Table Of ContentKARL MARX AND THE
POSTCOLONIAL AGE
RANABIR SAMADDAR
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, United Kingdom
Babak Amini
London School of Economics and Political Science
London, United Kingdom
The Marx Revival The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Whether the puzzle is
the economic boom in China or the economic bust in ‘the West’, there is no doubt that Marx
appears regularly in the media nowadays as a guru, and not a threat, as he used to be. The lit-
erature dealing with Marxism,which all but dried up twenty-five years ago, is reviving in the
global context. Academic and popular journals and even newspapers and on-line journalism are
increasingly open to contributions on Marxism, just as there are now many international con-
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daily and weekly papers are featuring the contemporary relevance of Marx’s thought. From
Latin America to Europe, and wherever the critique to capitalism is reemerging, there is an
intellectual and political demand for a new critical encounter with Marxism. Types of
Publications This series bring together reflections on Marx, Engels and Marxisms from per-
spectives that are varied in terms of political outlook, geographical base, academic methodolo-
gies and subject-matter, thus challenging many preconceptions as to what “Marxist” thought
can be like, as opposed to what it has been. The series will appeal internationally to intellectual
communities that are increasingly interested in rediscovering the most powerful critical analysis
of capitalism: Marxism. The series editors will ensure that authors and editors in the series are
producing overall an eclectic and stimulating yet synoptic and informative vision that will draw
a very wide and diverse audience. This series will embrace a much wider range of scholarly
interests and academic approaches than any previous “family” of books in the area. This inno-
vative series will present monographs, edited volumes and critical editions, including transla-
tions, to Anglophone readers. The books in this series will work through three main categories:
Studies on Marx and Engels: The series include titles focusing on the oeuvre of Marx and
Engels which utilize the scholarly achievements of the on-going Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe,
a project that has strongly revivified the research on these two authors in the past decade.
Critical Studies on Marxisms: Volumes will awaken readers to the overarching issues and world-
changing encounters that shelter within the broad categorisation ‘Marxist’. Particular attention
will be given to authors such as Gramsci and Benjamin, who are very popular and widely
translated nowadays all over the world, but also to authors who are less known in the English-
speaking countries, such as Mariátegui. Reception Studies and Marxist National Tradition:
Political projects have necessarily required oversimplifications in the 20th century, and Marx
and Engels have found themselves ‘made over’ numerous times and in quite contradictory
ways. Taking a national perspective on ‘reception’ will be a global revelation and the volumes
of this series will enable the worldwide Anglophone community to understand the variety of
intellectual and political traditions through which Marx and Engels have been received in local
contexts. Aims of the Series The volumes of this series will challenge all the ‘Marxist’ intel-
lectual traditions to date by making use of scholarly discoveries of the Marx-Engels
Gesamtausgabe since the 1990s, taking on board interdisciplinary and other new critical per-
spectives, and incorporating ‘reception studies’. Authors and editors in the series will resist
oversimplification of ideas and reinscription of traditions. Moreover their very diversity in
terms of language, local context, political engagement and scholarly practice will mark the
series out from any other in the field. This series will involve scholars from different fields and
cultural backgrounds, and the series editors will ensure tolerance for differences within and
between provocative monographs and edited volumes. Running contrary to 20th century
practices of simplification, the books in this innovative series will revitalize Marxist intellectual
traditions. Series Editors: Terrell Carver (University of Bristol, UK) Marcello Musto (York
University, Canada) Assistant Editor: Babak Amini (London School of Economics, UK)
More information about this series at
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Ranabir Samaddar
Karl Marx and the
Postcolonial Age
Ranabir Samaddar
Calcutta Research Group
Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-319-63286-5 ISBN 978-3-319-63287-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63287-2
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P a
reface and cknowledgements
Four years ago, the debate that took place between Vivek Chibber and
scholars of subaltern studies on the occasion of the publication of Chibber’s
Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital left me disappointed. Here
was an opportunity to remove confusions and inadequate understandings,
and clear up the ground for a deeper theorisation of the specifics of post-
colonial condition under global capitalism, and discuss threadbare several
related issues. But grandstanding prevailed at the cost of dialogue and
clarity. Many found Chibber’s conception of postcolonial theory narrow;
and some pointed out that he had even refused to consider great anti-
colonial thinkers like Mao or Fanon, Ho Chi Minh or Amilcar Cabral as
vital elements in postcolonial thought. Chibber had approached his
object—postcolonial thought—with set terms that never integrated
Marxism with what can be regarded as a body of radical anti-colonial and
postcolonial ideas. Equally, others found the defence by the subaltern
studies scholars confined to refuting Chibber’s criticism; they did not
seem prepared to analyse what made postcolonial condition an integral
part of global capitalism as well as a particular gradient in the globalisation
of radical ideas, marked as it was with ambivalence towards global capital-
ism. For them, studying differences between the postcolonial condition
and the Western condition was the main purpose of postcolonial thought.
