(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside

Abstract

The essay’s focus is on the outside. The urgency of rethinking an outside to (global) capitalism stems from the need for critical reflection on two sets of ideas incumbent upon the South: one set marked by globality and the other marked by a continuum of terms such as “local,” “third world,” and “pre-capital.” Such a critical reflection takes the essay to a rethinking of the given script of Marxism from the outside, reengaging with advanced Marxian reflections on questions of “hegemony” and psychoanalytic exegeses on questions of “foreclosure” (verwerfung). Interrogation of extant theorizations on hegemony and foreclosure lead both to more abstract considerations on the Lacanian symbolic and the real and also to apparently more concrete reflections on “global capitalism” and its outside: the “world of the third.” Other than defamiliarizing the given script of capitalist development, this has the potential to open up new avenues to think of politics and subject.

Key Words:

• Class
• Foreclosure
• Hegemony
• Third World
• World of the Third

Acknowledgments

We thank the three respondents, Pranab Kanti Basu, Antonio Callari, and Joel Wainwright, for reading the book (WTGC) so closely and with such attention; we have learnt a lot from their critical reflections; we have also managed to see our own book through unthought of angles and axes because of their reflections. We also thank Chizu Sato, the book symposium editor, and the reviewer of the author’s response to Basu, Callari and Wainwright. We acknowledge the editorial suggestions and support of Serap A. Kayatekin, Jared Randall, and Ceren Özselçuk.

Notes

1 The idea of the “Althusserian” is intimately tied to a dialog between Marx and Freud/Lacan; WTGC remains informed by such a dialog; in fact, that dialog forms the conceptual and methodological framework of the book (see Dhar and Chakrabarti 2015).

2 See Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg (2012b, chap. 7–8) for the way certain noncapitalist class sets are hooked to the circuits of global capital through the “local-global market” and for how certain others remain within what we have called “local” or “world of the third market” or nonmarket kinds of transactions.

3 We heard the idea of the “table” looked at from above and looked at from below from Asha Achuthan.

4 “The ‘Third World’ began as a loose political alliance (‘non-alignment’) between nation-states in the context of US-Soviet rivalry after World War Two. At least one tendency had evolved by the 1960s into a revolutionary ideology committed to movements of national liberation on three continents. At the same time the ‘Third World’ rapidly came to be more than a description of governmental coalitions and/or allied revolutionary movements in the context of the Cold War. The apparent gulf between the industrialised nation-states (where ‘development’ was understood not to be a problem any longer) and the rest of the world in the 1950s suggested that a distinguishing characteristic of ‘Third World’ countries was a shared ‘underdevelopment’” (Berger 1994, 269).

5 See Badiou, who distinguishes “four general fields of truth”: politics, science, art, and love. “These are the only four fields in which a pure subjective commitment is possible, one indifferent to procedures of interpretation and verification. True politics is a matter of collective mobilization guided by a general will … and not the business of bureaucratic administration or the socialized negotiation of interests” (Hallward 2004, 3; see also Hallward 2003).

6 Basu (2016, 257) calls this “forced closures, like all modernist discursive closures.”

7 Here we have in mind Lacan’s (1998) distinction between knowledge and truth in Seminar XX.

8 Though Laclau and Mouffe (1985) do.

9 See Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Dasgupta (2015) for a full-blown theorization of capitalism or capitalist hegemony.

10 See Chakrabarti and Dhar (2012a) for a rereading of world of the third as “gravel in the (nationalist) shoe.”

11 “Turning from within outward” is a metaphor of political subject reconstitution we take from Asha Achuthan (2001, 2004).