The focus of this research is posed on a ‘provincial’ version of Marxism to contribute to the dialogue between putative centres and peripheries within Marxist theory. In doing so, I propose to bring to the fore some of the reflections set up by the so-called
‘postcolonial reason’ in order to clarify what, in my view, is an important dimension of the ongoing crisis of Marxism in vast areas of the Global South. Varieties of Marxisms – political movements as well as forms of intellectual and theoretical resistance (cf. Jameson, 1996: 3) – seem to have developed through similarly overdetermined processes in South-Eastern Asia and Latin America. Two determinations were in my view crucial in these processes. On the one hand, there are those nationalist movements sprung up in most of the then-called ‘Third world’
(now Global South) during the twentieth century. On the other, the rapid processes of ‘bolshevization’ (a catch-name for Stalinization) of the Communist parties in these regions. The latter transformed to an important extent many of these
29 organizations into satellites for the USSR's foreign policies, helping thus to disseminate a particular version of dialectical and historical materialism.
With significant exceptions, the official ideology of international Communism in the Global South was by and large built upon a reduction of the dimensions of class struggle to a rigid concept of ‘class’ as an economic subject framed into a pre-determined, linear conception of ‘national’ development. Stalin’s 1925 decree of
‘socialism in one country’ as the URSS state-policy certainly contributed to reinforce such stage-based ideology of national modernization from feudal to capitalist to socialist. For the Latin American case, Löwy points out that the first significant polemic within communist organizations revolved around the “nature of the revolution”: bourgeois-democratic or socialist (1992: xiv–xv). From the viewpoint of official Marxism, a Latin American revolution ought first to accomplish the bourgeois and democratic tasks as well as to allow for the consolidation of capitalist productive structures. Along similar lines, the Subaltern Studies can be recognized by the intense criticism of the predominance of nationalist agendas in bourgeois as well as Marxist historiographies of India. In particular, Ranajit Guha famously confronted Eric Hobsbawm’s definition of non-capitalist, traditional forms of discontent such as social banditry as “pre-political” (Hobsbawm 1999: 5). The Indian historian, in turn, read this indication as the pre-supposition of a predominant class/nation developmental axis in which the proletariat assumes the role of prototype of a ‘national’ class. In other words, Hobsbawm’s definition of ‘pre-political’ (i.e., devoid of ideology, organization and programme) makes apparent the all-too Western division-line that configures the modern political reason. In doing this – Guha concluded – Marxist historiography colludes in colonial commitments with nationalist-elite historical accounts. Such a criticism inaugurated a line of reflection which, by searching for a reading of history ‘against the grain’, could free historical accounts of subaltern movements from the modernization templates and national narratives that furnished leftist policies during the last century.13
13 Guha differentiates between ‘elites’ striving for the building of the colonial state (and thus writing state’s history) and ‘the people’ –the subalterns– defined in terms of the
“demographic difference” (1982: 8) from the latter. For a survey of the displacement from the Gramscian category of ‘subalternity’ as relational, historic qualifier adjective, to
30 Two decades after Guha's intervention, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe brought the subalternist argument forward to a further level. In a reading of Marx’s Grundrisse highly informed by Althusser and Toni Negri, yet complemented by a Heideggerian lens,14 the author establishes that two different temporalities play out in post-colonial capitalism. He distinguishes between living labour or labour-for-itself and abstract labour or labour-for-capital, each of which pertains to irreducible manners of temporalizing history. Therefore, he proposes to distinguish History 1 or “history posed by capital”, on the one hand, and History 2 or “histories that do not belong to capital’s life process”, on the other (Chakrabarty, 2000: 50) This is perhaps an idiosyncratic way to say that there are structures necessaries for capital’s reproduction while other are not, as Vivek Chibber (2012: 225) argues.
Nonetheless, Chakrabarty’s argument is more concerned to identifying the traces of a model somehow internal to History 1 in Marx’s own discourse, so that Marxist theory is criticized for its commitment to capital’s structure of temporalization and historicization. In doing so, Chakrabarty orients his criticism towards the collusion of Marxism’s hegemonic version with a conception of history that pertains to the dominant classes – namely, historicism.
