new ideological-institutional fetishes that can cover up the blatancy of this generalisation.

II

So much about the continuity that enters into the making of the AAP phenomenon. Let us now talk about the break – which is not really about the AAP but about the conjunctural newness that shapes the AAP, or about what the AAP tells us about the context of its emergence. Let us begin by a few assertions that we think are very obvious.

The Aam Aadmi Party is an attempt to resolve the legitimation crisis that the Indian state and bureaucracy have been facing in recent years. It is an attempt to overcome the divide between the social and the political that the economic has generated in the neoliberal phase of capitalist development. It is an effort on the part of the Indian political system to bring back the citizenry to recommit itself to India’s state formation. It is an apparently paradoxical attempt to mobilise the simmering political apathy for the task of strengthening the state. Its multi-class nature, which is being celebrated by some commentators (as if there can be any mono-class formation in electoral democracy), in fact makes it another candidate for reassuring the state machinery of the much needed legitimation by neutralising conflictual interests. It is an attempt to bring out some positive common sense out of the non-sense and chaos of the streets. It demonstrates the will of the liberal Indian state to overcome its crisis yet again by recognising and normalising the “democratic excess”. What is posed as “anti-establishment” becomes the ground for strengthening the establishment – a new context in which the state must reproduce itself, its re-formation. In sum, the AAP is a truce – a disarming of the very street from which it claims its origin.

In so many assertions that I make above, there is an understanding of the underlying structure of contemporary reality, of which the AAP is a product. The legitimation crisis that we are talking about is essentially a crisis in the political reproduction of this structure, difficulties for the Indian state to deal with the socio-political impact of the volatility of capital relations that constitute this structure.

The minimisation of the state that neoliberalism demanded was definitely not about withering away of the state, it was not even about its non-intervention in economy, nor about its weakness. It was essentially about the autonomisation of credit money and finance from any socio-political influence, except that which facilitates its expansion. It was about expanding the liberal capitalist state’s capacity to guard against any “externality” in the economic passage, against self-temptations. It was still about depoliticising “the conduct of social relations as relations of liberty, freedom, equality and Bentham”. (Bonefeld 2010) It was always about strengthening “the separation that the state embodies” – “the state separates people, separates leaders from masses, separates the political from the economic, the public from the private”. (Holloway 2010)

Financialisation intensifies the flow of capital on which every economic activity is dependent in capitalism, transcending any plausibility to bind it in a discrete fraction of timespace. It connects lives and work to the precarities of open markets. Ever-intensifying mobility of finance capital has made ineffective the estatal management of money and prices, which had the potential of being influenced by the balance of social forces. It is the sub-alterity of the ‘social’ in this ‘economic’ process that alienates the former, constituting a legitimation crisis for the state especially during the down cycle of economies – a barrier in the process of the social reproduction of state as “a particular surface (or phenomenal) form of the capital relation”. (Holloway & Picciotto 1977) This crisis becomes crucial when it starts creating barriers in the resurgence of the economic – for capitalist accumulation – i.e., when the social starts attacking the divide between the economic and the political as a fetishism, when the social relations of production that finance sought to regulate are problematised and in the process the social itself starts becoming politicised. Ultimately, the insubordination of the social is a manifestation of the inability of capital to subsume living labour, when the latter starts asserting its own autonomy in some or other form.

The essential function of this strong state as neoliberals envisage is to manage the socio-political fallouts of neoliberalism. If people are not ready to give their consent to neoliberalisation, then they must be forced to submit. But this subservient role of the state and its shameless display has progressively weakened its support base in the social and has increased political apathy. Throughout the 1990s and in the 2000s there were numerous occasions when the states throughout the globe had to face unmanageable situations and were either forced to resort to violence or try hard to divert public attention from them by investing more in wasteful exercises. All this exploded in 2008. And Keynesians – left and liberals – were elated to find an opportune moment to call for bringing the state back in – not just as a backstage manager but as the administrator of the economy – managing the demand-and-supply, and setting the prices right. If only wishes had wings. Capitalism needed the welfare state and had it.