In other words, polemics was unable to shed light on the specific reality
sought to be represented by postcolonial thought: how Marxism could
help unearth this reality, identify the fetish of difference, which nonethe-
less was rooted in this reality, and the significance of this particularity
under global capitalism, especially in the neoliberal age. Both sides
v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
steadfastly refused to engage in asking what constituted the meeting
ground of neoliberal capitalism and postcolonial capitalism. It seemed as if
both sides did not want to acknowledge the existence of anything by the
name of postcolonial capitalism. Both sides refused to learn from Marx
how to study a phenomenon, in this case capitalism in the postcolonial
world. The quarrel was about the supposed purity or sanctity of a
“thought”—how Marxist it was, or how different it was.
In writing this book, I wanted to move away from this mode of
thinking.
Of course, the argument deserves merit, namely, that it is not enough
to point out that capital and labour are not two banal universalisms with
normative and epistemological presuppositions, inasmuch as it can be
equally deservedly argued that it is not enough to point out the particu-
larities—national, local, historical and of other kinds. The problem is when
we move from the universal to the particular, from the universality of capi-
tal’s functioning to the particular zoning of its enactment. Chibber’s
stance and the subaltern defence transformed the problem into a supposed
antagonism between the champions of universalism and those of particu-
larism. Marx would have been the last to approach the problem in this
way. Marxism is not a seamless universalist epistemology or a gospel of
universals. It is also not a sacred book of particulars.
This book was written in this polemical context. It is meant to analyse
the problem of the relation between the global and the particular, univer-
sal and the specific, historical and the transcendental, and the abstract and
the concrete. It intends to show that the emergence of what Marx called
abstract labour is specific to capitalism, as the latter introduces a dynamics
through which the dispersed, disparate labouring activities of producers
are forced into a common phenomenon, called productive labour. Capital
as a universal category thus involves the incorporation and absorption of
particular mechanisms of production (labour) and distribution (market).
Much of this book is devoted to explaining this dynamic and teasing out
the political consequences of this formulation.
It also explains the dialectical relation between what Marx had called
formal subsumption, that is where capital had subsumed the labour pro-
cess as it found it, taken it over in the existing form, brought into being by
other modes of production, and real subsumption where capital produces
capital and the entire society functions towards producing relative surplus
value made possible by a less personalised and less violent mode of value
creation and extraction. Yet, as this book shows, both are needed for
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S vii
capital’s globalising role and mission, and they are complimentary to each
other in this neoliberal age. The difference between the two processes
indicates fissure as well as interrelation. The debate around the universalis-
ing role of capital and hence on the theme of “difference” is thus, beyond
a point, sterile and purposeless. In fact, by harping on difference we only
deny the global significance of the revolutionary ideas developed in the
“South”, by now securely ensconced in what we know as Marxism. This is
the reason why Lenin and Mao are discussed in several places in this book,
one that is devoted to the theme of Marx and the postcolonial question.
The globalisation of the postcolonial predicament is the other site of what
has been called the provincialisation of the West. Postcolonial theorists
much in the manner of their opponent, Chibber, failed to probe this con-
nection and offer compelling insights relating to the interface of neoliberal
capitalism and postcolonial capitalism.