Historicism is defined by Chakrabarty as “the idea that to understand anything it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development”; from this idea derives the projection of a modernity that occurred “first in the West, and then elsewhere”, by a process of diffusion and spreading of modes of relationship and beliefs that are originally Western (2000: 6). This is what Johannes Fabian, discussing the case of anthropology, called “the denial of coevalness” or
“allochronism”, the operation through which spatiotemporal distance functions as an epistemological dispositif of otherness and subalternization. But it is also akin to the notion of historicism that Benjamin saw as the main polemical target of the materialist historian, for instance, in his notes entitled ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’: “A conception of history that has liberated itself from the schema of progression within an empty and homogeneous time would finally
‘subalternism’ as a noun or condition, see M. Modonesi (2014: 30). For an insightful re-reading of the ‘pre-political’ in the Hobsbawm-Guha debate, see A. Toscano (2010: 44–57).
14 Chakrabarty turns to Heidegger’s notions of ‘fragmentariness’ and ‘not-yet’ in order to “find a home for post-Enlightenment rationalism in the histories of Bengali belonging”
(2000: 21–22).
31 unleash the destructive energies of historical materialism which have been held back for so long.” (1996a: 406) Sharing none of his revolutionary urgencies, Chakrabarty (2000: 23) recalls Benjamin’s historicism so as to couple the critique of
‘progress’ with the critique of ‘development’.
Chakrabarty contributes significantly to identifying the complicities among capital, nation-state narratives, and the teleological version of Marxism predominant in vast areas of the Global South. More specifically, from his contribution it is possible to problematize the existence of different structures of temporality enmeshed in those zones of the world where capital’s subsumption or annihilation of traditional ways of worlding remains incomplete. Conversely, the interpellation-effects of historicism (“[t]hat was what historicist consciousness was:
a recommendation to the colonized to wait”, 2000: 8) rings particularly loud in the memory of Latin American settle of accounts with its own ‘orthodox Marxisms’. The
‘first in the West, then elsewhere’ that characterizes capital’s imperial grammars (historicism in Chakrabarty) and was adopted by nationalist agendas, was mimicked and hence reinforced by Marxist ideology of a stage-led historical course from pre-capitalist to capitalist (and eventually, to post-capitalist) phases.
I find it productive to re-initiate the (critical) dialogue with those ‘History 2s’
that remain partially enclosed in subaltern traditions of resistance and struggle, traditions coeval to national formations and imperial or multinational powers. In this sense, the value of Chakrabarty’s insights does not rest so much in the accuracy of his conceptual formulations but in his resistance to the subsumption of subaltern ways of worlding and worldviews into a narrative of national edification and integration. What, in other words, becomes visible in his reflections is the necessity to bring to the fore the decolonization of knowledge from the prison-house of capitalist, putatively Western temporalization of life, as an ineluctable task for our times -a task which, in turn, demands piecemeal critical reconsiderations of the narrative of development and progress entailed in both national and Marxist narratives. John Kraniauskas refers to the task envisaged by the subalternist perspective in terms of the “disjunctural critique of the total apparatus of development” (2005: 54). This is what I will call from now on ‘subalternist hypothesis’.
32 In my view, one of the dimensions of the current crisis of Marxism, at least in the Global South, rests on the dead weights that its formation as a variety of development or modernization theory imprinted in the popular grammars of these peoples. What arguably framed both nationalism and ‘orthodox’ Marxism in vast areas of the periphery was a development narrative built upon the lines of capitalist modernization processes; a narrative in which non-capitalist social elements were considered archaic, backward, hence predestined to be left behind. Of course, it was not only a narrative, but a whole set of policies, mobilizations of resources and ideologies. The emphasis on the narrative aspect is intended to highlight the ideological moment, that is, the crystallization of an image of historical development in the ‘consciousness’ of the working and other popular classes – or in what we might call, following Gramsci, the ‘grammar’ of the subalterns (more on this below).