What we see today in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, a return of the state which was already there – it is a return of the state as itself – a state which is not just a guard of private players of neoliberalism, but a guardian that secures the basic values of capitalism, ready to reprimand those who foul, ready to listen to those who complain of foul play and to judge. It is (neo)liberal to its core, is committed to socialise the basic liberal values. It abstracts itself from identities to oversee their intermingling and competition, thus reducing them to mere abstract individualities.  It satisfies the “need for the constant political facilitation of free economy by means of a ‘market police’, which includes the embedding of the ‘psycho-moral forces’ of enterprise in society at large to maintain its entrepreneurial ‘vitality’ in the face of a socially and morally disintegrating market logic”. (Bonefeld 2013)

The traditional political formations, including those who claimed a grounding in the segments down the hierarchical ladder, were instrumentalised too much during the insurgent moments of neoliberalism. They are unable to preserve the “separation that the state embodies.” That has incapacitated them from dealing with the social impact of the global economic crisis. Diverse class interests start expressing themselves autonomously and (il-)legitimately swelling the streets, merging the diverse tunes into a cacophony. This cacophony, its incomprehensibility, is what constitutes the legitimation crisis for a state. Traditional political oppositions have failed in their function as interpreters of this outswelling. They are unable to reduce it to mere competition between abstract identities.

It is this cacophony and the inability of the existing political formations to subsume it that India’s President was alluding to in the speech that we referred to in the beginning. The so-called post-ideological formations like the AAP come in handy at this juncture. The a-politics of aam aadmi or common or average man is what can bring back order to the streets – the reduction of difference and conflicts to undifferentiated hordes of abstract individuals identified with the sovereign.

III

This idea has long been prevalent among political theorists that democracy “presupposes an identity between sovereign and people: sovereign people, popular sovereignty”. This identification is codified in the Indian Constitution too, and it is evident in President Mukherjee’s speech. Legislative changes have sufficed till recently in overcoming any breach or crisis that has cropped up in this identification. Articles 3, 340, numerous amendments to the Constitution and other legislative measures could overcome any breach in the said “identity” and reproduce it within the framework of the Indian state formation.

The twentieth century has reincarnated democracy as a state-form, rather than just a form of government as “in the democracy of the ancients”. In the definition of democracy as a state-form “the word ‘identity’ is useful…because it points to the complete identity of the homogeneous people, this people that exists within itself qua political unit without any further need for representation, precisely because it is self-representing”. (Schmitt, quoted in Tronti 2009) Italian Marxist Mario Tronti elaborates that this identity precludes majoritarianism – the power of the majority. In fact, any difference must be fought away, including between the majority and the minority. Therefore, the discourse of mainstreaming the latter, cutting them to the size of the one – un-ity. “There is in democracy an identitarian vocation hostile to the articulation of any difference whatever as well as to any order of difference”. (Tronti 2009)

Mainstreaming, averaging, neutralising – this is what democracy does. It creates the persona of the average, neutral, common man – Aam Aadmi. Power is de-sacralised, secularised and profaned. Common man is one with the state. Tronti takes this conceptualisation to an extreme, when he seems to argue that with the processes of globalisation there is a gradual extinction of the state in an institutional sense. However, it is hard to dispute when he says that the function of the state is recuperated within the social. This simply is to reassert the self-representative nature of the demos – its common-ality, “the massification of thoughts, feelings, tastes, behaviours expressed in that political power which is common sense”. Tronti (ibid.) explains himself further when he defines the common:

“The ‘common’ which is spoken of today is really that in-common which is already wholly taken over by this kind of self-dictatorship, this kind of tyranny over oneself which is the contemporary form of that brilliant modern idea: voluntary servitude.”

He aptly concludes giving us a key to disentangle the spirit of democratisation epitomised by forces like the AAP:

“The average bourgeois has won: this is the figure of democracy. Democracy is this: not the tyranny of the majority, but the tyranny of the average man. And this average man constitutes a mass within the Nietzschean category of the last man.”