The neglect of Marx in understanding revolutionary dimensions of
postcolonial condition and interrogating postcolonial politics is equally
astounding. On one hand Marxist political theorists of the West have for-
gotten that in “most of the world” their political theorisation counts for
very little, and except in the pages of famous Marxist and New Left jour-
nals these theorisations and philosophising do not relate to the broader
world. On the other hand, postcolonial political theorists have damned
Marx for being European and steadfastly refused to learn from Lenin or
Mao or even Gramsci on how to understand Marx in taking revolutionary
politics forward in conditions of “backward” capitalism and agrarian crisis.
For them, Marx is outdated because class is dead, and it is time of the
people—masses of petty producers, informal workers, urban dwellers,
impoverished peasants and educated youth and the intelligentsia. In these
flotsam and jetsam of life the State does not count; the government counts,
but that, too, only through negotiations with the unorganised, rabble-
roused masses. Hence, the discussions on class, people, populism, political
subjecthood, power, autonomy, dual power and other related issues have
become extraordinarily impoverished in postcolonial countries, at least in
India. One cannot but be struck by the extreme scarcity of references to
Marx’s ideas in any random study of communist party and group literature
on politics today. Once again, Marx is subject to a scissor-like operation
and is taken out of the radical horizon of politics. This is the other reason
for writing this book.
While writing I became aware of the immense value of the analyses,
commentaries, debates and sentiments evident in the discussions among
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
communists worldwide in the 1950s to the 1970s: the postwar era thought
to be outdated and no longer holding lessons for us. Likewise, we are
often oblivious of the polemical and the dialogic context in which the clas-
sic works of Marx or Lenin or Mao were written. Any study of their for-
mulations without reference to the debates, discussions and dialogues
amidst which they took shape will lose half of its power. Marxism is noth-
ing if it is not argumentative. Finally, the literature on the postcolonial
condition also has been of great value. Even though in this book I have
not concurred with it on several issues, these writings have been necessary
to understand some of the dimensions of the postcolonial condition. This
is the reason why I have written in the book that postcolonialism is like a
commodity. We cannot bypass it; we cannot immerse ourselves in it. Being
aware of the fetish of the postcolonial, we have to approach the problem-
atic dialectically, and analyse it.
In writing this book I have incurred debts to quite a few colleagues and
friends, who provided me with comments and suggestions on my ideas.
My acknowledgements are to Etienne Balibar, Ritajyoti Bandopadhyay,
Manuela Bojadzigev, Livio Boni, Andrew Brandel, Partha Chatterjee, Atig
Ghosh, Giorgio Grappi, Mithilesh Kumar, Sandro Mezzadra, Iman Mitra,
Prabhu Mohapatra, Brett Neilson, Immanuel Ness, Ned Rossiter and
Samita Sen. Some of the draft chapters were presented for discussion in
study classes, workshops and seminars at the Calcutta Research Group.
Many participants enthusiastically commented on those presentations. My
debt is to all of them including the organisers of those study meetings, in
particular, Paula Banerjee, Samata Biswas and Anwesha Sengupta.
I am especially grateful to Terell Carver and Marcello Musto for the
interest they took in my work. Their comments helped me in formulating
some of the arguments.
Two final prefatory submissions: First, the postcolonial condition the
book speaks of is a generic description, while there is huge and marked
unevenness within the postcolonial world. Hence the title of the book
speaks of the postcolonial age. Indian references have come easily in this
book as the author is an Indian, but the idea has never been to suggest that
the Indian condition prevails more or less in the same form in other post-
colonial countries. The idea was to indicate the trajectory of postcolonial
capitalism. Second, readers will notice that in this book I have used in
some cases as reference more than one edition of a same book or article.
Sometimes I chose one edition because the translated version there seemed
better, sometimes only internet editions were available to me, and I could
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S ix
only access the print edition much later or vice versa; in other cases I had
to use whatever I could lay hold of. I wrote this book in the past two years
while I was frequently travelling on work-related matters, and I could not
carry with me all the necessary books and articles. I have standardised
these references as far as possible, but inconsistencies may have remained.
Readers may kindly forgive me for this.
Kolkata Ranabir Samaddar
June 2017