Inscribing this research in the perspective of Marxism’s deprovincialization, my recourse to a ‘subalternist hypothesis’ searches to retain the tensions between History 1 – capital’s tempo, historicism – and the fragmentary, disjointed set of worlding practices and worldviews implicated in History 2 – temporalities subaltern to capital, that is, but not essentially different nor irreducible to other than themselves. In doing so, I follow the works that have attempted a critical but productive engagement between Marxism and postcolonial inquires.15 Harry Harootunian says in this regard that “[d]eprovincializing Marx entails not simply an expanded geographic inclusion but a broadening of temporal possibilities unchained from a hegemonic unlinearism.” (2015: 2 emphasis added) It is a unilinearism shared by various self-declared revolutionary nationalisms as well as orthodox Marxisms. I agree with Neil Larsen when he indicates that postcolonial perspectives make “one step forward” in identifying this ideological complicity as a critical node of emancipator ideologies in the Global South; and – Larsen goes on – these perspectives make “two steps back” when the critique conspicuously avoids class-analysis (2001: 35). The problem, however, seems to me to be precisely whether
15 See for example C. Bartolovich and N. Lazarus eds. (2002); B. Parry (2004); J.
Kraniauskas (2000, 2005), N. Lazarus and R. Varma (2008); K. Linder (2010).
33 Marxism is still able to offer a non-reductionist and non-deterministic framework for the sort of class-analysis needed today.16
I propose to seize upon the notion of ‘subaltern’ to give account of the ways of worlding, worldviews and structures of temporality whereby a class becomes – or not – a distinctive socio-political subject. As the condensation of social (hence historical) relations at a highly overdetermined level, a class might be understood as shaped by multi-layered experiences of proletarianization and de-proletarianization, of subalternization, resistance and antagonism (and eventually, autonomy) to capital’s rule. This is especially so in the less-favoured areas composing the uneven-and-combined developmental landscape of capitalism at a world scale, and composes what I figure as hetero-temporal conjunctures through which class-struggle is conducted.
In what could seem at first glance as a mere coincidence, Harootunian (2015:
115ff) points out in this regard the contemporaneity of Gramsci’s The Southern Question and Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays, two works in which the problems of subalternity were unfolded under the frame of the ‘national question’.
Having the conceptual coincidences between these two authors been profusely analyzed by Mariateguista scholars (see next chapter), this semblance is also indicative of the presence of a hypothesis that, within Marxism, has worked to destabilize and re-think the Marxist concept of class itself, from the standpoint and conditions of the Global South. As the next chapter addresses, the consideration of the North-South division proposed by these Marxist intellectuals invites to reconsider the geopolitical dynamics of capital under imperialism; at the same time, it projects Marxist theory beyond fetishistic formulations ingrained in Eurocentric premises, envisaging the conception of a plurality of different temporalities coming
16 I tend to agree with James Martin when, commenting on Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’, he states that “[t]he problem with class analysis lies in its abstract and reductive character. Whilst it is possible to abstractly identify different class positions in relation to a capitalist economy, any concrete analysis has to take into account a wider variety of social forces that do not easily fall into a ‘proletarian’ or ‘bourgeois’ camp. […] This is not to say that ‘class’ is not at times a useful shorthand for a variety of phenomena. But it is an imprecise shorthand and fails to fully grasp the character of different social identities and antagonisms. Few post-Marxists would deny the class divided character of capitalism. But to say that classes are the major social forces upon which the entirety of society is built is a different matter altogether. […] We may classify the distribution of certain of the benefits and losses of capitalism in terms of classes but this does not make an automatic case for political agency.” (2002: 133).
34 together and pressing upon the current situation. Harootunian concludes that, from Gramsci and Mariátegui, the idea of a ‘South’ functions less as a geographical location of backwardness or belatedness and more as a particular temporal register, or set of registers of different nature. In this sense, the appellation to the Global South in this thesis is intrinsically tied to the idea of hetero-temporality that characterizes capitalist modernity.