In fact, almost a century back, a liberal American philosopher, John M Mecklin (1918) talked about the “tyranny, more powerful, more insidious perhaps than any other”, about hydra-headed, myriad-handed modern tyrant, about “the tyranny of the average man”, of this “dominant mediocrity”, a “mythical personage” which becomes real “because of the steam-roller effect of the unwritten law of democracy, namely, uniformity.” The average man “dominated by routine and tradition” is “like the golden calf of apostate Israel he is but the creation of our own hands and yet we worship him as our god.”

President Mukherjee (2014) called out to the common man against any fracture. “A fractured government, hostage to whimsical opportunists, is always an unhappy eventuality. In 2014, it could be catastrophic.” So the question is to build and manage consensus, not giving space to fracturing.

For Tronti, contemporary political systems are actually apolitical since they do not negotiate between antinomies or social contradictions, but seek to evade them. The (a)political choices are between two aggregates of consensus:

“[O]n the one side we have reactionary bourgeois drives, and on the other progressive bourgeois drives. And I say drives, that is, emotive reflexes, symbolic imaginaries, all moved and governed by great mass communication. Reactionary and progressive drives which nonetheless share this average bourgeois character. On the one hand compassionate conservatism, on the other political correctness. These are the two great blocs. This is the governmental alternative offered by apolitical democratic systems.” (Tronti 2009)

Where do the traditional political formations among workers, the traditional communist parties figure in this apolitical system of consensus? What do we make of the hillarious responses of the left to the AAP’s performance? Their bewilderment is a thousand and first symptom of their embeddedness in capitalist polity – all of them wanted to see themselves in the AAP’s place. Their anxiety to find affinity with the AAP in its successes or to trivialise it by chanting “same old same old” is a reflection of their sense of trepidation about their own future. Communist leaders are trying hard to convince their cadre and the media about their continued relevance.

On the other hand, the chartist left – from NGOs to fringe holier-than-thou militant reformist sects find their role as lobbyists quite self-gratifying with the emergence of the apolitics of aam aadmi – they can perhaps play on the anxieties of the electoral competitors – accept our demands or we will expose you before the aam aadmi. They are increasingly finding lobbyist techniques and blackmailing more satisfying than sharpening social antagonisms and contradictions. That increases their visibility, as it synchronises well with the sensationalist drives of “great mass communication”.

What Tronti expresses about the transformation of workers’parties in the West has always been true for the communist parties and groups in India – right from their genesis they have been trying hard to be parties of the whole people, and have worked well in the popular management of class conflicts and dissipating the “destructive antagonistic character” of working class politics.

IV

However, in our critique of the times we must satisfy the task bestowed upon us by Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. We must recognise the urgency to discern the ground and forms of politics that can change the world. Tronti (ibid.) in his analysis of mass bourgeois democracy finds a contradiction – janus bifrons – at its centre whose incomplete resolution is the persona of the average man, aam aadmi:

“within democracy, within its history, we find knotted together a practice of dominaton and a project of liberation – they always present themselves together, they are co-present. In some periods (periods of crisis, states of exception) these two dimensions are in conflict. In others (such as in the contemporary situation, which is a state of normality, or at least that is the way I read it) they are integrated.”

So, the task for Tronti is not just to untie the knot, but cut it apart permanently. The institutional left has always tried to untie it so that new institutions could be built and consolidated – thus retying the knot. The project of liberation has hitherto served to make the practice of domination more and more resilient. Against the average mass bourgeois common man, which is the ideal of bourgeois democratic normalcy (of national/ people’s/ new varieties), a critical praxis must be posed that deconstructs the contemporary state-form, its institutional and ideological apparatuses and exposes the underlying structure of social relations based on exploitation and domination, and how everyday conflicts shape them.

In a recent work, Tronti (2010) has once again posed the working class as the revolutionary political subject. He talks about liberating the revolutionary discourse of people from its constitutional, institutional appropriation, resuscitating “the authentic meaning of the political concept of the people: specifying and determining it with the social concept of labour. A people, not of the subjects of the crown, not of citizens, but of workers”. He further concludes,

“The working people as a general class is possible only today, in working conditions that are extended and parcellised, far-reaching and fragmented, territorialised and globalised – the Marxian meaning of labour, without qualifiers, from the exhaustion of the hands to the exhaustion of the concept, from the occupation you don’t love to the occupation you can’t find, an archipelago of islands that make up a continent.” (Ibid)

As Tronti (2009) stresses, it is only during crises and states of emergency that we find the breach in the democratic state-form and an opportunity to cut the knot that ties the practice of domination and the project of liberation together. But here Walter Benjamin’s eighth thesis on philosophy of history must be brought in to grasp the permanent revolutionary project of the working class. This thesis must be recognised as a strategisation of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. In fact, the various theses, despite their terse makeup, constitute a formidable attack on the social democratic interpretation of history as progression, that takes capitalist exploitation and fascism as “historical norms”. Benjamin (1940 [1969]) shows how this interpretation has led to conformism and “servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus”. Nothing corrupted the working class “so much as the notion that it was moving with the current”. That labour is “the source of all wealth and all culture” is an illusion that serves to resurrect the protestant ethic of work in secularised form.

Like Tronti, Benjamin too posits the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class against its reduction into an evolutionary agency among “man or men”, aam aadmi to redeem “future generations”. He accuses social democracy of making “the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice”. The working class is revolutionary as “the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.”

The specificity of the eighth thesis lies in exposing the limited significance of the legal-fictional conception of the “state of emergency” or exception in grasping the state in which the oppressed or the working class lives. The application of this conception is limited to understanding how apolitical systems utilise it to build up their emergency apparatuses to reproduce themselves. However, “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Labour-capital relations that constitute the everydayness of capitalism are always an emergency situation with the self-annihilating mission of the working class posing a constant death threat to capital and capitalism. Going back to our discussion on “separations that the state embodies”, the so-called de-politicisation of the economic actually implies that the arena of everyday life is always under a state of emergency. To know this fact one should simply interact with a wage worker – employed or unemployed. Remember, panopticon was modelled on factory life. In the era of financialisation and global social factory, capitalism has acquired a “fractal panopticist” character: “The pantopticon of the global market is ‘fractal’, in that each level of social aggregation, each node or singularity, is ‘self-similar’ to others.” It is a global network of prison houses. (De Angelis 2007: 217)

The strategic contributions of Benjamin’s eighth thesis lie at two levels. First, it brings out the conception of history as class struggle (not just as its history), which can be understood only by looking beyond formal processes and progression. History is made in class praxes and antagonisms. Secondly, it stresses on the class strategy of realising “a real state of emergency” that will not allow capital to settle and any of its regime to become a “historical norm.”

V

Aam Aadmi is always there as the spirit behind liberal democracy – in the conjuncture of the capitalist state or sovereign and people, but it is only during an explicit breach in this identity that aam aadmi seeks embodiment. It is a formal state of emergency when street rage and cacophony start to threaten the abstraction of the liberal state, separations that it embodies. This formal emergency is a result of “the oppressed” emerging out of their subalterity. They are in the process of creating a real state of emergency by emerging as a class. Aam aadmi must ground itself to average all the voices in the streets and bring order – these voices must get equal representation, and be subsumed. Anarchy must be curbed. But this cannot be accomplished simply by promises or actions from above, but by seeking oneness with the street – by reintegrating people with the State, regrounding it in the social.  The President representing compassionate conservatism is legitimately anxious, and would prefer either the old guards directing this populism, or the new ones learning old tricks and language to ensure continuity. However, the task is to renew consensus behind the State – the depth of apathy and alienation must be matched by the height of populism.

But it is in this breach that we must seek radical possibilities. The compulsion of the State to reproduce itself in the social, in everydayness, desacralises its instruments, exposes its vulnerabilities. If we find traditional political formations and state institutions complaining about disrespect to the decorum of the officialdom and of “populist anarchism”, it is not populism that they fear, but anarchism on the ground with which populism seeks to connect. The fear is whether populism will consolidate itself and strengthen the basis of state formation or it will over-expose its egregious vulnerabilities. It is the latter that might make the whole edifice of the State fall like a pack of cards – expose the Naked King and his mythical subject, Aam Aadmi. Whether mohalla samitis (neighbourhood councils) will be a replication of the gram sabha, homogenising the neighbourhoods, reproducing and formalising the everyday exploitative social relations in state formation; or are they going to be a ground to generalise, locate and intensify class struggle: will we see a spur of rent strikes, food riots, factory occupations and squatting? Will direct democracy be reduced to the ritual of janata darbar, and eventually a junta darbar? Or will it be a call for a dual power tending towards the destruction of the liberal state? Well, the theoretician among aam aadmi leaders have made it clear: some of them can be socialists, but they are not silly.

References:

Benjamin (1940 [1969]) – Benjamin, W. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, Knopf (1969).

Bonefeld 2010 – Bonefeld, W. “Free economy and the strong state: Some notes on the state”, Capital & Class 34(1), pp 15-24. (February 2010).

Bonefeld 2013 – Bonefeld, W. “Human economy and social policy: On ordo-liberalism and political authority”, History of the Human Sciences 26(2), pp 106-125 (April 2013).

De Angelis 2001 – De Angelis, M. The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Power, Pluto Press (2007).

Holloway 2010 – Holloway, J. “Foreword to the German Edition”, in Raul Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, AK Press (2010).

Holloway & Picciotto 1977 – Holloway, J & S. Picciotto, “Capital, Crisis and the State”, Capital & Class 1(2), pp 76-101 (Summer 1977).

Mecklin 1918 – Mecklin, J.M. “The Tyranny of the Average Man”, International Journal of Ethics, 28(2), pp 240-52 (January 1918).

Mukherjee 2014 – Address by the President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee on the eve of Republic Day of India 2014, New Delhi (January 25, 2014).

Tronti 2009 – Tronti, M. “Towards a Critique of Political Democracy”, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5(1) (2009).

Tronti 2010 – Tronti, M. “We have populism because there is no people”, Democrazia e Diritto (2010, no. 3-4) published in English in 2013.

Sevagram Gandhi Ashram,
Wardha (Maharashtra)

We are meeting again in Sevagram on 18-19 January 2014. Last time when we converged there in October 2013 we discussed the need to ground the organisational question and the notion of workers’ politics in the everydayness of class struggle – a struggle between workers’ self-activities (the assertion of the autonomy of labour) and their subsumption by capital. We discussed the practice of workers’ inquiry as a double edged revolutionary weapon that allows us, on the one hand, to “recognise and record” the politics in everyday class struggle and, on the other, to rescue the militancy of past experiences from forms that have become redundant or limited or have been subsumed/ co-opted by capital, while reconnecting it to the contemporary forms of self-activities of the working class.

The discussion went on to critique the vanguardist and statist tendencies within the working class movement that tend to essentialise and overgeneralise particular forms of experiences and reify the notions of state and state power, neglecting the problem of its reproduction in the conflictual realm of daily class struggle, the ground where workers directly challenge and subvert state and class power.

Our critique of organisational forms is not just a formal critique, but an attempt to deconstruct them within class struggle against capital and capitalism – recognising the fact that the working class adopts and discards forms according to the exigencies of class struggle, “the struggle of the present.” These forms, as far as they remain forms of working class organisation, must be (re)founded in the (re)composition of the working class itself. In 1881 reacting to a comrade’s suggestion to replicate the First International, Marx rebuked the idea saying, so far as such internationals or socialist congresses “are not related to the immediate given conditions” they “are not merely useless but harmful. They will always fade away in innumerable stale generalised banalities.” Therefore our task is always to understand militant possibilities – including organisational – with which “immediate given conditions” are impregnated.

In our forthcoming January meeting we propose to discuss the changing conditions of the “real movement” of the working class and “premises now in existence,” in order to comprehend programmatic possibilities that are being posed, in which we find the ground for our collective intervention. In order to pursue our task we propose following sessions for the meeting:

1. Regional/Group Reports
2. Introduction of electronics/micro-electronics and the recomposition of class
3. The continuation of our discussion on the organisational question and the role of communists
4. Networking among ourselves and beyond.